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agricultural depression, society had to open up to wealthy business families and even American heiresses. The upper classes generally tended to marry later than the others, producing irregular behaviour among the young men, and a higher proportion of unmarried women.
    There were generally more women than men (the marriage rate, low early in the century, increased in mid-century, and declined in the last quarter). Figures suggest that of 100 Englishwomen of marriageable age, 57 would be married, 12 would be widows, and 30 spinsters: there was recognition of the problem of the unmarried middle-class woman (the 25,000 governesses were in a difficult, anomalous position, genteel but employed, not family or guests or servants, suspect as marital predators).
    While women generally needed to marry, their legal position left much to be desired. Until 1870, all a wife’s property was her husband’s (Charlotte Brontë was not pleased to have her copyright and royalties transferred to her father’s curate when she married him); the upper classes sought to circumvent this with pre-marital trust arrangements. Divorce was only possible by individual Acts of Parliament until 1857, though the new law really only benefitted the better-off; a husband could obtain divorce on grounds of adultery, but a wife had to prove adultery aggravated by various nastinesses.
    The middle classes, a group always hard to define, were more anxious about definitions and assertions of social identity. Status required that women should be idle, occupying themselves with making calls, water-colours or embroidery (though a fair number did engage in ‘good works’, pestering the poor with fruit, advice and religious tracts); to support them, some 750,000 lower-class women were employed as domestic servants, mostly in one- or two-servant households. Before marriage, middle-class young women – as foreigners commented – had (or took) notable freedom in behaviour, which they largely lost on marrying. Sobriety of behaviour, and a cult of the self-sacrificial helpmate wife in a paternalistic family, increasingly became the norm. Much has been made of Victorian middle-class prudishness, which certainly existed, but appears to have been notably less than that of the Americans. Whether or not piano-legs were concealed, everything else in the house was smothered, with thick, double curtains, silk-lined or flock-patterned wallpaper, Brussels carpets, heavy, polished furniture and innumerable ornaments to occupy the housemaids’ time. Also smothered was discussion of sexuality, in accordance with the public belief that ‘the majority [of women] are not much troubled by sexual desire’ (numerous private journals and letters suggesting that, on the contrary, they found it no trouble at all). It is worth noting here the sharp decline in the national birth rate from the early 1870s, indicative of family planning, probably by use of barrier methods.
    There were many reports on the working classes by middle-class explorers, shocked and anxious to shock in order to provoke reforms. Living conditions could be horrible in the big-city slums, but there were improvements, and, if one third of working-class housing was poor or wretched, another third was considered ‘decent’ and ‘comfortable’. It was assumed – thrillingly – that over-crowding and multiple occupancy of bedrooms would lead to promiscuity and incest, though other accounts suggested reasonable care for modesty and propriety; again, suggestions of millowners’ and overseers’ ‘droits de seigneur’ over women workers were often contradicted (though sexual licence in the mines seems well documented).
    Many reports, then and since, have dwelt on prostitution, rife in all the cities and industrial, military and naval towns (provoking the notorious Contagious Diseases Act that permitted the arrest, detention and compulsory examination of any