Bleak Houses. Lisa Surridge
law, conjugal rights—that I contemplated all the time. Like Holmes, I have learned new ways of reading, and in time my footnote became an article, and the article became this book. In the process, fictional scenes that I had previously thought of as peripheral came into a different focus for me. For example, I discovered that J. W. Kaye’s 1856 article “Outrages on Women,” written as he contemplated a parliamentary bill proposing flogging penalties for wife abuse, cites Bleak House (1852–53) as a text about how to deal with the problems of wife beating.1 In the midst of listing possible ways to alleviate marital violence—day care, parks, and improved housing being among his rather surprising suggestions—Kaye quotes at length the scene in which Esther and Mrs. Pardiggle visit the brick maker’s family. He sees Bleak House (which was serialized before and during the debates on the 1853 Act for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults upon Women and Children) as a paradigmatic example of public regulation of private domestic violence, of the public’s misreading or failing to read “the history of the black eye, or the bruised forehead, or the lacerated breast” (OW, 253). Until I read Kaye’s article, I had not perceived Dickens’s novel as part of the 1850s debate on wife-assault penalties, but rather had seen the black eye of the brick-maker’s wife as something of a sideline to the text’s main issues. This present study will, I hope, enhance the modern reader’s understanding of Victorian narratives of marital violence by suggesting their relationship to the Victorian debates on marital violence. At all times, I intend as far as possible to reinsert such texts into the cultural nexus from which they originated. The many bleak houses and black eyes in this book, then, are considered in their cultural moment as far as I can reconstruct it.
I turn back to Kaye for a moment because his article “Outrages on Women” contains one of the strongest Victorian statements about the prominence of wife beating in contemporary print culture. Kaye wrote in 1856 that “outrages upon women have of late years held a distressingly prominent position. It is no exaggeration to say, that scarcely a day passes that does not add one or more to the published cases of this description of offence” (OW, 233–34). To show how common such narratives had become in contemporary newspapers, Kaye cited a typical police report from the (London) Times:
WORSHIP STREET.—Charles Sloman, a surly-looking fellow, was charged with outrages upon his wife.
The wife, a decent-looking woman, who gave her evidence with manifest reluctance against her husband, said, she only wished to be parted from him; that the prisoner had lamed her with kicks, struck her in the face with his fist, and knocked her down. She had been married only eight years, but had been beaten and ill-used so many times, that she really could not say how often, but was seldom or never without black eyes and a bruised face.…
Mr. Hammill sentenced the prisoner to be committed to the House of Correction for six months, with hard labour, and at the expiration of that to find good bail for a further term of like duration. (OW, 234)
Such a narrative, Kaye observes, was not exceptional: wife abuse had become an “every-day story” in Victorian newspapers (OW, 234). As Kaye’s article attests, “marital oppression” or “wife beating” became the focus of considerable attention in nineteenth-century print culture.2 Police reports, newspaper and journal articles, cartoons, and political debates all testify to the urgency of this issue for Victorians. Battered women, asserted John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor in the Morning Chronicle in 1846, were dying “in protracted torture, from incessantly repeated brutality, without ever, except in the fewest and rarest instances, claiming the protection of law” (CW, 24:919). In 1853, Punch deplored
THAT the Tyrant Man should so long have been suffered, at the expense of a small sum, to wreak his malevolence on the Victim Woman; that the Brute, like a chartered ruffian, should have been empowered to beat, kick, and trample upon her, with indefinite, short of fatal, violence, for the consideration of about five pounds; … that even now the Wretch who may commit such outrages on a Female will incur no heavier penalty than a moderate imprisonment: might make foreigners imagine that our laws, in this regard, had either been enacted by a Parliament of BLUEBEARDS, or dictated by King Henry VIII. (Punch, 16 April 1853, 158)
Similarly, the Contemporary Review (1868) evoked “cases where a wife has suffered grievous bodily harm at the hands of a ruffianly husband, who, not considering ‘scourges and clubs’ sufficiently efficacious weapons, has beaten her with the poker or the fire-shovel” (IEL, 123). The theme was still powerful in 1874, when Punch featured a huge illustration entitled “Woman’s Wrongs,” depicting a man holding a poker, standing over and threatening his kneeling and injured wife (Punch, 30 May 1874, 227; fig. 0.2); in 1878, when Frances Power Cobbe deplored the prevalence of “Wife-Torture in England”; and in 1892, when Matilda Blake demanded “Are Women Protected?” and filled the Westminster Review’s pages with bloody narratives of wife battery while deploring the low sentences received by assailants.
In the ecclesiastical, divorce, criminal, and magistrates’ courts; in the Houses of Parliament; in domestic manuals, newspapers, journals, and petitions, Victorians debated how to prevent and punish wife assault. As these debates reveal, wife beating stood at the vortex of some of the most urgent issues of the period: marital coverture, divorce, domesticity, manliness, and women’s rights. Did the husband control his wife’s body? Her behavior? How should this authority be exercised? Was manliness compatible with violence? At what point did the wife’s rights as a person overrule the husband’s rights as domestic ruler? When and how should the law interfere in the relationship between husband and wife? Under what circumstances should the privacy of the home be sacrificed to protect the wife? In the courts, in Parliament, in newspapers, and—as I will argue—in their fiction, Victorians questioned the limits of male authority, the husband’s power to chastise, the definition of matrimonial cruelty, and the community’s role in regulating domestic violence.
This book examines Victorian novelists’ engagement with the issue of marital violence from 1828 to the end of the nineteenth century. My analysis starts in the years following the 1828 Offenses Against the Person Act, legislation that opened magistrates’ courts to abused working-class wives. This act was instituted by Robert Peel as part of his legal reforms, and was part of a general trend toward higher sentences for crimes against the person.3 Drafted in part because of popular concern about “disputes between man and wife,” the act extended summary jurisdiction to common assault and battery.4 Under the new act, abusive 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