France nominally did not permit breach of promise actions, holding that marriage must involve free consent from both parties, and if the engagement is legally binding, then free consent is not possible. However, any party may sue for losses as a result of improper behavior by an engaged person. In Scots law before 1812, damages were limited only to actual financial losses. After World War II, German, Spanish, and Italian law allowed for the recovery of actual damages incurred as a result of a failed engagement. In popular culture Literature The social damage from receiving attention from a man is discussed in a passage from the 1801 novel Belinda by Maria Edgeworth, where an older woman is urging Miss Belinda Portman to give a suitor more time to attach her affections, though Belinda is worried that even by just passively accepting his attentions for a certain time, she might find herself "entangled, so as not to be able to retract", even "if it should not be in my power to love him at last": Breach-of-promise actions were part of the standard stock-in-trade of comic writers of the 19th century (such as Charles Dickens in Pickwick Papers, or Gilbert and Sullivan in Trial by Jury), but most middle- and upper-class families were reluctant to use them except in rather extreme circumstances (such as when a daughter became pregnant by a man who then refused to marry her), since they led to wide publicity being given to a scrutiny of personal concerns, something which was strongly repugnant to the family feeling of the period (especially where young women were concerned). Media Trial by Jury is an 1875 curtain-raiser and comic opera that enacts a satirical trial for breach of promise. The successful musical launched the careers of librettist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan. In the 1935 film We're in the Money, Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell play two process servers trying to serve a rich playboy, Ross Alexander, with a breach of promise suit. The episode "A Woman's Privilege" of the featurette series The Scales of Justice recounts the unusual case of a man who sues a woman for breach of promise following a cruise ship romance engagement. In the film A Hard Day's Night, the character playing Paul McCartney's grandfather is pursued by young women who wish to sue the older man for breach of promise. In season 8 of