his fears constitute the only channel by which his actions can be touched” (6d). Punch also supported flogging “in a clear case of brutality towards a woman”—the article does not mention children—arguing that “nothing can be too degrading for one who degrades himself in the manner alluded to” (19 March 1853, 119). Finally, Mill threw his weight behind the measure, arguing in an anonymous and privately printed pamphlet on Fitzroy’s bill, “Overwhelming as are the objections to corporal punishment except in cases of personal outrage, it is peculiarly fitted for such cases” (CW, 21:105). (Unlike Punch, Mill mentions assaults on both women and children; notably, he also was able to imagine assaults on children by women, a possibility that others seem to have overlooked.) Ultimately, however, the amendment failed by a two-to-one margin, as most MPs agreed with Fitzroy that flogging was “inconsistent with the feeling of the age” (125 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 677).3 What public and parliamentary discussion there was on Fitzroy’s bill, however, provides important evidence that domestic assault was widely perceived as a violation of manliness, an act of men “reduced below the level of the brute” (124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1419), and a betrayal of British values, as Punch communicated with its Orientalized image of a “Tyrant” man wielding force over his wife (16 April 1853, 158; fig. 2.1). Implicit too, was the assumption that family violence characterized lower-class men who could not control their passions as middle-class mores increasingly demanded. Hammerton observes, “Middle-class manliness, denoting protectiveness and benevolence to women, as well as undisputed power, was … compromised by the unruly men of the lower classes” (Hammerton, Cruelty, 61). Describing abusive men as brutes, sympathetic MPs represented beaten wives as “defenceless,” “soft,” and “kindly” (124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1414, 1417), loyal to their abusers and unwilling to testify against them. Earl Granville, speaking in the House of Lords, deplored the “cases of great cruelty, wholly wanton and unprovoked, committed by brutal husbands upon their defenceless wives and children” (127 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 551). Implicit in the descriptions of brutal men and defenseless wives and children was the middle-class expectation that the husband should protect—not abuse—his family. This argument applied with particular force to women, assumed to deserve protection from all men. As Viscount Palmerston argued in the House of Commons, “He did not at all admit that a man was more entitled to commit these injuries upon his own wife, than upon another man’s wife. On the contrary, he thought that it was a greater offence. His own wife was more entitled to expect protection, and another man’s wife had her own husband to guard her from injury” (125 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 680). Debates on the 1853 bill thus illustrate how legislative attempts to control family violence were fueled by middle-class ideals of masculine behavior. Focusing on the right role of men much more than on the rights of women, MPs sought to correct male behavior while preserving middle-class gender roles. Important as the 1853 act was to women suffering assault, it was based on an idea of wife battery as a violation of cherished gender norms, an offence of the brutal against the weak. The act was premised on the physical and moral supremacy of men in marriage. It sought not to limit that power but to correct its application.
Figure 2.1. Illustration for “Panel for the Protection of Ladies,” Punch 24 (1853): 158.
The Closed Home
While MPs in 1853 harnessed shifting ideals of manliness to counter the problem of marital violence, they worked within the doctrine of coverture, which authorized very extensive powers to the husband. At midcentury, the doctrine of coverture had been reinforced by the 1840 Cochrane decision, which enforced the “general right of the husband to the control and custody of his wife” (Times, 12 June 1840, 7e).4 The facts of the Cochrane case were as follows: Cecelia Maria and Alexander Cochrane married in 1833. In 1836, Cecelia Cochrane left her husband, taking their young son, and went to live with her mother in Ireland and France. Alexander Cochrane successfully applied for a writ for restitution of conjugal rights. The writ was not effective while Cecelia was in Ireland, but in May 1840 she was “induced by a strategem” (Times, 12 June 1840, 7d) to come to England and to go to her husband’s lodgings. Alexander “immediately placed her in custody” and kept her in his rooms, despite her declaration that “whenever she has it in her power she will again run away” (Times, 12 June 1840, 7d). Part of Alexander Cochrane’s concern, he told the judge, was that while in Paris, Cecelia had attended “masked balls and other places of that description, in the company of persons unknown to [him]” (Re Cochrane [1840] 8 Dowling 631). Cecelia Cochrane herself applied for a writ of habeus corpus, and the court had to decide whether her husband had the “right to restrain her of her liberty until she [was] willing to return to a performance of her conjugal duties” (Re Cochrane [1840] 8 Dowling 630).
The Cochrane case points to a number of unspoken anxieties underlying early Victorian male authority. As Anna Clark notes, in the ideal of the Victorian middle-class home the wife was “sheltered, safe and submissive” (A. Clark, “Humanity,” 192). In theory, no interference should have been required if the wife observed the marriage contract. But what if, like Cecelia Cochrane, a wife refused to acknowledge the husband’s authority? What powers did husbands such as Alexander Cochrane have to enforce their “natural” authority? How far should the state intervene in the domestic sphere?
The Cochrane decision reveals that for Victorian wives, there was force behind the idea that the husband ruled the household. In this precedentsetting case, the judge supported Alexander Cochrane’s rights to confine his wife and hold her to the provisions of the marriage contract. The judge gave Cecelia Maria two options: to stay in the marriage willingly, or by constraint: “[I]f there be any thing painful to Mrs. Cochrane in the present state of things, she cannot properly complain of it; for it arises from her own breach of duty, and she may end it when she pleases by cheerfully and frankly performing the contract into which she has entered. The moment that she makes restraint of her person to be unnecessary for keeping in the path of duty, the restraint will become illegal” (Times, 12 June 1840, 7e). The Cochrane decision clearly articulates the assumptions about male authority in marriage that underlay the more idealizing rhetoric of the 1853 debates in the British Parliament. It shows the extent to which the state delegated its authority to the husband, recognizing him as the center of authority in the home and supporting his powers there. (Feminist Caroline Frances Cornwallis summarized the implications of the Cochrane case for women in the pages of the radical Westminster Review: “[T]he common law views the relation of husband and wife as that of master and bondswoman. A hired servant could not be so treated” [PMW, 187n].) The decision also reveals how deeply reluctant the courts were to intervene in the domestic sphere. The issue of wife assault, then, pitted the new scrutiny of male marital conduct against the state’s reluctance to interfere in the middle-class private realm.
Dombey and Son: The Failure of Middle-Class Manliness
Charles Dickens’s novels focus repeatedly on cruelty to women and children. In particular, Bleak House, serialized from March 1852 to September 1853, coincided with and reflected the concerns of the parliamentary debates on the 1853 act. Dickens’s intensely sympathetic portrayal of Allan Woodcourt aiding Jenny, the abused brick maker’s wife (chapter 46, part 14), was published in April 1853, the month after Fitzroy proposed his act in the House of Commons. Moreover, Bleak House was perceived as an intervention in the wife-assault debates of the early 1850s, as is evident from J. M. Kaye’s 1856 article “Outrages on Women,” which references the brick makers’ episode (OW, 251–53). However, Bleak House, like Oliver Twist and Sketches by Boz, located violence in the lower-or lower-middle-class home and family, as did the 1853 parliamentary debates. For this reason, this chapter focuses on Dombey and Son, which takes the far less conventional step of portraying violence in the middle-class home. Unlike Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, or even the aspiring office boy of “Meditations in Monmouth Street,” Dombey
