Probably not a major inaccuracy, but an interesting one revealed just this week: in the movie Coal Miner’s Daughter, based on the memoir of the same name of course, it was canon that Loretta Lynn married when she was 13, had a baby at 14, was a mother of 4 by 18.
Turns out she shaved three years off of her age somewhere along the line, so while still ridiculously young for marriage and maternity (at least by most people’s standards), she was actually 15/almost 16 when she married, and add a few years to the rest. (I’ve read that she was a grandmother at 29, but other accounts put that a couple of years or more older- now it turns out she was a wizened old lady of 34 or so before she was a grandma.)
Nonsense. The mean age for those marrying for the first time in early-modern England was about 23 for women and about 26 for men. That was because there were strong social pressures against couples marrying before the groom was financially independent and able to set up his own household.
Oddly enough, I spent about a 1/2-hour one day trying to figure out Mozart’s yearly earnings. The closest I could get to was relating his income to the then-cost of bread, and doing a simple conversion.
Not very scientific, but there you go.
Anyway, Mozart’s best year financially was the year he died - by my “bread calculations” he earned well in excess of $500,000 that year, and in no year in Vienna did he ever make less than $100k-equivalent.
Earning figures come from Mozart: A Life, by Solomon.
There was also a ban on burying people in the city at the time, part of the Emperor’s program to “rationalize” funerals. In addition, very few non-nobles had marked graves at the time.
The movie does. The play makes passing reference to his wife (she’s seen but not heard); he calls her “La Statuosa” because she is so “virtuous and… rigid”.
In the play the ingenue he is horrified to learn has been seduced my Mozart eventually becomes his mistress once he becomes “Evil Salieri”.
A big income and and even bigger debt are hardly incompatable, especially in an era when people sought to maintain stations in society that required almost limitless funds. If you were a wealthy commoner you spent like a baron, if you were a count you spent like a duke, if you were a duke you spent like the crown prince, etc.
That’s the impression one always gets from reading Thackeray, anyway. No character seems capable of living within his means, and the debtors’ prison always looms.
Which is one reason why, on average, the man was generally older than the woman.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned studying history, it’s that averages can be misleading. I would imagine there was great variation between the city and the countryside, and between one class and another.
I know of a number of cases throughout Europe and the American colonies (and early United States) where the man was considerably senior to his wife, and she married while still in her teens. There’s also a famous 19th-century painting of a wedding in a Russian Orthodox church, in which the groom is clearly middle-aged and his bride is maybe 14. Such matches were far more common than one today might think.
Nitpick. Bullingdon shoots first because he is the aggrieved party. There is no coin toss. Seems backwards to me since it rewards the aggressor in a duel situation.
Not a child-bride case, but Frances Folsom married President Grover Cleveland when she was 21 and he was 49 (and practically her stepfather). Nobody appeared squicked at the time. What squicked people out (or so the Republicans claimed to be) was Cleveland (possibly) having sired a bastard.
Marie Antoinette and the future Louis XVI were married at the ages of 15 and 16, respectively. As I say, it was common to marry young when the average life expectancy was around 45 (and for one man to go through several wives).
Only for the nobility and upper classes. For the rest, the man was expected to be able to support a familt before he got married. That meant becoming a journeyman in a craft, or establishing his own farmstead. The overwhelming majority of people did not marry young.
And, of course, different rules/considerations always governed royal marriages. No need to wait for a prince to “get established” in life, he’d be married off whenever a diplomatically advantageous prospect was on the market.
U-571 wasn’t a hugely successful movie and the thing it’s most known for, really, is being historically inaccurate. I don’t think anyone’s been fooled.