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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

This line: " It drew many favourable reviews, including one in 1829 in The Gardener's Magazine on the inventions proposed in it. In 1830, the 46-year-old reviewer, John Claudius Loudon, sought out the 22-year-old Webb, and they married the next year."

Sounds pretty creepy by contemporary standards, but reading Loudon's page he was also a fascinating character and both he and Jane were accomplished horticulturalist"

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She was also a poor orphan who took to writing to have fund to live, so a marriage proposal from someone with similar interests - they even wrote books together - and they apparently lived quite happily until he died from cancer 14 years later.

It's an unremarkable age gap by Victorian standards. Men above working class status typically waited until they could support a family before marrying, and women typically married young (16-21 was common among the nobility: at 22 an unmarried woman was all but washed-up). Death in childbirth was sky-high by modern standards, and older husbands died of diseases which today would be survivable, so the average duration of a marriage was much the same as it is today -- about 12 years -- even though divorce was difficult hence rare.

(Victorian mores may seem alien to modern eyes because they arose from medical and social constraints we're no longer subject to.)

This is echoed in a trope that many will recognize from Back to the Future: Part III. Scientists/intellectuals in earlier eras attracted to each other by interests rather than age.

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