Mr. WHITE.—You were wrong to wake your husband when he was asleep; you were the first aggressor. Never wake your husband again when he is having a comfortable sleep. I cannot grant you a warrant.
The applicant then left the office apparently very much disappointed. (Times, 19 November 1834, 4a)
This exchange clearly exemplifies two competing and incompatible views of marriage: the applicant expects court intervention, and the magistrate merely recommends submission. The magistrate does not exactly endorse the husband’s violence, but condemns the wife as having been too provocative in her behavior and, by implication, too aggressive in seeking the warrant.8
A comedic report from the Morning Chronicle (7 September 1835) provides a final example of the noninterventionist view. Under the ironic headline “An Agreeable Honeymoon,” the newspaper reported that “an elderly man” named Patrick Mack was charged with having beaten his wife three weeks after their marriage. The early part of the report balances the couple’s sparring against the magistrate’s seriousness:
Elizabeth Mack stated … Mr Mack suddenly became jealous of one of her lodgers, and because she laughed at such folly and discouraged it, he struck her a blow under her left eye that struck the fire out of it, and she had never been fit to be seen since; besides which, he had sharpened a knife to cut her open, as he said, more easily. [a laugh]
The LORD MAYOR: How could you, defendant, so brutally violate your honeymoon? (Morning Chronicle, 7 September 1835, 4c)
The tone is changed, however, by the husband’s counteraccusations that his wife went drinking with another man and returned home to pull the covers off the bed. The reporter signals a shift in tone through the use of brogue, having used standard English for Mrs. Mack’s earlier statement:
Mack said that when his wife returned from her entertainment nothing would satisfy her but she must pull all the clothes off his bed, and wrap herself up in them on the floor. He was asleep at the time, and she stripped him so softly that he knew nothing about it till he awoke from dreaming that he fell into a ditch. He felt about, but d——l a wife or anything else could he find in the bed. At last he heard a sound snore from the middle of the floor, and though he was married only a few days, he knew whose it was: so up he got, and felt his way over to the spot, and when he stooped down his wife gave a sleepy groan, and muttered, “Jack, jewel, hisht! Paddy’ll hear you!” [great laughter]. (Morning Chronicle, 7 September 1835, 4c)
This report becomes a miniature masterpiece of comic writing in which the accusation of brutality (the wife’s eye was permanently injured) and the magistrate’s seriousness gradually become almost irrelevant. The charges are dropped; the court recommends that the couple separate; they leave, trading colorful insults. By the end of the report, the couple is represented as mutually combative both verbally and physically. In this type of relationship, the report implies, the discipline of the courts has no place.
The newspaper articles above exemplify Ellen Ross’s description of Victorian working-class marriage, in which conflict was open, women were not deferential, and husbands struggled to maintain authority over wives (Ross, 576). Contrasting with this lighthearted treatment is the serious tone reserved for cases of life-threatening abuse, manslaughter, or murder. But there are other cases that are treated with deep seriousness even when the injuries do not seem much greater than those described above. This interventionist approach is exemplified in “Two Weeks After Marriage” (Morning Chronicle, 12 November 1835), which relates that John Sellis was brought before the magistrate by a policeman who saw him knocking down and kicking his wife. As the wife did not appear to lay charges, the magistrate let Sellis go, but the dialogue between them captures competing expectations of marital—especially masculine—behavior:
MR. ROGERS (to the prisoner): What have you to say for yourself?—Defendant: The woman is my wife, and I don’t see that the officer had any business to interfere with us.
MR. ROGERS: Your wife, you wretch! Is that any reason you should be allowed to murder her?—Defendant: She came to me at nine o’clock, when I was taking my pint and pipe in a public-house, and wanted me to go home.
MR. ROGERS: Well, was there any harm in that?—Defendant: I consider so; I was not to be taken out of a public-house when she thought proper; it was not my time to leave it; and because I would not go home with her she pushed me and ran out of the house, and I followed her and knocked her down.
MR. ROGERS: Well, I never met with such a remorseless ruffian. How long have you been married, you brute?—Defendant: Only two weeks.…
MR. ROGERS: What a happy prospect you and your wife must have! Perhaps you may live together fifty or sixty years, and what a wretched life you will lead, if we are to judge from your unmanly conduct in this instance.…
Prisoner: “I wasn’t going to let her order me as she liked.”
MR. ROGERS: Hold your tongue; you swore to your Maker to protect her, and if you so soon violate your marriage vows, what is to become of her? (Morning Chronicle, 12 November 1835, 4d)
What is interesting about this case is that John Sellis’s protest strongly resembles Louisa Johnson’s challenge to the court. But whereas Louisa Johnson, as a combative wife, won the support of the court for her point of view, here the accused is labeled a “remorseless ruffian” and a “brute” who indulges in “unmanly conduct.” A key factor seems to be Sellis’s wife, whose absence conveys a kind of voiceless passivity; she thus is seen as needing protection from her husband, and—failing that—from the courts.
A further article from the Morning Chronicle (12 January 1836) exemplifies the new interventionist ethos of the courts and the public, as well as an emergent admiration for a new kind of heroine: the passive victim who refuses to defend herself or to testify against her abusive spouse. In this case, Timothy Reardon was charged with assaulting a watchman who had interfered in a dispute between him and his wife. The watchman said “he would not have taken notice of the squabble if he had not seen an extraordinary degree of cruelty upon the part of the man, and of patience upon the part of the woman” (Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1836, 4d). The watchman’s testimony is interesting because it indicates the two factors—male brutality and female passivity—that made him intervene. Another witness, a gentleman, also remarked on the woman’s passivity, saying that “the woman’s patient and forgiving disposition exceeded anything he had ever heard of” (Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1836, 4d). Finally, the wife herself denied (against the evidence of all the other witnesses) that her husband had assaulted her:
Mrs. Reardon denied, in the most positive manner, that her husband had struck or kicked her. She admitted that he had pushed her, because she deserved it, for knocking a mutton pie out of his hand, but nobody had the right to interfere.
Other persons, who saw the whole transaction, declared that the defendant beat the watchman as desperately as he beat his wife; and that the watchman would have been choked if the police had not assisted him.
The Woman persisted in saying that her husband was all in the right, and appealed strongly to Sir Peter Laurie, who, however, though anxious to do her every kindness, would not let her husband go until he had fined him in the penalty of twenty shillings. (Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1836, 4d)
In this case and others, the woman’s refusal to defend herself or to testify in court against her husband receives grudging admiration from magistrate and reporter, as if the womanly qualities they admire—passivity and loyalty—are incompatible with a wife laying charges against
