This article is concerned with the relationship which existed between Manchester's parliamentary candidates and their involvement with local charities. Both of these areas, “charity” and “parliamentary elections” formed distinct fields of activity, each with their own structures and each producing a particular set of dispositions. Success depended on the individual's habitus and having the right degree of personal or cultural capital. In the mid to late Victorian period parliamentary candidates were meant to possess the qualities of a local leader. The election field determined the need to prove fitness to represent the local community. Part of the criteria for this included involvement with local charities. This suggested moral worth and firm commitment to the area. The charity field provided a particular type of status for the individual. This article will explore the relationship between the two fields of activity and how entering the election field determined the need to also enter the charity field to provide the individual with its vital dispositions.

Since 1981, nuptiality has been identified as the main driver of rapid eighteenth-century English population growth. Over the course of the long eighteenth century, “national” rates of female non-marriage declined while female age at first marriage fell by roughly three years, reaching 22–23 years by the 1820s. The cumulative impact of more and earlier marriage on fertility is believed to have greatly outweighed the effect of falling mortality in generating aggregate population growth. Such a perspective has not gone unchallenged. There have been persistent calls for the re-examination of the place of urban demography within this framework. Concern has also been voiced over the sources which underpin the family reconstitutions on which calculations of marriage ages are based, the technique of family reconstitution itself, and over the representativeness of the marriage samples which family reconstitution yields. However, the most recent work of the Cambridge Group, based upon twenty-six family reconstitutions, appears to confirm the centrality of marriage ages to the English demographic system. Percentile distributions of marriage ages suggest that over the course of the eighteenth century there was an important decline in the proportion of marriages undertaken by women in their late twenties and thirties, more than balanced by the development of an early marrying group in their late teens.

When Dr Johnson made his famous eighteenth-century remark about second marriages being a triumph of hope over experience, his wit could easily have been directed toward the unions that Steven King has illuminated. It is never entirely clear why people marry or choose to marry the people they do, a situation that is as frustrating to historians as to friends and family. Marriage remains one of life's great mysteries, perhaps the last great mystery left to us. It fascinates and absorbs us, providing an inexhaustible audience for daytime soap operas and evening situation comedies. Romance novels top the fiction charts; and Hollywood returns to the theme time and again.

Marriage fascinates precisely because it is so unpredictable, so much beyond our control. One would think that the riskiness of the lottery of love would frighten, even repel, us, but instead we are drawn to it as a gambler is drawn to the slots or the track. Love is, like gambling, a form of “deep play”, which reveals things about ourselves that we can only discover when we move from the world of choice to the realm of chance. Today, marriage is often the central episode in the stories we tell when we try to explain ourselves to ourselves and to others. It is the most elaborately celebrated and ritualized of all the events of the adult life course, the source of our most precious images and memories. Marriage is simply enchanting.

Autobiographies and diaries have furnished many historians, including those who otherwise eschew qualitative data, with an apposite quote with which to launch their papers. Other historians select extracts from such sources to add colour to arguments advanced initially from the analysis of parish registers or court records. As a major source in their own right, diaries, autobiographies and letters provide the historian with valuable insights into the motivations, conscious or unconscious, of the authors. Such sources are less forthcoming on the perspectives and motivations of other persons whose activities feature in the written record as their motivations have to be teased out from the distorted and necessarily partial account of the author. Nor is it always easy to distinguish exceptional events in the life of a diarist from those which might have been experienced by persons of equivalent status or even more widely. The temptation is to overgeneralize on the basis of limited evidence.

Steven King in “Chance Encounters? Paths to Household Formation in Early Modern England”, has chosen to be particularly ambitious, selecting a limited number of diaries and autobiographies to challenge the applicability of the widely held association between the accumulation of economic resources and age at marriage and the claim that couples in deciding to marry assessed the state of their current resources and their future prospects. From this base Dr King launches a further set of hypotheses concerning the involvement of parents in the choice of their child's marriage partner, changes over time in the density and quality of contacts between kin and with neighbours, and the significance of these factors for the decline in the mean age at marriage in England over the course of the eighteenth century.

These two perceptive commentaries offer very different interpretations of the significance of the evidence presented in “Chance Encounters”. Crudely put, Richard Wall suggests that I have gone too far in placing chance, kinship and economic irrationality at the centre of my reconceptualization of marriage motivations. Individual calculation and economic motivation cannot be placed in the background of explanations of the individual or aggregate nuptiality experiences in an English context. By attempting to use autobiographical evidence to try and understand both the process of “getting married”and wider changes in marriage ages at the “national” level, I have written an article with two imperfectly related parts, and thus achieved neither end. Equally crudely put, John Gillis suggests that I have not gone far enough in my attempts at reinterpretation, and that I needed to talk more about the meaning of marriage ceremonies, contemporary understanding of the courtship process, and the role of Fortuna in the process of “getting married”. I shall consider all of these issues below. The one thing which unites the commentaries is a concern over sources, and it is apposite to use this question as a launch pad for restating and refining the analytical line opened in “Chance Encounters”.

HILL, BRIDGET. Servants. English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1996. vii, 278 pp. £35.00.

ROMANO, DENNIS. Housecraft and Statecraft. Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore [etc.] 1996. xxvi, 333 pp. Ill. $54.00.

Over the last two decades, our understanding of domestic service, its changes throughout history and its links to larger political and economical transformations, has been enriched by feminist and historical scholarship. A first step towards a better understanding of domestic work was made when feminists challenged the dominant theoretical bias that formerly had concentrated exclusively on the production process, and argued that the separation of the domestic and the public which occurred with the emergence of capitalism became the root cause of women's subordination. This separation resulted in a situation where anything associated with the domestic became hidden, undervalued and perceived as unimportant. In later debates this dichotomizing framework has been further developed into discussions on the ways in which “the domestic” may shift in content and form; how it may be associated with not only what is conducted within the home, but also with the type of work (domestic work) and the type of people (women) considered as belonging in the home. Although the boundaries separating the domestic and public spheres may perpetually experience shifts, the implications of this separation are considered to be more or less clear, namely the devaluation of women's work and women's identity.