Morality during the Victorian Era is a Study in Contrasts, contrast by different classes, contrast by different locations and contrast by different dates/decades. In spite of bathing machines and voluminous costumes, nude bathing was not unknown. In polite society there was a prudery which would prevent the mention of the word "leg", one would say "limb", and even in my youth we did not talk of the "breast" of a chicken only the "white" meat. However lewdness was not unusual and not just among the working classes. Surprisingly Queen Victoria liked to draw and collect male nude figure drawings , and Victorian Erotica in literature - books and magazine - was a large thriving business. However until the second half of her reign, divorce was a rarity, even though the Prince Consort's parents had been divorced. In the early years of Victoria's reign it was still legal to sell one's wife, but this was rapidly becoming unacceptable . This was often prearranged and she was sold to her lover - a working man's divorce - with the threesome meeting in the pub afterwards to seal the deal with a pint or two. In 1857 the Matrimonial Causes Act became law. This act allowed a man to divorce his wife for adultery but a woman could only divorce if adultery were accompanied by cruelty, so a husband could beat his wife or be unfaithful to her but not both for then she could divorce him. Before that, divorce was governed by a court of the Church of England, an expensive and exclusive procedure, but now it was moved to the Civil Courts establishing that marriage was based on contract rather than sacrament and widening the availability of divorce beyond the wealthy. It is interesting to note that in the House of Lords the bill was supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury. One of his predecessors had opposed a Factory Act on the grounds that if the lower classes worked fewer hours it would give them more free time to indulge in the drinking of gin ( very cheap at that time until a tax was imposed) and other evils. In the first year of the Marriage Causes Act the number of applications for divorce rose from 3 to 300. Coincidentally from about that time there were many improvements in other areas began. Crime and illegitimacy rates at the time Queen Victoria died in 1901 had fallen by about half from their mid-nineteenth century high. Public drunkenness became less common; literacy became nearly universal,; sanitation and diet improved at every level of society, and wages nearly doubled in a generation. The reputation of Victoria's reign being one of high morality and prudery comes from the last decade rather than the first By the end of the Victorian era there was increasing mobility - the railways and the increased demand for labour in new occupations in the cities - and greater urbanisation so that often neither neighbours nor the clergy would know if a couple were legally married, unlike a country village where everybody knew each other. I did some research on the Shenton family which included a William Churcher. In Apr 1902 in Alverstoke he murdered Sophia Jane Hepworth They although never married are shown as husband and wife in the 1901 census so one can perhaps assume that they were claiming to be married, and nobody questioned it or perhaps cared. David