Bleak Houses. Lisa Surridge
women in mid-nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. They argue that “the representation of bourgeois women fades into blankness … as the safety of their domestic sphere is threatened” (Lawson and Shakinovsky, 2) and explore the repressions and evasions underlying these “haunting absence[s]” (Lawson and Shakinovsky, 17) in Victorian texts. Although I differ from Lawson and Shakinovsky in that I see marital violence as being urgently and centrally explored in nineteenth-century texts, whereas they argue that it is “evaded or set aside” (Lawson and Shakinovsky, 1), their study gives much-needed attention to the ways in which Victorian texts represent such violence and to the considerable tensions surrounding its representation. Their detailed readings of texts have both enriched and challenged my own. Because of its interdisciplinary interests in feminism, literature, and law, Marlene Tromp’s study is closest to my own. We both see a close relationship between fiction and the law relating to spousal assaults; however, while Tromp argues that sensation fiction anticipated legal developments later in the century, I see a more reciprocal and interlocutory relationship between the law and the novel on this issue. I also perceive a greater role being played by realist fiction and the newspaper in bringing marital violence into the public eye. While I sometimes differ from Tromp, I am always indebted to her insightful and detailed study.
This book, then, traces Victorian novelists’ intense engagement with the issue of marital violence from 1828 to 1904. Chapter 1 situates the early works of Charles Dickens against the fallout from the 1828 Offenses Against the Person Act, which brought accounts of working-class marital violence almost daily into the newspapers. Chapters 2 and 3 examine Dombey and Son and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Chapter 4 reads “Janet’s Repentance” in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. The opening of the divorce court in January 1858 made middle-class marital violence a regular item of interest in Victorian newspapers, and chapters 5 and 6 examine how divorce reporting informs The Woman in White and He Knew He Was Right (both of which derive their structures from marital cruelty trials). Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph, the book’s two final chapters illustrate how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny.
The study as a whole, then, suggests that narratives of marital violence permeated Victorian middle-class culture, even as these very narratives threatened to undermine its central tenets of domesticity, marriage, and protective masculinity. I will argue that the newspaper played a key role in this probing of domestic life, as its pages were filled with revelations of marital violence in the working classes, after 1828, and the upper classes, after 1858. Nineteenth-century novelists, I will contend, reacted to this new probing of marital conduct, variously celebrating the loyalty of the passive woman who refuses such investigation, bringing middle-class violence into the public eye, building plots to reflect the structures of newspaper reports, and thematizing the role of the newspaper in modern life. As I will show, the novels of the period actively engage with the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century; thus while Nancy Armstrong argues that domestic fiction “actively sought to disentangle the language of sexual relations from the language of politics,” I suggest that insofar as such fiction portrayed marital assault it was always more or less overtly political. If we have failed to see its politics it is because we—not its original readers—are separate from the parliamentary and media debates that created its contemporary relevance.10
Whereas Tromp sees the sensation fiction of the 1860s as having revealed middle-class violence in an unprecedented way, I feel that this shift was inaugurated earlier in the century, with the revelation of working-class violence after 1828, and then of middle- and upper-class violence after 1858. Moreover, I contend that realist fiction played a greater role in this revelation than Tromp recognizes, and sensation a lesser one. Marital cruelty was a late addition to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensational Aurora Floyd (1863), for example, whereas it was always central to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Dombey and Son.11 How, then, does this affect our view of realism, traditionally seen as upholding middle-class ideology and social structures? As I will show, such texts may depict marital violence as means of reasserting marriage as an ideal to be refined or corrected; they need not conclude that marriage is rotten because they depict rotten marriages. On the contrary, a number of texts in this study uphold marriage, domesticity, and the protective male as ideals even as they show women battered by brutal husbands. Indeed, the texts that openly question marriage—such as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, “Janet’s Repentance,” and The Wing of Azrael—are the exception, not the rule. However, any representation of wife assault in nineteenth-century fiction implicitly opens fissures in middle-class ideology by pointing to gaps or flaws in the ideology of marriage, that cornerstone of Victorian gender relations. Such fictions highlight moments when the marital ideal is challenged, probed, or even destroyed, moments when writers and readers were forced to restore or repair this ideal or even to imagine its dissolution.
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PRIVATE VIOLENCE IN THE PUBLIC EYE
The Early Writings of Charles Dickens
Figures 1.1, 1.2, 1.3. Details from “Handy Phrenology,” Punch 15 (1848): 104.
On 9 september 1848, Punch published a spoof on the trend of “Hand Phrenology,” or the analysis of human character by the shape of the hand (104). The accompanying cartoons featured a cast of a boxing glove (fig. 1.1) and the blunt-fingered, powerful hand inside it (fig. 1.2). A third detail showed the blunt hand from the back (fig. 1.3), with a label around the wrist denoting its owner’s identity: “Sykes”—Bill Sikes, the criminal who brutally murders the prostitute Nancy in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.1 The Punch cartoon of 1848, published in a period of protest concerning inadequate penalties for wife assault, suggests the extent to which the figures of Sikes and Nancy became a kind of shorthand for wife beater and victim in the Victorian period. Published in January 1839, the scene of Nancy’s murder horrified and fascinated Victorians throughout the time span of this study. Featured in music hall songs, feminist discourse, Punch, and in Dickens’s famous readings from 1868 to 1869, the figures of Bill and “poor wretched Mrs. Bill Sikes” became cultural icons of the spousal abuse problem with which Victorians struggled from the 1820s to the end of the century.2 This first chapter examines the cultural context that made the murder scene in Oliver Twist so powerful to its original readers of the late 1830s. I will suggest that the figure of Nancy, as well as the other portraits of battered women in Dickens’s sketches and early fiction, responded to a dramatic cultural shift in the late 1820s and early 1830s whereby wife beating entered the public eye through the daily newspapers.
In her study of marital violence and sensation fiction, Marlene Tromp argues that Oliver Twist looks back to tales of family violence in The Newgate Calendar.3 I want to suggest a more immediate context for Dickens’s depictions of marital violence—that is, the newspaper coverage of marital assault trials following the 1828 Offenses Against the Person Act, the first piece of nineteenth-century legislation to address wife beating. It is well known that the young Charles Dickens became a journalist during the “upheavals of the early thirties,” when the Reform Bill, cholera, economic depression, and