Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 February 1882 — The Deceased Wife’s Mister. [ARTICLE]

The Deceased Wife’s Mister.

There are many thousands of Englishmen whose chief object in life is to marry their deceased wife’s sisters. They have formed a society for the cultivation of this peculiar sport, and annually attempt to induce Parliament to abolish the law which now interferes with their singular passion. They denounce this law as a relic of the Boman Catholic dominion, and insist that a deceased wife’s sister is not malum in se, and that it is a disgrace to an enlightened age that she should be malum prohibitum. So far Parliament has refused to listen to them. The majority of Englishmen do not wish to marry deceased wife’s sisters, and naturally think it absurd that any one else should wish to; and inasmuch as Mr. Gladstone has never written a pamphlet denouncing the deceased wife’s sister as the giant evil of the age, there is no reason to suppose that he will suddenly become her champion. It is a curious illustration of the uninventive character of the British mind that there should be, say 30,000, Englishmen who are vainly striving to marry their deceased wives’ sisters. In a really enterprising community these men would have avoided all trouble and longed-for sisters instead of the original deceased wives. Simple and easy as this expedient is, no Englishman appears to have thought of it When one of the thirty thousand wishes to marry a girl, he apparently thinks it necessary first of all to marry her sister; then to wait until his wife dies—which is in most cases a trying, tedious and uncertain occupation—and then to spend the rest of his life in vainly trying to obtain the repeal 6f the law which stands between him and the object of his affections. All this trouble and unhappiness could be avoided were the man to marry the coveted sister in the first instance; but such is the obstinate conservatism of the British mind, that it will probably behalf a century before Englishmen avail themselves of this simple remedy. There is another way in which the almost national English desire to marry a deceased wife’s sister may be looked at, but it similarly requires us to note the characteristic Engbsh lack of enterprise. It would occur to most men in this country that a wife’s sister lacks the element of romance. If a man’s wife has an unmarried sister, and she is not an objectionable girl, she is very certain to be on familiar terms with him. She is tbe one to whom he naturally looks for help when his wife is sick. She comes and takes care of the children and temporarily superintends his buttons. She pours out his coffee in the morning and meets him when he comes home at night from business. Thus she knows him thoroughly. If he is cross and unreasonable in the early morning, as many men are said to be, he cannot conceal it from his wife’s sister. If he come home at night too tired to try to make himself agreeable, she discovers what a difference there is between a brother-in-law and an unattached young man who exhibits himself to ladies only at his most agreeable moments. She knows the condition of his shirts and stockings; she sees him without his wig, and she learns the precise number of his false teeth. On the other hand, if she is ever irritable in the morning, he suffers from it; if she wears false hair, she cannot keep it secret from him, and it is morally certain that at some time he will meet her dressed in a way that will destroy any illusions he may have cherished as to the beauty of her figure and her entire physical genuineness. How can there be room for romance in the intercourse of two such familar acquaintances ? In the nature of the case there can be none. "When the American widower determines to marry again, he naturally desires to renew the romance of his earlier courtship, and so seeks his new wife among women with whom his acquaintance is so slight that he can assume that they possess all imaginable perfections. That the Englishman, instead of taking this course, prefers to marry his wife’s sister, simply shows that he lacks enterprise to search for a wife. He prefers to save himself the trouble of search, pursuit and capture by requesting his sister-in-law, who, in that capacity, has sewed on occasional buttons for him, to sew on perpetual buttons in the capacity of his second wife. Nothing more utterly prosaic than the of a deceased wife’s sister can be imagined, and it could only take place in the most prosaic and unenterprising of countries. — New York Times.