TT - Victorian Guide to selecting the perfect mate.

"Better, a thousands times, the single, free, and independent maidenhood, than for a woman to trail her life in the dust, and bring poverty , shame, and disgrace on her children, by marrying a man addicted to dissipated habits." Heaven forbid!!!!!

I'm a sucker for this type of book and couldn't resist it. Here is how Professor Hill - The Essential Handbook of Victorian Etiquette (1994 - adapted from material Professor Thomas E. Hill wrote between 1873 -1890) suggests you go about selecting your mate!

1. Marry someone of similar form, complexion and temperament to themselves.
   
2. Bright red hair and florid complexions indicate excitable temperament and should marry the jet-black hair and the brunette type.
   
3. Grey, blue, black or hazel eyes should not marry those of the same colour.
   
4. Where eye color is very pronounced, the union should be with those of a decidedly different color.
   
5. The corpulent should unite with the thin and spare,
6. The thickset and short should choose someone with a different constitution.
   
7. The irritable with the quiet and slow, the quick-motioned, rapid speaking with the calm and the deliberate.
   
8. Impulsive with the stoical.
   
9. Thin, bony, wiry, prominent featured, Roman-nosed, cold-blooded individual should marry the round-featured, warm-hearted, and emotional.
   
10. Straight and fine haired should unite with curly.
    
11. Flat-nosed should marry the 'full Roman';
    
12. A woman who takes after her father should marry a man who takes after his mother.
    
13. But in all these cases where the type is not pronounced, but is on the contrary, an average or medium, those forms, features and temperaments may marry either. (TG for that!)