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Morris B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. 314. $35 (ISBN 0-801-43678-8).

countering the notion that “modern” ideas about marital privacy gained currency during this period. Sievens reintroduces new “ideals of domestic privacy” to explain the increasingly formulaic nature of elopement notices by 1830, but taken together these books suggest that the concept needs to be used with care in any setting (Sievens, 120). Their overall effect is to reinforce Nancy Cott’s recent arguments about the enduring public character of marriage (Cott, Public Vows, 2000). Foyster raises the intriguing possibility that the late nineteenth century saw a shift in the nature of public responsibility for marital breakdown, rather than a new concept of privacy. The rise of institutional and professional resources addressing the problem of marital violence made neighbors and other community members less likely to intervene. “When marital violence became somebody’s problem, in terms of it lying within their professional expertise,” Foyster argues, “it ceased to be everybody’s problem” (233). Foyster’s and Sieven’s books call attention to geographic as well as chronological continuities in the legal and extra-legal practices regulating marriage. Despite the comparative ease with which early national New Englanders could obtain divorce, they closely resembled the English couples documented by Foyster in their preference for alternative means of mediating marital conflict, and in the behavioral standards by which they judged husbands and wives. The parallels suggest the need for more explicitly comparative work on the relationship between customary forms of household justice, popular beliefs about marriage and family, and legal change. The dramatic modifications in family law that have occurred on both sides of the Atlantic over the past two centuries cannot be understood solely in terms of national narratives, however much they have hinged on national politics and played into debates about national identity.