TypeMaster

Guest

Home
Stories
Getting Married

Loading story...

Elevate your typing speed and keyboard muscle memory with classic literature and progressive, deliberate practice training. Available completely free online and offline.

100% FreeOffline - Windows + macOS

Platform

Practice Levels
Story Mode
Offline Software
Resource Blog

Trust & Profiles

GitHub Repository
Product Hunt
AlternativeTo
Softpedia Safe

© 2026 TypeMaster.|Developed by NTXM.

All Rights Reserved

Typing practice book cover: Getting Married

56 CHAPTERS

Ongoing Story

Getting Married

On the morning they are meant to be wed, Edith Bridgenorth and Cecil Sykes are instead reading pamphlets about the dangers of marriage. Edith’s father, the Bishop of Chelsea, is writing a book on the history of marriage. In his kitchen, the rest of the family assembles and attempts to hash out a better alternative to marriage as it stands. Among them are Boxer, who is proposing to Lesbia for...

Campaign Progress

0%

In Progress

Word Count88,554

Est. Practice2531 min

CHAPTERS

56

Preface 1

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and thinking it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into disastrous a...

Preface 1 1

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and thinking it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into disastrous a...

Preface 1 2

Now most laws are, and all laws ought to be, stronger than the strongest individual. Certainly the marriage law is. The only people who successfully evade it are those who actually avail themselves of...

Preface 1 3

However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think so little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order of nature, like gravitation. Except for this error, which may be reg...

Preface 1 4

If we adopt the common romantic assumption that the object of marriage is bliss, then the very strongest reason for dissolving a marriage is that it shall be disagreeable to one or other or both of th...

Preface 1 5

The answer to this question is an answer which everybody knows and nobody likes to give. What is driving our ministers of religion and statesmen to blurt it out at last is the plain fact that marriage...

Preface 1 6

The late Hugh Price Hughes, an eminent Methodist divine, once organized in London a conference of respectable men to consider the subject. Nothing came of it (nor indeed could have come of it in the a...

Preface 1 7

There is no shirking it: if marriage cannot be made to produce something better than we are, marriage will have to go, or else the nation will have to go. It is no use talking of honor, virtue, purity...

Preface 1 8

We must be reasonable in our domestic ideals. I do not think that life at a public school is altogether good for a boy any more than barrack life is altogether good for a soldier. But neither is home ...

Preface 1 9

In most healthy families there is a revolt against this tendency. The exchanging of presents on birthdays and the like is barred by general consent, and the relations of the parties are placed by expr...

Preface 1 10

Let us try to get at the root error of these false domestic doctrines. Why was it that the late Samuel Butler, with a conviction that increased with his experience of life, preached the gospel of Laod...

Preface 1 11

It would be hard to find any document in practical daily use in which these obvious truths seem so stupidly overlooked as they are in the marriage service. As we have seen, the stupidity is only appar...

Preface 1 12

We now see that the statesman who undertakes to deal with marriage will have to face an amazingly complicated public opinion. In fact, he will have to leave opinion as far as possible out of the quest...

Preface 1 13

Now if England had been governed in the past by statesmen willing to be ruled by such public opinion as that, she would have been wiped off the political map long ago. The modern notion that democracy...

Preface 1 14

Political Science means nothing else than the devising of the best ways of fulfilling the will of the world; and, I repeat, it is skilled work. Once the way is discovered, the methods laid down, and t...

Preface 1 15

The reform of marriage, then, will be a very splendid and very hazardous adventure for the Prime Minister who takes it in hand. He will be posted on every hoarding and denounced in every Opposition pa...

Preface 1 16

First, it will have to make up its mind as to how many people we want in the country. If we want less than at present, we must ascertain how many less; and if we allow the reduction to be made by the ...

Preface 1 17

This system certainly shows a much higher development of social intelligence than our marriage system; but if it were physically possible to introduce it into human society it would be wrecked by an o...

Preface 1 18

The number of wives permitted to a single husband or of husbands to a single wife under a marriage system, is not an ethical problem: it depends solely on the proportion of the sexes in the population...

Preface 1 19

Experience shows that women do not object to polygyny when it is customary: on the contrary, they are its most ardent supporters. The reason is obvious. The question, as it presents itself in practice...

Preface 1 20

It may now be asked why the polygynist nations have not gravitated to monogamy, like the latter-day saints of Salt Lake City. The answer is not far to seek: their polygyny is limited. By the Mohammeda...

Preface 1 21

Now the right to bear children without taking a husband could not be confined to women who are superfluous in the monogamic reckoning. There is the practical difficulty that although in our population...

Preface 1 22

Let us not forget, however, in our sympathy for the superfluous women, that their children must have fathers as well as mothers. Who are the fathers to be? All monogamists and married women will reply...

Preface 1 23

But before we allow this to deter us from touching the sacred fabric, we must find out whether it is not already coming to pieces in all directions by the continuous strain of circumstances. No doubt,...

Preface 1 24

As to what actual marriage is, one would like evidence instead of guesses; but as all departures from the ideal are regarded as disgraceful, evidence cannot be obtained; for when the whole community i...

Preface 1 25

The truth which people seem to overlook in this matter is that the marriage ceremony is quite useless as a magic spell for changing in an instant the nature of the relations of two human beings to one...

Preface 1 26

It is necessary to lay some stress on these points, because few realize the extent to which we proceed on the assumption that marriage is a shortcut to perfect and permanent intimacy and affection. Bu...

Preface 1 27

One of the consequences of basing marriage on the considerations stated with cold abhorrence by Saint Paul in the seventh chapter of his epistle to the Corinthians, as being made necessary by the unli...

Preface 1 28

Unfortunately it is very hard to make an average citizen take impersonal views of any sort in matters affecting personal comfort or conduct. We may be enthusiastic Liberals or Conservatives without an...

Preface 1 29

There is, too, a really appalling prevalence of the superstition that the sexual instinct in men is utterly promiscuous, and that the least relaxation of law and custom must produce a wild outbreak of...

Preface 1 30

Our relief at the morality of the reassurance that man is not promiscuous in his fancies must not blind us to the fact that he is (to use the word coined by certain American writers to describe themse...

Preface 1 31

On the other hand, we have all seen the bonds of marriage vilely abused by people who are never classed with shrews and wife-beaters: they are indeed sometimes held up as models of domesticity because...

Preface 1 32

What is more, they are protected from even such discomfort as the dislike of his prisoners may cause to a gaoler by the hypnotism of the convention that the natural relation between husband and wife a...

Preface 1 33

Without pretending to exhaust the subject, I have said enough to make it clear that the moment we lose the desire to defend our present matrimonial and family arrangements, there will be no difficulty...

Preface 1 34

The best way to avert such a struggle is to open the eyes of the thoughtlessly conventional people to the weakness of their position in a mere contest of recrimination. Hitherto they have assumed that...

Preface 1 35

The political emancipation of women is likely to lead to a comparatively stringent enforcement by law of sexual morality (that is why so many of us dread it); and this will soon compel us to consider ...

Preface 1 36

Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or ev...

Preface 1 37

All this has an important bearing on the question of divorce. Divorce reformers are so much preoccupied with the injustice of forbidding a woman to divorce her husband for unfaithfulness to his marria...

Preface 1 38

Any tolerable western divorce law must put the sentimental grievances first, and should carefully avoid singling out any ground of divorce in such a way as to create a convention that persons having t...

Preface 1 39

The one question that should never be put to a petitioner for divorce is “Why?” When a man appeals to a magistrate for protection from someone who threatens to kill him, on the simple ground that he d...

Preface 1 40

The husband, then, is to be allowed to discard his wife when he is tired of her, and the wife the husband when another man strikes her fancy? One must reply unhesitatingly in the affirmative; for if w...

Preface 1 41

Suppose, again, a woman presents herself at the Labor Exchange, and states her trade as that of a White Slave, meaning the unmentionable trade pursued by many thousands of women in all civilized citie...

Preface 1 42

Divorce, in fact, is not the destruction of marriage, but the first condition of its maintenance. A thousand indissoluble marriages mean a thousand marriages and no more. A thousand divorces may mean ...

Preface 1 43

It must not be forgotten that the refusal to accept the indignities, risks, hardships, softships, and divided duties of marriage is not confined to our voluntary old maids. There are men of the mould ...

Preface 1 44

I shall also say as little as possible of the pathology of marriage and its kerbstone breakwater. Only, as there seems to be no bottom to the abyss of public ignorance on the subject I am compelled to...

Preface 1 45

The pathology of marriage involves the possibility of the most horrible crime imaginable: that of the person who, when suffering from contagious disease, forces the contagion on another person by an a...

Preface 1 46

A less obviously silly evasion, and one which has a greater air of common sense, is “After all, seeing that most couples get on very well together, does it matter so much?” The same reply might be mad...

Preface 1 47

First among these is the habit of allowing ourselves to be bound not only by the truths of the Christian religion but by the excesses and extravagances which the Christian movement acquired in its ear...

Preface 1 48

But Mammon overreached himself when he tried to impose his doctrine of inalienable property on the Church under the guise of indissoluble marriage. For the Church tried to shelter this inhuman doctrin...

Preface 1 49

How strong was the feeling that a husband or a wife is an article of property, greatly depreciated in value at secondhand, and not to be used or touched by any person but the proprietor, may be learnt...

Preface 1 50

I must not reply flippantly, Make them all Wards in Chancery; yet that would be enough to put any sensible person on the track of the reply. One would think, to hear the way in which people sometimes ...

Preface 1 51

But please do not imagine that the evils of indissoluble marriage can be cured by divorce laws administered on our present plan. The very cheapest undefended divorce, even when conducted by a solicito...

Preface 1 52

To sum up, we have to depend on the solution of the problem of unemployment, probably on the principles laid down in the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, to make the sexual rel...

Preface 2

N.B.⁠—There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused, and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in t...

Dramatis Personae

Mrs. Alice Bridgenorth Alderman William Collins General Boxer Bridgenorth Miss Lesbia Grantham Mr. Reginald Bridgenorth Mrs. Leo Bridgenorth The Bishop of Chelsea, Alfred Bridgenorth Mr. St. John Hotc...

Getting Married

On a fine morning in the spring of 1908 the Norman kitchen in the Palace of the Bishop of Chelsea looks very spacious and clean and handsome and healthy. The Bishop is lucky enough to have a XII centu...