Another literary one ~~ I have been amazed by the people who say that Romeo & Juliet anticipated marriage, or had premarital intercourse, or whatever phrase they choose: whereas in fact that exceptionally moral young couple took the trouble to make their way to Friar Laurence's cell to be married in order that they could go ahead with it, in accordance with their consciences & upbringing.

'Well, anyway,' such people will grudgingly go on, 'they were below the age of consent.' The number of people who seem to imagine that the age of consent is some sort of law of nature, rather than a piece of ad hoc late-Victorian legislation, is astonishing. As is the number who don't even know what it is; no less a writer than Kingsley Amis predicated the whole of a novel 'Girl 20', on the erroneous conviction that it was 18; whereas it has been 16 ever since the concept was formally introduced into our laws at all, follo2wing a press campaign by W T Stead on child prostitution, in 1885 ~ tho a prior law only 10 years before had set it at 13.

~M~