In 1813 (the year in which the anti-matrimonial note of _Queen Mab_ was written), Shelley regarded marriage with the eyes and by the lights of eighteenth-century writers, who decried the institution as the source of human misery and depravation. The evils, that caused these writers to distinguish themselves in the long war against wedlock, were no imaginary grievances. On the contrary, they were evils which the Anglican reformers foresaw would result from a too stringent marriage-law, and for which they wished to provide by their proposals for divorce. They were evils crying aloud for remedy throughout the country. Almost every parish of the land had a miserably mated couple, whose union should have been terminated by the law. For the mischief there was no remedy but the old cumbrous and costly proceedings for obtaining the greater divorce,--_i.e._ the suit in the first instance in the Ecclesiastical Court for the minor divorce from board and bed, and the subsequent suit for the parliamentary severance of the bond of marriage:--a process that, making divorce the luxury of the rich, denied it altogether to the poor. In the first thirty-seven years of the present century, only seventy suitors (less than two a-year) obtained special parliamentary enactments for their liberation from wretched wedlock. In the last thirty-seven years of the previous century, such divorces were much less frequent. The rich alone could afford to pay for the parliamentary relief. For the poor, and for the people raised only a few degrees above poverty, there was no divorce. Under these circumstances, whilst almost every rural village had a Stephen Blackpool, there necessarily arose vehement discontent not only with the defective marriage-law, but with marriage itself. Nothing was said against the obstacles to entering marriage; but everywhere an outcry was heard against the impossibility of getting out of marriage. Amongst the populace, social sentiment permitted a man in many cases to be the physician of his own trouble, and after deserting his lawful wife, to live with a woman who was not his wife. The general grievance being the difficulty of escape from uncongenial wedlock, the Radical writers dealt with this grievance, and usually forbore to criticise the impediments to marriage, of which no large number of people complained.