Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, women were encouraged to aspire to marriage. In The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits, Sarah Stickney Ellis, a best-selling author, maintained that women were "clothed in moral beauty," which was best applied to raising virtuous children and keeping men, the rightful holders of "worldly aggrandizement," on the straight and narrow (Harrison 30). Unlike Tennyson, Ellis professed that young ladies should be well versed in "domestic ideology," because they were "inferior [to men] in mental power in the same proportion that [they were] inferior in bodily strength" (Cruse 339). Subsequently, Ellis claimed that female education should focus on cleverness, defined as "aptness in doing everything that falls within the sphere of ordinary duty"; learning, or basic skills in language and science, which served primarily to attract and keep the interest of men; and knowledge which would "lead to general illumination" (399). Certainly, the prevalence of these ideas is apparent in Money, by Lord Lytton, in which Sir John Vessey says to his daughter Georgina:
             [I never] stuffed your head with histories and homilies; but you draw, you sing, you dance;
             you walk well into a room; and that's the way young ladies are educated nowadays, in
             order to become the pride of their parents and a blessing to their husbands – that is,
             ...