sales in London; the two papers thus “constituted a formidable engine for the manufacture of public opinion” and, by extension, key forums in which class identity and gender roles were circulated and reinforced.7 We should note that the very great majority of marital assault cases that reached the magistrates’ courts were from the lower classes—people of the middle class considered the police courts to be below their purview. Moreover, the magistrates, journalists, and readers of the daily newspapers identified with the emergent middle class. The 1828 act thus functioned very largely as a means by which lower-class private conduct was regulated, and can be seen as one of a number of pieces of legislation (including the new Vagrant Act of 1822 and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834) that defined and regulated the emergent working class, still in the process of both external definition and self-definition in the early decades of the nineteenth century. So what was at stake post-1828 was not so much the regulation of marital assault in general as the regulation of such assaults in the lower classes by middle-class institutions such as the court and the newspaper.
What is crucial to the present study is that in the early 1830s, when the effects of the 1828 act began to be felt in the public press, there was as yet no consensus on how and when the state should intervene in marital assault cases. As social historians have established, in the turbulent decades of the early nineteenth century, two models of working-class marriage competed in the public mind, the courts, and the press. The first represented a strong tradition of combative marriage, according to which “women were neither ladylike nor deferential, where men struggled to hold on to their authority over them, where ‘sexual antagonism’ was openly acknowledged” (Ross, 576; see also Hammerton, Cruelty, 31). At the same time, however, a new model was gaining ground, one that was “far more critical of the working-class tolerance of violence between husband and wife” (Tomes, 339). Nancy Tomes’s research shows that between 1840 and 1875, magistrates were increasingly guided by a middle-class ideal of marital harmony based on male protection and female submission. They started to view “the physical abuse of women as ‘barbaric’; wife-beaters in particular were called ‘brutes,’ ‘ruffians,’ and ‘tyrants’” (Tomes, 339). But in the early 1830s, when Dickens’s career was beginning, the class structure that emerged from the industrial revolution (and its attendant assumptions about social control of marital violence in the lower classes) was only just forming. In the 1830s’ newspaper accounts of wife-assault trials, we see, then, a lack of consensus as to how (and indeed whether) marital assault should be controlled. In some cases, couples, magistrates, and reporters seem to take mutual combativeness for granted and to resist interference in a seemingly self-regulating (albeit violent) system. This attitude competes in contemporary newspapers with a deep seriousness more typical of later Victorian writings on marital assault, in which mutual combativeness is felt to violate matrimonial harmony and to signify a worrying degree of general violence in the working class.
In the following pages, I provide examples of cases that exemplify these contradictory impulses in the early Victorian public press. In using newspaper accounts, I am cognizant of Shani D’Cruze’s warning: as she notes, the impression that such reports render “real voices” must be tempered by the knowledge that these reports were shaped by the institutional requirements of the courts and the newspaper, were limited by the types of questions and answers permitted in court, and thus are are often formulaic in structure (D’Cruze, 13). D’Cruze nevertheless affirms that newspaper articles can reveal the “points of view of both wives and husbands … as well as the judgments of the bench and the editorial voice of the reporter” (D’Cruze, 80). I am especially interested in how such cases reveal contestation or consensus surrounding what kinds of marital assault should be regulated. For the purpose of this inquiry, then, the editorializing of the reporter and the comments of the judge and others—that is to say, the visible institutional context(s) in which the assault is framed—form a critical part of the historical record.
I will start with three cases in which intervention is deemed inappropriate and then contrast these with three cases in which it is seen to be appropriate. Typically, a reporter signals that court interference is inappropriate if the case is characterized by open acrimony or sparring in court, as well as by the abused woman’s active resistance. Such cases also often involve age or size disparity or couples of Irish extraction. The reporter may signal lack of seriousness by tone, comedic devices, or simply by recording the magistrate’s dismissal of the case. A case reported in both the Times and the Morning Chronicle on 11 October 1834 represents a situation in which legal intervention was deemed unsuitable. Mr. Johnson had been charged with “having disturbed the neighbourhood with the very sound of the blows which he inflicted on his wife Louisa” (Morning Chronicle, 11 October 1834, 4c). The dialogue between Louisa Johnson and the magistrate captures a collision between class-based assumptions about marriage:
The LORD MAYOR (to the wife).—Well, I suppose you are come to complain of your husband?
Mrs. Johnson.—No, I an’t.
The LORD MAYOR.—Didn’t he give you that black eye?
Mrs. Johnson.—Not he, indeed. I’ve got a violent cold in my eye. To be sure, he sometimes gives me a dab in the face, but then that’s only between he and I. It’s nothing to nobody else.…
The LORD MAYOR.—Then, you have no complaint to make against him?
Mrs. Johnson.—Complaint! What would I complain against him for? I have a right to complain of those that wouldn’t let him alone.
The LORD MAYOR.—You deserve to be treated well, my poor woman. He must be a great brute who would strike you, and I must protect you against the violence of this man.
Mrs. Johnson.—Why, then, God bless your Lordship, leave us to settle the business ourselves. (Laughter).
Mr. Hobler.—She’ll manage him better than we can, my Lord. (Times, 11 October 1834, 4b; see Morning Chronicle, 11 October 1834, 4c)
The reporting of this dialogue implies strongly that middle-class assumptions about protecting abused women do not apply to this case. Despite the neighbors’ apprehension that her husband might murder her, Louisa Johnson suggests that her primary conflict is with the courts, not with him. Her strong defense of the combative marriage makes the Lord Mayor’s early Victorian concerns about wife abuse sound like so many pious clichés; moreover, the voice of Mr. Hobler supports her view that the “management” of this marriage is better left to the couple, not the magistrate. Such reports exemplify magistrates’ and reporters’ assumptions that working-class couples who engaged in such combative relationships, in which wives had the “right to fight” (Tomes, 342), were not within the purview of the court.
The Times of 19 November 1834 features another case exemplifying a noninterventionist ethos. This case, however, reverses the roles in the Johnson case: here the woman asks for intervention, and the magistrate refuses it:
A respectable-looking young woman entered the office, and addressing the bench said that she wanted a warrant against her husband.
Mr. WHITE.—What has he done to you?
Applicant.—He beat me last night when he came home, and I want a warrant against him for the assault.
Mr. WHITE.—What did you do to provoke him to assault you? …
Applicant.—Why, he came home to tea, which I had got ready for him, and while he was drinking it he fell asleep, and I only just woke him, when he threw the tea all over me.
Mr. WHITE.—You should not have woke him, particularly as he was such an irritable man. You should have let him sleep on as he liked, and then you would have been sure to have peace.
