Bleak Houses. Lisa Surridge
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.
Applicant.—But then he turned me out of doors.
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