Bleak Houses. Lisa Surridge
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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