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Manners & morals

June 2009

Marriage in our time

by Kenneth Minogue

On matrimony in a culture of convenience.

One of the excitements of growing older in the contemporary West is the recognition that the moral basis of life has flipped. It happens in every generation. Consider the position of Lord Melbourne in 1837, kissing hands as prime minister with that delightful but formidable girl who had just been crowned Queen Victoria. This Regency rake, a real swinger in his time, suddenly had to recognize that he had blundered by longevity into a very serious and engaged moral environment. It was to be called “Victorian.” He adapted very well, especially to the Queen, but he knew he was in a different world.

Think again of those same Victorians at the end of the nineteenth century, when Oscar Wilde and the Café Royal set were just beginning to attach a sneer to the very idea of respectability, an attachment that became increasingly explicit as the twentieth century wore on. Respectability is, no do ...

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Kenneth Minogue is is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics.


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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 June 2009, on page 32

Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

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