Cuckoldry : A Historical Note
• Gender Studies
From the Times Literary Supplement:
… Matthew Pilkington, poet and clergyman, was also an Irish specimen of what Henry Fielding called “the modern husband”, in a comedy of that name. That is, Matthew sought to profit from his wife’s body by proxy, hoping that a rich friend would cuckold him, for a reasonable price – or, when Laetitia failed to succumb, that he could be rid of her by catching such a friend in the act of cuckolding him. Divorce would almost certainly favour the innocent, injured party.
An eighteenth-century memoir with a timeless refrain: all men are bastards