One hundred years ago
Lord Dalhousie made a very able speech on Monday in favour of the Bill legalising marriage with a deceased wife's sister. He said that the Bill avowedly dealt only with a single case, instead of putting the change of law on any great principle, because the case with which it was drawn to deal was the only one in which the grievance of the present prohibition was severely felt. In all our larger colonies — all the colonies, indeed, except some of those of South Africa — a marriage with a deceased wife's sister is now legal. The existing law is widely set at defiance; but he wish- ed the law altered, not because it had been often broken, but because public opinion sustained those who broke it. In London alone there were 5,000 couples who had married in defiance of the law, and in a little place like Stratford-on- Avon there were no fewer than twenty such couples. He was himself acquainted with thirteen men who had married their sisters-in-law, and in many of these cases it was at the request, sometimes at the death-bed request, of their wives.
Spectator, 17 June 1882
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