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This line: " It drew many favourable reviews, including one in 1829 in The Gardener's Magazine on the inventions proposed in it. In 1830, the 46-year-old review
by Angostura 3y ago
This line: " It drew many favourable reviews, including one in 1829 in The Gardener's Magazine on the inventions proposed in it. In 1830, the 46-year-old reviewer, John Claudius Loudon, sought out the 22-year-old Webb, and they married the next year."
Sounds pretty creepy by contemporary standards, but reading Loudon's page he was also a fascinating character and both he and Jane were accomplished horticulturalist"
- mathgeek 3y agoThis is echoed in a trope that many will recognize from Back to the Future: Part III. Scientists/intellectuals in earlier eras attracted to each other by interests rather than age.
- vGPU 3y agoShe was also a poor orphan who took to writing to have fund to live, so a marriage proposal from someone with similar interests - they even wrote books together - and they apparently lived quite happily until he died from cancer 14 years later.
- cstross 3y agoIt's an unremarkable age gap by Victorian standards. Men above working class status typically waited until they could support a family before marrying, and women typically married young (16-21 was common among the nobility: at 22 an unmarried woman was all but washed-up). Death in childbirth was sky-high by modern standards, and older husbands died of diseases which today would be survivable, so the average duration of a marriage was much the same as it is today -- about 12 years -- even though divorce was difficult hence rare. (Victorian mores may seem alien to modern eyes because they arose from medical and social constraints we're no longer subject to.)
- bitwize 3y ago[flagged]
- vGPU 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]