husbands could be tried and sentenced in magistrates’ courts without the need for a lengthy jury trial.5 Although the maximum sentence for assault under the act was relatively low (a fine of £5 or two months in prison), the remedy was quick and accessible. Soon after the act came into effect, the magistrates’ courts were flooded with abused wives.6 This shift toward the prosecution of minor assaults was in turn supported by Peel’s establishment of the London police force; after 1829, the police were available to arrest and prosecute abusive husbands (Doggett, 114).
Figure 0.2. “Woman’s Wrongs,” Punch 66 (1874): 227.
Social historians recognize 1828 as a key turning point for abused women because access to legal redress became cheaper and more accessible. I, in turn, am interested in the 1828 act’s impact on Victorian print culture—specifically, in how the act had the effect of bringing accounts of marital violence daily into the public eye. The 1828 act precipitated a significant cultural shift: newspapers like the Morning Chronicle and the Times, which habitually reported on police and judicial news, now reported on wife-assault cases on an almost daily basis. Not that newspapers had been free of wife murder and manslaughter cases prior to the act. On the contrary, newspapers in the late 1820s featured horrendous crimes of assault on wives and sexual partners, including the infamous “Red Barn Murder” of May 1827, in which William Corder killed his lover, Maria Marten, and buried her body in a shallow grave in the floor of the barn (Times, 8 August 1828, 2f, 3a–e; 9 August 1828, 3a–f). As Sir Peter Laurie remarked during the 1828 trial of James Abbott, who had cut his wife’s hands and throat with a knife, the newspapers of the day “teemed” with “horrible acts” of marital violence (Times, 3 October 1828, 3f). The change prompted by the 1828 act was that, with magistrates able to handle such cases, lesser assaults came to trial more often. The key difference was thus the level of violence in question. In the 1830s, I argue, common assault and battery in a familial context assumed unprecedented visibility in the public press. This decade, then, marks the cultural moment when—to use Kaye’s words—working-class wife assault became an “every-day story” (OW, 234).
It was not until the 1857 Divorce Act took effect that middle-class assaults received the same level of publicity. When the divorce court opened in January 1858 and divorce reporting became a regular feature of the daily press, a similar revolution in print culture occurred. The dates of 1828 and 1858 thus mark crucial turning points in the public visibility of spousal assault—1828 for working-class violence, 1858 for middle-class violence, the thirty-year time lag underlining the resistance to investigating or exposing the middle-class home. Despite this distinction, the 1828 act did have a significant effect on middle-class readers. First, and most obviously, it was middle-class readers who consumed most of the newspapers that covered the trials of abusive husbands in magistrates’ courts. Narratives of working-class spousal violence thus became part of middle-class culture. One might suppose that this public disciplining of working-class assaults allowed the middle-class readers of newspapers and novels to feel safely distanced from such violence. Yet, as I will argue, middle-class models of marriage infused both the press reports and the fictions of the period, even while their ostensible topic was working-class violence. This is especially relevant in light of D. A. Miller’s suggestion that the nineteenth-century novel played an important disciplinary role for the liberal subject. In The Novel and the Police, Miller suggests that the novel takes social discipline “out of the streets and into the closet”—that is, “into the private and domestic sphere on which the very identity of the liberal subject depends” (Miller, ix). Victorian novels, as I will show, take as a central theme the disciplining of spousal violence, both contemplating the public, legal means and creating one of the primary private means by which this was to occur.
This book, then, considers the following questions: In an era when print journalism accorded new visibility to wife assault, how did the middle-class domestic novel treat the phenomenon of “private” family violence? How did Victorian novelists participate in and respond to the urgent debates surrounding wife assault in the Victorian public press? My analysis will proceed chronologically from the early 1830s, through the intense debates on wife assault in the late 1840s and early 1850s, to the 1850s divorce debates and the opening of the new divorce court (when, once again, marital cruelty entered the public eye in unprecedented ways), and culminate in the fin de siècle, when late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under scrutiny. Victorian novelists, I will suggest, were not separate from this scrutiny of marital conduct, but actively participated in it. Moreover, I will argue that their representations of domestic violence were charged with their relationship to a continuing debate, the urgency of which is still with us, but the terms of which at specific nineteenth-century moments we have now largely forgotten.
Notably, the wife-assault debates were linked to other, related Victorian debates about violence. Tropes of animal cruelty run through the novels in this study (battered women are repeatedly paralleled with beaten dogs or horses) and suggest the relationship between the wife-assault debates and the rise of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and the antivivisection campaigns for the more humane treatment of working, laboratory, and domestic animals. Moreover, Victorians linked wife and child abuse as two related forms of violence. The 1853 Act for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults upon Women and Children raised penalties for both these crimes, seen jointly as a violation of protective manliness and “a blot” on the “national character” (124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1414). This book focuses specifically on marital violence—that is, assault, cruelty, and rape—but at times will examine as well how Victorian texts linked violence toward animals or children with violence against married women.
In considering the relationship between legal cases and the novel, I will suggest that the newspaper played a central role in mediating between these two apparently very separate discourses. Court reporting in newspapers, as Shani D’Cruze and Barbara Leckie have shown, provided an important arena in which issues of gender, class, and “private” domestic conduct were publicly negotiated.7 The nineteenth-century domestic novel—with its scrutiny of intimate behavior and spaces—also functioned as a locus in which such negotiations occurred. Like Leckie, I perceive an intense relationship between the Victorian newspaper and the novel in their public scrutiny of “private” conduct, a relationship that was especially close in serial fiction, since this type of fiction, like newspaper reporting of legal trials, took place over time. Moreover, I will argue that the novel increasingly takes the public scrutiny of private conduct as a theme in itself, actively contemplating the construction of the private through and by the public eye of the newspaper.
When I started research on this topic, there was a dearth of literary scholarship on marital violence in Victorian literature. While literary critics had largely neglected the topic of spousal assault, I found that legal and social historians had amassed a rich and growing body of research on marital breakdown, marital cruelty, and marital violence in Victorian England, research that proved invaluable to my own. In the area of legal history, John M. Biggs provides a cogent history of the concept of matrimonial cruelty, while Maeve E. Doggett traces legal developments in the areas of marriage and wife beating in Victorian England, focusing especially on the husband’s right to beat and/or confine his wife. In particular, her book provides detailed analyses of the Cochrane decision of 1840 and the Jackson decision of 1891. Margaret May provides a useful introduction to changing patterns of and views on family violence in the nineteenth century, as well as an analysis of the major changes in marriage law between 1853 and 1914. Fruitfully combining feminist and legal history, Anna Clark’s 1992 article examines wife beating and the law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while Mary Lyndon Shanley examines campaigns for marriage law reform between 1850 and 1895, focusing on changes to coverture, divorce, child custody, and married women’s property law. Shanley’s excellent chapter on wife abuse, conjugal rights, and marital rape is of particular relevance to anyone
