Advice on Courtship and Marriage

• Dress up, spruce up, and be on the alert. Don’t wait too long to get one much more perfect than you are; but settle on some one soon. • So far as the record is preserved, unchastity has contributed above all other causes, more to the ruin and exhaustion and demoralization of the race than all other wickedness. • Any presentation to a lady in a public ballroom, for the mere purpose of dancing, does not entitle you to claim her acquaintance afterwards. These sage words of advice on courtship, marriage and sex in Victorian society are often hilarious a hundred years later. Wry and witty, these pearls of wisdom from days gone-by show how times change – and people don’t!