Bleak Houses – Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

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Lisa Surridge is associate professor
of English at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. She is coeditor of
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd
and has published on Victorian fiction in
many journals, including Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Review,
Dickens Studies Annual, Victorian Newsletter, and Victorians Institute Journal.
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B L E A K H O U S E S Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction
LISA SURRIDGE
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
Athens
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Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 
www.ohio.edu/oupress ©  by Ohio University Press
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved
Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ ™
            
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Surridge, Lisa A. (Lisa Anne), –
Bleak houses : marital violence in Victorian fiction / Lisa Surridge.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN --- (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN ---X (pbk. : acidfree paper)
. English fiction—th century—History and criticism. . Marriage in literature.
. Domestic fiction, English—History and criticism. . Family violence in literature.
. Abused women in literature. . Child abuse in literature. . Violence in literature.
I. Title.
PR.MS 
'.—dc

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C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
vii
Acknowledgments
ix
List of Abbreviations
xi
Introduction 
. Private Violence in the Public Eye:
The Early Writings of Charles Dickens 
. Domestic Violence and Middle-Class Manliness:
Dombey and Son 
. From Regency Violence to Victorian Feminism:
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 
. The Abused Woman and the Community:
“Janet’s Repentance” 
. Strange Revelations: The Divorce Court, the Newspaper,
and The Woman in White 
. The Private Eye and the Public Gaze:
He Knew He Was Right 
. Marital Violence and the New Woman:
The Wing of Azrael 
. “Are Women Protected?” Sherlock Holmes
and the Violent Home 
Notes

Bibliography 
Index
v

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I L L U S T R AT I O N S Figure .. Sidney Paget, “I Am the Wife of Sir Eustace Brackenstall,”
illustration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the
Abbey Grange,” 

Figure .. “Woman’s Wrongs,” 

Figures ., ., .. Details from “Handy Phrenology,” 

Figure .. “The Gin Drop,” 

Figure .. George Cruikshank, “Sikes attempting to destroy his dog,”
illustration for Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, –

Figure .. Illustration for “Panel for the Protection of Ladies,” 

Figure .. “Useful Sunday Literature for the Masses; or, Murder Made
Familiar,” 

Figure .. Hablôt K. Browne, “Mr. Carker in his hour of triumph,”
illustration for Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, –

Figure .. William Hogarth, “First Stage of Cruelty,” –

Figure .. William Hogarth, “Cruelty in Perfection,” –

Figure .. “A pair of black eyes,” 

Figure .. “Doing What He Likes with His Hone,” 

Figure .. R. Seymour, “The Dying Clown,” illustration for
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, –

Figure .. “The Expressions of the Hand,” 

Figure .. Illustration for the  stereotyped edition of
George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life

Figure .. “The New Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes,
Westminster Hall,” 

Figure .. Illustration for “Divorce A Vinculo,” 

Figure .. “The Case according to the Petitioner’s statement,” 

Figure .. “The Case according to the Respondent’s statement,” 

vii
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viii | Illustrations
Figure .. Illustration for “Divorce A Vinculo,” 

Figure .. “Is Marriage a Failure? As a Rule—Yes,” 

Figure .. “For Assaulting His Wife,” 

Figure .. “He Fell Senseless to the Ground,” 

Figure .. “She Fell Quivering to the Ground,” 

Figure .. Sidney Paget, “Mrs. Stapleton Sank upon the Floor,”
illustration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the
Baskervilles,” 

Figure .. Sidney Paget, “A Wild-Eyed and Frantic Young Man
Burst into the Room,” illustration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” 

Figure .. Sidney Paget, “I Could See by Holmes’s Face That He
Was Much Puzzled,” illustration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” 

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A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S I would like to thank the University of Victoria for research leaves in 
and , and for grant money for research assistance. My thanks go espe­
cially to the student assistants themselves: Lori Emerson, Treava Kellington,
Anna Kelly, Daniel Martin, Kelly Pitman, and Matt Thomson. I am also
grateful to Darlene Hollingsworth and Diana Rutherford at the Depart­
ment of English at the University of Victoria for their proofreading help.
This book has been long in the writing, and I owe its completion to
the many people who have encouraged my research and commented on the
manuscript’s many draft versions: Luke Carson, Christopher Keep, Mary
Elizabeth Leighton, and Marie Surridge in particular. I would also like to
thank the anonymous readers at Ohio University Press, as well as my
editors, Sharon Rose, Bevin McLaughlin, and Nancy Basmajian. Special
thanks to Judith Mitchell for her critical acumen and warm encourage­
ment and to John Adams, who has been a strong and loving source of sup­
port in this work and in all things.
Permissions
Some of the material in this book appeared in “Dogs’/Bodies, Women’s
Bodies: Wives as Pets in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Domestic
Violence,” Victorian Review  (): –, and in “Domestic Violence,
Female Self-Mutilation, and the Healing of the Male in Dombey and Son,”
Victorians Institute Journal (): –, and is reprinted here by per­
mission of the editors.
ix
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A B B R E V I AT I O N S
AF
Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Aurora Floyd. Ed. Richard Nemesvari and
Lisa Surridge. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, . Originally
published .
AWP
Matilda Blake. “Are Women Protected?” Westminster Review 
(): –.
BS
Barbara Leigh Smith [later Bodichon]. A Brief Summary, in Plain
Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (). In
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group, ed.
Candida Ann Lacey, –. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
.
CBQ
W. Gurney Benham. Cassell’s Book of Quotations. London: Cassell,
.
CW
John Stuart Mill. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Ed. Ann
P. Robson and John M. Robson.  vols. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, –. Originally published –.
Day
Harry How. “A Day with Dr. Conan Doyle.” Strand Magazine 
(): –.
DC
Charles Dickens. David Copperfield. Ed. Nina Burgess. Oxford:
Clarendon, . Originally published –.
DS
Charles Dickens. Dombey and Son. Ed. Alan Horsman. Oxford:
Clarendon, . Originally published –.
ELRW
J. J. S. Wharton. An Exposition of the Laws Relating to the Women of
England; Showing Their Rights, Remedies, and Responsibilities, in
Every Position of Life. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and
Longmans, .
ELW
Caroline Norton. English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century
(). In Selected Writings of Caroline Norton. Delmar, NY:
Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, .
EW
Harriet Taylor Mill. “The Enfranchisement of Women” (). In
Sexual Equality: Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill,
and Helen Taylor, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson,
–. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, .
xi
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xii | Abbreviations
HK
Anthony Trollope. He Knew He Was Right. Ed. John Sutherland.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, . Originally published
–.
HS
Abraham Dreyfus. “He and She.” Strand Magazine  (): –.
IEL
Alfred Dewes. “The Injustice of the English Law as It Bears on the
Relationship of Husband and Wife.” Contemporary Review 
(): –.
JP
James F. Sullivan. “The Judge’s Penance.” Strand Magazine  ():
–.
LCW
Margaret Oliphant. “The Laws Concerning Women.” Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine  (): –.
Lilies
John Ruskin. “Lecture II—Lilies: Of Queen’s Gardens.” In Sesame
and Lilies: The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander
Wedderburn, vol. , –. London: George Allen, .
LQ
Caroline Norton. A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor
Cranworth’s Divorce Bill. rd ed. London: Longman, Brown,
Green and Longmans, .
Marr.
Mona Caird. “Marriage” (). In “Criminals, Idiots, Women,
and Minors”: Victorian Writing by Women on Women, ed. Susan
Hamilton, –. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, .
MC
Charles Dickens. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Ed.
P. N. Furbank. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, . Originally
published –.
MG
Eliza Lynn [later Linton]. “Marriage Gaolers.” Household Words 
(): –.
MIW
Annie Besant. Marriage As It Was, As It Is, And As It Should Be: With
a Sketch of the Life of Mrs. Besant. Ed. Asa K. Butts. New York:
A. K. Butts, .
MW
Mabel Sharman Crawford. “Maltreatment of Wives.” Westminster
Review  (): –.
OCS
Charles Dickens. The Old Curiosity Shop. Ed. Angus Easson. Har­
mondsworth, UK: Penguin, . Originally published –.
OT
Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist. Ed. Peter Fairclough. Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin, . Originally published –.
OW
J. W. Kaye. “Outrages on Women.” North British Review  ():
–.
PC
Mona Caird. “Punishment for Crimes against Women and Children.”
Westminster Review  (): –.
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Abbreviations | xiii
PMW
Caroline Frances Cornwallis. “The Property of Married Women.”
Westminster Review  (): –.
PP
Charles Dickens. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.
Ed. Robert L. Patten. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, . Orig­
inally published –.
Prince
J. E. Preston Muddock. “The Prince’s Crime.” Strand Magazine 
(): –.
PW
John Stuart Mill. “Protection of Women.” Sunday Times,  August
, b.
QV
Arthur Christopher Benson and Viscount Esher, eds. The Letters
of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence
between the Years  and .  vols. London: John Murray,
.
Rev.
James Craigie Robertson. Review of Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam
Bede, The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot. Quarterly Review 
(): –.
SB
Charles Dickens. Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers, –. Vol.
, The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, ed. Michael
Slater. London: J. M. Dent, . Originally published –.
SCL
George Eliot. Scenes of Clerical Life. Ed. Thomas A. Noble. Oxford:
Clarendon, . Originally published .
SSH
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Original “STRAND” Sherlock Holmes.
The complete facsimile edition. Chatham, UK: Wordsworth,
. Originally published –.
State
Anon. “The State of the Law Courts. IV. The Criminal Courts.”
Strand Magazine  (): –.
SWH
C. P. Sanger. “The Structure of Wuthering Heights” (). In
Wuthering Heights: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Alastair Everitt,
–. New York: Barnes and Noble, .
TD
Thomas Hardy. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Ed. Juliet Grindle and
Simon Gatrell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, . Originally
published .
TL
L. A. Atherley-Jones. “The Triumph of Love.” Strand Magazine 
(): –.
TR
Ferdinand de Saar. “The Toilers of the Rocks.” Strand Magazine 
(): –.
TWH
Anne Brontë. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Ed. Herbert Rosengarten.
Oxford: Clarendon, . Originally published .
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xiv | Abbreviations
VIC
F. Startin Pilleau. “The Vision of Inverstrathy Castle.” Strand
Magazine  (): –.
VN
Richard Marsh. “A Vision of the Night.” Strand Magazine  ():
–.
WA
Mona Caird. The Wing of Azrael. Montreal: John Lovell and Son,
.
WH
Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights. Ed. Hilda Marsden and Ian Jack.
Oxford: Clarendon, . Originally published .
WQ
Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx. The Woman Question. London:
Swan Sonnenschein, Lowry, .
WTE
Frances Power Cobbe. “Wife-Torture in England” (). In
“Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors”: Victorian Writing by
Women on Women, ed. Susan Hamilton, –. Peterborough,
ON: Broadview, .
WW
Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White. Ed. John Sutherland. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, . Originally published –.
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B L E A K H O U S E S Surridge FM
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Surridge INTRO
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INTRODUCTION
 “T A   A G” (), Sherlock Holmes
and Dr. Watson are called to investigate a murder in an upper-class home.
Sir Eustace Brackenstall lies dead in his dining room, felled by a blow from
his own poker. Lady Brackenstall, also injured, has a “terrible mark upon
her brow” and two “vivid red spots” on her arm (SSH, ). When Holmes
and Watson arrive, she tells them what happened. The night before, she had
been making a last tour of the house before bedtime. She entered the din­
ing room, surprising three thieves who were coming in through the French
windows. One man grabbed her by the wrist and throat; when she tried to
scream, he struck her a “savage blow with his fist over the eye” (SSH, ).
When she came back to consciousness she was gagged and bound to a
chair with the cord from the bell pull. Her husband rushed into the room
with his cudgel in his hand. One of the thieves dealt Sir Eustace a deadly
blow with the poker, whereupon Lady Brackenstall fainted again. When
she came to, the thieves had collected up the silver and were helping them­
selves to the Brackenstalls’ best wine. They checked Lady Brackenstall’s
bonds and fled through the French windows, taking the silver with them.
She called the servants, who sent for the local police, who in turn called in
Holmes. By the time Holmes arrives, the local police have identified the
I

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 | Introduction
criminals as the “Lewisham gang of burglars”—“commonplace rogues,” as
Watson describes them (SSH, ; ).
The private upper-class home shattered by lower-class poker-wielding
ruffians; the protection of the wife by the husband; the wife as passive
victim—“The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” seems a tissue of classbased assumptions about who commits crime, against whom, and how.
But not so fast. Holmes notices that though three wine glasses are soiled,
only one contains bees-wing, a crust that forms in fine wines after long
storage. He also wonders how the criminals managed to use the bell pull
to tie up Lady Brackenstall, since pulling on the rope would presumably
rouse the servants. Although Holmes gets back on the train to London,
these anomalies—meaningful only to those who understand fine wine and
good servants—so obsess Holmes that he gets off the London train and
goes back to Kent. There he minutely examines the window, the carpet, the
chair, the rope, and the bell pull. “We have got our case,” he tells Watson,
“one of the most remarkable in our collection”(SSH, ). He tells Lady
Brackenstall that her story is an absolute fabrication. He then sends a
telegram to a ship’s captain working on the Adelaide-Southampton line.
Captain Croker arrives in Baker Street and relates a different story. He
tells Holmes that he met and loved Mary Taylor (the future Lady Brackenstall) when he was first officer on the ship that brought her from Australia
to England. When she married Sir Eustace, he accepted his loss, but he
could not accept what he heard from her maid: that her husband abused
her. According to Croker, there were no thieves, no intruders: the villain,
he says, was Sir Eustace himself. Lady Brackenstall’s eye was blackened by
her baronet husband, who was “for ever illtreating her” (SSH, ). Croker
himself killed Sir Eustace when he saw him “welt” her across the face with
a stick (SSH, ). The sailor then tied the wife to a chair to make her look
innocent; poured the wine into the glasses to create the illusion of three
thieves; threw the family silver in the pond to provide a motive for the
crime; and disappeared until the telegram from Holmes summoned him
to the Baker Street flat.
Like the first story, this one is heavily inflected by class, and it over­
turns all the assumptions of the first about where and how domestic vio­
lence occurs, and by whom and against whom it is committed. Holmes,
Watson, and the reader are forced to reassess their assumptions surround­
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Figure .. Sidney Paget, “I Am the Wife of
Sir Eustace Brackenstall,” illustration for
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure
of the Abbey Grange,” Strand Magazine
().
ing domestic violence—assumptions that wife beating occurs in the kitchen
rather than the dining room; that black eyes belong to the East End, not
the east wing; and that commonplace rogues rather than baronets cudgel
their wives. “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” then, is quintessen­
tially a text about reading narratives and signs of marital violence. With its
multiple stories, multiple tellers (Lady Brackenstall, the maid, the sailor,
the local police), and multiple interpreters (Holmes, Watson, the local po­
lice, the story’s reader), the text draws attention to how such narratives are
produced, disseminated, and interpreted. It draws attention to the intru­
sion of the public gaze into the private sphere; to the body of the woman
as a text to be deciphered by medical or legal experts (fig. .); to the ques­
tion of how a woman’s private loyalties may impact public narratives
about or investigation into spousal assault; and to the role of the courts in
the punishment of the assailant. As such, it foregrounds many of the key
themes of this book.
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When I first started thinking about Victorians and marital violence, I
was writing a footnote to an article on an entirely different subject. Like
Holmes, I had a train to catch (although mine was metaphorical), and I al­
most walked away from the subject that now forms the focus of this study.
At the time, I had not read the extensive wife-assault debates in the Victo­
rian print media, and I was not aware that wife beating formed part of
a web of Victorian issues surrounding marital power—coverture, married
women’s property law, divorce 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
 article “Outrages on Women,” written as he contemplated a parlia­
mentary bill proposing flogging penalties for wife abuse, cites Bleak House
(–) 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  Act for the Better Prevention and Pun­
ishment of Aggravated Assaults upon Women and Children) as a paradig­
matic 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, ). Until I read Kaye’s
article, I had not perceived Dickens’s novel as part of the s 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 nar­
ratives of marital violence by suggesting their relationship to the Victorian
debates on marital violence. At all times, I intend as far as possible to rein­
sert 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
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 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, –). To show how common such narratives had be­
come in contemporary newspapers, Kaye cited a typical police report from
the (London) Times:
 .—Charles Sloman, a surly-looking fellow, was
charged with outrages upon his wife.
The wife, a decent-looking woman, who gave her evidence with mani­
fest 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 re­
ally 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, )
Such a narrative, Kaye observes, was not exceptional: wife abuse had be­
come an “every-day story” in Victorian newspapers (OW, ). 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 , were
dying “in protracted torture, from incessantly repeated brutality, without
ever, except in the fewest and rarest instances, claiming the protection of
law” (CW, :). In , Punch deplored
 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
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 | Introduction
that our laws, in this regard, had either been enacted by a Parliament of
, or dictated by King Henry VIII. (Punch,  April , )
Similarly, the Contemporary Review () 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, ). The theme was still power­
ful in , 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,  May , ; fig. .); in ,
when Frances Power Cobbe deplored the prevalence of “Wife-Torture in
England”; and in , when Matilda Blake demanded “Are Women Pro­
tected?” 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 pe­
titions, 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 hus­
band’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 fic­
tion, Victorians questioned the limits of male authority, the husband’s
power to chastise, the definition of matrimonial cruelty, and the commu­
nity’s role in regulating domestic violence.
This book examines Victorian novelists’ engagement with the issue of
marital violence from  to the end of the nineteenth century. My analy­
sis starts in the years following the  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
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Figure .. “Woman’s Wrongs,” Punch  (): .
and battery.⁴ Under the new act, abusive husbands could be tried and sen­
tenced 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 £ or two months in prison), the remedy was quick and ac­
cessible. Soon after the act came into effect, the magistrates’ courts were
flooded with abused wives.⁶ This shift toward the prosecution of minor as­
saults was in turn supported by Peel’s establishment of the London police
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 | Introduction
force; after , the police were available to arrest and prosecute abusive
husbands (Doggett, ).
Social historians recognize  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  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  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 wifeassault 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 s featured horrendous crimes of assault on
wives and sexual partners, including the infamous “Red Barn Murder” of
May , in which William Corder killed his lover, Maria Marten, and
buried her body in a shallow grave in the floor of the barn (Times,  August
, f, a–e;  August , a–f ). As Sir Peter Laurie remarked during
the  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,  October , f ). The change prompted by the
 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 s, 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, ).
It was not until the  Divorce Act took effect that middle-class as­
saults received the same level of publicity. When the divorce court opened
in January  and divorce reporting became a regular feature of the daily
press, a similar revolution in print culture occurred. The dates of  and
 thus mark crucial turning points in the public visibility of spousal
assault— for working-class violence,  for middle-class violence,
the thirty-year time lag underlining the resistance to investigating or ex­
posing the middle-class home. Despite this distinction, the  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
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Introduction | 
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 do­
mestic 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 middleclass domestic novel treat the phenomenon of “private” family violence?
How did Victorian novelists participate in and respond to the urgent de­
bates surrounding wife assault in the Victorian public press? My analysis
will proceed chronologically from the early s, through the intense de­
bates on wife assault in the late s and early s, to the s divorce
debates and the opening of the new divorce court (when, once again,
marital cruelty entered the public eye in unprecedented ways), and culmi­
nate in the fin de siècle, when late-Victorian feminism and the great mar­
riage 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 par­
ticipated in it. Moreover, I will argue that their representations of domes­
tic 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
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 | Introduction
(RSPCA) and the antivivisection campaigns for the more humane treat­
ment of working, laboratory, and domestic animals. Moreover, Victorians
linked wife and child abuse as two related forms of violence. The  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 charac­
ter” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ). 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 newspa­
pers, as Shani D’Cruze and Barbara Leckie have shown, provided an impor­
tant 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 rela­
tionship 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 increas­
ingly takes the public scrutiny of private conduct as a theme in itself, ac­
tively 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 so­
cial historians had amassed a rich and growing body of research on mari­
tal 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  and the Jackson
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decision of . 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  and .
Fruitfully combining feminist and legal history, Anna Clark’s  article
examines wife beating and the law in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen­
turies, while Mary Lyndon Shanley examines campaigns for marriage law
reform between  and , focusing on changes to coverture, divorce,
child custody, and married women’s property law. Shanley’s excellent chap­
ter on wife abuse, conjugal rights, and marital rape is of particular rele­
vance to anyone interested in nineteenth-century marital violence. Finally,
A. James Hammerton melds social and legal history in his article “Victo­
rian Marriage and the Law of Matrimonial Cruelty,” arguing that marital
cruelty cases provide important evidence of shifting views on marriage,
both in the judges’ domestic ideals and in the expectations and grievances
of the applicants.⁸
On the subject of divorce and marriage breakdown, Allen Horstman’s
seminal  study traces the history of Victorian divorce before and after
the Matrimonial Causes Act of , providing insight into the development
and use of cruelty as grounds for divorce. Hammerton’s invaluable book
Cruelty and Companionship examines the experience of Victorian marital
conflict in the working and upper classes, men and women. Thoroughly
interdisciplinary, his book draws on newspapers, advice manuals, novels,
working-class balladry, and novels, as well as legal cases, in tracing the dy­
namic and shifting views on marriage in this period. There is also excellent
research on the social history of nineteenth-century working-class violence:
Nancy Tomes documents the erosion of the working-class women’s “right
to fight” in the mid-Victorian period; Ellen Ross provides a vivid picture
of the causes and forms of working-class conflict from  to ; and
Clark’s article discusses the relationships among working-class culture,
law, and politics as regards wife beating in the nineteenth century. Finally,
D’Cruze looks at how physical and sexual violence impinged on Victorian
working women. My research is deeply indebted to this rich collection of
historical work, and I hope to bring it to bear on the large body of Victo­
rian fictional material representing wife battery.⁹
Although there were no full-length studies of domestic assault in Vic­
torian literature when I began my research, two books appeared as this
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manuscript neared completion: Marlene Tromp’s The Private Rod: Mari­
tal Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain (), and Kate
Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky’s The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century Literature (). Lawson and Shakinovsky’s psy­
choanalytic study examines the violated bodies of middle-class women in
mid-nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. They argue that “the repre­
sentation of bourgeois women fades into blankness . . . as the safety of
their domestic sphere is threatened” (Lawson and Shakinovsky, ) and ex­
plore the repressions and evasions underlying these “haunting absence[s]”
(Lawson and Shakinovsky, ) 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, ), their study gives
much-needed attention to the ways in which Victorian texts represent
such violence and to the considerable tensions surrounding its representa­
tion. 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; how­
ever, while Tromp argues that sensation fiction anticipated legal devel­
opments 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  to . Chapter  situates the early
works of Charles Dickens against the fallout from the  Offenses Against
the Person Act, which brought accounts of working-class marital violence
almost daily into the newspapers. Chapters  and  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 s and early s. Chapter 
reads “Janet’s Repentance” in light of the parliamentary debates on the
 Divorce Act. The opening of the divorce court in January  made
middle-class marital violence a regular item of interest in Victorian news­
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Introduction | 
papers, and chapters  and  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 mar­
riage 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 , and the upper classes,
after . 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 vio­
lence into the public eye, building plots to reflect the structures of news­
paper reports, and thematizing the role of the newspaper in modern life.
As I will show, the novels of the period actively engage with the wifeassault debates of the nineteenth century; thus while Nancy Armstrong ar­
gues 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 po­
litical. 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 cre­
ated its contemporary relevance.¹⁰
Whereas Tromp sees the sensation fiction of the s as having re­
vealed 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 , and then of middle- and upper-class violence after
. Moreover, I contend that realist fiction played a greater role in this
revelation than Tromp recognizes, and sensation a lesser one. Marital cru­
elty was a late addition to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensational Aurora
Floyd (), for example, whereas it was always central to The Tenant of
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Wildfell Hall and Dombey and Son.¹¹ How, then, does this affect our view
of realism, traditionally seen as upholding middle-class ideology and so­
cial 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 mar­
riages. 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 representa­
tion 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 high­
light moments when the marital ideal is challenged, probed, or even de­
stroyed, moments when writers and readers were forced to restore or
repair this ideal or even to imagine its dissolution.
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| |
P R I VAT E V I O L E N C E IN THE PUBLIC EYE
The Early Writings of Charles Dickens
Figures ., ., .. Details from “Handy Phrenology,” Punch  (): .
O  S , Punch published a spoof on the trend of “Hand
Phrenology,” or the analysis of human character by the shape of the hand
(). The accompanying cartoons featured a cast of a boxing glove (fig.
.) and the blunt-fingered, powerful hand inside it (fig. .). A third de­
tail showed the blunt hand from the back (fig. .), 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 , published in a period of protest concerning in­
adequate 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

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in the Victorian period. Published in January , 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  to , the figures of Bill and “poor
wretched Mrs. Bill Sikes” became cultural icons of the spousal abuse prob­
lem with which Victorians struggled from the s to the end of the cen­
tury.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 s. I
will suggest that the figure of Nancy, as well as the other portraits of bat­
tered women in Dickens’s sketches and early fiction, responded to a dra­
matic cultural shift in the late s and early s 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  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 incendiarism combined to create considerable social ten­
sion.⁴ He joined the Mirror of Parliament in , just in time to record
some of the Reform Bill debates, and the Morning Chronicle in , in the
heat of the post–Reform Bill era, as the newspaper championed Whig re­
form measures in the face of political opposition from the Tories and jour­
nalistic opposition from the Times.⁵ What is important to my study is that
Dickens became a journalist for a reformist newspaper in the wake of the
 Offenses Against the Person Act, which extended the jurisdiction of
magistrates’ courts to cover common assault and battery, thus opening up
these accessible courts to battered women.
We do not know whether Dickens actually worked as a reporter in the
magistrates’ courts that heard these wife-assault charges. ( We do know that
he was familiar with at least some magistrates’ names, characters, and decisions.)⁶ But it is reasonable to assume that he knew the content of the six
to eight pages of the daily paper for which he worked as a reporter. And if
he read the Morning Chronicle, Dickens would inescapably have been fa­
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miliar with the litany of domestic assaults and wife murders that filled its
police and court news section in the wake of the  act. “Extraordinary
Charge of Murder” ( August ); “Cutting and Maiming” ( August
); “The Way to Get Rid of a Wife” ( August ); “Desperate As­
sault and Attempted Suicide” ( August ); “Matrimonial Miseries”
( August ); “Murder in Hulme, Manchester” ( August ); “Mat­
rimonial Miseries” ( September ); “Serious Assault” ( September
); “Matrimonial Jars” ( September )—such headlines from the
Morning Chronicle during just the first two months of Dickens’s employ­
ment as a staff journalist indicate how prevalent and disturbing were re­
ports of wife assault at this time. And just as Dickens’s early sketches and
fiction pick up the hot topics of the day—such as dangerous omnibus
drivers (described in “Omnibuses”), the Norton-Melbourne trial (paro­
died in the Bardell-Pickwick trial), and electoral corruption (parodied in the
Eatanswill election in The Pickwick Papers), so too the references to marital
violence in Dickens’s journalism and fiction indicate his awareness of this
contemporary issue. Battered women appear in “Gin Shops” ( February
), “The Pawnbroker’s Shop” ( June ), “Seven Dials” ( September
), “The Hospital Patient” ( August ), “Meditations in Monmouth
Street” ( September ), The Pickwick Papers (April –November
), Oliver Twist (February –April ), The Old Curiosity Shop
(–), and The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (–).
Moreover, these abused women take on more and more important roles:
they are incidental in Dickens’s early sketches of London, central to “The
Hospital Patient,” feature in interpolated narratives in The Pickwick Pa­
pers, form a thematic focus in The Old Curiosity Shop, and play a central
and redemptive role in Oliver Twist. In both his journalistic “Sketches of
London” and his early fiction, Dickens thus both responded to and par­
ticipated in the new prominence of marital assault in the public press.
What these early writings about battered woman share is an enormous
anxiety concerning the new visibility of wife assault. Dickens’s newspaper
sketches and early fiction return repeatedly to scenes of public interven­
tion in marital violence, to the moment when magistrate, private citizen,
or journalist witnesses, testifies to, or interferes in spousal assault. From
his early sketches and tales—Sketches by Boz () through The Pickwick
Papers (–), to Oliver Twist (–) and The Old Curiosity Shop
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(–)—he dwells almost obsessively on this moment when the “pri­
vate” violence of the home enters the public eye. Thus, even as Dickens’s
texts participate in the newfound visibility of marital violence, they reveal
a deep ambivalence concerning public intrusion into domestic privacy. And
so these texts come, paradoxically, to uphold those characters who resist that
intrusion—women who maintain the privacy of the home by remaining
loyal to their abusers, refusing the proffered intervention of the police, the
courts, the journalist, or the doctor. Dickens’s reverence for the passive
victim is striking because it flies in the face of the known fact that workingclass women did seek relief in the courts (Doggett, ); it also contra­
dicts what we know about working-class women’s traditional resistance to
violence—their willingness to fight to protect themselves or other women
from abuse (see Hammerton, Cruelty, ). In place of these two historically
documented forms of resistance, Dickens created working-class female
characters who are passive in the face of abuse, and who refuse or resist in­
tervention when it is offered—characters who, in other words, work to
produce and reinforce the emergent middle-class values of domestic privacy
and the companionate marriage. Dickens’s subjects may be working-class
battered women, but his texts are thus laced with the growing middle-class
concerns over the impact of public intrusion on the private home.
Wife Assault in the Early Victorian Public Press
After the  act, magistrates’ courts were “flooded” with battered workingclass wives (Doggett, ). In turn, stories about battered women appeared
frequently in the court reports of daily newspapers, precipitating a signifi­
cant cultural shift in how images of marital violence were produced and
circulated in early nineteenth-century Britain. This is not to say that
newspapers had been free of spousal violence before , but after the
 act, with magistrates able to handle such cases, less serious assaults
came to trial more frequently. The key issue, as I note in my introduction,
was thus the level of violence in question. There was no doubt in the public
mind that murderers such as William Corder should be punished. But
marital assault trials heard by magistrates after the  act concerned a
level of violence that had not previously been brought under serious public
scrutiny, and contemporary press accounts evinced considerable anxiety
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and doubt as to whether this kind of violence belonged in the courts at all.
It was at this charged moment that Charles Dickens wrote his sentimental
and influential portrayals of lower-class battered women.
In order to establish the context in which to understand Dickens’s con­
cern with battered women, I have examined wife-assault trials from the mid­
s in the Times and the Morning Chronicle, thus choosing the leading
Tory and Whig newspapers of the period, including the paper for which
Dickens worked as a staff reporter in the s. M. J. D. Roberts notes that
the combined circulation of the Times and the Morning Chronicle (eleven
thousand per day) accounted for one-third of daily newspaper sales in
London; the two papers thus “constituted a formidable engine for the
manufacture of public opinion” and, by extension, key forums in which
class identity and gender roles were circulated and reinforced.⁷ We should
note that the very great majority of marital assault cases that reached the
magistrates’ courts were from the lower classes—people of the middle class
considered the police courts to be below their purview. Moreover, the
magistrates, journalists, and readers of the daily newspapers identified
with the emergent middle class. The  act thus functioned very largely
as a means by which lower-class private conduct was regulated, and can be
seen as one of a number of pieces of legislation (including the new Vagrant
Act of  and the Poor Law Amendment Act of ) that defined and
regulated the emergent working class, still in the process of both external
definition and self-definition in the early decades of the nineteenth cen­
tury. So what was at stake post- was not so much the regulation of
marital assault in general as the regulation of such assaults in the lower
classes by middle-class institutions such as the court and the newspaper.
What is crucial to the present study is that in the early s, when the
effects of the  act began to be felt in the public press, there was as yet
no consensus on how and when the state should intervene in marital as­
sault cases. As social historians have established, in the turbulent decades
of the early nineteenth century, two models of working-class marriage com­
peted in the public mind, the courts, and the press. The first represented a
strong tradition of combative marriage, according to which “women were
neither ladylike nor deferential, where men struggled to hold on to their
authority over them, where ‘sexual antagonism’ was openly acknowledged”
(Ross, ; see also Hammerton, Cruelty, ). At the same time, however,
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a new model was gaining ground, one that was “far more critical of the
working-class tolerance of violence between husband and wife” (Tomes,
). Nancy Tomes’s research shows that between  and , magis­
trates were increasingly guided by a middle-class ideal of marital harmony
based on male protection and female submission. They started to view
“the physical abuse of women as ‘barbaric’; wife-beaters in particular were
called ‘brutes,’ ‘ruffians,’ and ‘tyrants’” (Tomes, ). But in the early s,
when Dickens’s career was beginning, the class structure that emerged from
the industrial revolution (and its attendant assumptions about social con­
trol of marital violence in the lower classes) was only just forming. In the
s’ newspaper accounts of wife-assault trials, we see, then, a lack of
consensus as to how (and indeed whether) marital assault should be con­
trolled. In some cases, couples, magistrates, and reporters seem to take mu­
tual combativeness for granted and to resist interference in a seemingly
self-regulating (albeit violent) system. This attitude competes in contem­
porary 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 news­
paper 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 require­
ments of the courts and the newspaper, were limited by the types of ques­
tions and answers permitted in court, and thus are are often formulaic in
structure (D’Cruze, ). D’Cruze nevertheless affirms that newspaper arti­
cles 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, ). I am especially interested in how such cases reveal contes­
tation 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 visi­
ble 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 inappro­
priate and then contrast these with three cases in which it is seen to be
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appropriate. Typically, a reporter signals that court interference is inappro­
priate 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 in­
volve 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  October  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,
 October , c). The dialogue between Louisa Johnson and the magis­
trate captures a collision between class-based assumptions about marriage:
The   (to the wife).—Well, I suppose you are come to com­
plain of your husband?
Mrs. Johnson.—No, I an’t.
The  .—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 be­
tween he and I. It’s nothing to nobody else. . . .
The  .—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  .—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,
 October , b; see Morning Chronicle,  October , c)
The reporting of this dialogue implies strongly that middle-class assump­
tions 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.
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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 “manage­
ment” 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, ), were not within the purview of the court.
The Times of  November  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 re­
fuses it:
A respectable-looking young woman entered the office, and addressing
the bench said that she wanted a warrant against her husband.
Mr. .—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. .—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. .—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. .–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,  November , a)
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
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the husband’s violence, but condemns the wife as having been too provoca­
tive in her behavior and, by implication, too aggressive in seeking the
warrant.⁸
A comedic report from the Morning Chronicle ( September ) pro­
vides a final example of the noninterventionist view. Under the ironic head­
line “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  : How could you, defendant, so brutally violate your
honeymoon? (Morning Chronicle,  September , c)
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 mut­
tered, “Jack, jewel, hisht! Paddy’ll hear you!” [great laughter]. (Morning
Chronicle,  September , c)
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
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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 rela­
tionship, 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, ). 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 inter­
ventionist approach is exemplified in “Two Weeks After Marriage” (Morn­
ing Chronicle,  November ), 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 expecta­
tions of marital—especially masculine—behavior:
.  (to the prisoner): What have you to say for yourself?—De­
fendant: The woman is my wife, and I don’t see that the officer had any
business to interfere with us.
. : Your wife, you wretch! Is that any reason you should be al­
lowed 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.
. : 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.
. : Well, I never met with such a remorseless ruffian. How long
have you been married, you brute?—Defendant: Only two weeks. . . .
. : What a happy prospect you and your wife must have! Per­
haps 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 in­
stance. . . .
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Prisoner: “I wasn’t going to let her order me as she liked.”
. : 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,  November , d)
What is interesting about this case is that John Sellis’s protest strongly re­
sembles Louisa Johnson’s challenge to the court. But whereas Louisa John­
son, 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 ( January ) exem­
plifies 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 extraor­
dinary degree of cruelty upon the part of the man, and of patience upon
the part of the woman” (Morning Chronicle,  January , d). 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,  January , d). 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 de­
fendant 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,
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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,  January
, d)
In this case and others, the woman’s refusal to defend herself or to testify
in court against her husband receives grudging admiration from magis­
trate and reporter, as if the womanly qualities they admire—passivity and
loyalty—are incompatible with a wife laying charges against her husband.
Yet her very passivity seems to guarantee the intervention against which
she protests: the court simply takes over the protective male role that her
husband has abdicated.
Indeed, in the Times of  October , the conflict between per­
sonal loyalty and public intervention becomes the main affective focus of
a report. The case involved a man called John Goldsmith, who had stabbed
himself and was suspected of plotting to murder his sweetheart, Elizabeth
Evans. Elizabeth Evans did not initially appear in court to make a com­
plaint, and so it was assumed that she “did not intend to press the charge”
(Times,  October , a). Goldsmith was questioned, and on his as­
surances that he did not intend to harm himself or Evans, dismissed. Then,
in almost novelistic discourse, the reporter describes Elizabeth Evans’s dra­
matic entrance into court:
As soon, however, as [Goldsmith] reached the outer office, a dreadful
outcry and scuffle were heard. He met the father leading Elizabeth in,
sobbing and half fainting, and he rushed towards her, perhaps to clasp
her in his arms, but it was feared for some dreadful purpose. Elizabeth
shrieked, and the bystanders shouted “Oh! keep him off!” and after a
short struggle he was repulsed and placed at the bar. He turned pale and
quivered, and when asked why he was so violent, he said “How can I
help it, when I see her cry so?”
Elizabeth, who seemed to be about  years of age, without any un­
usual attractions, cried anew on being led up to give evidence.
“You know, Betsey, I never said I would kill you,” observed the pris­
oner in an imploring manner.
“I am not come here to say anything against you, John,” said she, in
a very kind tone.
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In reply to questions from the magistrate, she said, however, that he
had repeatedly threatened her life, and that he would sooner kill her than
see her become another’s. (Times,  October , a)
This passage depicts Evans as divided between conflicting loyalties (loyalty
to Goldsmith vs. fear of Goldsmith and duty to the court). Her discourse
alternates between private and public spheres: she addresses Goldsmith in
the language of domestic loyalty (“I am not come here to say anything
against you, John”) but responds to the interventionist ethos of the mag­
istrate (“she said, however, that he had repeatedly threatened her life”).
The report highlights the great emotional appeal of the reluctant female
witness at this moment when intervention in private relationships was so
freighted with tension and anxiety.
The newspaper reports of the early s thus exemplify not only a pe­
riod when spousal assault assumed an unprecedented visibility in the public
press, but also a moment at which a new interventionist ethos competed
with an earlier laissez-faire attitude to marital violence. This moment of
ideological tension formed the context for Dickens’s early sketches and
fiction. His writings, as I will show, reveal deep ambivalence concerning
public intervention in the private sphere. Even as they participated in the
new interventionist ethos, these texts returned obsessively and anxiously
to the moment of intrusion, the moment at which the domestic home or
private relationship is opened up for scrutiny by the medical system, the
courts, or—most saliently—the journalist.
Striking Scenes: “The Pawnbroker’s Shop”
In his article “The Pawnbroker’s Shop” (Evening Chronicle,  June ),
Dickens first explicitly confronted the question of public intervention in
“private” working-class violence. In this early sketch, the middle-class jour­
nalist invites the reader to explore the pawnshop through his eyes, estab­
lishing the newspaper as the surrogate eye of the middle-class reader. The
scene that Dickens paints captures various levels and manifestations of mis­
ery, from genteel poverty to drunken rage and prostitution. The focus on
marital violence begins with an altercation between a drunken man and a
female neighbor who accuses him of beating his wife. The argument arises
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when the man “vent[s] his ill humour” by striking an “unfortunate little
wretch” of a street urchin:
“What do you strike the boy for, you brute?” exclaims a slipshod woman,
with two flat irons in a little basket. “Do you think he’s your wife, you
willin [villain]?” “Go and hang yourself !” replies the gentleman addressed,
with a drunken look of savage stupidity, aiming at the same time a blow
at the woman which fortunately misses its object. “Go and hang your­
self; and wait till I come and cut you down.”—“Cut you down,” rejoins
the woman, “I wish I had the cutting of you up, you wagabond! (loud).
Oh! you precious wagabond! (rather louder). Where’s your wife, you
willin? (louder still; women of this class are always sympathetic, and
work themselves into a tremendous passion on the shortest notice). Your
poor dear wife as you uses worser nor a dog—strike a woman—you a
man!” (very shrill). (SB, )
The sketch thus implicitly poses the questions of who should intervene in
abusive situations and how that intervention should occur. The sketch pits
the lower-class neighbor (who vehemently defends the urchin and the bat­
tered wife) against the middle-class journalist, testing them for their suit­
ability to take on this public task. (We should note here that Dickens never
endorsed a noninterventionist view.) Crucially, this sketch represents the
lower-class woman’s intervention as part of the problem, not the solution.
Dickens’s insertions (“loud,” “rather louder,” “louder still,” “very shrill”)
depict her as unrestrained. The working-class woman’s willingness to defy
brutal men is represented here as lamentably aggressive. The squabble be­
tween the man and his neighbor thus resembles the domestic disputes in
magistrates’ courts, which (as noted above) seemed to negate any sympa­
thy for the participants on the part of magistrates or reporters. Indeed, her
intervention is seen to make things more, not less, violent: “This eloquent
address,” Dickens writes, “produces anything but the effect desired” (SB,
). The man hits about him, and a brawl ensues.
At this point the wife appears, exhibiting the passivity so markedly
lacking in the other woman. This is a study in contrasts: whereas the in­
tervening neighbor was “slipshod” and “shrill,” the wife is “wretched,”
“worn-out,” and “in the last stage of consumption.” Her face bears “evi­
dent marks of recent ill-usage,” and in her arms she bears a “thin, sickly
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child,” the mark of maternal care. As she enters, the journalist tells the
reader, the man “turns his cowardly rage” away from the aggressive neigh­
bor and toward his wife (SB, –). We should note that with the adjec­
tive “cowardly,” the journalist takes over the condemnation of the abuser,
and in terms similar to those voiced by the “shrill” woman: he too indicates
that for a man to strike a woman is unmanly. But the combative neighbor
has gained little sympathy for this position. Not so the wife, who invokes
such pity immediately. Her “imploring tone” and “bursting into tears”
(SB, ) render her the antitype of the aggressive neighbor: a passive—
and hence sympathetic—victim. The husband then hits her, sending her
flying out of the shop. As the journalist describes it, “Her ‘natural protec­
tor’ follows her up the court, alternately venting his rage in accelerating her
progress, and in knocking the scanty bonnet of the unfortunate child over
its still more scanty and faded-looking face” (SB, ). “Natural protector”
—the irony relies absolutely on the reader accepting a gender relationship
in which men are seen as the protectors of the “weaker sex.” Dickens thus
creates sympathy for the battered woman, but simultaneously implies that
women who defend themselves or others are unworthy of sympathy. The
article pits the companionate model against the combative model of mar­
riage, and suggests that battery is a violation of the former. Working-class
women’s traditional willingness to fight and to physically defend one
another is here negated. Instead, the middle-class journalist—and, by ex­
tension, the middle-class reader—assumes the position of regulator and
“natural protector” of the passive and beaten wife.
Notably, Dickens reiterates this condemnation of intervening women
in The Old Curiosity Shop (–). In this novel, the wife beater is rep­
resented by the demonic and lawless figure of Quilp; his victims are his
wife, whose arms are “seldom free from impressions of his fingers in blue
and black colours” (OCS, ), and, symbolically if not literally, Little
Nell, the novel’s child heroine, whom Quilp fantasizes about raping. From
an ideological point of view, the novel’s most interesting figure is Mrs.
Jiniwin, Quilp’s mother-in-law and antagonist. When Mrs. Jiniwin and
her friends gather at Quilp’s house to discuss their objections to violent
husbands, they embody the resistance offered by a neighbor in “The Pawn­
broker’s Shop,” a resistance that social historians recognize as a salient fact
of working-class life. But, as in “The Pawnbroker’s Shop,” in The Old
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Curiosity Shop this resistance is not admired; on the contrary, it is seen to
be nearly as monstrous as Quilp himself. When Mrs. Jiniwin tears the head
off a shrimp to indicate what she would have done had her husband been
abusive (OCS, ), Dickens endows the action with an aggression that
compares to Quilp’s bestial appetite a few pages later, as he eats “hard eggs,
shells and all, and devour[s] gigantic prawns with their heads and tails on”
(OCS, ). Unlike Quilp, Mrs. Jiniwin is primarily a comedic figure. But
she forms part of a significant pattern in the novel, whereby female com­
bativeness (represented also by the persistent presence of the Punch and
Judy show in the text) is contrasted negatively with Little Nell’s passivity,
a passivity that the narrative constructs as sympathetic, admirable, and
quintessentially feminine.
What is significant about these early narratives is that they contemplate
—only to dismiss—the figure of the working-class woman as intervener.
Toward this figure, Dickens shows the same lack of sympathy that the
Times and the Morning Chronicle evinced for the squabbling Irish or for
Louisa Johnson. Dickens’s relationship to the public press of the s is
thus complex. In contrast to the ambivalent press reports of the period,
Dickens consistently endorses public intervention. But he does so almost
exclusively on behalf of a passive victim, who embodies the values of do­
mesticity and female passivity that were increasingly cherished by the mid­
dle class. It is clear that The Old Curiosity Shop achieved its extraordinary
sales because of—not despite—its excessively passive heroine, Little Nell.
If Mrs. Jiniwin represents the old style of relationship, in which workingclass women gave as good as they got at the hands of abusive men, then
Nell embodies the new middle-class ideal of passive womanhood. The sales
figures for Dickens’s texts—The Old Curiosity Shop sold a hundred thou­
sand copies, the largest circulation yet achieved by any novelist—suggest the
immense popular appeal of this move, and in turn point to the ideological
work of Dickens’s fiction in promulgating this ideal of the passive woman.⁹
Marital Violence in the Public Eye: “The Hospital Patient”
While Dickens vilifies Mrs. Jiniwin, his sketches and early fiction show an
almost reverential sympathy for women who passively submit to abuse.
Hence the cultural importance of Nancy in Oliver Twist, who symbolized
for Victorians Mrs. Jiniwin’s antitype. The figure of “poor wretched Mrs.
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Bill Sikes” (Echo,  January , ) represents the working-class woman
who does not fight, but defines herself by her passivity. What is important
is that Nancy is not unique in Dickens’s writings, but rather represents one
of a number of his female characters who are admired for their submission
to abuse. For example, in The Pickwick Papers the interpolated narrative of
“The Convict’s Return” idealizes a passive response to marital violence: “I
do firmly and in my soul believe, that the man systematically tried for
many years to break her heart; but she bore it all for her child’s sake, and,
however strange it may seem to many, for his father’s too; for, brute as he
was and cruelly as he had treated her, she had loved him once; and the rec­
ollection of what he had been to her, awakened feelings of forbearance and
meekness under suffering in her bosom, to which all God’s creatures, but
women, are strangers” (OT, ). Similarly, Martin Chuzzlewit celebrates
Mercy’s clinging loyalty to her violent husband:
He answered her with an imprecation, and—
Not with a blow? Yes. Stern truth against the base-souled villain: with
a blow.
No angry cries; no loud reproaches. Even her weeping and her sobs
were stifled by her clinging round him. She only said, repeating it in
agony of heart, How could he, could he, could he! And lost utterance in
tears. (MC, –)
The most significant parallel to Nancy, however, is in Dickens’s “The Hos­
pital Patient” (Carlton Chronicle,  August ), published six months be­
fore the first numbers of Oliver Twist. In this sketch, Dickens describes a
woman who is dying from injuries inflicted by her lover, but who will not
testify against him to the magistrates, doctors, and journalists assembled at
her bedside. Instead, she persists in denying that her lover injured her and
says that her injuries were caused by an accident. I turn to this sketch be­
cause it not only anticipates Dickens’s more famous character of Nancy
but does so in a way that makes explicit Dickens’s preoccupation with the
court handling and journalistic reporting of assault trials.
What makes “The Hospital Patient” important to my study is that the
injured woman’s death occurs in public, and that it happens just after an
interview that mimics a courtroom situation. The characters (the journal­
ist, the police officers, the magistrates, the doctor) are clearly representa­
tive figures who dramatize society’s response to victims of marital abuse,
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and the sketch thus focuses on public institutions and their relationship to
abused women. The sketch’s theme of spousal assault is introduced when
the scene jumps from the hospital to the police office, where the journalist
sees a “powerful, ill-looking young fellow at the bar, who was undergoing
an examination, on the very common charge of having, on the previous
night, ill treated a woman, with whom he lived in some court hard by”
(SB, ). A surgeon’s report says that the woman’s recovery is “extremely
doubtful” (SB, ), so the arresting police officer, joined by the journal­
ist, sets off that night with the prisoner, Jack, to hear her testimony. They
are joined at the hospital by two magistrates, the house surgeon, and two
dressers (surgeon’s assistants). The sketch thus sets up a situation in which
the battered woman’s private life is relentlessly exposed to public scrutiny.
As she lies dying in a public institution, the woman’s final moments are
invaded by the still more public eyes of the press and the magistrates.
An ambivalence surrounding public institutions and their relation to the
home frames the more intense focus on the official investigation of “pri­
vate” spousal abuse.
I have problematized the term “private” here because Dickens’s texts,
which penetrate from external street scenes to interior scenes of marital vio­
lence, suggest implicitly that the poor who engage in marital violence have
no “inside” space, no privacy from the scrutiny of the middle-class reformer.
And yet this scrutiny was performed by Dickens even as his novels pro­
mulgated a companionate model of marriage that enshrined the home as
a sacred inalienable space. For middle-class Victorians, policing domestic
relationships was highly problematic; as D. A. Miller notes, it moved sur­
veillance out of the public arena of the streets and into the domestic space
through which bourgeois liberal identity was constructed.¹⁰ Set in the
public space of the hospital, with magistrates present who transform the
ward into a court, “The Hospital Patient” pits the privacy of relationships
against the reformer’s impulse to investigate. At the crux of this conflict is
the battered woman’s choice of whether to make a “private” relationship
public by testifying to her abuse.
The drama of Dickens’s sketch peaks as the party enters the ward. The
woman’s body provides a ghastly spectacle: “She was a fine young woman
of about two or three and twenty. Her long black hair, which had been
hastily cut from near the wounds on her head, streamed over the pillow in
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jagged and matted locks. Her face bore deep marks of the ill usage she had
received; her hand was pressed upon her side, as if her chief pain were there;
her breathing was short and heavy; and it was plain to see that she was
dying fast” (SB, ). D’Cruze notes that court investigations put women’s
bodies on display as often grotesque testimonials to male violence (–).
Here the newspaper sketch offers the reader a voyeuristic glimpse of a de­
gree of injury that could not be displayed in the courtroom. At the same
time, the reader is invited to scrutinize the private relationship between
this victim and her attacker:
The magistrate nodded to the officer, to bring the man forward. He
did so, and stationed him at the bedside. . . .
“Take off his hat,” said the magistrate. The officer did as he was de­
sired, and the man’s features were disclosed.
The girl started up, with an energy quite preternatural; the fire
gleamed in her heavy eyes, and the blood rushed to her pale and sunken
cheeks. It was a convulsive effort. She fell back on her pillow, and cover­
ing her scarred and bruised face with her hands, burst into tears. . . .
After a brief pause the nature of the errand [i.e., collecting her evidence]
was explained, and the oath tendered. (SB, )
The suspense of the scene rests on the woman’s conflict. Like Elizabeth
Evans, she must choose between personal loyalty and public intervention.
The scene is particularly interesting because its conflict is dramatic rather
than legal: the woman’s testimony is not necessary for a conviction, as wit­
nesses have testified already to the assault. In legal terms, the fate of such
a prisoner would depend solely on the woman’s recovery. If she lived, he
would probably receive a relatively short prison term. If she died, a man­
slaughter conviction could lead to transportation and a murder conviction
to hanging. The body of the woman thus bears enormous meaning, one
that was commonly registered in newspaper reports of the period, in which
surgeons might report that a woman was “in a very precarious condition”
(Times,  July , d) or “appeared to be in a dying state” (Morning
Chronicle,  September , e). In terms of the legal outcome, then, it
does not matter what the patient in Dickens’s sketch says; it matters sim­
ply whether she lives or dies. But her accusation matters intensely in this
drama in which private relationships have become the subject of public
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scrutiny. Thus instead of creating legal suspense, the narrative focuses on
personal drama: Will she accuse her lover? Will she preserve the privacy of
the familial relationship?
The hospital patient remains loyal to her abuser, insisting that he is
not guilty. In the face of a public investigation that promises to take her
side, she insists on the inviolability of the private relationship. The scene
is highly melodramatic:¹¹
“Oh, no, gentlemen,” said the girl, raising herself once more, and fold­
ing her hands together; “no, gentlemen, for God’s sake! I did it myself—
it was nobody’s fault—it was an accident. He didn’t hurt me; he wouldn’t
for all the world. Jack, dear Jack, you know you wouldn’t!”
Her sight was fast failing her, and her hand groped over the bedclothes
in search of his . . .
“Jack,” murmured the girl, laying her hand upon his arm, “they shall
not persuade me to swear your life away.” (SB, )
Her denial is utterly unconvincing except as evidence of her resistance to
the investigation. But its pathos creates the climax of the narrative: “We
respect the feelings which prompt you to this,” says one magistrate (SB,
). In this text that pits public investigation against private loyalty, even
the foiled investigators revere the woman’s attempt to preserve marital pri­
vacy. That the nameless hospital patient has probably been a prostitute¹²
adds irony to this drama of the public and private: the hospital patient is
a “public” woman, yet she becomes an eloquent defender of the private
sphere.
That Dickens believed in the scrutiny of the police and the courts and
participated in the scrutiny of the press does not mean that he was unam­
bivalent about them. He revered women’s attempts to keep their private
battles out of the public eye, and saw such attempts as examples of supreme
loyalty. In Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, he transposes the police court
into a divine one, imagining women reluctantly giving evidence before
God: “Oh woman, God beloved in old Jerusalem! The best among us
need deal lightly with thy faults, if only for the punishment thy nature will
endure, in bearing heavy evidence against us on the Day of Judgement!”
(MC, ). His depictions of women’s loyalty efface many practical rea­
sons why Victorian women might have refused to testify against their hus­
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bands in court. One such reason was that a husband’s jail term might send
a wife and children to the workhouse. Another reason for not testifying
was that when the husband got out of jail he might seek revenge. As Tomes
points out, going to the police or testifying against an abusive husband
could be extremely dangerous: she cites several cases in which women were
killed or had acid thrown at them because they sought legal redress (Tomes,
). As John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor observe, the abuser’s few
months of imprisonment were followed “by a resumption of all his former
power, and [the wife’s] imagination can well suggest with what conse­
quences to her” (CW, :). Yet despite such obvious reasons why women
might not have testified against their husbands, Dickens consistently ide­
alizes this decision. “The Hospital Patient” sketch is interesting because
the woman’s dying state removes her from any such practical considera­
tions. Her decision about whether to testify or not can be taken without
any fear of consequences whatsoever. It is also without legal significance.
What matters culturally and ideologically is that in her final moments, in
a highly public institution, the hospital patient insists on the inviolability
of the private sphere.
Dickens’s sketch ends with the patient’s death, which transforms the
assault charge into manslaughter or murder, and is thus far more powerful
legally than any testimony. But by refusing to indict her lover, by main­
taining the privacy of their relationship, the hospital patient gains the
reader’s sympathy. She epitomizes the loyal battered woman who at once
deserves the protection of the journalist and the courts, and at the same
time refuses this protection in the name of the companionate marriage.
The tension between these two impulses is resolved by her death; the in­
voluntary testimony of her dead body gives the courts full power to regu­
late her abuser.
Over Her Dead Body: Nancy as Passive Victim
As Michael Slater notes in his headnote to “The Hospital Patient,” this
sketch looks forward in “a number of ways . . . to the character of Nancy
in Oliver Twist” (SB, ). Like both “The Pawnbroker’s Shop” and “The
Hospital Patient,” Oliver Twist pits the intrusive eyes of journalist, novelist,
and the courts against the values of marital privacy and loyalty. Ironically,
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then, in a novel that “features a massive thematization of social discipline”
(Miller, Novel, ix), Nancy is positioned both as a subject of regulation
(as prostitute and battered woman) and as epitomizing those values of
domesticity and family that Dickens almost obsessively excluded from
such regulation.
Initially, the novel associates Nancy with the streets, thus opposing her
with Rose Maylie. Virginal and domestic, the middle-class Rose represents
“the lovely bloom and spring-time of womanhood,” and seems “made for
Home, and fireside peace and happiness” (OT, ). In contrast, Nancy
belongs to the lower classes, the streets, and—as she herself predicts—to a
violent and premature death. But the relationship is not finally one of
contrast. For the fascinating thing that Dickens does with the character of
Nancy is to make the prostitute the epitome of womanly virtues (mater­
nal nurturance, marital loyalty, and domestic privacy) as conceived by the
Victorian middle class. Tromp, as well as Lawson and Shakinovsky, argues
that Oliver Twist and other novels by Dickens work to fix domestic abuse
in the lower classes (Tromp, –; Lawson and Shakinovsky, ); I would
argue that while Oliver Twist does so, it also, and very significantly, works
to apply to those classes the ideological values of the emergent middle class.
But Nancy applies these middle-class values in a lower-class setting in
which they are impractical, unrecognized, and ultimately fatal. Like the
police court reports in the Times and the Morning Chronicle, Oliver Twist
thus depicts a collision between two different ideals of femininity. An ex­
ample of this collision between passive and combative femininity occurs
when Nancy imagines what she would do if Bill were condemned to death.
She envisages a performance of masochistic loyalty: “I’d walk round and
round the [prison] till I dropped, if the snow was on the ground, and I
hadn’t a shawl to cover me” (OT, ). Bill’s response is scathing: “And what
good would that do? . . . Unless you could pitch over a file and twenty
yards of good stout rope” (OT, ). The supreme example of Nancy’s pas­
sivity occurs when she refuses to leave Sikes. When Rose offers to get Nancy
to a “place of safety,” (OT, ), Nancy refuses: “I must go back. . . . I am
drawn back to him through every suffering and ill-usage; and I should be,
I believe, if I knew that I was to die by his hand at last” (OT, ). Very
significantly, Nancy points out that this fidelity identifies her with “ladies”
of the middle class:
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“When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are,” replied
[Nancy] steadily [to Rose], “give away your hearts, love will carry you all
lengths—even such as you, who have home, friends, other admirers,
everything, to fill them. When such as I, who have no certain roof but
the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse,
set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that has been
a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us? Pity us,
lady—pity us for having only one feeling of the woman left, and for
having that turned, by a heavy judgement, from a comfort and a pride,
into a new means of violence and suffering.” (OT, )
Nancy thus exemplifies a middle-class ethos in a working-class rela­
tionship. It is one of the novel’s central ironies that the impulses making
Nancy refuse middle-class assistance to leave Bill are precisely those “feel­
ing[s] of the woman” that she shares with the middle class. Nancy’s loyalty
to Bill thus promotes the emergent middle-class ideal of selfless femininity.
In contrast, the fights between Sikes and his dog parody the combative
marriage commonly associated with the “brutal” classes to which Nancy
belongs. It has frequently been noted that Nancy is paralleled with Sikes’s
dog, Bull’s-eye: Fagin says explicitly that Sikes treats Nancy “like a dog”
(OT, ), and Tromp rightly points out that “Bull’s-eye, like the target
after which he is named, takes Bill’s hits just as Nancy does” (Tromp, ).
Significantly, the fight between Sikes and Bull’s-eye features a poker, a
stereotypical instrument of working-class domestic abuse (see fig. ., “The
Gin Drop,” Punch,  November , ). Moreover, Tromp notes that
when Fagin interrupts a fight between Bill and the dog, Bill turns on Fagin,
asking, “What the devil do you come between me and my dog for?” (OT,
), echoing the common phrasing “me and my wife” (Tromp, ). But
whereas Tromp argues that “this parallel points up Nancy’s animalistic quali­
ties” (Tromp, –), I would argue the reverse. In my view the text distin­
guishes between Nancy and the dog in their response to this shared violence.
Crucially, Nancy remains passive toward her abuser, whereas Bull’s-eye ag­
gressively resists Sikes’s beatings, responding to violence with violence:
[A] kick and a curse, [were] bestowed upon the dog simultaneously.
Dogs are not generally apt to revenge injuries inflicted upon them by
their masters; but Mr Sikes’s dog, having faults of temper in common with
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Figure .. “The Gin Drop,” Punch  (): .
his owner, and labouring, perhaps, at this moment, under a powerful
sense of injury, made no more ado but at once fixed his teeth in one of
the half-boots. . . .
“You would, would you?” said Sikes, seizing the poker in one hand,
and deliberately opening with the other a large clasp knife, which he
drew from his pocket. “Come here, you born devil! Come here! D’ye
hear?”
The dog no doubt heard; . . . but, appearing to entertain some unac­
countable objection to having his throat cut, he remained where he was,
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and growled more fiercely than before: at the same time grasping the end
of the poker between his teeth, and biting at it like a wild beast. (OT, )
The symbol of the dog thus identifies the combative relationship as
brutal and animalistic, while the narrator consistently guides the reader to
revere Nancy’s passive loyalty. Moreover, the text also includes another
negative example of the combative relationship, ironically embodied in
the union of parish beadle and workhouse matron: these representatives of
the law show themselves to be lawless in their domestic conduct, as Mrs.
Bumble inflicts “a shower of blows” on her husband’s head (OT, ). I see
a significant contrast between Mrs. Bumble (who exemplifies a combative
and aggressive working-class woman) and Nancy, whose passive demeanor
represents what the middle classes increasingly tried to impose on the work­
ing classes. Thus Nancy represents a textual exemplar of supreme devotion
under the companionate model. As Dickens writes in his preface to the
 edition of Oliver Twist, “From the first introduction of that poor
wretch, to her laying her blood-stained head upon the robber’s breast,
there is not a word exaggerated or over-wrought. It is emphatically God’s
truth, for it is the truth He leaves in such depraved and miserable breasts;
the hope yet lingering there; the last fair drop of water at the bottom of the
weed-choked well” (OT, ). As Tromp notes, Dickens wrote this preface
because critics had found Nancy’s devotion unconvincing and unnatural
(Tromp, ); I share her conclusion that “Dickens was generating a new
moral code, one over which there was enough tension to arouse resistance
and to require such effusions” (Tromp, ). However, I see this new code
as articulated in response to the newspapers, rather than The Newgate Cal­
endar, and I see Nancy as a character through whom Dickens promulgates
middle-class values, rather than, as Tromp argues, one who represents the
pure physicality of the working-class woman (Tromp, ).
As in the sketch “The Hospital Patient,” the major issue in the rela­
tionship of Sikes and Nancy is middle-class intervention in domestic
assault cases. Both texts create a space between the assault and the death
of the battered woman. In this gap, intervention by the middle class is
offered and refused: the hospital patient refuses to testify and, similarly,
Nancy refuses to take help from Rose Maylie. Both texts culminate in the
death of the battered woman, which brings this intervention down in full
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force. Finally, in both texts, middle-class intervention—the impulse to take
on the role of woman’s “natural protector,” which the abuser has violated—
is refused in terms that appeal to the companionate ideal on which the im­
pulse to intervene is based. Ironically, therefore, while Nancy’s loyalty
traps her in delinquency and removes her from the protection of middleclass reformers such as Mr. Brownlow, Rose Maylie, and Mr. Losberne, at
the same time it appeals powerfully to the values they cherish most. Like
the magistrate in “The Hospital Patient,” they are forced to admire Nancy’s
resistance to their own intervention. Nancy’s perfect loyalty is exemplified
in her death, when she shows no resistance to Bill’s assault. This contrasts
with her defense of Oliver, when she struggles “violently” (OT, ) to save
the child from “being ill-used” by Sikes (OT, ). We realize that Nancy
is capable of resistance, but will not exercise it in her own defense. She re­
sponds to Bill’s murderous assault with an embrace. As he beats her to
death, she clings to him. Her perfect passivity to Sikes exemplifies the fe­
male loyalty that Dickens so revered:
“Bill, dear Bill, you cannot have the heart to kill me. Oh! think of all
I have given up, only this one night, for you. You shall have time to
think, and save yourself this crime; I will not loose my hold, you cannot
throw me off. Bill, Bill, for dear God’s sake, for your own, for mine, stop
before you spill my blood! . . .”
The man struggled violently to release his arms; but those of the girl
were clasped round his, and tear as he would, he could not tear them
away. (OT, )
As Tromp notes, this scene generates a huge amount of sympathy for
the abused woman (Tromp, –); however, this sympathy is ideologically
loaded. Tromp interprets Nancy’s death as insulating the middle class from
spousal abuse, locating that violence in the pure physicality of the workingclass woman (Tromp, ). I agree that Nancy might temporarily play such
an insulating role—but such insulation was short-lived at best, since by the
s, Dickens himself would portray domestic assault in the middle-class
Dombey home. What is more important, in my view, is that Nancy rep­
resents a projection of emergent middle-class domestic ideology onto a
working-class character.
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Nancy’s death is crucial because it unleashes the public intervention
that she has so signally resisted. Like the death of the hospital patient, her
murder produces an almost excessive degree of public scrutiny. In “The
Hospital Patient,” this is implicit; Dickens would have expected his read­
ers to know that Jack now faces charges of manslaughter or murder rather
than assault. In Nancy’s case, the intervention is immediate and explicit.
Morning brings the symbolic gaze of the sun, which “light[s] up the room
where the murdered woman lay” (OT, ). The sun suggests the impossi­
bility of concealment: “[Sikes] tried to shut it out, but it would stream in”
(OT, ). Moreover, as the sun rises, Bill starts to undertake the first acts
of subterfuge, which the text suggests are futile. He burns the club and tries
to rub blood off his trousers. Finding this impossible, he cuts the stained
pieces out of his trousers, and burns them. Finally, he washes Bull’s-eye’s
feet, finding that “The very feet of the dog were bloody” (OT, ). The
bloody feet of the dog as well as the permanent stains on Sikes’s clothing
are highly significant. They both point to the fact that Nancy’s death is not
a private event. Her blood moves the evidence of Sikes’s crime outside the
walls of the private home. The traces of his violence ineluctably move his
crime into the public eye.
The death of the prostitute in Oliver Twist spurs an excess of public
scrutiny and intervention—pursuit by the mob, by police, by concerned
middle-class citizens, and by the justice system. This wave of retributive
justice seems to resolve the dilemma that Nancy’s own refusal of interven­
tion posed. While Nancy is alive, the privacy of her relationship is re­
spected. Once she is dead, that privacy is waived absolutely. Even the dead
woman seems to partake in the ensuing scrutiny, as her “eyes” (OT, )
represent the most powerful symbol of the forces that pursue Sikes to his
death. As Armstrong observes, “As she comes back to haunt the criminal,
. . . the figure of the prostitute works on the side of legitimate authority”
(Armstrong, ).
Indeed, the dead woman is omnipresent to Sikes as he tries to elude
pursuit. Her presence is most tangibly represented by Bull’s-eye, for in the
final scenes of the novel, the dog becomes unexpectedly like Nancy, dis­
playing her illogical and pathetic devotion to an abusive owner/master.
Although Bull’s-eye does resist Sikes’s attempt to drown him, he appears in
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Figure .. George Cruikshank, “Sikes attempting to destroy his dog,” illustration for
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (–).
Cruikshank’s illustration (fig. .) as cowed, tail between his legs and back
curved in a posture of submission—indeed, one is hard pressed to recog­
nize the aggressive creature from the earlier illustrations. After he runs away
from Sikes, his aggression seems to diminish further: he is portrayed as in­
jured (bruised and lame); moreover, like the faithful Nancy, he seems un­
able to leave Sikes, as even his running away reunites them. Whereas in the
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early part of the text the identification of Nancy with the dog is attained
metonymically through their common position as Sikes’s victims, in the
final scenes Dickens makes this identification grotesquely concrete: Sikes
sees Nancy’s eyes looking out of the dog’s body. This has the uncanny and
morally satisfying effect of enabling Nancy to avenge her own murder, as
Sikes slips into his own noose at the sight of “the eyes” (OT, ). However,
this effect—which might seem to mitigate Dickens’s earlier glorification of
Nancy’s passivity—is almost immediately obliterated by the subsequent
behavior of the dog, who lets out “a dismal howl” (OT, ) and plunges
after his (her?) master. Like Nancy’s, his skull is crushed, perfecting the
identification between them (Tromp, ). The victim’s passivity—even sui­
cidal self-immolation—was thus necessary to Dickens’s conclusion after all.
The deaths of Nancy and Sikes, which represent, respectively, the glo­
rification of the loyal passive woman and the drive toward public inter­
vention in marital violence, thus embody the contradictory impulses of
the s regarding wife assault. At this key moment in early nineteenthcentury culture, the emergent ideal of marital privacy was pitted against
the impulse to intervene in wife-beating cases. Nancy, then, stands on the
fault line of early Victorian views on the regulation of marital violence. In
her loyalty to Bill, she exemplifies the middle-class value of marital pri­
vacy; in her death, she brings down the full force of public intervention.
This powerful literary figure thus emerged from the newfound visibility of
wife assault in the print culture of the s and, through her enormous
popularity throughout the century, worked to consolidate the feminine
ideal of passive loyalty that she so signally embodied.
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| |
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND
MIDDLE-CLASS MANLINESS
Dombey and Son
I   “Meditations in Monmouth Street” (Morning Chronicle,
 October ), Charles Dickens turns his attention to the connection
between manliness and domestic assault. Gazing at an array of secondhand
men’s clothing in a shop—a boy’s suit, some corduroys and a round jacket
stained with ink, a threadbare suit, a vulgar suit, a green coat with metal
buttons, and a coarse common frock—he imagines the clothes as the pos­
sessions of one individual, the detritus of a life: “There was the man’s whole
life written as legibly on those clothes, as if we had his autobiography en­
grossed on parchment before us” (SB, ). From the schoolboy in the inky
suit to the ruffian in the coarse frock, he reads the man’s moral deterioration
in the clothing. Crucially, the man’s imagined moral descent is signaled by
acts of domestic assault: Dickens pictures him hitting his mother with a
“drunken blow” and striking his wife as she holds a “sickly infant, clamour­
ing for bread” (SB, , ). Finally, Dickens imagines the mother dying in
poverty and the family destitute, while the man (now a criminal) is trans­
ported and dies a lingering death. “Meditations in Monmouth Street,” then,
depicts manly virtue eroding into laziness, drunkenness, domestic violence,
and crime. The sketch thus deploys family violence as a key sign of lost
manliness. As a Times editorial stated on  March , “a man [shows]

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that he has no claim to consideration as a man by acts of brutal violence
against a woman or a child” (d).
While the sketch “Meditations in Monmouth Street” focuses on vio­
lence against women as a sign of lost manliness, Dickens’s other early writ­
ings reveal a nascent interest in the conscience of the male abuser. In Jack’s
sobbing in “The Hospital Patient,” and Sikes’s haunting by Nancy in
Oliver Twist, Dickens probes the possibility of the abuser’s redemption
even as he celebrates female passivity. In Dickens’s early work these are still
gestures; the central point of narrative interest remains the abused woman.
In –, however, Dickens published Dombey and Son, his full anatomy
of failed manliness. Here, as in the Monmouth Street sketch, domestic as­
sault marks the nadir of masculine failure, in this case in Mr. Dombey’s
descent from Victorian businessman and paterfamilias to lonely bankrupt.
When Dombey’s wife leaves him (as he thinks) for his business manager,
Mr. Carker, he fantasizes about “beating all trace of beauty out of [his wife’s]
triumphant face with his bare hand” (DS, ). Instead, in his impotent
rage, he strikes his daughter Florence in the central hall of their home, con­
flating the women in a symbolic assault on both of them. When he com­
mits this assault on wife and child, his business, his home, and his very
identity collapse. Through his inability to understand his obligations within
the domestic sphere—in particular his duty to protect wife and child—the
successful middle-class businessman falls into the role of the abuser, widely
perceived by Victorians as that of the unmanly and unclassed. Paradoxi­
cally, then, even as Dombey and Son draws public attention to middle-class
family violence, the text’s symbolic language—of slums, tenements, and
class descent—still points to the identification of such violence with the
working class.
“Much More a Man’s Question”
That Dickens should turn his attention in Dombey and Son to the con­
nections between manliness and family violence points to a growing trend
in the s and s for Victorians to see domestic assault as a man’s
issue. Lewis Dillwyn, MP for Swansea, exemplified this trend when in 
he introduced to the House of Commons a bill proposing flogging as pun­
ishment for wife abusers. He described wife assault as “not altogether a
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woman’s question, but . . . much more a man’s question.” As he urged the
all-male House of Commons, “It concerned the character of our own sex
that we should repress these unmanly assaults” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ;
my emphasis). In Dickens’s interest in masculinity and domestic assault—
evident in his early sketches and fiction and central to Dombey and Son—
he joined in a growing tendency to scrutinize men’s marital behavior and
to connect manhood with the cherished Victorian ideal of domesticity.
The Victorians’ regulation of domestic violence partook of their “pro­
gressive construction of men’s conjugal behaviour . . . as a problem to be
regulated” (Hammerton, Cruelty, –) and in turn signals the period’s shift­
ing definitions of masculinity. As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall
document in Family Fortunes, the early nineteenth century witnessed the
construction of a new subject position—that of the bourgeois man for
whom manliness was inextricably linked to domesticity: “[M]iddle-class
men who sought to be ‘someone,’ to count as individuals because of their
wealth, their power to command or their capacity to influence people,
were, in fact, embedded in networks of familial and female support which
underpinned their rise to public prominence” (Davidoff and Hall, ). For
the Victorian middle-class male, Davidoff and Hall argue, domestic har­
mony thus represented the “crown of the enterprise as well as the basis of
public virtue” (Davidoff and Hall, ). This bourgeois script equated British
manliness with self-control over both sexual and violent urges.¹ Violence
in the home thus destroyed the two central facets of Victorian manliness:
it shattered the connection between manliness and domesticity and it
showed a man unable to exercise self-control. Hence Dillwyn could char­
acterize wife assault as “much more a man’s question” than a woman’s (
Parl. Deb. s., col. ).
As I will show, Dombey and Son forms part of this discourse that con­
structed family violence as a threat to masculinity. It represents Dombey’s
injury to his daughter as a symbolic assault—a blow, a murder—on his
own manliness. And, paradoxically, the text closes with Dombey’s man­
hood restored by means of, rather then despite, his daughter’s injury. As I
will argue, this renders the novel closed to the implications of its own cen­
tral narrative event. As Anna Clark observes, marital violence threatened
Victorian patriarchy because it disrupted the idea that men protected
women in the home (A. Clark, “Humanity,” ). Domestic violence was
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thus a kind of oxymoron, explosive in its implications for Victorian middleclass values. This threat to the patriarchal home underlies the central sec­
tion of Dombey and Son, when Edith and Florence, Dombey’s wife and
child, leave the Dombey home, and the house itself becomes a symbolic
ruin, permeable to the gaze of all onlookers. Yet finally the text allays rather
than confronts this threat. By restoring Mr. Dombey to domestic harmony
at its conclusion, the text focuses on recreating protective manliness rather
than critiquing the unequal gender relations underlying spousal assault.
This closure, however, is unstable: in order to reconstitute the home, the
text excludes and vilifies Edith, its most powerful female figure, just as
The Old Curiosity Shop dismisses the combative Mrs. Jiniwin. Hence both
Dombey and Son and The Old Curiosity Shop reveal an uneasiness about
female independence and protest, specters fast becoming reality when
Dombey and Son was serialized between  and .
Constructing Manliness: The “Good Wives’ Rod”
and the Cochrane Decision
Before analyzing Dombey and Son, I want to look at the parliamentary de­
bates on the  Bill for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggra­
vated Assaults upon Women and Children to illustrate that members of
Parliament described family violence as an assault on manliness. On 
March , Mr. Fitzroy, Undersecretary of the Home Department, rose in
the House of Commons to propose a bill to “enlarge magistrates’ powers
to inflict summary penalties for brutal assaults on women and children”
(Doggett, ). This bill, dubbed the “Good Wives’ Rod,” became the first
piece of legislation to perceive assaults on women and children as a dis­
tinct category (May , , ); it thus formally inaugurated the very
category of “family violence” as opposed to assault in general. It increased
the maximum penalties under the  Offenses Against the Person Act to
£ or six months in prison (with or without hard labor) and made it pos­
sible for a third party witnessing an assault to bring a complaint to a magis­
trate (Doggett, –). As he introduced his bill, Fitzroy argued that assaults
on women and children constituted “a blot” on the “national character”
( Parl. Deb. s., col. ). Addressing the all-male House of Commons,
Fitzroy constructed a manly middle-class Englishman revolted by press
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accounts of wife assault: “No one could read the public journals without
being constantly struck with horror and amazement at the numerous re­
ports of cases of cruel and brutal assaults perpetrated upon the weaker sex
by men who one blushed to think were Englishmen, and yet were capable
of such atrocious acts. One’s mind actually recoiled when he thought of
the dastardly and cowardly assaults which were being constantly perpetrated
upon defenceless women by brutes who called themselves men” ( Parl.
Deb. s., col. ). Fitzroy repeatedly emphasized the inadequacy of the
justice system as he read out cases from  and . (Interestingly, al­
though the proposed bill was to cover women and children, it was the wife
beater, that “brute in the form of a man” [ Parl. Deb. s., col. ] who
drew Fitzroy’s attention, as not one of these cases involved abused children.)
His speech contrasted manliness, courage, and humanity with the brutal,
cowardly, and inhuman qualities of the wife beater. Moreover, the speech
used horror at marital violence as a marker of true Englishness, and crimes
against women as a betrayal of nationhood. Fitzroy’s point was that a true
Englishman could neither beat his wife, nor bear to read in the newspapers
about others doing so. Genuine British manliness, he suggested, was in­
compatible with committing or countenancing marital violence.
In the late s and early s, a period of growing journalistic and
political activity on the subject of domestic assault, Victorians who sought
to solve the problem of wife assault approached the issue from two distinct
ideological positions. The first, exemplified by Fitzroy, represented men as
women’s natural protectors. Advocates of this position embraced a manly
ideal combining authority with self-control, and sought greater punish­
ments for men who violated standards of masculinity by using violence
against the “weaker sex” ( Parl. Deb s., col. ). One can distinguish
from this the emergent feminist position that held that wife beating was a
symptom of women’s legal nonexistence. This view was put forward by
John Stuart Mill, Helen Taylor, and Barbara Leigh Smith, all of whom
tried to change laws governing marital coverture and married women’s prop­
erty. But these positions were by no means mutually exclusive. Mill, for ex­
ample, one of the most passionate advocates for corporal punishment, at
times characterized women as weak and in need of protection. In “Protec­
tion of Women” (Sunday Times,  August ), he described assault vic­
tims as “helpless, virtuous, unoffending creatures,” and their assailants as
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“bipedal monsters” and “brute beasts” (PW, b). It is characteristic of the
complexity of gender relations and feminism in the s that Caroline
Norton (one of the most forceful advocates for feminist legal reform) both
deplored the legal nonexistence of married women and asserted her infe­
riority to men: “The natural position of woman is inferiority to man,” she
wrote. “Amen! . . . . I am Mr Norton’s inferior; I am the clouded moon of
that sun. . . . Put me under some law of protection” (LQ, –). In this
moment of ideological contest, debate on the  “Good Wives’ Rod”
very largely represented the former position: most MPs perceived wife and
child assault as a symptom of men’s failure to act as guardians or protec­
tors of the weak. MPs thus defended male superiority while seeking to en­
sure the correct use of male power. Parliament, then, became one of many
forums in which the ideal of manly self-control was defined and enforced.
The  bill was relatively uncontentious, indicating the widespread
perception that something needed to be done about wife assault, a problem
that feminists and nonfeminists alike perceived as being on the increase
(Doggett, ).² The Times supported the measure ( March , d),
and Punch wrote, “Mr. Fitzroy deserves eternal honour for having taken up
the cause of the ill-used Women” ( March , ). The only substan­
tial issues of debate were whether flogging should be added as a punish­
ment for assaults against women and children, and whether a magistrate
should have the summary power to inflict as substantial a penalty as a £
fine or a six-month prison sentence. The flogging amendment was pro­
posed by Mr. Phinn, who argued that corporal punishment was appropri­
ate “where men were already reduced below the level of the brute” (
Parl. Deb. s., col. ). It was supported by the Times ( March ),
which argued that “there can be no question of ‘degrading’ a man who in­
flicts a course of violent and continued brutality upon a woman or a child.
The truth is, the brute is so degraded already that, short of miracles, his
fears constitute the only channel by which his actions can be touched”
(d). Punch also supported flogging “in a clear case of brutality towards a
woman”—the article does not mention children—arguing that “nothing
can be too degrading for one who degrades himself in the manner alluded
to” ( March , ). Finally, Mill threw his weight behind the measure,
arguing in an anonymous and privately printed pamphlet on Fitzroy’s bill,
“Overwhelming as are the objections to corporal punishment except in
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cases of personal outrage, it is peculiarly fitted for such cases” (CW, :).
(Unlike Punch, Mill mentions assaults on both women and children;
notably, he also was able to imagine assaults on children by women, a pos­
sibility that others seem to have overlooked.) Ultimately, however, the
amendment failed by a two-to-one margin, as most MPs agreed with Fitzroy
that flogging was “inconsistent with the feeling of the age” ( Parl. Deb.
s., col. ).³ What public and parliamentary discussion there was on
Fitzroy’s bill, however, provides important evidence that domestic assault
was widely perceived as a violation of manliness, an act of men “reduced
below the level of the brute” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ), and a betrayal
of British values, as Punch communicated with its Orientalized image of
a “Tyrant” man wielding force over his wife ( April , ; fig. .).
Implicit too, was the assumption that family violence characterized lowerclass men who could not control their passions as middle-class mores
increasingly demanded. Hammerton observes, “Middle-class manliness,
denoting protectiveness and benevolence to women, as well as undisputed
power, was . . . compromised by the unruly men of the lower classes”
(Hammerton, Cruelty, ). Describing abusive men as brutes, sympathetic
MPs represented beaten wives as “defenceless,” “soft,” and “kindly” (
Parl. Deb. s., col. , ), loyal to their abusers and unwilling to testify
against them. Earl Granville, speaking in the House of Lords, deplored the
“cases of great cruelty, wholly wanton and unprovoked, committed by bru­
tal husbands upon their defenceless wives and children” ( Parl. Deb. s.,
col. ). Implicit in the descriptions of brutal men and defenseless wives
and children was the middle-class expectation that the husband should
protect—not abuse—his family. This argument applied with particular
force to women, assumed to deserve protection from all men. As Viscount
Palmerston argued in the House of Commons, “He did not at all admit
that a man was more entitled to commit these injuries upon his own wife,
than upon another man’s wife. On the contrary, he thought that it was a
greater offence. His own wife was more entitled to expect protection, and
another man’s wife had her own husband to guard her from injury” (
Parl. Deb. s., col. ). Debates on the  bill thus illustrate how leg­
islative attempts to control family violence were fueled by middle-class
ideals of masculine behavior. Focusing on the right role of men much more
than on the rights of women, MPs sought to correct male behavior while
preserving middle-class gender roles. Important as the  act was to
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Figure .. Illustration for “Panel for the Protection of Ladies,” Punch  (): .
women suffering assault, it was based on an idea of wife battery as a viola­
tion of cherished gender norms, an offence of the brutal against the weak.
The act was premised on the physical and moral supremacy of men in
marriage. It sought not to limit that power but to correct its application.
The Closed Home
While MPs in  harnessed shifting ideals of manliness to counter the
problem of marital violence, they worked within the doctrine of coverture,
which authorized very extensive powers to the husband. At midcentury, the
doctrine of coverture had been reinforced by the  Cochrane decision,
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which enforced the “general right of the husband to the control and cus­
tody of his wife” (Times,  June , e).⁴ The facts of the Cochrane case
were as follows: Cecelia Maria and Alexander Cochrane married in . In
, Cecelia Cochrane left her husband, taking their young son, and went
to live with her mother in Ireland and France. Alexander Cochrane success­
fully applied for a writ for restitution of conjugal rights. The writ was not
effective while Cecelia was in Ireland, but in May  she was “induced
by a strategem” (Times,  June , d) to come to England and to go to
her husband’s lodgings. Alexander “immediately placed her in custody”
and kept her in his rooms, despite her declaration that “whenever she has
it in her power she will again run away” (Times,  June , d). Part of
Alexander Cochrane’s concern, he told the judge, was that while in Paris,
Cecelia had attended “masked balls and other places of that description, in
the company of persons unknown to [him]” (Re Cochrane []  Dowl­
ing ). Cecelia Cochrane herself applied for a writ of habeus corpus, and
the court had to decide whether her husband had the “right to restrain her
of her liberty until she [was] willing to return to a performance of her con­
jugal duties” (Re Cochrane []  Dowling ).
The Cochrane case points to a number of unspoken anxieties under­
lying early Victorian male authority. As Anna Clark notes, in the ideal of
the Victorian middle-class home the wife was “sheltered, safe and submis­
sive” (A. Clark, “Humanity,” ). In theory, no interference should have
been required if the wife observed the marriage contract. But what if, like
Cecelia Cochrane, a wife refused to acknowledge the husband’s authority?
What powers did husbands such as Alexander Cochrane have to enforce
their “natural” authority? How far should the state intervene in the do­
mestic sphere?
The Cochrane decision reveals that for Victorian wives, there was force
behind the idea that the husband ruled the household. In this precedentsetting case, the judge supported Alexander Cochrane’s rights to confine
his wife and hold her to the provisions of the marriage contract. The judge
gave Cecelia Maria two options: to stay in the marriage willingly, or by
constraint: “[I]f there be any thing painful to Mrs. Cochrane in the pres­
ent state of things, she cannot properly complain of it; for it arises from
her own breach of duty, and she may end it when she pleases by cheerfully
and frankly performing the contract into which she has entered. The mo­
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ment that she makes restraint of her person to be unnecessary for keeping
in the path of duty, the restraint will become illegal” (Times,  June ,
e). The Cochrane decision clearly articulates the assumptions about male
authority in marriage that underlay the more idealizing rhetoric of the 
debates in the British Parliament. It shows the extent to which the state
delegated its authority to the husband, recognizing him as the center of
authority in the home and supporting his powers there. (Feminist Caroline
Frances Cornwallis summarized the implications of the Cochrane case for
women in the pages of the radical Westminster Review: “[T]he common law
views the relation of husband and wife as that of master and bondswoman.
A hired servant could not be so treated” [PMW, n].) The decision also
reveals how deeply reluctant the courts were to intervene in the domestic
sphere. The issue of wife assault, then, pitted the new scrutiny of male
marital conduct against the state’s reluctance to interfere in the middleclass private realm.
Dombey and Son: The Failure of Middle-Class Manliness
Charles Dickens’s novels focus repeatedly on cruelty to women and chil­
dren. In particular, Bleak House, serialized from March  to September
, coincided with and reflected the concerns of the parliamentary de­
bates on the  act. Dickens’s intensely sympathetic portrayal of Allan
Woodcourt aiding Jenny, the abused brick maker’s wife (chapter , part
), was published in April , the month after Fitzroy proposed his act
in the House of Commons. Moreover, Bleak House was perceived as an in­
tervention in the wife-assault debates of the early s, as is evident from
J. M. Kaye’s  article “Outrages on Women,” which references the brick
makers’ episode (OW, –). However, Bleak House, like Oliver Twist
and Sketches by Boz, located violence in the lower- or lower-middle-class
home and family, as did the  parliamentary debates. For this reason,
this chapter focuses on Dombey and Son, which takes the far less conven­
tional step of portraying violence in the middle-class home. Unlike Bill
Sikes in Oliver Twist, or even the aspiring office boy of “Meditations in
Monmouth Street,” Dombey belongs to the middle class, the class to which
Dickens’s readers largely belonged. There is a crucial distinction between
Dickens’s portrayal of Sikes and Nancy’s violent relationship and his
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portrayal of violence in the Dombey home. As Tromp notes, Oliver Twist
insulates the middle class from violence (Tromp, ). Dombey and Son re­
fuses the reader any such distance. Dickens’s portrayal of violence in the
Dombey home is highly significant. While lacking the gruesome physicality
of Nancy’s murder, Dombey’s assault on his daughter and wife constitutes
an assault on contemporary ideals of middle-class manliness, an assault
that hit very close to home for many readers of the novel. Far from but­
tressing middle-class status by portraying the lower classes or the gentry
as violent, Dombey and Son worked to expose domestic violence in the
middle-class home. Dickens’s text, however, simultaneously reveals a deep
ambivalence concerning state intervention there. Even as it portrays the
Dombey home as subject to the same male violence found in the police
courts and the newspapers, and even as it invites the reader to participate
in the public scrutiny of the middle-class home, the text recoils from pry­
ing eyes and attempts to reconstitute the middle-class home as a private
space. Endorsing the Cochrane decision’s construction of the middle-class
home as a space in which interference should be minimized, the novel thus
attempts to resolve the issue of domestic assault within the home itself.
In Dombey and Son, the narrator pleads for “a good spirit who would
take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the
lame demon [Asmodeus] in the tale” (DS, ).⁵ To a large extent, the
novel realizes this Asmodean ambition. Serialized between  and ,
roughly six years after the Cochrane decision and five years before the 
act, the novel showed middle-class readers a home of their own social stra­
tum torn by family violence. And such violence is not merely incidental to
the text. The novel’s structural fulcrum is chapter  (“The Thunderbolt”),
in which Dombey strikes his daughter, Florence. More complex still, the
narrative establishes through setting, symbol, and parallelism that Dombey’s
assault on Florence substitutes for his desire to beat his wife Edith, whom
he suspects of adultery. Thematically and structurally, this assault lies at
the center of the text.
The anatomy of Mr. Dombey’s failed manliness begins in the novel’s
first chapters. These depict the relationships between men, women, and two
houses—the commercial House of Dombey and Son and the domestic
house of the Dombey family. These early chapters invoke the key Victo­
rian assumption (elucidated by Davidoff and Hall in Family Fortunes) that
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the House of Dombey and the house of the Dombeys are inseparable en­
terprises, and will succeed or fail together. As Gail Turley Houston argues,
Dombey and Son thus “foregrounds the way the Victorian economic sys­
tem was founded on family relations, more particularly, those between
men and their mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters.”⁶ The text strongly
suggests that feminine nature—which the narrator describes as “a nature
that is ever, in the mass, better, truer, higher, nobler, quicker to feel, and
much more constant to retain, all tenderness and pity, self-denial and de­
votion, than the nature of men” (DS, )—has the potential to redeem
“the rapacious nature of capitalist England” (Houston, ). Mary Poovey
notes that in the nineteenth century, femininity was thus seen as capable
of “mitigat[ing] the effects of the alienation of market relations”; by repre­
senting female work as selfless—and thereby distinguishing it from paid
labor—Victorians were able to construct the home as a space of “(appar­
ent) non-alienation.”⁷ Dombey, however, fails to mitigate his capitalist
alienation through associating himself with redemptive femininity in the
domestic sphere. He neglects his first wife as well as his daughter in favor
of his capitalist enterprise (ironically named the “House of Dombey”). In
his second marriage, Dombey misconstrues the relations between the pri­
vate and public spheres when he chooses his bride, Edith Granger—“very
handsome, very haughty, very wilful”(DS, )—based on her ability to
represent his commercial persona in public. Finally, Dombey confuses the
private and the public when he delegates his business manager, Carker, to
exercise his authority over his wife. These errors, according to the text’s
logic, constitute a failure of manhood, a failure that is conveyed symboli­
cally through a number of discreet allusions to impotence.⁸ The House of
Dombey will fail because Dombey, the “Head of the Home Department,”
is neither the father nor the man that contemporary bourgeois expecta­
tions demand.
While the novel’s opening thus foretells Dombey’s failure to understand
women’s ability, under the Victorian gender system of separate spheres, to
redeem the competitive and aggressive lives of men, the text represents this
failure in a key central trope—that of domestic assault. The specter of mari­
tal violence appears early in the text, immediately after Mrs. Dombey’s
funeral. In an act whose symbolism eludes him, Mr. Dombey orders the
furniture swathed in newspapers and holland:
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When the funeral was over, Mr. Dombey ordered the furniture to be
covered up. . . . Accordingly, mysterious shapes were made of tables and
chairs, heaped together in the middle of rooms, and covered over with
great winding-sheets. Bell-handles, window-blinds, and looking-glasses,
being papered up in journals, daily and weekly, obtruded fragmentary
accounts of deaths and dreadful murders. Every chandelier or lustre,
muffled in holland, looked like a monstrous tear depending from the
ceiling’s eye. Odours, as from vaults and damp places, came out of the
chimneys. The dead and buried lady was awful in a picture frame of
ghastly bandages. (DS, )
The muffling and bandaging are highly symbolic: the Dombey home, al­
ways neglected, now becomes a house of death. Muffled in holland, Mrs.
Dombey’s portrait seems swathed in “ghastly bandages” (DS, ). As the
metaphor of bandaging powerfully suggests, there lurks in this house the
threat of violence, injury, and wounding—specifically, injury to women.
What form that injury might take is ominously suggested by the pages of
“journals, daily and weekly” that wrap the furniture, bellpulls, and look­
ing glasses. From these newsprint sheets, the narrator tells us, “obtrud[e]
fragmentary accounts of deaths and dreadful murders.” The real fear that
haunts the House of Dombey is that the dreadful crimes of the daily and
weekly newspapers will, through Dombey’s failure to understand the value
of women’s ideological work in the Victorian gender system, come to rest
in the middle-class home.
Part  of the serial version of Dombey and Son (which contains the de­
scription of “accounts of death and dreadful murders” obtruding from the
newspapers muffling the furniture and portrait) was published in October
. A perusal of the Times for September and October  reveals the
crimes that haunted the Victorian cultural imagination at this time: marital
assault and wife murder. As a Times editorial noted, “instances of brutality
on the part of a husband towards a wife” had “of late been very numerous”
(Times,  August , d). The police reports of the Times from the au­
tumn of  contain a litany of violent crimes against women:
-.—An elderly man, named Richard Tweedy, described
as a foreman in the London Docks . . . was placed at the bar, yesterday,
before Mr. , charged with cutting and wounding his wife,
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Catherine Tweedy, with intent to murder her. (Times,  September
, d)
-.—A few days ago a young married woman named
Anne Guest, whose face was shockingly cut and contused, and one of
her eyes closed up, applied to Mr.  for an assault warrant
against James Guest, her husband, a journeyman dyer, living in Whitecross place, Finsbury. (Times,  September , d)
-.—Yesterday Edward Spiller, a middle-aged man of re­
spectable appearance, described as lately a publican, was brought up on
a warrant before Mr. , charged with violently assaulting his
wife, Caroline Spiller, and also conspiring with another man, now in cus­
tody, named Thomas Byrne, to effect a capital offence upon her person.
(Times,  September , b)
  .—An inquest was held before Mr. P.F.
Curry, borough coroner, on Wednesday, upon view of the body of Cather­
ine Tully, of Thomas-street, in this town, who met her death by kicks in
the abdomen, received from her husband. (Times,  September , e)
-.—Robert Long Andrews, a young man, was
summoned by Fanny Andrews his wife, for ill-treatment. (Times,  Oc­
tober , e)
-.—Yesterday a young man named Alfred Wilton, de­
scribed as a boot and shoemaker, was placed at the bar before Mr.
, charged with causing the death of his wife, Sarah Wilton,
a young woman aged , by drowning in the Regent’s Canal. (Times, 
October , f )
-.—Yesterday a middle-aged man, named John Lacy,
was placed at the bar before Mr. , charged with brutally as­
saulting his wife, Ann Lacy. (Times,  October , d)
As I argue in chapter , newspaper accounts of wife-beating trials in mag­
istrates’ courts had been a new phenomenon in the s after the  act
came into effect. By the time Dickens was writing Dombey and Son in
–, these stories were all too common. Yet they still held power to
shock. This power is revealed in Fitzroy’s speech when he introduced his
“Good Wives’ Rod” to the House of Commons in : his most powerful
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rhetorical argument in favor of the bill was reading wife-assault cases verba­
tim from the newspapers. In Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, a full column
and a half is filled with these paragraph-long synopses of predominantly
lower-class spousal assaults, each of which, Fitzroy argued, should strike
the imagination with “horror and amazement” ( Parl. Deb. s., col.
). Fitzroy’s speech is fascinating because he foregrounds the shocking
moment at which these (apparently alien) lower-class crimes entered the
consciousness of the middle-class newspaper reader. (This contrasts with
Punch, which in  depicted a lower-class man reading accounts of do­
mestic murder in the newspaper, and with his home papered with illustra­
tions of gibbets and of criminals such as James Greenacre [fig. .].) Like
Fitzroy’s speech, the depiction of the Dombey house points to the mo­
ment when middle-class domesticity is shattered by the kind of violence
associated with the magistrates’ courts and the newspaper. The fear of this
tainting suggestively links the “ghastly bandages” on the portrait of the
first Mrs. Dombey with the “fragmentary accounts” obtruding from daily
and weekly papers. The threat that hangs over the house of Dombey is
that of wife assault.
Dombey and Son thus suggests that unmitigated male aggression in the
marketplace—that is, capitalist aggression that is not balanced by selfless
female labor in the home—will lead to uncontrolled acts of domestic as­
sault more commonly associated with the Victorian working class.⁹ Dickens
thus represents domestic violence in Dombey and Son as symptomatic not
of a problem in the gender system but of Mr. Dombey’s failure to recog­
nize the rightness of the current gender system and to benefit from its selfregulating properties. Like the  act which followed its publication,
Dombey and Son thus seeks not to change gender relations but to reassert
and reinforce them.
The threat of domestic violence is realized in chapter , suggestively
entitled “The Thunderbolt.” Domestic assault shatters the house of
Dombey when Mr. Dombey discovers that his second wife, Edith, has left
him for his business manager, Mr. Carker. The narrator states explicitly
that Dombey’s first impulse is to assault his wife: “He read that she was
gone. He read that he was dishonoured. He read that she had fled, upon
her shameful wedding-day, with the man whom he had chosen for her hu­
miliation; and he tore out of the room, and out of the house, with a fran­
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Figure .. “Useful Sunday Literature for the Masses; or, Murder Made Familiar,”
Punch  (): .
tic idea of finding her yet, at the place to which she had been taken, and
beating all trace of beauty out of the triumphant face with his bare hand”
(DS, ). Edith has left, however, so Dombey strikes his daughter in­
stead: “[I]n his frenzy, he lifted up his cruel arm and struck her, crosswise,
with that heaviness, that she tottered on the marble floor; and as he dealt
the blow, he told her what Edith was, and bade her follow her, since they
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had always been in league” (DS, ). The text makes it clear that Dombey
conflates his daughter with his supposedly adulterous wife—this is a com­
bined act of wife and child assault. Such an assault signals his failure to
control his wife and his failure to protect the weak. In contemporary
terms, it means that self-regulating system of the middle-class home—
whereby male market aggression was regulated by the female economy of
selflessness—has failed, and that his home has been destroyed from within.
Interestingly, however, at the level of representation, Dombey’s assault cata­
pults him out of the middle class and into the realm of police reports and
newspaper journalism. As Mr. Toots says with unwonted accuracy, Mr.
Dombey has become “a Brute” (DS, ).¹⁰
The logic behind the  debates, which portrayed domestic violence
as an assault on manliness, is consistent with the novel’s symbolism, which
consistently depicts Dombey’s blow as having fallen not on Florence, but
on himself. In a notable use of the passive voice, Florence imagines her fa­
ther as receiver, not as agent, of the assault: “She had seen the murder
done. In the last lingering natural aspect in which she had cherished him
through so much, he had been torn out of her heart, defaced, and slain.
The thought of it was so appalling to her, that she covered her eyes, and
shrunk trembling from the least remembrance of the deed, or of the cruel
hand that did it” (DS, ). These passages convey metaphorically that by
striking his daughter, Dombey has destroyed himself. In his Exposition of
the Laws Relating to the Women of England, J. J. S. Wharton would write
that marital violence in the “higher stations of life” was “degrading to the
husband” (n). Similarly, the narrator of Dombey and Son judges that
“for the stain of [Dombey’s] domestic shame there was no purification”
(DS, –). Symbolically, Dombey not only has lost his middle-class
identity, but has shattered the structure of the middle-class home. Imme­
diately after Florence is hit by her father, she runs into the streets. Figura­
tively, the Dombey home disappears: it is described as “the home that
existed no more,” as “the terrible dream [Florence] had once called Home,”
and as “[a]ll past, all gone, all lost, and broken up!” (DS, , , ).
The moment of abuse can thus be seen as a symbolic breach in the middleclass home itself.
The bankruptcy that brings down the House of Dombey realizes in
economic terms the destruction wrought by Dombey’s violence a year ear­
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lier. In turn, the Dombey home becomes a symbol of Dombey’s decline,
swiftly losing the spatial divisions that identified it as middle class. In an in­
version of middle-class order, the servants feast on Dombey’s food: “[m]at­
trasses [sic] and bedding appear in the dining room; the glass and china get
into the conservatory” (DS, ). Perhaps most importantly, the home is
no longer private: “strangers” intrude there, staring, making notes, and tak­
ing “panoramic survey[s]” (DS, ). The Dombey house has assumed all
the permeability and disorder of a tenement. The Asmodean desire to open
the house to view has been terribly realized.
Healing Florence
Because chapter  formed part of a Christmas number, Dickens worried
about ending with Florence on the streets. Instead, in order to “leave a pleas­
anter impression on the reader,” he concluded the number with Florence
safely cared for by Captain Cuttle (DS, appendix B, ). Significantly,
then, Florence’s wounds are healed by the working class. Here there is no
implication that brawn or calluses go hand in hand with domestic violence.
(Compare the Times of  August : “Let the ruffian who indulges his
fury on his wife, or his mistress, learn that every cowardly blow he deals
will be retaliated by an arm as brawny as his own” [e].) Yet while Dombey
and Son challenges the contemporary view that domestic assault occurs
primarily in the lower classes, the novel offers no substantial challenge to
the idea that wife assault primarily concerns men. Thus it works its reso­
lution by restoring and healing Mr. Dombey himself.
The text signals its disinterest concerning Florence’s healing by the
plethora of images which identify Dombey—not Florence—as the injured
person in the assault. As I have shown, the narrative represents Dombey
as having been murdered by his own violence. In a similar exchange of
roles, it depicts Florence—not Dombey—as somehow guilty in the as­
sault. As she runs into the streets, Florence experiences a “wildness of sor­
row, shame, and terror” (DS, ). Even when she is in Captain Cuttle’s
care, this attention to Florence’s shame persists. Florence looks in the mir­
ror and sees on her breast “the darkening mark of an angry hand”; she is
“ashamed and afraid” (DS, ) of this injury, which becomes like a mark
of Cain on her. The sight of the “darkening mark upon her bosom” makes
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her “afraid of herself, as if she bore about her something wicked” (DS,
–).
The guilt attached to Florence’s injury may reflect the fact that, prior
to the age of photography, the woman’s injured body was the most potent
and public sign of private violence. One reason why many spousal assaults
were tried by summary judgment was that magistrates could hear assault
cases quickly, while injuries were still visible. As Mr. Fitzroy said in the
 parlimentary debates, “[I]t was obvious that after the lapse of some
weeks [the victim of assault] would present a very different spectacle to the
magistrates and jury at the sessions, from what she presented to the mag­
istrate before whom she appeared immediately after the brutal assault. The
marks of the assault would be greatly obliterated” ( Parl. Deb. s., col.
). At the same time, Fitzroy and others repeatedly described women’s
notorious reluctance to testify against their abusers: “It must be remem­
bered that women rarely complained”; “the woman rarely complained of
her husband, or a child of its parent, until brutality had arrived at such a
pitch that life was insecure”; “it was almost impossible to get a woman to
appear against her husband” ( Parl. Deb. s. col. –). The parli­
mentary debates thus pitted the woman’s body against her voice, as if the
body’s testimony constituted a betrayal in which a moral wife would not
participate willingly.
As I argue in chapter  of this study, Dickens’s early writings, such
as “The Hospital Patient,” focus on precisely this conflict between the
woman’s bodily and verbal testimony, celebrating those women who choose
to remain silent rather then confront their abusers. And in David Copperfield, Dickens returns to this conflict. When David contemplates Rosa
Dartle’s face, he sees the remarkable scar (DC, ) on her lip from when
Steerforth threw a hammer at her. The text represents the scar as volatile,
changing, shifting. When Rosa is angry with Steerforth, her rage seems to
bring out the scar “like a mark in invisible ink brought to the fire” (DC,
). The scar then stands out “like writing on the wall” (DC, ), as if
created by Rosa’s resentment rather than Steerforth’s violence. The text’s
figurative language thus suggests that the abused woman’s anger, rather
than the man’s violence, puts the “writing on the wall” (DC, ) about
domestic violence. In contrast to Rosa Dartle—who, as her sharp name sug­
gests, “brings everything to the grindstone” (DC, )—Florence Dombey is
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passive and forgiving. She does not accuse her father, but her scarred body
does, and her Cain-like scar is redolent of this unwitting disloyalty.
The text suggests by implication another source of Florence’s culpa­
bility. Florence’s guilt is relieved only when she returns to the middle-class
home. Thus it seems that Florence’s Cain-like status—her scarred breast,
her wandering through the streets, her exile as she sails on the sea—arises
because she leaves, betrays (and thus destroys) the middle-class home.
This accords with Dickens’s sympathetic portrayal, in texts such as “The
Convict’s Return,” “The Hospital Patient,” “The Pawnbroker’s Shop,” and
Oliver Twist, of women who remain loyal to their abusers. As I argue in
chapter , women’s loyalty appealed to Dickens because it exemplified
what he saw as a wife’s highest moral duty, faithfulness to her husband.
Such loyalty reinforces the paramount status of the home, and the notion
that the home is constituted—and society perpetuated—by the combina­
tion of man’s authority and woman’s loyalty. As we have seen, Dombey
violates this central principle of the gender system when he devalues the
selfless work of femininity. At the explicit level, the text thus ascribes blame
for the assault to Mr. Dombey. However, according to the logic of the Vic­
torian gender system, Dombey cannot be healed without the presence of
Florence, the very embodiment of selfless femininity. Dombey and Son
thus suggests that at some level Florence, by leaving, is responsible for the
shattering of the middle-class home, and that only through her presence
can that home be reconstituted. Like the Cochrane decision, then, Dombey
and Son is based on the fundamental principle of a closed home, one that,
in the act of opening, is destroyed. Politically, it is highly significant that
the text brings to a quick end the interlude in which it envisages the abused
woman leaving the violent home and entering the wider community. As I
will argue in chapters  and , both Anne Brontë and George Eliot imagine
such a future for their fictional heroines, Eliot in particular. In contrast,
Dombey and Son achieves closure when Florence returns to the family home
and restores her father’s domestic authority.
However, Dombey and Son complicates the issue of domestic violence
and female loyalty because Edith and Florence take different paths at the
end of the novel. Dickens’s representation of Dombey’s single blow as tar­
geting both wife and daughter allows the text to imagine two contrasting
reactions to family violence. (Edith, of course, does not experience violence
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per se; instead, the novel indicates that she sees her husband’s drive to pos­
sess her as a form of abuse.) Both women leave the home—Edith to seek
revenge, Florence in panic. And while the text is deeply sympathetic to
Edith in her mistreatment by Dombey, her departure exposes her to its full
negative judgment. Florence, too, temporarily violates the duty of faith­
fulness when she leaves home and draws middle-class domestic violence
into the public eye. Her guilt is assuaged only when she returns to the
closed circle created by male authority and middle-class domesticity.
Outside the Closed Home: Edith
Like Florence, Edith leaves Dombey. But whereas Florence leaves in panic
and eventually submits to male authority, Edith leaves in rage and revenge
and refuses to return. Edith thus functions as a kind of avatar for the sub­
missive Florence, acting out the rage from which Florence is so signally
free. In political terms, Edith represents the woman who refuses to be con­
tained by domestic structures. And Dombey and Son casts out this aggres­
sive woman much as The Old Curiosity Shop had ridiculed Mrs. Jiniwin.
Edith does not leave Dombey for the same reason that Florence does.
Crucially, Dombey does not physically injure his second wife. Instead,
Edith leaves because she feels prostituted by a marriage that was a finan­
cial transaction (her beauty exchanged for her husband’s money). Put in
terms of the text’s view of gender relations, Dombey mistakenly treats his
marriage as part of the market instead of part of the redemptive home
sphere, which was culturally constructed, as Poovey suggests, as outside
economic forces (Poovey, –). And, as Robert Clark argues, the narra­
tive is deeply sympathetic to Edith, treated as she is “like a commodity
available to the highest bidder in the marriage market.”¹¹ Repeatedly, the
text suggests that the marriage is a prison: Edith and her husband are
“forced and linked together by a chain” (DS, ), with a “manacle” join­
ing their “fettered hands” (DS, ). She is surrounded by images of tor­
ture: the “roses on the walls and floors” have “sharp thorns, that [tear] her
breast” (DS, ), and she wears her bridal wreath as if it were “a garland
of steel spikes” (DS, ). Bird and pet imagery also convey Edith’s captive
state. She wears “delicate white down” on her robe and the “pinion of
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some rare and beautiful bird” (DS, , ) at her wrist. By association,
then, the “chafing and imprisoned” bird in Carker’s home that swings on
a “gilded hoop . . . like a great wedding-ring” (DS, ) clearly represents
Edith.
But just as the text portrays Florence as guilty for leaving her father’s
home, it depicts Edith’s departure as violent and vengeful. In the illustra­
tion ironically entitled “Mr. Carker in his hour of triumph” (fig. .),
Edith directs her hand and arm toward Carker’s groin in a castrating ges­
ture. Behind her, pictures of women with weapons (an Amazon with a spear
and Judith with a weapon) suggest Edith’s concealed knife. Metaphori­
cally, her pretended adultery constitutes a symbolic wound to the phallus:
“I struck a blow that laid your lofty master in the dust,” Edith tells Carker;
“I single out in you the meanest man I know, . . . that his wound may go
the deeper, and may rankle more” (DS, , ). In her drive for revenge,
as well as her pretended adultery, Edith becomes the target of the text’s
vilification. Patricia Ingham argues that Dickens’s texts contain a number
of “excessive females,” like Edith, who wreak “emotional havoc” because
they represent what happens when “female nature . . . tries to overthrow
the proper order of things and to control where it should simply provide
and influence. It represents a threat to male governance by removing the
order that it should bring. As the narrator makes clear, it offers a radical
threat to men and to husbands in particular.”¹² But whereas Ingham ar­
gues that Dickens’s passionate women elicit “narrative admiration” even as
they cause “chaos” (Ingham, , ), I submit that this admiration and
sympathy is limited largely to Edith’s suffering within marriage. (Robert
Clark even argues that such sympathy was only “made possible by Dickens’s
intention to ruin her in the end” [R. Clark, ].) Once outside the marriage,
Edith comes in for the full force of the text’s negative judgment. Like Mrs.
Jiniwin, Edith is shown to be too aggressive, too forward, too independ­
ent. But whereas Mrs. Jiniwin looked back to the traditional figure of the
lower-class combative wife, Edith embodies a threat that loomed on the
Victorian horizon: the aggressive feminist claiming equality or independ­
ence. Her unwillingness to forgive excludes her from the text’s closure,
which shows the reconstitution of the Dombey home around the end­
lessly forgiving Florence.
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Figure .. Hablôt K. Browne, “Mr. Carker in his hour of triumph,” illustration for
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (–).
Healing Dombey
Florence enables the text’s reassuring conclusion because Dombey’s reedu­
cation in manliness depends on the woman’s selfless willingness to forgive.
It depends, in other words, on those qualities that Dickens viewed as essen­
tial to femininity—the capacity to be, in comparison to men, “more con­
stant to retain, all tenderness and pity, self-denial and devotion” (DS, ).
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As Mary Poovey argues, this idea is fundamental to the Victorian doctrine
of separate spheres, in which the home was seen as a place of healing for
the male (Poovey, ). As I point out in chapter , this quality is exempli­
fied in the extraordinary devotion of the hospital patient and above all by
Nancy in Oliver Twist. In Dombey and Son, Florence exhibits this selfless
and specifically feminine devotion. Thus, by the text’s own logic, Dombey
can be healed only within his own home, and by the daughter he assaulted.
Through Florence’s forgiveness, violence is contained within the domestic
sphere and absorbed back into the patriarchal home. Dombey and Son thus
reaffirms the precedence of the middle-class gender system, and the doc­
trine of women’s selflessness as healing balm. But in so doing, the text sug­
gests that, in the middle class at least, the home is the place of healing for
abusive men. It thus reinforces the doctrine of the closed home even as it
portrays that home as shattered by physical violence.
To examine how Florence restores the Dombey home, I turn to the
scenes of “Retribution” (the title of chapter ) and Florence’s return. It is
clear that Dombey suffers retribution by being feminized: he takes on Flo­
rence’s role as he wanders the house at night. Climbing the stairs to Paul’s
room, he enters Florence’s space and adopts her mourning role there. The
text explicitly identifies Dombey with his neglected daughter: “He knew,
now, what it was to be rejected and deserted; now, when every loving blos­
som he had withered in his innocent daughter’s heart was snowing down,
in ashes, on him” (DS, ). Dombey’s failed manhood thus culminates in
a period of temporary feminization. This education in humility, however,
prepares him only to resume a wiser version of his former manliness. The
reunion with Florence restores the feminine principle that he has hitherto
ignored, and returns Dombey to his rightful masculine role—that is, a
role that acknowledges the woman’s separate and necessary powers as nur­
turer and moral guide.
The reunion scene thus restores the gender roles to their rightful places.
In this context, it is clear that the house of Dombey—the domestic house,
that is, not the business empire on which Dombey has previously based
his identity—can be reconstituted and restored only by Florence’s return.
She, and not Edith, represents that selfless femininity that, according to
the text’s own logic, Dombey needs to make him whole. A modern reader
might suppose that a successful reunion would rest on Dombey’s contri­
tion for his assault and Florence’s forgiveness. But according to the logic of
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the separate spheres and the healing potential of the female, this is not the
case. Instead, the scene focuses on Florence’s apology to her father:
“Papa! Dearest papa! Pardon me, forgive me! I have come back to ask
forgiveness on my knees. . . .”
“Papa, dear, I am changed. I am penitent. I know my fault. I know my
duty better now. Papa, don’t cast me off, or I shall die!”
He tottered to his chair. He felt her draw his arms about her neck; he
felt her put her own round his; he felt her kisses on his face; he felt her
wet cheek laid against his own; he felt—oh, how deeply!—all that he
had done.
Upon the breast that he had bruised, against the heart that he had al­
most broken, she laid his face, now covered with his hands, and said,
sobbing:
“Papa, love, I am a mother. . . . When [my child] was born, and when
I knew how much I loved it, I knew what I had done in leaving you.
Forgive me, dear Papa!” (DS, –; my emphasis)
Arlene Jackson remarks that this scene “seems grossly unfair to Florence. . . .
That she should need to beg forgiveness seems to be a total inversion.”¹³
But Jackson’s remark reflects a modern view of gender; Florence’s apology
is entirely consistent with the mid-Victorian doctrine of selfless feminin­
ity. Indeed, Dickens’s plans for numbers  and  identify Florence’s “re­
lenting towards her father” as a key element in this section (DS, appendix
B, ).
We may wonder, as Jackson does, what Florence is guilty of. As dis­
cussed above, it is clear that Florence has committed the fault of allowing
her reaction to Dombey’s violence to destroy the middle-class home and
expose it to prying eyes. In this context, it is significant that the text figures
Mr. Dombey’s pain in terms of home invasion. He imagines his house as
contaminated by footmarks:
Of all the footmarks there, making them as common as the common
street, there was not one, he thought, but had seemed at the time to set
itself upon his brain while he had kept close, listening. He looked at
their number, and their hurry, and contention—foot treading foot out,
and upward track and downward jostling one another—and thought,
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with absolute dread and wonder, how much he must have suffered dur­
ing that trial, and what a changed man he had cause to be. He thought,
besides, oh was there, somewhere in the world, a light footstep that
might have worn out in a moment half those marks! (DS, )
Whereas in previous chapters the text represents the Dombey home as
a slum, now the home has degenerated into a common thoroughfare.
Figuratively, the house has disappeared altogether, leaving Dombey—like
Florence—in the streets. The metaphor of the footprint suggests Dombey’s
cure: “[W]as there, somewhere in the world, a light footstep that might
have worn out in a moment half those marks!” Dombey’s healing will occur
when Florence, back from the streets, reenters the middle-class home and
thus restores its privacy. Hers is the one “light footstep” that by being
single—not multiple, numerous, common—will restore the house to pri­
vacy again.
The text thus depicts Florence as a blotter that can absorb Dombey’s
pain. But the scars of Florence’s own, more palpable injury are not erased.
Instead, they play a key role in the reunion, when Dombey’s shattered
mind is restored: “Upon the breast that he had bruised, against the heart
that he had almost broken, she laid his face, now covered with his hands”
(DS, ; my emphasis). Here it appears that Florence’s injury, hitherto as­
sociated with shame, takes on a healing function. As she draws Dombey’s
head to her bruised breast, her injury heals his. The healing of the father
and the reconstitution of the home in Dombey and Son thus are, paradox­
ically, made possible because of the wounds that Florence received at her
father’s hands. Christlike, Florence heals because she has been wounded.
This sanctification of the battered woman here recalls how the dying pros­
titute’s injuries redeem her in Oliver Twist. But Dombey and Son directs the
abused woman’s redeeming power at the abuser himself. The “stain of . . .
domestic shame” (DS, –) is thus purified within the home. Dombey
and Son draws a closed circle around the middle-class home. Intervention
—to heal or punish—has no place there. In chapter , Florence’s flight
from her home suggests symbolically that the “Thunderbolt” of family vio­
lence destroys middle-class domestic structures. This representation of the
home as unable to contain domestic violence is, however, signally reversed
in the novel’s closure, which restores Dombey to manhood and domestic
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authority. Like the Cochrane decision, the novel thus foregrounds the pri­
macy of male authority and the exclusivity of the home. The text’s ending
indicates that domestic assault may shatter the middle-class home, but that
its cure nevertheless lies in a return to and reconstitution of that home, not
in an escape from it.
This reconstitution of the home, however, remains precarious. For
while the Cochrane decision enforced the wife’s return to her husband’s
authority, Mr. Dombey has to settle for his daughter’s submission. Thus
Dombey and Son evades the central question of the husband’s authority,
which, as Ingham notes, is radically threatened by “excessive” females such
as Edith (Ingham, ). To return to Anna Clark’s insight, marital violence
threatens patriarchy because it disrupts the idea that men protect women
in the home (A. Clark, “Humanity,” ). Dombey and Son allays this
threat by restoring Florence to her father’s authority and reinstating the
home around a renewed family group. But the text redraws the circle of
home in having Florence return instead of Edith. Mr. Dombey’s manly
authority is thus thrown into question even as the text attempts to show
his healing and restoration.
Little wonder, then, that the penultimate chapter portrays an uncon­
vincing “Relenting” (the title of chapter ) on Edith’s part. Sandwiched
between the reunion of Florence and Dombey and the sentimental final
chapter comes Edith’s crucial gesture of apology. In the penultimate chap­
ter, the ever-forgiving Florence intervenes with Edith to gain some mea­
sure of forgiveness for Dombey. At first Edith refuses: “Tell him, if he asks,
that I do not repent of what I have done—not yet—for if it were to do
again to-morrow, I should do it” (DS, ). Then, at the “silent touch”
(DS, ) of Florence’s hand, she relents on the condition that Dombey
has changed. Her apology is entirely conditional: “But if he is a changed
man— . . . Tell him that if, in his own present, he can find any reason to
compassionate my past, I sent word that I asked him to do so. Tell him
that if, in his own present, he can find any reason to think less bitterly of
me, I asked him to do so” (DS, –; my emphasis). But Edith’s relent­
ing—hard won, reluctant, and conditional—fails to convince. Her last
words convey her absolute alienation from domestic or familial structures:
as Kate Flint notes, Edith’s “future, in terms of the plot, is to be cast out, an
anomaly, into self-imposed but inevitable exiled limbo in southern Italy.”¹⁴
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She shares this exile with Cousin Feenix, a limp man who serves as the text’s
warning of what happens to men if they eschew their natural authority.
Hence, even while Dombey and Son celebrates the restoration of the
middle-class home once shattered by domestic discord and violence, the
exiled figure of Edith suggests the fundamental instability of this closed
home. Unlike Cecelia Cochrane, Edith leaves the home and stays outside
it. In this respect, Edith stands for all that threatened the discourse of re­
formed manliness at midcentury. Such a discourse assumed women’s will­
ingness to retain a dependent and submissive role—and there were already
signs from the nascent feminist movement that such willingness was wan­
ing. Notably, the serialization of Dombey and Son coincided with John
Stuart Mill’s and Harriet Taylor’s campaign to draw attention to wife abuse;
one of their suggestions was that an abused woman should be granted an
automatic separation from her husband (CW, :,). The text’s vilifica­
tion of Edith for her decision to leave her marriage betrays an uneasiness
about such female independence, casting it as a symptom of vengefulness
and unfeminine aggression. Through Florence’s ready forgiveness, the text
attempts to reassure the reader that domestic assault does not fundamen­
tally threaten the authority or the structure of the middle-class home: it
suggests instead that if masculine authority is reformed and rightfully re­
assumed, women will resume their dependent position under that author­
ity. But Edith’s unfeminine recalcitrance suggests otherwise. Exiled, cast
out, and yet omnipresent, she stands as evidence of Dickens’s anxious aware­
ness that the idealizing discourse of manly reform failed to contemplate the
rebellious woman who refused to be contained by the middle-class home.
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3
| |
FROM REGENCY VIOLENCE
TO VICTORIAN FEMINISM
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
A I     , between the s and s the Victorians’
daily exposure to newspaper accounts of marital violence changed radically,
a shift propelled by the  Offenses Against the Person Act. An important
aspect of this newspaper coverage was the ideological tension surrounding
intervention in working-class marriages, in which women had traditionally
maintained a right to defend themselves against violence. As I have argued,
Dickens’s fiction allayed this tension by celebrating the figure of the pas­
sive woman who is protected from violence by paternalistic intervention.
The middle-class impetus to regulate domestic behavior was thus articu­
lated in opposition to an earlier model of combative marriage in the lower
classes. However, social historians also observe that during the early decades
of the nineteenth century, the same Victorian middle classes articulated a
new model of domestic manliness in opposition to earlier aristocratic mod­
els. As Davidoff and Hall argue, “Christian manhood had to be created
anew from the tissue of ideas associated with masculinity in the eighteenth
century. . . . Masculine nature, in gentry terms, was based on sport and
codes of honor derived from military prowess, finding expression in hunt­
ing, riding, drinking and ‘wenching’” (Davidoff and Hall, ). As indicated
in chapter , this new model of domestic manliness was linked to the issue

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of marital assault, since many Victorians hoped to solve wife beating by re­
forming masculinity rather than by changing the rights of women. Dombey
and Son followed this fundamentally conservative impulse by reconstitut­
ing the private home around the reformed Mr. Dombey and the forgiving
Florence, while exiling the recalcitrant Edith, who represents the rebellious
women who haunt Dickens’s fiction from the s onward.
In this chapter, I turn to Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
published in , the same year that Dombey and Son finished serialization.
Unlike Dombey and Son, which is set in the era of its publication, The Ten­
ant of Wildfell Hall is largely set in the s, narrated by the middle-aged
Gilbert Markham as he looks back from the late s onto the scenes of his
youth. It thus reflects on the momentous shift that occurred in ideals of
marriage and domesticity between the Regency and the Victorian periods.
But whereas, as I have argued in chapter , Dickens’s early texts were con­
temporary with—and indeed helped to facilitate—that shift, The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall looks back on it. Through its double time frame, the novel
contrasts the s and the s, and so contemplates the differences
between Regency and Victorian mores.¹ By juxtaposing Helen’s first and
second marriages, the novel compares the moral unrestraint and domestic
disharmony of the aristocracy under the Regency and George IV with the
disciplined manliness and domestic harmony of the Victorian middle class.
Characters’ lives thus exemplify the nation’s development: Arthur Hunting­
don’s violence dies with George IV, while Gilbert Markham matures with
the century, starting as a “puppy” (TWH, ) and “coxcomb” (TWH, ) in
the s and steadily exerting “rule” (TWH, ) over his impulsive spirit.
By , Gilbert exemplifies Victorian manliness and self-control. Thus The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall, like Dombey and Son, helps to consolidate a new
model of Victorian manliness at midcentury. Yet while the two novels share
an emphasis on nonviolent masculinity, Brontë does not support female
passivity or the doctrine of the closed home. Instead, The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall criticizes marital coverture as an underlying cause of domestic assault
and abuse, and compares women to domestic animals abused by their own­
ers. Thus although it sets its violent scenes in the Regency past, The Tenant
of Wildfell Hall forms part of the emergent feminist discourse of the late
s and early s, which linked marital violence to concerns over mari­
tal coverture and connected animal and wife abuse.
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The Novel’s Depiction of Regency Masculinity
Juliet McMaster has convincingly shown that Arthur Huntingdon and his
“reckless and dissipated companions” (TWH, ) represent the “masculine
ethos of the Regency” (McMaster, ). Helen Huntingdon’s diary (which
starts on  June ) begins in the year after George IV became king; it is
framed by Gilbert Markham’s narrative, penned in . Helen’s diary de­
picts the domestic life of the gentry on a large estate in the s, whereas
Gilbert’s letters suggest the dawning of middle-class Victorian domesticity.
Helen, as McMaster aptly notes, is a Victorian wife married to a Regency
husband (McMaster, ): she exemplifies midcentury values even though
her character is set in the s. This narrative structure—which George
Moore condemned as the creation of an inexperienced novelist—thus serves
the key ideological purpose of defining Victorian manliness against that of
the Regency.² As McMaster observes, contrasting their own mores with
those of the Regency was a strategy of self-definition commonly used by
Victorians (McMaster, ). Thackeray, a favorite author of the Brontës,
deployed this juxtaposition in his fiction (Vanity Fair) and in his lectures.
In his  lecture on George IV, for example, he remarked on the gulf
between the Georgian and mid-Victorian periods: “In this quarter of a
century, what a silent revolution has been working! How it has separated
us from old times and manners!” (qtd. in McMaster, ).³ As McMaster
demonstrates, Anne Brontë deliberately chose to set her second novel over
this gulf, and the “silent revolution” Brontë foregrounds is that in mascu­
line domestic behavior.
Helen’s diary from the s records the mores of her husband’s upperclass circle: these include drunkenness, marital infidelity, gambling, and
swearing.⁴ Crucially, her diary indicates that her husband’s friends see these
activities as “manly and admirable” (McMaster, ). As McMaster notes,
Walter Hargrave feels compelled “to go to a certain length in youthful in­
dulgences . . . to maintain his reputation as a man of fashion in the world,
and a respectable fellow among his own lawless companions” (McMaster,
), and Lord Lowborough’s wife scorns him when he tries to resist alcohol
and gambling. In contrast, Helen’s response typifies the Victorian view,
which saw such indulgences as unmanly. She describes Huntingdon as “a
man without self-restraint or lofty aspirations—a lover of pleasure, given
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up to animal enjoyments” (TWH, ). Yet Helen can still write that he
is “not a bad husband” (TWH, ). The text, however, undermines this
statement as deluded. Instead, Brontë represents the masculine ethos of
the pre-Victorian period as having produced very bad husbands, whose
behavior was both unmanly and dangerous—morally dangerous to men
and physically dangerous to women.
When The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published, Victorian critics
remarked on the stark violence of the Georgian scenes. The Rambler, for
example, described scenes of “the most disgusting and revolting species,”
while the Spectator commented on the author’s “morbid love for the coarse,
not to say the brutal.”⁵ Yet Charles Kingsley, writing in Fraser’s Magazine,
congratulated the author who dared to expose such “foul and accursed
undercurrents” beneath “smug, respectable, whitewashed English society”
(qtd. in Allott, ). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall did indeed strip the white­
wash from respectable homes by depicting marital violence in the estates
and manors of the rich. It thus serves as a fascinating counterpart to Oliver
Twist. Both texts inaugurate the Victorian scrutiny of violence in the home.
But whereas Dickens’s text opposes its new model of passive femininity
against older models of working-class marital behavior, Brontë’s novel ar­
ticulates its new model of domestic manliness and its feminist critique of
female passivity in opposition to the domestic mores of the Regency and
Georgian upper classes.
The novel contains both implicit and explicit scenes of marital violence.
Explicit violence occurs between Milicent Hattersley and her husband
after Hattersley has been carousing with Huntingdon and his friends. In
what the Examiner described as a “drunken scene of considerable power”
(qtd. in Allott, ), members of Arthur Huntingdon’s hunting party spill
into the drawing room after dinner, the aggression of their sporting pas­
times extending to this domestic scene. First, the drunken Hattersley seizes
Lord Lowborough’s arm and tries to force him to drink until “blind drunk”
(TWH, ). Moments later, he grabs his wife, Milicent, “remorselessly
crushing her slight arms in the gripe [sic] of his powerful fingers,” shaking
her, and pushing her so hard that she falls over (TWH, –). Lawson
and Shakinovsky highlight Milicent’s plea: “Do let me alone Ralph! re­
member we are not at home” (TWH, ). They note that the couple’s life
at home “is never represented in the novel, but Millicent’s [sic] plea is both
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indirect and highly suggestive in its evocation of that life” (Lawson and
Shakinovsky, ). In this public scene of marital violence, onlookers try to
intervene: “Don’t let him treat your sister in that way,” Helen Huntingdon
says to Walter Hargrave (TWH, ). Walter in turn tries to protect his sis­
ter from her husband: “Come now, Hattersley, I can’t allow that. . . . You
let my sister alone, if you please” (TWH, ). He is driven backward “by
a violent blow in the chest” (TWH, ). Finally, as a climax to his drunken
rage, Hattersley hurls a footstool at Arthur Huntingdon’s head. This scene,
which depicts marital assault with unwavering detail of action and dialogue,
was one of several that shocked reviewers by its brutal violence.
In contrast, violence between Helen and her husband is suggested
rather than explicit. During the couple’s “First Quarrel” (TWH, ), the
novel suggests physical violence by using the trope of the abused animal.
The incident is framed as follows: Huntingdon is listless, as the hunting
season is over and his friends have gone home. In a sadistic gesture, he
amuses himself by telling Helen tales of his past sexual exploits. In this
tense atmosphere, Huntingdon takes an “unusual quantity of wine” (TWH,
) at dinner. He enters the drawing room where Helen is reading, and
shuts the door “with a bang” (TWH, ). The text stops short of depict­
ing explicit violence between the two; however, wife abuse is obliquely
suggested in the following scene:
[He] went and stretched himself at full length on the sofa, and com­
posed himself to sleep. But his favorite cocker, Dash, that had been lying
at my feet, took the liberty of jumping upon him and beginning to lick
his face. He struck it off with a smart blow; and the poor dog squeaked,
and ran cowering back to me. When he woke up, about half an hour
after, he called it to him again; but Dash only looked sheepish and wagged
the tip of his tail. He called again, more sharply, but Dash only clung the
closer to me, and licked my hand as if imploring protection. Enraged at
this, his master snatched up a heavy book and hurled it at his head. The
poor dog set up a piteous outcry and ran to the door. I let him out, and
then quietly took up the book.
“Give that book to me,” said Arthur, in no very courteous tone. I
gave it to him.
“Why did you let the dog out?” he asked. “You knew I wanted him.”
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“By what token?” I replied; “by your throwing the book at him? but
perhaps, it was intended for me?”
“No—but I see you’ve got a taste of it,” said he, looking at my hand,
that had also been struck, and was rather severely grazed. (TWH, )
The scene positions Helen and Dash as joint recipients of Huntingdon’s
abuse. Violence is transferred from one to the other: while the man throws
objects at the dog, the woman is injured. Ostensibly, the wounding is
accidental—Huntingdon denies that he meant to hit Helen. The scene,
however, is fraught with suppressed meaning. As the injured wife asks,
“perhaps, it [the blow] was intended for me?”
There are numerous grounds to suggest that this scene refers obliquely
to marital assault. By , there was already ample philosophical precedent
supporting a link between human and animal violence. William Hogarth’s
The Four Stages of Cruelty (–), for example, depicts animal abuse es­
calating to the murder of a pregnant woman (see figs. . and .). Most
tellingly, perhaps, Wuthering Heights reveals human character though cru­
elty toward animals: Heathcliff hanging Isabella’s lapdog from a tree on
the night of their elopement, for example, presages his cruel treatment of
his wife. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, however, I would argue that the
blow to the spaniel does not merely intimate Huntingdon’s potential for
violence, but, in that Helen is identified with the spaniel, suggests that
such violence is already occurring. The spaniel and the woman are, in other
words, metonymically equated through their common relation to an abuser.
In his painting Lorenzo and Isabella (), almost exactly contemporary
with the novel, John Everett Millais uses this technique, suggesting familial
violence by depicting Isabella’s brother viciously kicking her dog in a ges­
ture that splits the foreground of the familial grouping.
The fact that Arthur Huntingdon’s dog is a spaniel reinforces this equa­
tion between Helen and the beaten pet. Spaniels are traditionally associ­
ated with the “feminine” qualities of gentleness, submission, subservience
—and with a willingness to be beaten, as exemplified by the adage, “A
spaniel, a woman and a walnut tree— / The more they’re beaten, the bet­
ter still they be” (CBQ, ). Helena’s speech to Demetrius in A Midsum­
mer Night’s Dream foregrounds these associations: “I am your spaniel,” she
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Figure .. William Hogarth, “First Stage of Cruelty,” from Four Stages of Cruelty
(–).
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Figure .. William Hogarth, “Cruelty in Perfection,” from Four Stages of Cruelty
(–).
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tells him. “The more you beat me, I will fawn on you. / Use me but as
your spaniel; spurn me, strike me, / Neglect me, lose me.”⁶ These connec­
tions between spaniels and beaten women help to reinforce the link in
Brontë’s text between the woman’s bruised hand and the blows that fall on
the dog. Indeed, later in the text, the wife abuser Hattersley explicitly
compares his submissive wife to a spaniel: “How can I help playing the
deuce,” he asks Helen, “when [Milicent] lies down like a spaniel at my feet
and never so much as squeaks to tell me that’s enough?” (TWH, ). The
spaniel metaphor thus strongly undermines the model of wifely submis­
sion. Whereas Dickens inaugurates the Victorian era with the model of
Nancy’s passivity, Brontë uses Regency characters to show this same model
as a demeaning one that Victorian women must leave behind.
The text, in fact, persistently connects the upper-class women of the
Regency with hunted or wounded animals. As Margaret Smith points out,
Helen’s diary is steeped in images of “the predator, intent on wounding and
capture.”⁷ Arthur’s surname (Huntingdon) makes the motif prominent;
moreover, Arthur and Helen become engaged in September, at the begin­
ning of the partridge season, during a hunting party at Staningley. Hunt­
ing figures frequently in Helen’s diary: “The gentlemen are all gone out to
shoot” (TWH, ), Helen writes sadly in the early days of her courtship.
When Helen tears up his portrait, Huntingdon deliberately abandons her
to go hunting: “Humph! I’ll go and shoot now!” (TWH, ). “Are you too
busy making love to my niece, to make war with the pheasants?” Helen’s
uncle jokes on October st, the first day of the pheasant-shooting season.
“I’ll murder your birds by wholesale,” replies Huntingdon (TWH, ).
Chillingly, he woos Helen—whom he calls his “vixen” (TWH, )—when
he is “all spattered and splashed . . . and stained with the blood of his prey”
(TWH, ). After marriage, his yearly calendar is dominated by the sea­
son in London and the shooting season at Grassdale estate. The shooting
season brings to Helen’s home men, alcohol, drunkenness—and violence.
Hunting metaphors also pervade the sexual relationships of the Re­
gency characters. When Hargrave attempts to force his unwanted sexual
advances on Helen, he, like Huntingdon before him, woos her in hunt­
ing season. Ironically, Huntingdon and Hattersley interrupt him to “join
[them] in a go at the pheasants” (TWH, ). Women’s identification with
prey continues as Hattersley tells Helen that his wife Milicent is too sub­
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missive; in hunting parlance, he says that he would prefer that she possessed
the “spirit to stand at bay now and then” (TWH, ). The highly sexual­
ized Lady Lowborough does not escape identification with animals. The
text describes her using the equine metaphors which, as Coral Lansbury
notes, permeated Victorian pornographic literature, women being repre­
sented as “show[ing] their paces” and “present[ing] themselves” to a riding
master, who “flogs and seduces them into submission.”⁸ As Margaret Smith
argues, the animal and predatory metaphors that pervade the Regency and
Georgian scenes of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall “taint the relationship of
the characters to each other with associations of sadistic pursuit, capture,
and destruction” (M. Smith, xxii). These hunting metaphors are pointedly
contrasted with Helen’s relationship with Gilbert, which the text sets against
the agricultural rhythms of hay making, plowing, and harvest. Although
Gilbert shoots hawks and crows, as a farmer he does so of necessity, not for
pleasure or sport. (Indeed, one might compare him to Hareton in Wuther­
ing Heights, who culls puppies for agricultural reasons but who never dis­
plays Heathcliff’s perverse pleasure in animal cruelty.)⁹ Brontë signals
Gilbert’s essential benevolence through his love of his setter, Sancho, and
his affection for young Arthur, to whom he gives Sancho’s puppy. Helen’s
two marriages, to Arthur Huntingdon (–) and to Gilbert Markham
( to the novel’s present time of ) thus suggest England’s matura­
tion from Regency excess to Victorian domesticity. Within this allegory of
national maturation, the novel traces Gilbert Markham’s own progress from
“coxcomb” (TWH, ) to mature husband.
While the novel contrasts Gilbert Markham and Arthur Huntingdon,
it nevertheless suggests that Gilbert too has excessive and violent urges
that he must learn to restrain. Gilbert feels “anger and despair” (TWH,
) when he sees Frederick Laurence with Helen in the garden at night
and suspects that they are lovers. (Frederick is in fact Helen’s brother and
hides their relationship so that her husband will not find her.) Gilbert’s
sexual jealousy erupts in a violent outburst that the chapter title unambigu­
ously describes as “An Assault” (TWH, ): “I had seized my whip by the
small end, and—swift and sudden as a flash of lightning—brought the
other down upon his head. It was not without a feeling of savage satisfac­
tion that I beheld the instant, deadly pallor that overspread his face, and
the few red drops that trickled down his forehead, while he reeled a moment
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in his saddle, and then fell backward to the ground” (TWH, ). Graphic
and unrelenting in detail, this scene depicts Gilbert’s assault on Frederick
as the most vicious in the novel. More injurious than Huntingdon’s assault
on Helen or Hattersley’s on Milicent, it signals Gilbert’s capacity for horrific
violence—and when sober, too. Anne Brontë thus endows her romantic
hero with an innate violence of temper and a turbulence of emotion that
resemble those of her sister’s hero, Heathcliff. But whereas Wuthering
Heights codes Heathcliff’s violence as darkly erotic, The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall portrays Gilbert’s passion as innately masculine, but in need of restraint
in order for him to become manly.
Gilbert’s progress toward Victorian manhood is achieved through an
agonizing process of self-knowledge, contrition, and self-restraint. He reads
Helen’s diary, realizes his blindness to her troubles, apologizes to Frederick,
and promises not to see Helen again. His apology to Frederick is blunt and
ungraceful—Gilbert flounders through the interview, clenches his hands,
stamps on the rug, and barely escapes groaning with frustration as he re­
peats his promise never to go near Helen—but is all the more genuine for
these qualities. Frederick warmly approves the self-restraint that Gilbert is
at last trying to achieve: “You have done right!” (TWH, ). The apology
and resolution launch Gilbert on his journey toward becoming a worthy
husband for Helen. The link between his treatment of Frederick and his
future conduct as Helen’s husband are suggested by Frederick’s “close
connection” (TWH, ) with Helen. In a striking example of feminiza­
tion, Gilbert sees Frederick’s “slender, white fingers” as “marvellously like
[Helen’s] own, considering he was not a woman” (TWH, ). The remark
suggests that like the spaniel, Frederick functions as a proxy for Helen.
Gilbert learns restraint with Frederick so that when he does hold Helen’s
white hand, he has become a “man,” as defined by the ascendant bour­
geois script that equated manliness with self-control over both sexual and
aggressive urges. But even as the text suggests the Victorians’ maturation
away from violence in the home, it does not naturalize that process at the
individual level. On the contrary, Gilbert’s difficult fight to control his bit­
ter jealousy and frustration makes him an exemplar of Victorian domestic
manhood as self-discipline (Sussman, ). The Christmas rose that Helen
gives Gilbert thus symbolizes him as much as it does her: both have with­
stood storms, Helen from without, Gilbert from within.
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The Context of the Late s
Although the violent scenes of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are set in the
s, its concerns are very much those of the s and s. I have al­
ready noted that both Dickens and Brontë help to consolidate a new ideal
of domestic manliness at midcentury. But Brontë’s novel also forms part of
an emergent feminist critique of marriage and marital violence that arose
in the late s.
As I note in chapter , in the s and early s agitation on wife
battery came from two very different ideological positions. The first, which
stressed male protection of the “weaker” sex, was exemplified by MPs de­
bating the  act who demanded punishments for the “brutal husbands”
who used violence against their “defenceless wives” ( Parl. Deb. s., col.
). The Times also represented this position in agitating during the late
s for greater punishments for wife abusers. On  August , it re­
ported on a particularly brutal assault in which a husband “dragged his
victim upstairs, ‘threw her down, beat her head against the floor, and,
kneeling upon her, squeezed her throat with his hands’ for two or three
minutes”—all because his wife had refused to “make a fire and prepare his
breakfast” (Times,  August , d). Despite the wife’s ten-day hospital
stay and the “marks of extreme violence” (Times,  August , d) on
her body, the jury found the husband guilty only of common assault. As
the Times commented, “The conjugal tie appears to [be] considered as
conferring on the man, a . . . degree of impunity for brutality towards
[the] woman” (Times,  August , d). A year later, the Times reported
on a similar case of leniency. In this instance, after a history of spousal as­
saults, the husband had finally killed his wife “by pouring a tea-kettle full
of boiling water over her” (Times,  July , d). The woman died from
burns; the accused was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to trans­
portation. “We shall begin to think,” remarked the Times, “that the murder
of a wife is an impossibility according to the view taken by contemporary
juries of the criminal law, which, as at present administered, seems scarcely
to contemplate any higher offense in a husband than manslaughter” (Times,
 July , d). As early as , Punch had attacked low wife-assault
penalties by publishing a “list of prices” “for the convenience of those in­
clined to assaults” so that “no man of limited means might, so to speak,
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Figure .. “A pair of black eyes,” Punch  (): .
commit an assault in the dark; but, knowing the exact cost of every injury,
might first consult his pocket, that the liveliness of his temperament should
not betray him into unexpected pecuniary difficulties” (Punch, , :).
Prices ranged from ten shillings for “[a] pair of black eyes” to five pounds for
“[k]icking a woman in the abdomen, with sundry other blows” (fig. .).
In opposition to this view, which stressed male protection of the weaker
sex, the late s witnessed the development of an emergent feminist
polemic that focused on changing the power structures of marriage rather
than merely increasing penalties for assault. In , John Stuart Mill and
Harriet Taylor mounted a public campaign for legislative reform to allevi­
ate wife abuse. On  October , writing in the Morning Chronicle,
Mill and Taylor argued that abused women had no faith in the justice sys­
tem: “[W]omen, in the lower ranks of life, do not expect justice from a
bench or jury of the male sex. They feel the most complete assurance that
. . . a tribunal of men will sympathize and take part with the man” (CW,
:). Mill and Taylor suggested that sentences under the  act were
insufficient: “[W]ho ever heard of a really severe punishment inflicted upon
a man for any amount of brutal ill-treatment of his wife? She knows well
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that if the case is too clear and strong to allow of dismissing the man with
a reprimand, and the woman with a piece of kind advice to be gentle and
submissive, the utmost he will have to undergo is a month or two months
imprisonment” (CW, :). They also pointed out that a wife had a strong
reason not to testify against an abusive husband: that is, the knowledge that
after being released from prison her husband would return to the marriage
(CW, :). More generally, Mill and Taylor drew attention to the dis­
parity between property crime and wife-assault sentences, arguing in the
Daily News of  July  that legislators had “yet to learn that there is a
thing infinitely more important than property—the freedom and sacred­
ness of human personality” (CW, :,). Mill supported the  act,
but he and Taylor also proposed more radical measures, such as automatic
separations following convictions for wife abuse. As they wrote in the Morn­
ing Chronicle on  May , “All that would be requisite is a short Act of
Parliament, providing that judicial conviction of gross maltreatment should
free the victim from the obligation of living with the oppressor, and from
all compulsory subjection to his power” (CW, :,). Moreover, in her
Westminster Review article on “The Enfranchisement of Women” (July ),
Taylor stressed the importance of women’s ability to earn and control
income: the “hideous maltreatment” of working-class wives, she argued,
“could not exist, if women both earned, and had a right to possess, a part
of the income of the family” (EW, n).
Mill and Taylor were not alone in seeing wife beating as symptomatic
of women’s legal and economic disenfranchisement. In her Petition for
Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law, presented to Parliament on
 March  (a petition signed by three thousand Victorian women,
including such prominent figures as Anna Blackwell, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Jane Welsh Carlyle, Charlotte Cushman, Marian Evans, Eliza­
beth Gaskell, Anna Jameson, Geraldine Jewsbury, Harriet Martineau, and
Bessie Raynor Parkes), Barbara Leigh Smith argues that the legal non­
existence of women contributed to the many “instances of marital oppres­
sion” detailed by the newspapers.¹⁰ In her Letter to the Queen on Lord Chan­
cellor Cranworth’s Divorce Bill (), Caroline Norton (herself a victim of
marital violence in the s) describes as a “grotesque anomaly” the legal
nonexistence of married women in a country with a female sovereign (LQ,
). She highlights the Cochrane decision, noting that an estranged husband
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“has a right to enter the house of any friend or relation with whom [the
wife] may take refuge, . . . and carry her away by force” (LQ, ). In par­
ticular, she attacks the “legal fiction” of marital unity when alienation ex­
ists in a marriage: in cases of true enmity, she writes graphically, husband
and wife are “about as much ‘one’ as those ingenious twisted groups of ani­
mal death we sometimes see in sculpture; one creature wild to resist, and
the other fierce to destroy” (LQ, ).
The Brontës’ fiction clearly reveals their knowledge of women’s in­
equality under Victorian law. As early as , C. P. Sanger pointed out
Emily Brontë’s remarkable grasp of inheritance laws in Wuthering Heights
(SWH, ); Elizabeth Langland similarly notes that a “full awareness of
[the] inequities in British Law informs Anne Brontë’s novel The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall.”¹¹ Although both Emily and Anne Brontë set their novels
back in time from the Victorian present, both Wuthering Heights and The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall focus on women’s legal nonexistence under marital
coverture, a hot-button topic of the late s and onward. In Wuthering
Heights, Heathcliff exploits the husband’s moral authority as well as the
Cochrane doctrine of the closed home when he tells Isabella that she is
“not fit to be [her] own guardian,” and that he, being her “legal protector”
will retain her in his “custody” (WH, ). As I will show, the treatment of
marital coverture in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall similarly forms part of the
midcentury feminist response to wife abuse. In representing Helen’s re­
sistance to coverture, and by focusing on the analogy between wives and
pets as things owned by men, the text articulates an active resistance to
marital violence. Brontë thus imagined a middle-class alternative both to
the combative woman of the lower class and to the model of Nancy’s pas­
sivity. What Brontë articulated—resistance to coverture, claim to children,
financial independence—was to be the foundation of the liberal feminist
response to marital violence for the next three decades.
Beaten Animals and Beaten Wives
On  November  in a London courtroom, a wagon driver named
William Burn was convicted of ill-treating a horse. Burn appeared before
the lord mayor, Sir George Carroll, who “expressed great indignation” at
his cruelty, and was about to impose the maximum penalty allowed by law
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(forty shillings or fourteen days in prison). At that point, Carroll learned
that Burn had a large family. “You deserve the highest punishment;” he
told Burn, “but I cannot think of punishing your wife and children.” He
reduced the fine to ten shillings or fourteen days in prison. On  Novem­
ber , John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor protested in the Morning
Chronicle about this sentence: “Hereafter, it seems, [having a large family]
is to be a license for violating the law, and, worse than that, for commit­
ting acts of savage brutality, which excite not merely regret but indigna­
tion that such a creature should have a wife and children in his power to
treat in the same manner” (CW, :). As this quotation suggests, their
primary object of concern was not the horse. Instead, Mill and Taylor
assumed that a man who beat his horse would also abuse his wife and
children:
He is either a wretch who wantonly ill-treats a helpless being, for the
pleasure of tyranny, because it is in his power and cannot resist; or an ir­
ritable, violent creature, who on the smallest provocation . . . flies into
an uncontrollable rage, and cannot restrain himself from wreaking a sav­
age vengeance. . . . [O]n either supposition we may infer what sort of a
taskmaster he is to the unfortunate woman and the unfortunate children,
who are as much in his power, and much more liable to rouse his fero­
cious passions than the animal over whom he tyrannised. (CW, :)
Mill and Taylor’s letter to the Morning Chronicle articulates the com­
mon Victorian assumption that violence to animals correlates with human
cruelty. As I have shown in chapter , Dickens exploits this parallel in Oliver
Twist: Fagin says explicitly that Sikes treats Nancy “like a dog” (OT, ).
But while Dickens uses the dog analogy to celebrate Nancy’s exemplary pas­
sivity and to encourage protection and intervention in abuse situations,
for emergent feminists, the analogy led straight to the doctrine of marital
coverture, which they saw as the fundamental power structure underlying
marital assault. Starting around the mid-s, they deployed the analogy
between wife and animal (often a dog or horse, as the animals most associ­
ated with men’s ownership) to suggest the connection between wife assault
and the legal nonexistence of women. For example, an early article by Eliza
Lynn (later Linton) in Household Words ( July ) openly compares the
status of wife with a that of prisoner, dog, or horse:¹²
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If the gaoler-marital be a decent fellow, and in love with his prisoner,
things may go on smoothly enough. But . . . if he be a man of violent
temper, of depraved habits, of reckless life, he may ill-treat, ruin, and de­
stroy his prisoner at his pleasure—all in the name of the law, and by
virtue of his conjugal rights. The prisoner-wife is not recognized by the
law; she is her gaoler’s property, the same as his dog or his horse; with
this difference, that he cannot openly sell her; and if he maim or mur­
der her he is liable to punishment, as he would be to prosecution by the
Cruelty to Animals’ Society, if he maimed or ill-treated his dog or his
horse. As “the very legal being of the wife is suspended during the mar­
riage, or at least incorporated or consolidated with that of the husband”
(vide Blackstone), it is therefore simply as a sentient animal, not as a
wife, nor as a citizeness, that she can claim the protection of the laws.
(MG, )
Lynn’s reference to Blackstone makes it clear that coverture was the main
foundation of the wife/animal comparison. Under this legal doctrine a
wife was absorbed into the “legal cover” of her husband. Barbara Leigh
Smith defines coverture in A Brief Summary . . . of the Most Important Laws
concerning Women ():
A man and wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as
a single woman, and her existence is entirely absorbed in that of her hus­
band. He is civilly responsible for her acts; she lives under his protection
or cover, and her condition is called coverture.
A woman’s body belongs to her husband; she is in his custody, and he
can enforce his right by a writ of habeas corpus. (BS, )
Feminists argued that the concept of legal coverture fueled wife beating by
encouraging men to feel that they owned their wives. As Mill and Taylor
wrote in the Morning Chronicle ( August ), “The baser part of the
populace think that when a legal power is given to them over a living
creature—when a person, like a thing, is suffered to be spoken of as their
own—as their wife, or their child, or their dog—they are allowed to do what
they please with it” (CW, :). As early as , Punch had remarked on
this sense of male ownership and its associations with wife battery, depict­
ing a wife abuser as one who is simply “Doing What He Likes with His
Hone [i.e., his wife]” (see fig. .: Punch,  December , ).
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Figure .. “Doing What He Likes with His Hone,” Punch  (): .
Between  and  (which includes the period in which Anne
Brontë was writing), an even greater irony rested on the wife/animal anal­
ogy. Developments in animal-protection legislation, plus the RSPCA’s vigi­
lance in prosecuting offenders, had outstripped the drive to protect women
against spousal violence. When he introduced the  Act for the Better
Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults on Women and Chil­
dren to the House of Commons on  March , Mr. Fitzroy argued that
“[h]e was only asking [MPs] to extend the same protection to defenceless
women as they already extended to poodle dogs and donkeys, for cruelty
to which, a person subjected himself, under the Cruelty to Animals Act,
to three months’ imprisonment, with or without hard labour” ( Parl.
Deb. s., col. ). Ironically invoking the spaniel/woman analogy, he asked
the House of Commons “to extend the same protection to the weaker sex,
as they now extended to a lady’s lapdog, or a spaniel of King Charles the
Second’s breed” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ). On  March , the Times
pressed the comparison of dogs and women: “Mr.  has just brought
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before the House of Commons the startling principle of English law that
women are of less value than Poodle dogs and Skye terriers” (d). But on
 March , Punch astutely pointed out the double-edged nature of the
analogy: “If we are to share the protection of poodle dogs and donkeys, I
suppose they will put collars round our necks, to prevent our being lost,
and saddles to support our burdens” (“Prevention of Cruelty to Women,”
). Thus it is crucial that Brontë, who invoked the analogy between dogs
and women, did so in a context of the novel’s sustained critique of marital
coverture.
“My Wife! What Wife? I Have No Wife”
“My wife! what wife? I have no wife” (TWH, ): Arthur Huntingdon’s
ironic reference to Othello indicates that, for him, Helen’s claims to selfidentity and moral independence violate the very foundation of marriage.¹³
The novel persistently focuses on the question of Helen’s moral and legal
selfhood, with this theme intensifying as Huntingdon’s drunkenness and
abuse escalate. But, significantly, this concern over Helen’s selfhood does
not arise from but precipitates some of the couple’s earliest quarrels, indi­
cating that for Brontë this issue was fundamental to all marriages, whether
happy or not.
Helen’s diary of her marriage—which significantly omits the marriage
ceremony of December —opens with the confession that if she “had
known [Arthur Huntingdon] in the beginning, as thoroughly as I do now,
I probably never should have loved him” (TWH, ). Her diary for Feb­
ruary to April  chronicles how the couple’s “First Weeks of Matrimony”
(the title of volume , chapter ) lead swiftly to their “First Quarrel” (the
title of volume , chapter ). Many of their conflicts turn on the issue of
Helen’s moral independence. She finds that her husband’s affection takes
a condescending form, erasing her sense of selfhood: “I could do with less
caressing and more rationality,” she writes. “I should like to be less of a pet
and more of a friend” (TWH, ). In turn, Huntingdon accuses her of
not loving him enough: he argues that a woman’s religious faith should
not “lessen her devotion to her earthly lord” (TWH, ). This dispute
anticipates a number of instances in which Helen asserts her right—in
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defiance of the law of coverture—to act as her own moral agent. In this re­
spect, the omission of the marriage ceremony is critical, because it means
that Helen’s diary (itself an assertion of independent selfhood) chooses not
to record the moment at which that selfhood was legally suspended in
favor of her husband’s moral guardianship.
This chapter entitled “First Weeks of Matrimony” thus explores the
central issue of whether even the most loving affection reduced a Victorian
wife to the status of a “pet” (TWH, ) or possession. It is in this context
of heightened concern over coverture that the text presents the couple’s
first quarrel. Her diary for  March  sets up an atmosphere of marital
tension: Huntingdon’s listless ennui outside the hunting season, his tales
of seduction prior to their marriage, and Helen’s revulsion at what she
considers to be immoral acts. The key issue, however, is Helen’s right to
judge her husband’s sexual conduct. He construes her anger as sexual jeal­
ousy, but she insists it arises from moral revulsion. As with the question of
religiosity, their disagreement revolves around Helen’s moral agency: Can
she judge independently of the frame of the matrimonial relationship?
The entry for April  describes a “downright quarrel” (TWH, ). Once
again, the topic is Huntingdon’s previous amours. Helen judges Lady F——
as “abominable” (TWH, ) for marrying for money, committing adultery,
and corrupting Huntingdon. Once again she reiterates that her reaction is
one of moral judgment, not jealousy. When he insists she is jealous, she
famously shuts her bedroom door in her husband’s face, saying that she
doesn’t want “to see [his] face or hear [his] voice again till the morning”
(TWH, ), thus physically enacting the moral separateness that she has
repeatedly claimed.
The shut door asserts a right that Helen has no legal grounds to claim:
her refusal of Huntingdon’s conjugal rights. Under Victorian law, a woman
was considered to consent to sexual intercourse with her husband at the
time of marriage and could not withdraw that consent thereafter. Legal his­
torians attribute this concept of “implied consent” to Sir Matthew Hale’s
statement in the seventeenth century that a “husband cannot be guilty of
a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual
matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this
kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.”¹⁴ Although the courts
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recognized exceptions if the couple mutually agreed to separate, or if the
wife’s health was endangered by intercourse, the basic common-law prin­
ciple of the wife’s implied consent stood in Britain until the late twentieth
century (M. Anderson, –). In the swiftly escalating conflicts of the
Huntingdons’ marriage, depicted in two short chapters covering February
to April , Helen’s diary records a series of challenges to her husband’s
legal, moral, and sexual control over her mind and body. It is in this con­
text of active contestation of his coverture that Arthur Huntingdon’s vio­
lence to Helen and the dog occurs. The novel’s use of the wife/pet analogy
clearly invokes the issue highlighted by Taylor and Mill when they pro­
pose the links between coverture, ownership, and violence (CW, :,).
The Huntingdons’ early marital disputes thus focus on Helen’s right
to act—in defiance of the law of coverture—as her own moral agent. Later
in the novel, which depicts Arthur’s alcoholism, abuse, infidelity, and bad
parenting, Helen asserts what she perceives as her right to make moral de­
cisions on her own behalf. I use the word “perceive” here because Helen
repeatedly claims rights that Victorian law did not accord to women. As I
have already pointed out, she effectively denies Arthur his conjugal rights,
though the courts considered that a woman was obligated by her marriage
vows to accept sexual relations with her husband. When she discovers his
adultery with Arabella, she denies him these rights indefinitely: “[W]e are
husband and wife only in the name. . . . I will not be mocked with the
empty husk of conjugal endearments, when you have given the substance
to another!” (TWH, –). On matters of religious belief and the raising
of her child, Helen refuses to defer to her husband, who in turn protests
her “unnatural, unwomanly conduct” (TWH, ). Finally, in the wake of
Huntingdon’s adultery, she claims the freedom to “do anything but offend
God and [her] conscience” (TWH, ). Taking her child without her hus­
band’s permission, she leaves Arthur and earns her living as an artist, thus
effectively claiming custody, separation, and the right to her own income.
Helen’s actions reject the legal status of the wife in Victorian England;
hence Arthur Huntingdon can justly claim that he has “no wife” (TWH,
) as defined by nineteenth-century law and convention. He has lost his
moral force—though not his legal right—to guide and arbitrate her behav­
ior. Helen thus reacts to marital abuse by attempting to reclaim the legal
status of the femme sole, or single woman.
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While Helen tries to reclaim her single status, her friend Milicent re­
sponds to a similar marital situation by exaggerated submission. We should
note at this point that Helen’s diary is structured around Helen’s and
Milicent’s contrasting responses to their abusive marriages. The novel very
clearly sets up the two women in parallel situations: Helen and Milicent
are neighbors who share the same class background and moral values; they
marry men from the same peer group who share alcoholic and abusive
traits. But whereas Helen adopts the “unwomanly” posture of withdraw­
ing from sexual relations, from coparenting, and finally from cohabiting
with her husband, Milicent—whom she describes as a sister “in heart and
affection” (TWH, )—responds to mistreatment with a submission remi­
niscent of Dickens’s Nancy. This parallel is interesting not merely with
regard to Helen’s and Milicent’s contrasting responses to abuse. More
uniquely, Helen becomes an intervener and advocate for Milicent in the
Hattersleys’ marriage. Her conversations with Hattersley give Brontë an
opportunity to air a debate on marital assault, its causes, and how it might
be prevented. These discussions address the dangers of women’s submis­
sion; they also, very significantly, portray a male abuser admitting that such
submission increases his violence.
The topic of his wife’s submission comes up even before Hattersley is
married. Even at this stage, he says that he will seek a wife unlike Helen:
“I must have somebody that will let me have my own way in everything—
not like your wife, Huntingdon, she is a charming creature, but she looks as
if she had a will of her own, and could play the vixen upon occasion” (TWH,
). Once the Hattersleys are married, Arthur remarks that Milicent
Hattersley “is a pattern to her sex” (TWH, ). Her husband can “come
home at any hour of the night or morning, or not come home at all; be
sullen sober, or glorious drunk; and play the fool or the madman to his own
heart’s desire without any fear or botheration” (TWH, ). But the text
refuses to accept such submission as a “pattern.” Instead, it suggests through
Hattersley’s conversations with Helen that such behavior perpetuates abuse.
While Hattersley purports to value his wife’s submission, he admits
that it provokes his violence. As he says to his wife, “[D]id you never, Milly,
observe the sands on the sea-shore; how nice and smooth they look, and
how soft and easy they feel to the foot? But if you plod along, for half an
hour, over this soft, easy carpet—giving way at every step, yielding the
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more the harder you press,—you’ll find it rather wearisome work, and be
glad enough to come to a bit of good, firm rock, that won’t budge an inch
whether you stand, walk, or stamp upon it” (TWH, –). As he com­
plains to Helen, Milicent is “too soft—she almost melts in one’s hands”
(TWH, ). She “looks flat,” he continues, “and wants shaking up a bit”
(TWH, ). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall thus suggests that Milicent’s pas­
sive loyalty actually exacerbates her husband’s violent tendencies. This con­
trasts strongly with Dickens’s early writings, which romanticize a passive
response to male violence. As I have argued, “The Pawnbroker’s Shop,”
“The Hospital Patient,” and Oliver Twist celebrate the loyalty of the sub­
missive wife, who refuses to resist, fight back, or protest against spousal vio­
lence in the court system, while Dombey and Son celebrates the submissive
daughter as the wife’s proxy.
Whereas Dickens’s early writings envisage benevolent intervention in
working-class marriages by middle-class representatives of the press, the
medical profession, and/or the courts, Dombey and Son shows the middleclass home as fundamentally closed to such intervention. Neither does
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall hold out any promise of formal intervention in
domestic disputes. This to some extent reflects class distinctions: women
of Helen’s or Milicent’s class would not have had recourse to the police
courts. But unlike Florence, who has to rely on benevolent strangers (Cap­
tain Cuttle) and eccentrics (Toots) for support when she leaves her home,
both women in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have brothers who—more or
less effectively—come to their aid and support. But the novel also suggests
that the primary solution to marital assault lies in a woman’s ability to
think and act for herself. Helen declares to Hattersley that she would not
submit passively to a husband’s abuse. “I would never contradict you with­
out a cause,” she tells him, “but certainly I would always let you know
what I thought of your conduct; and if you oppressed me, in body, mind,
or estate, you should at least have no reason to suppose ‘I didn’t mind it’”
(TWH, ). In envisaging the “Reformation” (TWH, ) of the Hatter­
sleys’ marriage, she predicts that it will stem from two sources: Hattersley
must acquire more gentleness and Milicent more spine. As Helen writes,
“Henceforth . . . she will doubtless be somewhat less timid and reserved,
and he more kind and thoughtful” (TWH, ). Thus, while the novel
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does not endorse the model of mutually combative marriage that Dickens
and others found so abhorrent, neither does it endorse the figure of the
passive wife. Instead, the text suggests that women’s submission served to
perpetuate abusive relationships.
While Anne Brontë’s views were unconventional by mid-nineteenth­
century standards, they were not so in the Brontë family itself. Juliet Barker
suggests that the experiences of Mrs. Collins, the wife of William Busfeild’s
curate at Keighley, inspired Anne Brontë’s character of Helen Hunting­
don.¹⁵ In , Mrs. Collins came to the Reverend Patrick Brontë for
advice. She told him of her husband’s “drunken, extravagant, profligate
habits,” and said that “he treated her and her child savagely” (Barker, ).
In an era when most Victorians preached a woman’s duty to stay in the
marriage, Anne Brontë’s father advised Mrs. Collins “to leave [her hus­
band] forever, and go home, if she had a home to go to” (Barker, ). In
April  Mrs. Collins came back to visit the Brontës, telling them that
she had made an independent life for herself after her husband had aban­
doned her “to disease and total destitution in Manchester” (Barker, ).
As Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey, by “excellent sense” combined with
“activity and perseverance,” Mrs. Collins had managed to support herself
and her children. She was now staying with the Sugdons at Eastwood house,
Charlotte concluded, “who I believe have been all along very kind to her
—and the circumstance is greatly to their credit” (qtd. in Barker, ).
While The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was probably inspired by Mrs.
Collins’s story, Anne Brontë did not believe that most people were like the
Sugdons. The novel uncompromisingly depicts the social price paid by a
woman who leaves her husband. The opening chapters of the novel show
Helen’s hopes for freedom as hopelessly naive: she lives in fear of Hunting­
don demanding his conjugal rights or their son, and suffers in social exile,
as she has the social status of neither widow nor unmarried woman. Like
Mrs. Pryor in Shirley, an abused woman who abandons her name, child,
and identity and lives incognito during her daughter’s childhood and ado­
lescence, Helen pays a huge price for her supposed “liberty” (TWH, ).
Moreover, while infant custody laws had changed between the s (the
novel’s setting) and  (its publication), laws governing conjugal rights
and married women’s property had not. Although the novel shows moral
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independence as intrinsic to women’s ability to resist abuse, it also high­
lights the many social barriers to their exercise of such independence in
practice.
Delirium Tremens, Delirious Men
The greatest test of Helen’s marital independence occurs when she returns
to Arthur Huntingdon before he dies. To a modern reader this appears
contradictory—how can Helen assert her independence by returning to
the “prison” (TWH, ) of her marriage? Within the novel, the jealous
Gilbert Markham voices this view: “[S]he is casting her pearls before swine,”
he tells Lawrence angrily. “May they be satisfied with trampling them under
their feet, and not turn again and rend her!” (TWH, ). Herbert Rosen­
garten has suggested that Helen’s return provides Anne Brontë with a chance
to promulgate her unconventional faith in universal salvation (TWH, ap­
pendix ). Arthur Huntingdon’s deathbed does give Brontë the opportu­
nity to express (through Helen) her view that “through whatever purging
fires the erring spirit may be doomed to pass—whatever fate awaits it, still,
it is not lost, and God, who hateth nothing that He hath made, will bless it
in the end!” (TWH, ). The alcoholic, adulterous, and worldly Hunting­
don provides a perfect test case for this theory. But to read his death scene
as exclusively religious in focus effaces the degree to which—paradoxically
—it depicts Helen’s independence from the husband to whom she has
returned.
To appreciate the significance of Arthur Huntingdon’s death, it is cru­
cial to note how many texts in this study depict a deathbed encounter be­
tween the abused wife and her dying husband: Dickens’s The Pickwick
Papers (–), Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (), George
Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentance” (), Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was
Right (), and Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (). I have already
analyzed in detail the meeting between the dying woman and her abuser in
Dickens’s “The Hospital Patient”; in contrast, many writers after Dickens
chose to depict the reverse scene—that is, the encounter between the dying
husband and his abused wife. This scenario is interesting for a number
of reasons: first, it puts the wife in an unprecedented position of physical
dominance; second, it holds out the prospect of deathbed reunion, apology,
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or forgiveness; and third, it suddenly places the abuse in a moral and reli­
gious (not legal) light.
I will discuss the deathbed scenes in “Janet’s Repentance,” He Knew
He Was Right, and The Wing of Azrael in other chapters; here, I will com­
pare the scene in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall with that in The Pickwick
Papers. In Pickwick, “The Stroller’s Tale” depicts the death of an alcoholic
pantomime actor. The narrator meets the ill and penniless actor playing
the clown in a London pantomime. A few days later, he receives a note
asking him to visit the dying clown. He is greeted by the man’s “wretched­
looking” wife (PP, ) and led to a single room in which the feverish man
lies in bed, the wife nurses him, and their son lies on a makeshift bed on
the floor.
This scene is fascinating in one salient respect: the dying man is terri­
fied of his wife. “Don’t leave me,” he pleads with the tale’s narrator, “She’ll
murder me; I know she will.” In his weakened state, he fears vengeance: “I
beat her, Jem; I beat her yesterday, and many times before. I have starved
her and the boy too; and now I am weak and helpless, Jem, she’ll murder
me for it” (PP, ). The scene focuses on the sudden role reversal: now the
husband, rather than the wife, is dependent and weak. In a form of ironic
justice, he now experiences what it is to fear a supposed caregiver. In his
delirium, he believes she must be more than human to have survived his
abuse. “Jem, she must be an evil spirit—a devil! . . . If she had been a
woman she would have died long ago. No woman would have borne what
she has” (PP, ). In this respect, “The Stroller’s Tale” resembles the haunt­
ing of Sikes by Nancy in Oliver Twist. Both texts suggest the nascent con­
science of the abuser through this aggrandizement of the battered woman
as death threatens or approaches him. The psychological transformation of
the abused woman into a supernatural figure seems to represent the abuser’s
incomplete and mistaken recognition of the almost sanctified status that
Dickens accorded to the loyal battered wife. Significantly, however, in
Dickens’s text the woman’s aggrandizement also involves her silence. In
“The Stroller’s Tale,” the wife speaks only twice. Apart from that, she says
nothing, her loyalty evidenced by her silent care.
“The Stroller’s Tale” ends in pathos. The illustration (fig. .) depicts the
actor’s death, capturing its anticlimax. For while the deathbeds of Nancy
and the hospital patient are highly melodramatic scenes of self-sacrifice and
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marital loyalty, the abuser’s death in “The Stroller’s Tale” provides no such
moral satisfaction. The suspense in the narrative surrounds whether or not
the dying actor will beg forgiveness for abusing his wife. But in his final
moment he is wordless, and his dramatic gesture is totally ambiguous:
He had raised himself up, so as to seat himself in bed—a dreadful change
had come over his face, but consciousness had returned, for he evidently
knew me. The child who had been long since disturbed by his ravings,
rose from its little bed, and ran towards its father, screaming with fright
—the mother caught it hastily in her arms, lest he should injure it in the
violence of his insanity; but, terrified by the alteration of his features,
stood transfixed by the bed-side. He grasped my shoulder convulsively,
and, striking his breast with the other hand, made a desperate attempt
to articulate. It was unavailing—he extended his arm towards them, and
made another violent effort. There was a rattling noise in the throat—a
glare of the eye—a short stifled groan—and he fell back—dead! (PP, )
Ironically, the wife freezes in the posture that his abuse has created. Though
the man seems to ask forgiveness or at least to ask his friend to provide for
his wife and child, she cannot respond and even snatches back the child
when it runs toward him “lest he should injure it.” Yet the overall tone of
“The Stroller’s Tale” is less condemnatory than pathetic. The man’s alco­
holism and poverty, the destitution evident in the bare room, and the
grotesque appearance of the dying man in the clown costume combine to
suggest powerfully the social origins of his abuse. Unlike Bill Sikes, whose
relationship with his dog shows him to be naturally and irremediably vio­
lent, the actor is shown to be violent because of desperate circumstances
that he cannot control.
“The Stroller’s Tale” highlights by contrast a number of significant
features of the deathbed scene in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and makes
apparent that the interest of Huntingdon’s demise does not lie exclusively
with the theme of universal salvation. I would suggest instead that Helen’s
religious focus is part of her more general assumption of moral independ­
ence. The scene between Helen and her dying husband immediately re­
calls the revenant women of “The Stroller’s Tale” and Oliver Twist:
For a long time, he lay silently looking upon me, first with a vacant
stare, then with a fixed gaze of strange, growing intensity. At last he star­
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Figure .. R. Seymour, “The Dying Clown,” illustration for Charles Dickens, The
Pickwick Papers (–).
tled me by suddenly raising himself on his elbow and demanding in a
horrified whisper, with his eyes still fixed upon me,—“Who is it?”
“It is Helen Huntingdon,” said I, quietly, rising, at the same time,
and removing to a less conspicuous position.
“I must be going mad,” cried he—“or something—delirious perhaps
—but leave me, whoever you are—I can’t bear that white face, and those
eyes—for God’s sake go, and send me somebody else, that doesn’t look
like that!” (TWH, )
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Like Bill Sikes and the dying clown, Arthur Huntingdon sees his wife as a
hallucination or apparition. But Helen does not, like the prostitute Nancy
or the actor’s wife, assume a self-immolating or voiceless position. On the
contrary, she insists that she is real: “No, Arthur, it was not a dream, that
your conduct was such as to oblige me to leave you; but I heard that you
were ill and alone, and I am come back to nurse you” (TWH, ). More­
over, while the actor’s wife and Nancy assume their greatest psychological
power as apparitions, Helen’s greatest moral strength comes not as a ghost
or revenant, and not when Huntingdon is most weak. On the contrary, as
her husband temporarily gains strength, she does too. The final encounter
between the two confirms that Helen’s independence does not rely on her
escape to Wildfell Hall—she has gained an independence of morals and
spirit that allows her to resist Arthur’s legal power even as she reenters the
marital home.
Helen’s strength appears when her husband regains consciousness. Her
first words—“your conduct was such as to oblige me to leave you”—affirm
the right that she has claimed (contrary to the marriage laws of either the
s or the s) to leave Huntingdon when his adulterous behavior and
corrupt parenting became morally repugnant to her. Almost immediately,
she moves to gain her husband’s legal consent to her separation and cus­
tody arrangements. She refuses to let him see his son until he has “prom­
ised to leave him entirely under [her] care and protection, and to let [her]
take him away whenever and wherever [she] please[s], if [she] should here­
after judge it necessary to remove him again” (TWH, ). This agreement
granted, Helen achieves a symbolic—if not legally effective—suspension
of the Cochrane decision of  and of s custody laws (which, prior
to the Custody of Infants Act of , gave women no custody rights what­
soever). When Huntingdon asks her if she will “run away” when he gets
well again, she corrects him: “[I]f I find it necessary to leave you, Arthur,
I shall not ‘run away’: you know that I have your own promise that I may
go whenever I please, and take my son with me” (TWH, ). Helen thus
makes a key distinction between her first escape—when she did run away,
secretly, at night, and in fear of being stopped—and her standing right to
leave if and when she sees fit. In many respects, then, the deathbed scene
in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall becomes an expository opportunity not only
to discuss spiritual salvation but to consolidate Helen’s hard-won independ­
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ence. Arthur Huntingdon’s death sets Helen legally free to marry Gilbert
Markham, but the period of his illness has already set her free morally. Her
return to Huntingdon’s physical presence while she resists his legal power as
husband makes Helen her own person again and thus directly contravenes
the doctrine of coverture. Her petlike status—suggested so powerfully in
the scene with the spaniel—has been wholly overturned.
Wives, Pets, and the Victorians
By knitting the fates of animals and women together, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall thus points to the political problem of men’s “ownership” or con­
trol of women. Whereas Dickens’s writings construct domestic violence as
a violation of the man’s role as the “natural protector” of woman, Anne
Brontë questions the very notions of protection and coverture. Her novel
implies that women’s “owned” status under coverture denies them moral
independence and contributes to wife abuse. She thus participates in the
emergent feminist position of the late s and s, in which women
such as Caroline Norton and Barbara Leigh Smith highlighted women’s
legal nonexistence as a cause of marital violence. In addition, Brontë’s use
of the wife/animal analogy in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall anticipates the
debates on the  Act for the Better Prevention and Punishment of
Aggravated Assaults on Women and Children, in which the discrepant
punishments for wife beating and animal abuse became a matter of na­
tional concern.
As Hammerton observes, the Matrimonial Causes Act of  repre­
sented a key change in legislative emphasis, from punishing the male
offender to securing financial independence for the abused wife (Hammer­
ton, Cruelty, ). This shift implicitly acknowledged the link between wife
abuse and the legal disempowerment or “nonexistence” of women. John
Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are generally recognized as having been in­
strumental in promoting this philosophical shift in the s and s,
while Frances Power Cobbe is credited with having helped to shape the leg­
islation of  that finally put it into legal effect. By developing the analogy
between wives and pets, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was one of the earliest
texts to draw attention to the connection between wife battery and women’s
legal powerlessness, thus anticipating the thrust of the  legislation, and
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indeed our modern understanding of spousal assault. While Tromp accords
to sensation fiction a critical role in marking the “language of violence in
the domestic space” and in “casting the frame” of later debates on wife as­
sault (Tromp, ), I would argue that certain realist texts, such as Brontë’s,
also performed this key ideological function.
After The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the analogy between beaten wife
and beaten animal did not disappear. Later Victorian novelists quite com­
monly coded marital violence through animal assault. In Caroline Norton’s
Stuart of Dunleath (), the abusive Sir Stephen Penrhyn beats his wife’s
dog, Ruellach, at their first meeting; in George Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentance”
(), the wife abuser Dempster brutally whips his own horses; in Wilkie
Collins’s The Woman in White (–), Sir Percival Glyde beats one of
the house spaniels shortly before he injures his wife; and in Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (), as Tromp notes, the “Softy’s” beating of
Bow-wow is “an encoded performance of marital violence” (Tromp, ).
In the s, this analogy accrued still greater force. The antivivisection
movement of the s drew much of its political strength from women,
and much of its emotional force from the connections between women and
tortured animals. As Coral Lansbury writes, “[E]very flogged and beaten
horse, every dog or cat strapped down for the vivisector’s knife, reminded
[women] of their own condition in society” (Lansbury, ). Brontë’s por­
traits of Helen, wooed by a blood-stained suitor and injured as her husband
hurls an object at his dog, and of Milicent, who “lies down like a spaniel”
(TWH, ) at the feet of her abusive husband, partake of this same recog­
nition of likeness. Thus while Brontë’s text functions as an allegory of the
nation’s maturation from Regency violence to Victorian masculine selfcontrol, it does not celebrate the Victorian status quo where marriage is
concerned. Rather, the novel’s construction of the parallel between beaten
women and animals emphasizes the links between legal powerlessness and
marital violence, while its critique of marital coverture invites readers to
scrutinize the legal and social inequities of Victorian marriage.
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4
| |
THE ABUSED WOMAN AND
THE COMMUNITY
“Janet’s Repentance”
T -  of the late s, which pitted emergent
feminists against those who wished to preserve current gender roles, set the
stage for the intense debate during the s on women’s place in marriage.
Imbricated in this debate was George Eliot’s story “Janet’s Repentance,”
which depicts with incisive realism Janet and Robert Dempster’s abusive
marriage, in which Robert throws Janet out of their home and Janet re­
covers through community support and healing. Serialized in Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine from July to November , the text was published
in the midst of social agitation on the marriage question. Moreover, it ap­
peared at a time when people across the political spectrum believed wife
beating to be increasing (Doggett, ). On  May , as he moved for
the appointment of a select committee to examine the operation of the
 act, Viscount Raynham said to the House of Commons that “the
number of these offenses had increased to such an extent as to become a
disgrace to the country” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ); Mr. P. O’Brien sup­
ported him, saying that “[h]e was certain that there was no one who read
the papers but must feel that there was a system of brutality pursued by
husbands towards women in England” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ). Punch
testified to this growing concern with a cartoon entitled “The Expressions

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Figure .. “The Expressions of the Hand,” Punch  (): .
of the Hand” (fig. .), showing the man’s hand that offers the wedding
ring before marriage raised in a fist afterward (Punch,  October , ).
During the s debates on divorce, married women’s property, and
the woman question, both legal sides of the marital-assault issue—the
criminal punishment of the abuser and the availability of divorce for the
abused wife—came under scrutiny. In , debates on the Act for the Bet­
ter Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults on Women and
Children focused national attention on family violence. In , , and
 Parliament considered (and rejected) flogging as a penalty for violent
assaults on women and children. Wife assault also gained prominence dur­
ing the debates on the divorce bill, as members of both Houses struggled
with what redress there should be when “a noble wife was united to a vicious
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husband . . . or where—as in the lower classes was especially the case—
they led a life of bickering and disunion, sometimes ending even in the
death of one of the parties” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. –). During the
same debates, Gladstone took up the cause of abused women, as he un­
successfully pushed to expand the legal definition of matrimonial cruelty
under the divorce bill to include mental suffering as well as “mere force”
( Parl. Deb. s., col. ).
Meanwhile, feminists mounted a sustained critique of women’s legal
inequality. In , Marian Evans’s friend Barbara Leigh Smith published
A Brief Summary, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws concern­
ing Women, which outlined women’s legal “nonexistence.” On  March
, Smith presented to Parliament her Petition for Reform of the Married
Women’s Property Law, signed by Marian Evans among three thousand
others. Not until  would a bill giving married women control over
their income and property pass through parliament, but in June , as
well as February, May, and July , MPs debated this issue. As they real­
ized, married women’s financial autonomy threatened male supremacy and
marital coverture; many feared it would set up a “separate interest between
husband and wife” ( Parl. Deb. s. col. ). To feminists, economic
power promised women greater ability to resist marital violence. As Marian
Evans wrote to her friend Sara Sophia Hennell, “Miss Leigh Smith has
sent me a copy of a Petition to be presented to Parliament praying that
married women may have a legal right to their own earnings, as a counter­
active to wife-beating and other evils.”¹ In the meantime, Caroline Norton
furthered the feminist critique of the double standard—and drew atten­
tion to her own situation as an abused wife—by publishing English Laws
for Women in the Nineteenth Century () and A Letter to the Queen on
Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill (), both incisive
critiques of the legal double standard affecting women’s access to child
custody, divorce, and control of property. Smith’s and Norton’s pamphlets
evince a growing feminist conviction that wife assault was related to the
structure of marriage itself. In , the Society for the Protection of Women
and Children from Aggravated Assaults was founded, the first organiza­
tion formed specifically to counter family violence (May, ).
Marian Evans started writing “Janet’s Repentance” in May , just as
the divorce bill was introduced for second reading in the House of Lords.²
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The story was serialized in Blackwood’s between July and November, its
first numbers coinciding with the divorce debates that took place from
May to August of  (the Matrimonial Causes Act received royal assent
on  August). The original readers of “Janet’s Repentance” thus encoun­
tered the text in a highly politicized climate, at a time when coverture,
wife assault, and marital cruelty were national issues. The story of Janet’s
abusive middle-class marriage, her drunkenness, her husband throwing
her out of their home, and her figurative baptism into the Milby commu­
nity thus intervened actively in an ongoing debate on marriage, coverture,
wife abuse, and women’s rights. Marlene Tromp argues that sensation fic­
tion was unique in tapping into “the ideological anxieties and contradic­
tions” of this period of volatility and change (Tromp, ). However, I see
Eliot’s realist narrative as having played a similar role. As I will suggest,
“Janet’s Repentance” entered the wife-assault debate in highly unconven­
tional ways, by depicting wife assault as a “commonplace” (SCL, ) aspect
of middle-class life, by depicting the abused wife as an alcoholic, by creat­
ing sympathy for the abuser, and by depicting wife assault as a community
issue rather than a private matter. In this last respect, “Janet’s Repentance”
marks a significant departure from the texts examined so far in this study.
Whereas Dombey and Son depicted the home as fundamentally closed, and
did not envisage a place for the abused woman in society, “Janet’s Repen­
tance” suggests that the abused woman’s recovery depends on the commu­
nity that receives and heals her. The place of healing, it suggests, is not
within the home but outside it.
“Commonplace Troubles”: Wife Assault, Realism,
and the Middle Class
The text’s most obviously controversial aspect lies in its depiction of wife
assault as a common aspect of middle-class life. The first two stories in
Scenes of Clerical Life establish a focus on the quotidian: “I wish to stir
your sympathy,” the narrator writes, “with commonplace troubles—to win
your tears for real sorrow: sorrow such as may live next door to you—such
as walks neither in rags nor in velvet, but in very ordinary decent apparel”
(SCL, ). This statement is clearly a manifesto of literary realism. But in
 it was a political manifesto as well: Eliot’s choice to represent middle­
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class wife battery as exemplifying “commonplace troubles” was far from
conventional.
Although Dickens had represented family violence in the middle-class
home in Dombey and Son, it remained rare to portray wife assault as a
middle-class issue. Contemporary commentators habitually located wife
beating in the overcrowded urban slums and in the “kicking district[s]”
(WTE, ) of the industrial north. Kaye, for example, imagines the screams
of the poor man’s “wife or paramour” echoing in “the close alley or teem­
ing courtyard wherein he dwells” and penetrating the “thin, dilapidated
partition-walls” (OW, ). Hammerton notes that statistics belie this
widely held view: his sampling of newspaper reports of marital violence
cases from Preston between  and  reveal that more than half the
accused were “from skilled, higher textile, lower-middle or middle-class
occupations” (Hammerton, Cruelty, ). Nevertheless, the parliamentary
debates from the s provide evidence that most MPs saw (or wished to
see) wife assault as a lower-class phenomenon. For example, when MPs
discussed the flogging amendment to the  act (an amendment defeated
 to ), they revealed their assumptions about wife beating and class:
no one seems to have envisaged gentlemen being flogged. The amendment
was introduced by Mr. Phinn, who argued that corporal punishment was
appropriate “where men were already reduced below the level of the brute”
( Parl. Deb. s., col. ). Phinn’s statement does not explicitly exclude
upper- and middle-class men, but the assumption was implicit, as it was
in Lord Lovaine’s speech when he said that “there were persons who could
not be reached by any other punishment, and it was for that class, and that
class only, which was so utterly degraded, that he recommended its inflic­
tion” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ; my emphasis). Similarly, John Stuart
Mill, who supported flogging, portrayed wife abusers as belonging to an
underclass needing education and moral management: “Those who pre­
sume on their consciousness of animal strength to brutally ill treat those
who are physically weaker, should be made to know what it is to be in the
hands of a physical strength as much greater than their own. . . . Whatever
else may be included in the education of the people, the very first essential
of it is to unbrutalize them; and to this end, all kinds of personal brutality
should be seen and felt to be things which the law is determined to put
down” (CW, :–). Yet others did perceive wife assault as crossing class
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lines: when another flogging bill was defeated in , Punch audaciously
suggested that perhaps “the real cause of the rejection of . ’
Bill, was the fact that wife-beating is not confined to the slums; and that
if all offenders in that particular had their deserts [sic], some highly re­
spectable gentlemen would not escape whipping” (Punch,  May : ).
Nevertheless, MPs discussing the Matrimonial Causes Bill in 
tended to assume that physical violence was restricted almost exclusively
to the lower classes. Gladstone expressed this widely held view when he
said that “adultery with cruelty was at present a thing almost unknown in
the higher classes of society, because the cruelty mentioned . . . did not
mean moral cruelty, but cruelty attended with the effect of producing
bodily fear” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ). The belief that upper-class men
did not hit their wives was so entrenched as to be formally acknowledged
in legal handbooks. In An Exposition of the Laws Relating to the Women of
England (), J. J. S. Wharton endorsed this view:
A blow between parties in the lower conditions and in the higher sta­
tions of life, bears a very different aspect. Among the lower classes, blows
sometimes pass between married couples, who, in the main, are very
happy, and have no desire to part; amidst very coarse habits, such inci­
dents occur almost as freely as rude or reproachful words; a word and a
blow go together. Still, even amongst the very lowest classes, there is gen­
erally a feeling of something unmanly in striking a woman; but if a gen­
tleman, a person of education . . . if a nobleman of high rank and ancient
family uses personal violence to his wife, his equal in rank, the choice of
his affections, the friend of his bosom, the mother of his offspring,—
such conduct in such a person, carries with it something so degrading to
the husband, and so insulting and mortifying to the wife, as to render
the injury itself far more severe and insupportable. (ELRW, n)
It is remarkable that this belief in the prevalence of lower-class battery
persisted despite Caroline Norton’s very public exposure of her violent
marriage to George Norton, Tory barrister and aristocratic younger son.
Norton’s account of her marriage, published in English Laws for Women in
the Nineteenth Century (), describes in detail the “personal violence”
(ELW, ) in their relationship, including a quarrel when George broke
down the door to her room, “flung the furniture about,” and tried to force
the maid out of the room (ELW, ). In the same text Caroline also de­
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scribed another episode, in which George grabbed her by the throat and
pinned her to the wall of their carriage. “The marks of his fingers,” she
wrote, “were in bruises on my throat” (ELW, ). As Hammerton argues,
after the divorce court opened in , newspaper accounts of divorce
cases helped to break down the Victorian presupposition that wife abuse
and cruelty were restricted to the lower classes (Hammerton, Cruelty, ).
But in , while the Divorce Bill was still being debated, the view persisted
that wife assault remained predominantly a lower-class phenomenon.
Against this view, Eliot represented middle-class marital violence as an
example of “sorrow such as may live next door to you” (SCL, ). As Simon
Dentith notes, Eliot brought to literature the “positivist understanding of
science, where one’s first obligation is to a minute and unflinching veracity
in honesty and observation.”³ And whereas Eliot has been justly criticized
for the upper- or middle-class angle of her observations on the working
class (see Dentith, –; Miller, Narrative, ), in this instance, she turns
this unflinching lens onto her own class. As Lawson and Shakinovsky note,
the text contains brutally realistic depictions of bourgeois marital violence,
rendered with the “terrible faithfulness” one would expect of a “newspaper
report or a sociology text” (Lawson and Shakinovsky, ). Even the fact
that the story is set “[m]ore than a quarter of a century” (SCL, ) before
 does not much reduce the political impact of identifying wife assault
with the quotidian. In any case, every edition before  lessened the effect
of temporal distance by using the present tense for wife assault scenes:
“[T]he heavy arm is lifted to strike her,” “[t]he blow falls” (SCL, ; my
emphasis). The present tense lends the scene dramatic immediacy, but it
has political impact too—instead of being comfortably distanced in the
past, the spousal violence appears as if in the reader’s present time. Moreover,
not only does the text suggest that marital assault is a quotidian aspect of
middle-class life, but it depicts Milby’s inhabitants as perfectly aware of
Robert Dempster’s abuse. The people of Milby choose neither to shun the
rather popular lawyer nor to intervene between him and his wife. In turn,
Janet’s “pride” (SCL, , ) stops her from acknowledging her abusive
situation. By implication, therefore, Eliot suggests that middle-class vio­
lence is not unknown but simply not admitted.
Even more controversial than depicting spousal violence in the middleclass home was Eliot’s choice to make Janet an alcoholic. The habitual
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Victorian assumption was that the abusive husband would be the alco­
holic. In temperance literature, for example, “drinking was a veritable code
word for male violence,”⁴ and, as May observes, temperance rallies often
featured reformed drunkards who were also ex–wife beaters (May, ). This
connection between alcohol and male violence appears in a Times editorial
from : “If a ruffian has drunk to excess and fails to pick a quarrel with
any of his boon companions, his natural impulse on his return home is
to beat, to cut, to stab, or to mutilate his wife” (Times,  August , e).
Dickens’s “Gin Shops” also illustrates this common connection, in its
depiction of drunken men who “slink home to beat their wives for com­
plaining, and kick the children for daring to be hungry” (SB, ). In con­
trast, Eliot depicts the abused wife as alcoholic. This greatly complicates her
story’s moral framework. First, it reverses commonly held Victorian views
on cause and effect where alcohol and violence were concerned, suggest­
ing that abuse has caused Janet’s drinking, rather than vice versa. Secondly,
it challenges the sentimentalization of the passive wife, since Eliot portrays
Janet’s passivity as caused by a drunken stupor rather than by elevated feel­
ings of marital loyalty. Finally, it risked that Victorian readers would not
sympathize with Janet at all. Before publication, Eliot’s editor John Blackwood feared this possibility. “I am sorry that the poor wife’s sufferings
should have driven her to so unsentimental a resource as beer,” he wrote
to Eliot, recommending that “he” “soften” this picture (Haight, :). After
publication, the Quarterly Review was scathing: “[I]n ‘George Eliot’s’ writ­
ings there is very much of this kind to regret. She delights in unpleasant
subjects—in the representation of things which are repulsive, coarse, and
degrading. . . . In ‘Janet’s Repentance,’ a drunken husband beats his beau­
tiful but drunken wife, turns her out of doors at midnight in her night­
dress, and dies of ‘delirium tremens and meningitis.’ The wife is exhibited
to us as staggering about the streets” (Rev., ).
Eliot’s decision to make her heroine an alcoholic reflects her realist
ambition to depict “mixed human beings” (Haight, ) rather than the
black-and-white characters of romance or melodrama. But sympathetic
political discourse on wife assault was heavily melodramatic, polarizing
“brutes” and “monsters” and their “helpless,” “virtuous,” and “unoffending”
victims (see, for example, EW, b). At the same time, a counterdiscourse
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tended to attribute domestic assault to “bad” or “shrewish” wives. Kaye, for
example, argued that assaults were often provoked by the woman herself:
Some women have an unfortunate way of what is expressively called
“nagging.” They let loose an army of small provocations, chiefly com­
posed of sarcasms and contradictions. If the man is not lashed into a
frenzy by this womanly mode of treatment, and, if beaten in the wordcombat, he does not assert his superiority in a more practical manner, he
covers his defeat by a retrograde movement, and consoles himself at a
neighboring tavern. This is only to defer the inevitable crisis. Maddened
by drink he returns ripe for action. His wife does not spare him; she has
now a new ground of attack. She opens upon him with a battery of taunts
and upbraidings, until he closes the argument by knocking her down, and
kicking her as she lies at his feet. (OW, )
Kaye studs his text with military metaphors (“army,” “ground of attack”)
that portray marriage as a battleground and the wife as an aggressor.⁵ In
Kaye’s portrait of the shrewish wife we can recognize the combative woman,
familiar from Dickens’s negative portraits in “The Pawnbroker’s Shop” and
The Old Curiosity Shop. In contrast, Eliot refuses to portray the wife either
as ideal victim or as nagging, aggressive combatant. Instead, her text chal­
lenges readers to sympathize with a heroine whose warm charity coexists
with disorderly household management, and whose poised public self con­
ceals alcoholism and abuse. As Carol Martin has shown, Eliot adeptly
managed the divisions of the serial so that each part’s conclusion dimin­
ished Janet’s vices and foregrounded the pathos of her life.⁶ Indeed, Kerry
McSweeney criticizes Eliot for idealizing her heroine in a way that conflicts
with the text’s realist mode.⁷ It is true that Eliot shows Janet as “majestic,
enduring,” and with a “tableau-like beauty” (McSweeney, ), but these
features coexist with the dingy fact of her frequent drunkenness. Janet’s
drunkenness remained as a challenge to contemporary discourses that sim­
plified women into good and bad, deserving and undeserving wives.
Eliot also portrays Dempster as a mixed figure. Just as she avoids por­
traying Janet either as shrewish wife or as wounded angel, she avoids mak­
ing the abuser into a “drunken tyrant” (SCL, ). Dempster is a loving son
to Mamsey and at times a loving husband. For example, chapter  greatly
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complicates the narrative’s moral scheme by depicting the Dempster family
as a united group, surrounded by the domestic iconography of friendly cat
and sunny garden. Yet this scene is not merely or simply ironic. Eliot ab­
solutely refuses the comfortable distance that many Victorian social com­
mentators placed between middle-class neighbors and abusive husbands.
Instead, she insists that “the man from whom we make it our pride to
shrink, has yet a close brotherhood with us through some of our most sa­
cred feelings” (SCL, ).
In summary, then, by viewing marital abuse as commonplace, by lo­
cating it in the middle-class home, and by refusing to polarize abuser and
victim into moral categories of good and evil, Eliot’s realism posed a sub­
stantial challenge to contemporary depictions of wife assault. In the next
section of this chapter I will turn to another way in which Eliot challenged
the social mores of her day—that is, in her depiction of wife abuse as a
women’s and community issue rather than a legal, domestic, or man’s issue.
Eliot’s concern with community has been often discussed.⁸ But critics have
not noted that, in the context of the wife-assault debates of the s, the
very idea of community was politically charged. While MPs contemplated
increased punishments for wife beaters, and liberal feminists fought for
increased women’s rights, Eliot challenged the very notion of the private
home. When Dempster throws Janet out of the home, she is figuratively
baptized into a rich and supportive network of friends. Because we have
largely come to adopt this community-based view of wife assault, it is per­
haps difficult to see how unusual Eliot’s view was in its time. Yet, reading
Eliot’s narrative as an intervention in the debate on wife abuse and mari­
tal cruelty that took place between  and , we can see that the text
presents a wholly innovative view of the wife-assault issue.
The Abused Woman and the Community
When Charles Dickens read Scenes of Clerical Life, he was one of very few
contemporary readers who pierced the male pseudonym: “I have not the
faintest doubt that a woman described [Janet] being shut out into the
street by her husband, and conceived and executed the whole idea of her
following of that clergyman,” he wrote. “If I be wrong in this, then I protest
that a woman’s mind has got into some man’s body by a mistake that ought
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immediately to be corrected” (qtd. in Haight, :). Dickens unerringly
singled out what made “Janet’s Repentance” different from contemporary
writing on domestic abuse, including his own. As I have argued, in both
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Dombey and Son the narrative crux occurs
when the middle-class woman leaves the domestic structures that contain
her. Outside the home, what place is open to her? Most contemporary writ­
ers depicted the abused woman as stepping into a social void, or worse,
into a community that judges her for leaving her home. As we have seen,
Anne Brontë symbolically illustrates the separated wife’s outcast status by
depicting Helen Huntingdon in a lonely mansion, isolated from the sur­
rounding community, her uneasy relationship with conventional domes­
ticity symbolized by her camping in one corner of an abandoned house.
Charles Dickens more forcefully intimated the tension between the abused
woman and the community by Florence’s Cain-like scar, a guilty sign that
disappears only when she returns home to heal her abuser. Even Caroline
Norton, one of the most outspoken advocates of legal reform in the s,
could not envision a future for her heroine who leaves an abusive mar­
riage. In Norton’s novel Stuart of Dunleath (), Lady Margaret writes to
Eleanor Penrhyn, “Do you know what the life is, that you desire to at­
tempt for yourself? Have you ever watched it in others? You leave home
because you are wretched—you will be wretched still—and more helpless”
(). The text symbolizes Eleanor’s radical homelessness by her exile: she
dies abroad, this foreign death suggesting that the community cannot or
will not embrace the separated wife. In stark contrast to these illustrations
of the blank future facing the woman who leaves her home, Janet is shut
out by her husband, only to find herself nurtured by the community at
large—by her women friends, her mother, and the evangelical minister
Mr. Tryan. As Coney writes, “The community receives her and restores
her and sanctifies her life” (Coney, ). The aspect of the text that Dickens
recognized as different from his own is that Eliot portrays the community
—not the family home—as the basic social unit and the instrument of
healing.⁹
Eliot’s vision of Janet’s baptism into a caring community contrasts
sharply with the debates on wife assault, divorce, and married women’s
property that preceded and coincided with its publication. These debates
show the abused wife enclosed in the home. The most concise statement
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of the closed-home doctrine is of course the Cochrane decision (),
when Cecelia Cochrane discovered that her home could become—quite
literally—a prison. But this idea of the closed home pervades the parlia­
mentary discourse of the s as well. For example, the  First Report
of the Commissioners Appointed by Her Majesty to Enquire into the Law of
Divorce argued against extending the legal definition of marital cruelty: “It
has sometimes been urged, that cruelty should have a more extended sig­
nification. . . . We cannot assent to these suggestions. . . . When people
understand that they must live together, . . . they become good husbands
and good wives, from the necessity of remaining husbands and wives” ().
Rather than extending the definition of cruelty to include mental suffer­
ing, the commission chose to enforce the closed nature of marriage. The
same logic appears in the debates on Dillwyn’s  flogging bill. The bill
failed, but what is interesting is that Dillwyn saw no contradiction be­
tween flogging a man and having him return to the marriage: the punish­
ment, he argued, “would not prevent a reconciliation” ( Parl. Deb. s.,
col. ). His optimistic logic was based on the idea of the state interven­
ing briefly to correct a fundamentally closed system. For example, Dillwyn
told the story of a South Wales man who was whipped for deserting his
wife and family and who “went back to his family, and never appeared be­
fore the Magistrates again; but they lived happily together ever since” (
Parl. Deb. s., col. ). Mill and Taylor argued against this logic when in
 they pressed for separation orders for women whose husbands had been
convicted of wife assault (CW, :,). This legislative change actually
did not occur until , when section  of the Matrimonial Causes Act
authorized the court to issue a separation order “if satisfied that the future
safety of the wife is in peril.” Even after , magistrates tended to ob­
serve the closed-home doctrine. As Mabel Sharman Crawford discovered
in  when she surveyed twenty-one recent wife-beating cases, not a sin­
gle separation order had been granted, despite evidence of savage violence
(MW, –). This indicates how enduring the idea of the closed home
would prove to be. However, in , when “Janet’s Repentance” was pub­
lished, that idea was just being legally reaffirmed by the Matrimonial
Causes Act, which closed the home around the abused woman by specify­
ing that cruelty alone was not sufficient for a women to obtain a divorce.¹⁰
As I will argue in chapter , after it opened in  the divorce court un­
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expectedly brought public attention to wife battery because of the sheer
number of cases citing cruelty. However, MPs who drafted the act in 
did not intend that the cruelty provision would enable so many women to
obtain divorces (Horstman, –). In its drafting in the late s, the
Divorce Act thus symbolically endorsed the idea that cruelty should be
cured within the home, not by moving outside it. In suggesting the abused
woman’s place in a rich community of support and nurturance outside the
home, then, “Janet’s Repentance” offers its most significant challenge to
contemporary views on marital cruelty.
The text’s setting suggests from the start this emphasis on community.
The story is set in the small provincial town of Milby. Eliot thus eschews
the anonymity of urban life (as in Dombey’s London) or the privacy of the
estate (as in Tenant’s Grassdale). Like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Scenes of
Clerical Life deals with marital assault at a historical distance. Unlike Brontë,
however, Eliot is not interested in allegorizing national progress through
the life of the individual; rather, she is interested in the relationship that is
forged between individuals and their community. The text contemplates
social relationships, social bonds, social fabrics. Specifically, Eliot chooses
to examine the relation of the battered woman to the community at the
moment of a great historical shift—that is, early Victorian society’s en­
counter with evangelicalism in the s. The choice is significant for Eliot,
as she views evangelicalism as not a religious but a moral turning point in
the life of Milby, the moment at which this society recognizes “something
to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self ” (SCL, ). While
Eliot represents this “turning” in the religious and heightened language of
baptism, repentance, and incarnation, the text is in fact relentlessly secu­
lar. Eliot is interested not in religious faith but in social relations. What is
surprising is that this heightened language of community should surround
the figure of the battered woman.
The scenes in the Red Lion and Mrs. Linnet’s parlor introduce us to
the town of Milby, which is, Eliot suggests, inescapably part of the story of
marital violence. As Lawson and Shakinovsky have noted, the “domestic
plot is not developed in isolation, but is deeply embedded within a complex
set of social relations in the small town of Milby” (Lawson and Shakinovsky,
). In contrast, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall represents the narrative of
abuse as consummately private: Helen reveals her journal only to her most
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trusted friend (also her future husband). Similarly, Dombey and Son sym­
bolically emphasizes the issue’s familial nature by opening and closing the
novel in the home, and by representing marital assault as shattering that
home. “Janet’s Repentance,” by contrast, shows marital abuse as relentlessly
public. By choosing the setting of the small town, Eliot makes social knowl­
edge of abuse inevitable; the only question that remains is how the com­
munity will respond to that knowledge.
At first, the narrative represents the community through gossip. The
reader initially gleans information about the “private” narrative of Janet’s
marriage through voices of judgment, scurrilous interest, and sympathy:
“[T]o see her daughter leading such a life!” (SCL, )
“For my part, I never thought well of the marriage.” (SCL, )
“Janet had nothing to look to but being a governess.” (SCL, )
“I certainly did consider Janet Raynor the most promising young woman
of my acquaintance.” (SCL, –)
“I’ve never been to the house since Dempster broke out on me in one of
his drunken fits. She comes to me sometimes, poor thing, looking so
strange, anybody passing her in the street may see plain enough what’s
the matter.” (SCL, )
“She never will admit to anybody he’s not a good husband.” (SCL, )
“She married him in opposition to the advice of her best friends, and now
she is not willing to admit that she was wrong.” (SCL, )
“There’s great excuses for her. When a woman can’t think of her husband
coming home without trembling, it’s enough to make her drink some­
thing to blunt her feelings.” (SCL, –)
“Under no circumstances can I imagine myself resorting to a practice so
degrading.” (SCL, )
“Janet’s Repentance” thus constructs the home as always permeable, al­
ways part of the social fabric. The text subtly but relentlessly dismantles
the predominant Victorian middle-class view of the home as separate from
the social world. In doing so, it suggests the inevitability of community
involvement in the wife-assault issue.
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The radical role of the community voices should prompt us to recon­
sider the view of community in Eliot’s fiction. In Narrative and Its Dis­
contents (), D. A. Miller observes that Eliot’s novels “pluraliz[e] the
perspective from which traditional [novelistic] form is commonly per­
ceived and delimited” (Miller, Narrative, ), fragmenting the narrative
into different strands. One of these strands, he argues, is the community
voice. He posits that in Middlemarch this voice functions to distinguish
the narratable and the non-narratable: “Characters who are felt to threaten
the ideology of social routine enter immediately into a network of chatter
and gossipy observation” (Miller, Narrative, ). The community voice
thus “marks the sites where an ideology feels itself in danger, and has already
begun to counter-attack” (Miller, Narrative, ). The community voice in
“Janet’s Repentance” does function in this way with respect to Mr. Tryan:
Milby’s objections to Tryan mark him as “the odd one out” (Miller, Narra­
tive, ), just as the community of Middlemarch singles out Dorothea. In
Middlemarch, Miller argues, story production and social control thus co­
incide where the voice of the community is concerned (Miller, Narrative,
). I would argue, however, that the community voice in “Janet’s Repen­
tance” serves a more radical purpose. Marital assault in the middle class was,
as we have seen, virtually non-narratable at midcentury; it was repeatedly
ignored in favor of discussions of lower-class violence. In contrast, Eliot
deploys the community voice, or narrative strand, in “Janet’s Repentance”
as a means of opening up the private middle-class home, of suggesting that
marital assault is in fact narratable and public.
Indeed, following this introduction to the Dempsters’ marriage
through the community voice and eye, readers enter the abusive home it­
self. But even within the home, climaxes in Dempster’s abuse are marked
by references to the outside. Repeatedly, Eliot’s text depicts Dempster’s
abuse of Janet as involving others: Janet’s mother, their guests—implicitly,
the community at large. For example, part  ends with a stark depiction of
Dempster’s violence in which descriptions of his blows are interspersed
with references to a portrait of Janet’s mother:
“I’ll beat you into your senses.”
He laid his hand with a firm grip on her shoulder, turned her round,
and pushed her slowly before him along the passage and through the
dining-room door which stood open on their left hand.
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There was a portrait of Janet’s mother, a grey-haired, dark-eyed old
woman, in a neatly-fluted cap, hanging over the mantelpiece. Surely the
aged eyes take on a look of anguish as they see Janet—not trembling, no!
it would be better if she trembled—standing stupidly unmoved in her
great beauty, while the heavy arm is lifted to strike her. The blow falls—
another—and another. Surely the mother hears that cry—“O Robert!
pity! pity!” (SCL, –)
As I have shown in chapter , in Dombey and Son, the mother’s “ban­
dage[d]” portrait (DS, ) signals the threat of family violence; the newspa­
pers draping the home bring the public discourse concerning lower-class
violence into the middle-class home as an immanent threat. But the late
Mrs. Dombey’s portrait implies no community intervention. In death, as
in life, Mrs. Dombey is in and of the home. Only Florence’s departure—
and her guilty injury—bring the world’s eyes into the private home. And
when this public scrutiny does come, it figuratively destroys the home by
turning the Dombey mansion into a ruin or tenement open to public view.
In “Janet’s Repentance,” by contrast, the mother’s portrait refers outside
the home, to a woman who is active in the community. The maternal por­
trait once again represents the place where public and private collide. Here,
however, the portrait symbolizes the public gaze falling on the “private”
act of violence. “Janet’s Repentance” thus shows the middle-class home to
be always already permeable.
Dempster’s abuse climaxes when Janet actively invites the public gaze
on the marriage. Hitherto, Janet has done as much as possible to conceal
his abuse. As Mrs. Pettifer says, “She never will admit to anybody that he’s
not a good husband” (SCL, ). Clothing functions as a key symbol of
this concealment. Janet’s clothes create her public facade, and make virtu­
ally unrecognizable the “private” figure seen by the reader:
And who is this bright-looking woman walking with hasty step along
Orchard Street so early, with a large nosegay in her hand? Can it be Janet
Dempster, on whom we looked with such deep pity, one sad midnight,
hardly a fortnight ago? Yes; no other woman in Milby has those searching
black eyes, that tall graceful unconstrained figure, set off by her simple
muslin dress and black lace shawl, that massy black hair now so neatly
braided in glossy contrast with the white satin ribbons of her modest cap
and bonnet. (SCL, –)
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Clothes here function as symbols of facades maintained for public view.
(As the narrator remarks, “Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of our­
selves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds” [SCL,
].) But clothes also figure prominently in the revelation of domestic
strife. In the marriage’s climactic scene, Janet deliberately decides not to
hide the clothes that Dempster has flung at her: “Janet’s face flushed with
anger, and for the first time in her life her resentment overcame the longcherished pride that made her hide her griefs from the world. There are
moments when by some strange impulse we contradict our past selves—
fatal moments, when a fit of passion, like a lava stream, lays low the work
of half our lives. Janet thought, ‘I will not pick up the clothes; they shall
lie there until the visitors come, and he shall be ashamed of himself’” (SCL,
). When she leaves Dempster’s clothes on the floor, Janet lets their visi­
tors see the naked truth about her marriage. As a result, Dempster flings
his wife out into the street with nothing on but her nightdress. The facade
of the marriage has been irrevocably torn off. So too, though, has the com­
munity facade of pretending not to see the violence that exists in the “pri­
vate” realm.
The moment when marital violence enters the public view is high­
lighted by the illustration to the  stereotyped edition of the text (fig.
.). The illustration shows Janet outside Mrs. Pettifer’s door in her white
nightdress. This plate captures the key moment in the narrative when
Dempster’s abuse of Janet becomes truly public. Hitherto it has been a
subject of gossip, sympathy and judgment, but Janet’s “pride” (SCL, ,
) and the tacit community agreement to ignore the abuse have con­
tributed to the illusion that wife assault is contained in the home. Paradox­
ically, although Dempster throws his wife out, he also subscribes to this
view of the closed home. He cannot conceive of Janet remaining away;
he expects her to return within hours—as do the servants. When he locks
her clothes in the closet (“of which he always kept the key in his pocket”
[SCL, ]), the text symbolically represents his belief that he controls his
wife absolutely. Dempster figuratively enacts the control endorsed by the
Cochrane decision in his belief that he can both throw his wife out onto
the street and lock her up. It seems he believes that there is no “outside” to
their marriage—as in law there was not. Historical research throws some
light on this apparent paradox: Shani D’Cruze points out that “a frequent
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Figure .. Illustration for the  stereotyped edition of George Eliot’s Scenes of
Clerical Life ().
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strategy of violent men was to put their wives, and sometimes children, out
into the street at night, exerting their total dominance of domestic space”
(D’Cruze, ).
I have already pointed out that Dickens took care to end the December
issue of Dombey and Son with Florence in Captain Cuttle’s care. Florence
may move between homes, but she has no place outside the home. In con­
trast, Eliot ended part  of “Janet’s Repentance” with Janet in the street.
The cold stones, the thick clouds, and the darkness figuratively represent
the “blank future” (SCL, ) facing a Victorian woman thrown out of the
marital home. Janet senses herself completely alone: “[E]very door was
closed; every window was dark” (SCL, ). Figuratively, she has been cast
into the social void symbolized in Brontë’s text by the isolated Wildfell Hall.
But in “Janet’s Repentance,” the community’s doors are not, in fact, closed.
The thin cohesion of gossip—the text’s early manifestation of community
—is transformed into meaningful bonds that embrace the abused woman.
A “faint light” (SCL, ) leads Janet to Mrs. Pettifer’s house, where Janet
finds spiritual rebirth. Her reunion with Mrs. Pettifer is marked with quasireligious language: “Janet kissed her with earnest sacramental kisses—such
kisses as seal a new and closer bond between the helper and the helped”
(SCL, ). Eliot invites the reader to imagine the “sacramental” bond by
which the abused woman enters into community. The closed circle of the
Cochrane decision has been symbolically broken.
“Janet’s Repentance” and the Discourses of Wife Abuse
When Janet enters the community, she also enters a discourse that con­
structs the abused woman in numerous and often contradictory ways.
Although the story is set more than a quarter of a century in the past, one of
Eliot’s greatest achievements in “Janet’s Repentance” is to render the s
and s debates on wife assault through the various characters in the text.
Like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, also set in the early s, “Janet’s Repen­
tance” was thus deeply involved in the politics of its own day. Dempster, for
example, echoes the spirit of the Cochrane decision. He has utter faith in
his control of Janet: “‘Pooh,’ he said inwardly, ‘she would go straight to her
mother’s. She’s as timid as a hare; and she’ll never let anybody know about
it. She’ll be back again before night’” (SCL, ). Janet’s worst nightmares
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similarly internalize her husband’s absolute power: “The future took shape
after shape of misery before her, always ending in her being dragged back
again to her old life of terror, and stupor, and fevered despair. Her husband
had so long overshadowed her life that her imagination could not keep
hold of a condition in which that great dread was absent” (SCL, ). The
text then jolts the reader with a startling rereading of the closed-home
doctrine: “Her husband would never consent to her living away from him:
she was become necessary to his tyranny” (SCL, ). Here, the text rep­
resents the wife as necessary, not to the institution of marriage or society’s
well-being, but to the husband’s sadistic ego. Once outside the home, Janet
recognizes that she has played the role of the “other,” whose presence in
the abusive marriage produces her husband’s power and selfhood.
By herself, her husband, her friends, and by Milby’s inhabitants, Janet
is variously framed in the legal and social discourses of the age. Before the
separation, Mrs. Dempster rehearses the Victorian cliché of blaming abuse
on the woman’s poor housekeeping skills: “Mrs Dempster had not yet
learned to believe that her son, Robert, would have gone wrong if he had
married the right woman—a meek woman like herself, who would have
borne him children, and been a deft, orderly housekeeper” (SCL, ).¹¹
After the separation, Mr. Tryan suggests the unexpectedly secular and prac­
tical solution of negotiating a separation agreement between Dempster and
Janet. Mrs. Raynor also supports legal intervention: “[W]e should consult
some one that may interfere for you with your husband” (SCL, ). Janet
herself contemplates a peace bond: “She had a vague notion of some pro­
tection the law might give her, if she could prove her life in danger” (SCL,
). At the same time, she remains unwilling “to put herself openly in the
position of a wronged woman seeking redress” (SCL, ). Instead, she is
drawn to the self-sacrificing script of Dickens’s texts: “I thought I should
like to go back to him, and try to make up for what has been wrong in me”
(SCL, ). Eliot’s text finally takes us to the servants’ quarters, where sen­
sationalism and fantasies of revenge mix comically with sympathy:
“I wouldn’t stan’ bein’ mauled as she is by no husband, not if he was the
biggest lord i’ the land. It’s poor work bein’ a wife at that price: I’d sooner
be a cook wi’out perkises.” (SCL, )
“She may well do as she does. I know I’m glad enough of a drop o’ summat myself when I’m plagued.” (SCL, )
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“I’d tek care he didn’t leather me—no, not if he was my husban’ ten
times o’er; I’d pour hot drippin’ on him sooner. But the missis hesn’t a
sperrit like me. He’ll mek her come back, you’ll see; he’ll come round
her somehow.” (SCL, )
“It’s my belief he’s murdered her, and shut her up i’ that closet as he keeps
locked al’ys. He’s capible on’t.” (SCL, )
The text thus frames Janet from multiple, heterogeneous viewpoints.
Even the abused woman herself seems to speak in different voices, em­
bracing first the socially approved script of loyalty, self-sacrifice, and guilt,
and then that of self-preservation. Part  thus renders both the intensity
and the complexity of public discourse surrounding the abused woman in
the s. Moreover, it does little to resolve the tensions between these het­
erogeneous viewpoints. The crucial point is that Janet has entered public
view as well as public discourse. Her appearance at Mr. Tryan’s lecture
symbolizes her entry into community public life: “Many eyes were turned
on Janet with a look of surprise as she walked up the aisle of Paddiford
church. . . . [S]he had left herself now no room for proud reluctance or
weak hesitation” (SCL, –). In the three days since Dempster forced
her from the house at midnight, Janet has become a public figure.
Meanwhile, the text also frames Dempster in terms that engage con­
temporary discourses on wife assault. In his case, it both deploys and re­
examines the powerful metaphor of animal battery that I examined in
chapter . As I have argued, Victorians connected animal and human vio­
lence, seeing animal ownership as a powerful metaphor for women’s legal
“nonexistence.” Dempster’s portrayal clearly draws on this metaphor: his
clients notice that when he is in a bad temper, he drives his horses furi­
ously (SCL, ). Like Mill and Taylor, who argued that a man’s perceived
ownership of his wife led to a perceived right to flog her, Eliot writes
explicitly that “an unloving, tyrannous, brutal man needs no motive to
prompt his cruelty; he needs only the perpetual presence of a woman he
can call his own” (SCL, ; my emphasis). Dempster’s violence is clearly
directed at animals or people he believes he owns or controls: his horses,
his servants, and his wife. When Janet leaves, he whips the coachman. As his
housemaid says perceptively, “We shall hev a pretty house wi’ him if [Janet]
doesn’t come back—he’ll want to be leatherin’ us, I shouldn’t wonder. He
must hev somethin’ t’ ill-use when he’s in a passion” (SCL, ).
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Yet Eliot’s use of the analogy between beaten wife and beaten ani­
mal differs significantly from that of Dickens or Brontë. In Dickens’s and
Brontë’s texts, the animal’s passive response feminizes it, the “spaniel”-like
fawning conveying the woman’s passive response to battery. The exception
is Bill Sikes’s dog Bull’s-eye, whose aggressive resistance highlights by con­
trast Nancy’s extreme loyalty to her abusive partner. In “Janet’s Repentance,”
therefore, there is ready irony in the fact that the wife, the coachman, and
the horse in turn throw over the traces. First Janet leaves, then the coach­
man threatens criminal charges, then the horse pitches Dempster from the
gig, injuring him fatally. There is thus a certain justice in Dempster’s end,
a justice that Dickens comes close to achieving when he depicts Sikes jump­
ing from the building at the sight of Nancy’s eyes in Bull’s-Eye’s face. But
whereas Bull’s-Eye jumps after Sikes in a self-immolating leap, nothing dis­
turbs the ironic nemesis of Dempster’s death when his beaten horse decides
that enough is enough.
Even more significantly, “Janet’s Repentance” suggests that wife abuse
is motivated not just by perceived ownership of a woman but by an active
“lust for torture” that is better satisfied by torturing a woman than by tor­
turing an animal: “A whole park of tame or timid-eyed animals to torment
at his will would not serve him so well to glut his lust for torture; they could
not feel as one woman does; they could not throw out the keen retort
which whets the edge of hatred” (SCL, ). This view of marital violence
as the active and enjoyable practice of “torture” (Eliot here anticipates the
title of Frances Power Cobbe’s  article, “Wife-Torture in England”)
significantly alters the wife/animal analogy. Domestic abuse, the text im­
plies, is about controlling not just the woman’s body but also her mind.
Not until the case of Kelly v. Kelly (–) would the divorce court rec­
ognize mental cruelty, but in “Janet’s Repentance” one can see a nascent
interest in the psychological aspects of abuse. Contemporary critics noticed
Eliot’s subtle rendering of psychology: “Janet’s Repentance,” they said, was
so realistic that it read like a biography (Martin, ).
Deathbed Sentences: Dempster’s Delirium and Death
Eliot’s interest in the psychological aspects of abusive relationships is evi­
dent in Dempster’s illness and death. As I noted in chapter , Victorian texts
commonly feature delirium scenes in which the abuser confronts his wife.
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In Dempster’s illness, he reenacts the key scenes of his marriage. We see a
kind of macabre replay of his violence, this time with Janet as a witness, not
a recipient, of the abusive acts. First, in conventional fashion, his illness
reveals his guilt: Robert Dempster believes that he has killed Janet. More­
over, like Dickens’s dying actor, he is terrified of his abused wife: “‘[S]he’s
coming. . . . [S]he’s cold. . . . [S]he’s dead. . . . [S]he’ll strangle me with her
black hair. Ah!’ he shrieked aloud, ‘her hair is all serpents. . . . [T]hey’re
black serpents. . . . [T]hey hiss. . . . [T]hey hiss. . . . [L]et me go. . . . [L]et
me go. . . . [S]he wants to drag me with her cold arms’” (SCL, ).
But Dempster’s death involves more than fear of retribution. In his
delirium, he relentlessly pursues themes of enclosure and escape. He is ob­
sessed with the “iron closet” (SCL, ), the place where he locked Janet’s
clothes in a symbolic gesture of containment on the night he thrust her
from their home. As I have already argued, these seemingly contradictory
gestures of containment and expulsion symbolize Dempster’s belief in his
absolute control over Janet—he did not believe that there was an “outside”
to their marriage. In his delirium, however, the “iron closet” becomes per­
meable: “Not there, isn’t she? Why do you ask me where she is? . . . She
buried herself in the iron chest. . . . [S]he left her clothes out, though. . . .
[S]he isn’t dead. . . . [W]hy do you pretend she’s dead? . . . [S]he’s com­
ing. . . . [S]he’s coming out of the iron closet” (SCL, ). Whereas Dickens’s
dying clown dreams of his wife’s vengeance, Dempster dreams that Janet
is mobile. On his deathbed, he recognizes what has already occurred: his
locked private space has been opened. Janet has returned to his bedside,
but his control of her movements and behavior has been broken. This is
analogous to the scene in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in which Helen de­
mands that Arthur sign a legal document to guarantee her continued right
to retain their son in her custody and to “let me take him away whenever
and wherever I please, if I should hereafter judge it necessary” (TWH, ).
But whereas Brontë affirms Helen’s quasi-legal “rights,” Eliot conveys Janet’s
essential freedom when her husband imagines her spirit escaping from its
locked space. In Dempster’s nightmare, he recognizes a fundamental social
reality. Through Janet’s acceptance by the community—through her abil­
ity to move and exist outside the home—the closed nature of the middleclass home has been irrevocably breached.
What remains is the powerful drive for the woman’s return that drove
Dombey and Son to its conclusion with Florence at her father’s side. After
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Dempster’s accident, Janet starts to enact this script, in keeping with the
prevailing Victorian tendency to sentimentalize the woman’s loyalty to her
abuser. The complexity of part  seems suddenly to close down:
[S]he began to be conscious of her relief from the burden of decision as
to her future course. The question that agitated her, about returning to
her husband, had been solved in a moment; and this illness, after all,
might be the herald of another blessing. . . . Robert would get better; this
illness might alter him; he would be a long time feeble, needing help,
walking with a crutch, perhaps. She would wait on him with such ten­
derness, such all-forgiving love, that the old harshness and cruelty must
melt away for ever under the heart-sunshine that she would pour around
him. (SCL, –)
With scenes like this (strikingly similar to Dombey and Son’s reunion fan­
tasy), there is little wonder that “Janet’s Repentance” has aroused the ire of
modern feminist critics.¹² Jennifer Uglow, for example, writes, “The women
in Scenes of Clerical Life are holy sacrifices through which men’s lives are
given spiritual meaning. They take the brunt of structural as well as per­
sonal alienation and distorted values.”¹³ However, the text does not allow
Janet’s sentimental dream of reconciliation to be realized. First, Mr. Pilgrim
tells Janet that Dempster will die, so there is no chance of the marriage
being rehabilitated. There remains the chance of a deathbed reconcilia­
tion, for which Janet longs: “[S]he only yearned for one moment in which
she might satisfy the deep forgiving pity of her soul by one look of love,
one word of tenderness” (SCL, ). However, Robert’s last gesture before
he dies is deeply ambiguous: he opens his eyes “full on Janet” and makes a
“faintly perceptible motion of the lips.” The narrator undercuts any possi­
bility of sentimental reconciliation: “[T]he moment of speech was forever
gone—the moment for asking pardon of her, if he wanted to ask it” (SCL,
; my emphasis). When Janet bends to kiss her abuser, her lips touch a
corpse. The conservative script of return and reunion has been refused,
and to a great degree undercut. Janet’s repentance will take another form.
Janet’s Repentance
It seems, perhaps, too obvious to point out that the story of “Janet’s Repen­
tance” asks us to contemplate just that—the repentance of the heroine. Yet
this issue of repentance is by no means simple. First, it is not clear what
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Janet should repent of. Alcoholism? Being a bad daughter? A bad wife?
Second, all of these write Janet into a discourse of sin and forgiveness at
odds with the secular nature of Eliot’s text. How might we, then, under­
stand Janet’s need for “repentance” in this secular context? For it is a central
paradox that Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life is concerned with secular issues.
The many who surmised that the tales had been written by a clergyman
failed to notice that, despite their detailed rendering of clerical life, the
stories emphasize human sympathy rather than Christian faith.¹⁴ This secu­
larity is confirmed by the text’s use of religious imagery to depict human
events. For example, “earnest sacramental kisses” (SCL, ) seal Janet’s
bond with Mrs. Pettifer, and Janet’s “baptismal epochs” of the soul (SCL,
) occur with Mr. Tryan. Even the incarnation is given human, not the­
ological, meaning, as ideas are “made flesh” in human form (SCL, ).
Thus, although the title “Janet’s Repentance” might seem to point to a re­
ligious discourse of sin and repentance surrounding the abused woman,
the text’s focus on the secular suggests another interpretation. Eliot, I sug­
gest, reinterprets the idea of repentance and the biblical texts surrounding
this concept in secular and politically progressive ways. First, the text de­
picts the abused woman as the biblical “lost sheep,” thus confirming the
social value of her rescue. Second, the text reinterprets the idea of repen­
tance itself, separating it from its Puritan association with sin and return­
ing it to its Greek meaning of “turning” or “rebirth.”
First, let us explore how the text engages with one of the key New Tes­
tament parables on the subject of repentance, the parable of the lost sheep.
The biblical parable is as follows:
And he spake this parable unto them, saying, What man of you, having
an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and
nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?
And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And
when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours,
saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which
was lost. I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sin­
ner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which
need no repentance.¹⁵
The first reference to this parable is from the perspective of Janet’s mother:
“Mrs Raynor had been reading about the lost sheep, and the joy there is in
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heaven over the sinner that repenteth. Surely the eternal love she believed
in through all the sadness of her lot, would not leave her child to wander
farther and farther into the wilderness till there was no turning” (SCL, ).
Though Mrs. Raynor’s perspective is conventional in most respects, there
is one unusual feature of this biblical paraphrase—that is, the use of the
word “turning.” “Turning” is the literal translation of the Greek metanoia,
commonly translated as “repentance.” Metanoia, which means “perceiving
afterwards,” signifies a “change of mind.”¹⁶ The English term “repentance”
is thus more limited than the “radical transformation of one’s being and
judgment” implied by metanoia.¹⁷ Eliot’s use of “turning” thus opens the
concept of repentance to the idea of radical and transformative change,
without the overwhelming emphasis on penance or fault.
The text’s second reference to Luke :– opens up the parable still
further. This sustained contemplation occurs at the opening of the serial’s
concluding part, and offers a fully secular reading of the parable. The text
quotes Luke :: “It was probably a hard saying to the Pharisees, that ‘there
is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and
nine just persons that need no repentance’” (SCL, ). The joy in heaven,
Eliot notes, is “entirely out of correspondence with arithmetical proportion”
(SCL, ): statisticians would value the ninety-nine over the one. But the
heart that has learned pity through suffering “insists on caring for individ­
uals” and “refuses to adopt the quantitative view of human anguish” (SCL,
). Adopting biblical phrasing to heighten her secular reading of the
biblical text, Eliot writes, “And so it comes to pass that for the man who
knows sympathy because he has known sorrow,” the angels’ rejoicing over
the one lost sheep “does not jar with the language of his own heart”: “It
only tells him, that for angels too there is a transcendent value in human
pain, which refuses to be settled by equations; that the eyes of the angels
too are turned away from the serene happiness of the righteous to bend
with yearning pity on the poor erring soul wandering in the desert where
no water is” (SCL, –). Crucially, the text accepts the “language of the
heart” as the test of the biblical lesson: though subtly rendered, this ac­
ceptance secularizes the parable. Human pain and human sympathy, not
sin and repentance, are the text’s key values.
Eliot’s renderings of Luke :– invite us to reconsider how the con­
cept of metanoia and the parable of the lost sheep apply to Janet. In this
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context it is important to realize that some Victorians recommended a kind
of utilitarian arithmetic when it came to abused women. For example, in
April , Margaret Oliphant argued in Blackwood’s that the law should
not be changed to redress abusive marriages because the legal shift would
jeopardize the “general peace” in order to protect a small minority: “Bride­
groom and bride alike enter defenceless into their life; no one can come
between them to help the weakest. . . . There have been bad fathers, bad
mothers, children heartless and accursed; yet none would break the gen­
eral bonds of nature for sake of these examples. Not even to redress such
clamorous wrongs can we put the general peace in jeopardy” (LCW, ).
Eliot’s reading of the lost sheep parable and her refusal “to adopt the quan­
titative view of human anguish” (SCL, ) refutes this privileging of the
common good at the expense of the few. Moreover, the text focuses not
on the “clamorous wrongs” described in “The Laws Concerning Women”
(LCW, ), but on silent suffering like Janet’s, which can readily be ig­
nored. Eliot takes the parable of the lost sheep and makes it a mandate for
active help to relieve such silent suffering.
Eliot’s secular reading of Luke :– thus opens up the very concept
of “Janet’s Repentance.” The text shows Janet’s strong sense of wrongdoing
(or conventional repentance) concerning her alcoholism, her marriage, and
her relationship with her mother. But the imagery of baptism, renewal,
and growth more than counterbalances this emphasis on wrongdoing.
Janet’s baptism into community represents a version of metanoia, a radical
transformation of her being. At the same time, I would suggest that this
“turning” or repentance is fundamentally secular. She is transformed by
sympathy, baptized into community. Janet’s ordeal and recovery transform
not only herself but Milby also.
As I have already pointed out, Eliot suggests that Evangelical religion
brought to Milby “that recognition of something to be lived for beyond
the mere satisfaction of self ” (SCL, ). The community embrace of Janet
signals this moral awakening. The sacramental effect is reciprocal: both
Janet and the community are baptized into new life. Indeed, Mr. Tryan
emphasizes that Janet has wronged others by refusing to admit her trou­
bles before. He says of Janet’s mother, “Do not wound her . . . by shutting
her out any longer from your troubles. It is right that you should be with
her” (SCL, ). In “Janet’s Repentance,” the battered woman’s silence is
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thus figured as a wound to the community, whereas in Dombey and Son,
the act of bringing public attention to battery figuratively injures the abused
woman herself.
I should note here that in Daniel Deronda (), Eliot continues her
contemplation of marital abuse but switches her attention to mental cruelty,
in a present-day setting. And there it is fascinating to see her reiterate many
of the moves made by earlier writers in their consideration of physical as­
sault. Gwendolen sees no outside to her marriage to Grandcourt; she finds
no community of support, but only her mentor figure, the lone and soonto-be exiled Deronda, whose help she most needs at the very moment at
which he disappears from her community into his own. In contrast to
Janet’s baptism into community, Gwendolen is inculcated into lonely
widowhood; her only escape from her abusive marriage is through Grand­
court’s death (it is crucial that in “Janet’s Repentance” and The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall the heroines’ escapes precede the deaths of their husbands).
Moreover, the imagery that signals Dempster’s view of the home as radi­
cally closed—the iron closet—attaches itself in Deronda to the abused wife,
as Gwendolen fears the image of the door in the panel, the tiny closed
space that represents her marriage. Eliot’s radical vision in the s on the
subject of women’s physical abuse thus seems to have failed in the s in
the face of mental cruelty.
It is all the more striking, then, that “Janet’s Repentance” should, as
early as , have envisaged a way out of the impasse of the closed home.
And in the context of the wife-assault debates that ran alongside “Janet’s
Repentance” when it was first serialized in the periodical press, Eliot’s in­
sistence on community was new and indeed radical. “Janet’s Repentance”
shows the community as responsible in its highest duty for the acceptance,
healing, and integration of the battered woman. Moreover, Eliot’s repre­
sentation of this community is quietly radical in that it shows women as
active and vibrant parts of the culture that receives, protects, and nurtures
Janet. As Uglow notes, Eliot’s text portrays a “strong ‘women’s culture’”
(Uglow, ), as Janet’s friends and her mother work first with Mr. Tryan to
rescue Janet and then to help Mr. Tryan himself in his final illness. In turn,
Janet rescues children by adopting them—a crucial symbol of her involve­
ment in this nurturing community in which bonds are constructed by
love, not law. The very fact that a single woman, Mrs. Pettifer, takes Janet
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in indicates that Eliot envisages women as creating and sustaining viable
supports in the community. Instead of portraying man as woman’s natural
protector (as Dickens does in “The Pawnbroker’s Shop”), “Janet’s Repen­
tance” depicts the wounded individual receiving compassion from a caring
society of both men and women. Janet is thus baptized as an individual
into a caring society of individuals. We can hardly imagine a greater—or
quieter—challenge to the protective structures of coverture.
Although Marian Evans signed the  Petition for Reform of the Mar­
ried Women’s Property Law launched by her friend Barbara Leigh Smith,
her fiction does not advocate legal remedies for wife assault. In an era when
fines and jail terms for aggravated assault on women and children were de­
bated and increased and when flogging was passionately debated as a pun­
ishment for wife beating, George Eliot addressed neither punishment nor
redress. Instead, she focused on the relationship between private home and
community as fundamental to the wife-assault issue. As it was predomi­
nantly constructed in legal and literary discourse, the middle-class home
was seen as separate from the rest of society—as a “place of Peace,” to use
John Ruskin’s term (Lilies, ). In contrast, “Janet’s Repentance” depicts the
home as continuous with the community—always part of and inseparable
from a larger human bond. In this respect, Eliot could be said to have
challenged one of the fundamental assumptions governing mid-Victorian
views on wife assault.
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| |
S T R A N G E R E V E L AT I O N S
The Divorce Court, the Newspaper,
and The Woman in White
I “A C  I” (), Sherlock Holmes declares to Watson that
“life is infinitely stranger” than fiction. “If we could fly out of that window
hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep
in at the queer things which are going on,” he remarks, “it would make all
fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and
unprofitable.” Watson is not convinced. The newspapers, he argues, push
realism to its “extreme limits,” and yet what they report of London life
seems bland and prosaic. Testing his theory, Watson reads at random a
headline from that day’s newspaper: “A husband’s cruelty to his wife.” The
headline is from the divorce column and the story, he tells Holmes, is
“perfectly familiar.” Even without reading the article, he knows what he
will find: “the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the bruise, the
sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of writers could invent nothing
more crude.” Holmes disagrees. He has worked on the Dundas separa­
tion case, he tells Watson, and it supports his theory that life is “infinitely
strange”: “The husband was a teetolaler, there was no other woman, and
the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of wind­
ing up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife,
which you will allow is not an action likely to occur to the imagination of

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the average story-teller” (SSH, ). In Culture and Adultery: The Novel,
the Newspaper and the Law, –, Barbara Leckie uses this scene to il­
lustrate the “potent complexity” and high visibility of adultery narratives
in Victorian newspapers after the divorce court’s opening in January .
Watson’s reaction, she argues, points to the commonness of adultery nar­
ratives in divorce court journalism, while Holmes’s theory asserts their
multiplicity and constant creation of “new alignments and new meanings.”¹
The same visibility and complexity, I would urge, is true of wife-abuse
narratives in the divorce columns of newspapers—indeed, the headline
Watson reads is not about adultery, but about cruelty as grounds for judi­
cial separation. After , the divorce court brought unprecedented pub­
licity to wife abuse, as marital cruelty across all classes was dissected in the
court and the newspapers. Women made up  percent of petitioners in
the new court (Horstman, ), and their most common allegation (other
than adultery) was cruelty (Hammerton, Cruelty, ).² As the Times re­
marked in December , reflecting on the first year of the new court’s
operation, divorce cases, taken “in a batch, . . . constitute a strange revela­
tion of the secret doings of the middle classes in this country” (Times, 
December , f ).
This chapter examines the relationship between the “strange revela­
tions” of wife abuse in divorce court journalism and the representations of
wife abuse in sensation fiction, the new genre that flourished in the same
period. Tromp argues that sensation novels offered “a very different image
of violence in the home than that contained in official reports” (Tromp,
), and that they launched an “alternative discourse” to that of the “scripted
social text” of the law (Tromp, , ). Specifically, she locates in The
Woman in White “an exposure” of marital violence in a wealthy home, a
counter to the parliamentary debates on the  divorce bill, which, she
points out, located wife abuse in the “humbler ranks,” in which “working­
class men were perceived as ‘drunken, profligate husbands’ and workingclass women as provocateurs whose infidelity or dissolution forced their
husbands into drunkenness and abuse” (Tromp, , ). There can be no
question that The Woman in White exposes marital cruelty in the upper
classes. In this “strange family story” (WW, ), Sir Percival Glyde—
described as a “mean, cunning, and brutal man” with a “savage temper”
(WW, , )—pressures his wife Laura to sign away her fortune to him,
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bruises her arms, dismisses her maid, locks her in her room, and arranges
for Laura to be abducted to an insane asylum while he stages her death.
Tromp astutely observes that where spousal assault is concerned, the novel’s
plot is conservative: the abusive Sir Percival Glyde turns out to be literally
as well as symbolically illegitimate, while his abused wife changes places
with a lower-class, illegitimate woman, Anne Catherick. These plot devices
relegate wife abuse to the lower classes, “purg[ing] violence from the houses
of lords” (Tromp, ). Tromp argues that the text nevertheless “compels
the reader to reconsider the potential production of violence in the upperclass home, especially because the revelation of Percival’s identity is long
delayed” (Tromp, ).
Tromp’s penetrating analysis of marital violence in Collins’s text does
not, however, contemplate the novel’s relation to divorce court journalism
after . While Tromp uses the  debates on the Divorce Bill to assess
how radical the novel’s exposure of marital violence was, I would suggest
that a more immediate context is the divorce court itself, which had been
operating for eleven months when the novel began serialization in All the
Year Round on  November . Indeed, the novel’s serialization imme­
diately followed the appearance of divorce columns in newspapers after the
newly appointed judge Sir Cresswell Cresswell opened the divorce court
in January . As Hammerton observes, these newspaper accounts of di­
vorce cases brought unprecedented publicity to marital conflict: “[T]he
daily diet of reports was wide enough in scope to expose the full range of
marital discord, from sensational adulteries to savage violence” (Hammer­
ton, Cruelty, ). Whereas in  Parliament had not perceived upperclass men as dangerous to their wives (Tromp, ), starting in January ,
newspaper reports on divorce trials revealed to Victorians that such men
were in fact just “as likely as those lower on the social scale to strike their
wives with pokers and similar weapons, throw them downstairs, beat them
during pregnancy, enforce sexual intercourse after childbirth, and indulge
in marital rape or enforced sodomy” (Hammerton, “Victorian Marriage,”
). Moreover, the multiplicity and heterogeneity of marital-assault nar­
ratives in divorce court journalism—narratives that crossed class lines—
effectively broke down what Tromp calls the “seamless text” constructed
by Parliament in  (Tromp, ). The prominence of these journalistic
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narratives calls into question whether sensation fiction played the central
role Tromp claims in exposing marital violence outside the working class.
I would argue that it did not. No incident of marital abuse in The Woman
in White (and there are many) exceeds the revelations of newspaper ac­
counts of divorce trials up to the novel’s final serial number in August .
I suggest instead that the sensation novel and the newspaper together par­
ticipated in the exposure of spousal violence that Tromp ascribes to the
sensation novel alone. Moreover, in its serial structure, its preoccupation
with evidence, its multiple narratives, and its focus on domestic secrets and
their exposure, The Woman in White declares its intimate relation to the
very genre of divorce court journalism.
Strange Revelations: Marital Cruelty and the Divorce Court
“The establishment of the Divorce Court,” pronounced the Times in May
, “has been one of the greatest social revolutions of our time” (Times,
 May , c). One of the most revolutionary aspects of this revolu­
tionary institution was its use by abused women. As Horstman notes, MPs
who drafted and voted on the Divorce Act did not anticipate either its
widespread use by women or the sheer number of cruelty allegations that
would be heard by the new court after . Advocates for the bill had as­
sumed that divorce would very largely be granted to men (Horstman, –),
as the act’s double standard notoriously allowed a husband a divorce on the
grounds of adultery alone, while a wife had to prove adultery plus either
incest, bigamy, rape, sodomy, bestiality, cruelty, or desertion (Horstman,
). A picture of the new court in the Illustrated London News (May )
implicitly registers this sexual double standard, as women are almost ex­
cluded from the visual field, appearing only in the bottom left corner,
grossly outnumbered by male judges, male barristers, and male spectators,
and excluded from the shaft of light that falls across Sir Cresswell Cresswell
(ILN,  May , ; fig. .). Yet while the act severely limited women’s
access to divorce, it did offer to an abused wife the possibility of a judicial
separation on the grounds of cruelty alone.³ Such a separation would give
her the right to be treated as a femme sole with respect to any property she
subsequently acquired. She was also freed from the legal disabilities of
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wifehood “for the purposes of contract, and wrongs and injuries, and suing
and being sued in any civil proceedings” (Doggett, –). However, the
act carried over the restrictive definition of cruelty from the Ecclesiastical
Court system: cruelty was defined as either actual physical violence or “a rea­
sonable apprehension of bodily hurt” (Hammerton, “Victorian Marriage,”
–). As has already been noted, Gladstone pushed for an expanded
legal definition of matrimonial cruelty, arguing that mental suffering as
well as physical force should count as grounds for divorce:
I have made some inquiries on this matter, and I understand that there
is no doubt, whatever, among the highest ecclesiastical authorities, . . .
that cruelty, for which divorce is to be given in these Courts, must im­
port danger to life, limb, or health, or a reasonable apprehension of such
danger. Is that the only kind of cruelty which prevails in civilized soci­
ety? Is that the only kind of cruelty which finds its way into the hearts
of educated and refined women? Is not the cruelty of insult just as gross,
just as wicked, just as abominable as the cruelty of mere force? ( Parl.
Deb. s., col. )
Despite such efforts, when the Matrimonial Causes Act was finally passed
in August , the definition of matrimonial cruelty remained unchanged.
Given these restrictions, Punch saw little chance that women would
gain much from the new court, observing in September , “You have
no right for Divorce, , to stir / (Save in cases so shocking they rarely
occur)” (Punch,  September , ; my emphasis). Had the Divorce
Act retained wives’ grounds for divorce as they existed before  (adul­
tery plus bigamy or incest), Horstman argues, such predictions would
have been fulfilled. However, by adding cruelty and desertion to the list of
marital crimes, Parliament opened the doors to women hoping for divorce
(see Once a Week,  February , ; fig. .). In the first year of the
divorce court’s operation, wives filed  of the  divorce petitions
(Horstman, ), an “immense number” according to Lord Redesdale, who
reviewed the statistics of the new court in the House of Lords on  July
 ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ). In divorce and separation cases filed by
women between  and , cruelty proved to be the most common
offense, cited by wives in  percent of divorce and separation petitions (as
compared to its citation in . percent of husbands’ petitions) (Hammer­
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Figure .. “The New Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, Westminster Hall,”
Illustrated London News ( May ): .
ton, Cruelty, ).⁴ Victorians in the late s were thus shocked by both
the number of women petitioners and the number of cruelty cases. Once a
Week facetiously registered this astonishing reversal of the court’s anticipated
use: “Sir Cresswell Cresswell represents ,, of English wives. . . . I
am an English husband. I write for husbands—and in the husband inter­
est. Brother husbands! we are betrayed!” (Once a Week,  February ,
). Hammerton points out that the “overwhelming preponderance of
women petitioners” in cruelty cases to some extent reflected the Divorce
Act’s double standard (Hammerton, Cruelty, ), as women had to find a
second grounds for divorce. Nevertheless, the huge volume of cases gave
shocking and unanticipated evidence of marital cruelty. As Horstman con­
cludes, “Either wives feared the stigma of divorce court less than the cruelty
of their husbands or there was more cruelty than expected” (Horstman
, ).
Modern historians agree that divorce court journalism after 
opened a “vivid window” on Victorian marriage (Hammerton, Cruelty, ;
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Figure .. Illustration for “Divorce A Vinculo,” Once a Week ( February ): .
Horstman, ). Hammerton argues that, in particular, divorce and sepa­
ration cases revealed the marital “tensions involved in cruelty charges”
(Cruelty, ). Between the divorce court’s opening in January  and the
last serial number of The Woman in White in August , Victorian read­
ers had been thoroughly inducted into the new era of publicity surround­
ing marital violence. The following list of examples drawn from the Times
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between January  and August  gives the modern reader a sampling
of the domestic threats and assaults cited in divorce and separation peti­
tions in the new court. These accounts of marital cruelty were at once
repetitive (in telling the story of spousal assault again and again) and stark
in their difference (in reflecting a multiplicity of types of violence and their
origins in all classes). A regular reader of the Times could have read about
a painter/glazier who had beaten his wife with a strap and cut her with a
knife (Hall v. Hall, Times,  July , f ); the rector of Burghfield, who
had dragged his wife into a carriage and taken her back home to a room
with all its furniture removed (Cherry v. Cherry, Times,  December ,
e); an innkeeper who had thrown a leg of mutton at his wife (Dowden v.
Dowden, Times,  April , b); a wine merchant who had tried to throw
his wife over the banister (Winstone v. Winstone, Times,  February ,
d); an “illiterate and eccentric” barrister “of considerable landed property”
who had threatened to throw his wife off a cliff (Stoate v. Stoate, Times, 
February , b); an aristocratic younger son and military captain who
had boxed his wife’s ears (Boynton v. Boynton, Times,  January , c,
d); a distiller who had twined his wife’s apron around her neck (Wood v.
Wood, Times,  January , d); a surgeon’s assistant who had threat­
ened his wife with a bowie knife (Palmer v. Palmer, Times,  July , e);
an independent minister turned chemist’s apprentice who had threatened
his wife with a pistol (Ray v. Ray, Times,  April , d); the son of an
Irish peer who had threatened his wife with a meat chopper (Rowley v.
Rowley, Times,  November , b); an artist who had beaten his naked
wife with a furze brush (Anthony v. Anthony, Times,  December , a);
one publican who had struck his wife with a riding whip and a bronze
candlestick ( Jaquier v. Jaquier, Times,  June , d) and another who
had flogged his wife with a clothesline (Ferguson v. Ferguson, Times,  June
, d ); and finally, in close parallel to the “sensational” plot of The
Woman in White, a barrister who had induced his wife to execute a deed
transferring her inheritance to him (Dax v. Dax, Times,  July , d)
and a merchant who had threatened to drive his wife to a madhouse or to
her grave within six months (Green v. Green, Times,  June , c). As
these examples show, such cases crossed class lines. Indeed, Hammerton’s
survey shows that  percent of petitioners citing cruelty were working
class,  percent lower middle class and  percent middle and upper class
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(Hammerton, Cruelty, ). As he notes, these accounts of cruelty undercut
the “comfortable assumption that marital violence was a problem peculiar
to the lower orders” (Hammerton, Cruelty, ). The Times wrote wryly in
December , “Sir Cresswell Cresswell is holding up a mirror to the age.
We have been accustomed in our writings, in our public meetings, and in all
places and in all manners, to point to the middle classes of English society
as models of virtue and patterns to mankind. . . . Are the middle classes re­
ally better and of purer life than their fellow-creatures more highly or more
humbly up the social scale?” (Times,  December , e).
As Tromp points out, when The Woman in White was published in
–, critics debated whether the novel’s plot reflected “improbable in­
cident” (as the Saturday Review opined) or “stern reality” (as Henry James
saw it).⁵ Margaret Oliphant argued that everything in the book was “le­
gitimate, natural, and possible” (Page, ), while the Dublin University
Magazine objected to many incidents as “grotesque or improbable” (Page,
). How grotesque or improbable was it for Victorians to imagine marital
assault in the houses of the middle class or the gentry? Did Sir Percival’s
abuse of Laura shatter Victorians’ assumptions about wife abuse? The an­
swer is that the flood of cruelty cases in the divorce court after  had
radically unsettled any presupposition of fixed knowledge on this subject.
As the Times wrote, “[W]e do not believe that any one either of the most
eager supporters or violent opponents of the Divorce Bill of  had the
least idea of the quantity of matrimonial misery which was silent only for
want of the opportunity to express itself. . . . Beneath the smooth current
of English social existence were hidden many strange things which now
for the first time are brought to light” (Times,  January , d).
Some responded to the onslaught of cruelty cases by assuming that
the charges were fabricated. Speaking in the House of Lords on  April
 on the “great social danger” of the divorce court’s successful use by
women, Lord Campbell suggested that wives, instead of suing for a judi­
cial separation, “invariably added” a cruelty charge and opted for divorce
( Parl. Deb. s., col. –). Similarly, Once a Week posited that women
and their advocates concocted cruelty charges in order to obtain divorces. Its
 article “Divorce a Vinculo; or, The Terrors of Sir Cresswell Cresswell”
featured a barrister who leaves the court lest the jury “catch him laughing”
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at his client’s trumped-up claims: “Groans—agony—woe—stuff and non­
sense. That’s only my client, Mrs. Dobbs, repeating her lesson; and devil­
ish well she does it, too. . . . We had to prove cruelty in order to entitle us
to dissolution, and so I called Mrs. Dobbs, and left her to make out her
own case. Women have a surprising genius for these things” (Once a Week,
 February , ). The same journal also ran a pair of illustrations
showing the discrepancy between “The Case according to the Petitioner’s
Statement” (fig. .) and “The Case according to the Respondent’s State­
ment” (fig. .), strongly suggesting that accounts of marital behavior were
exaggerated for the purpose of divorce actions (Once a Week,  March ,
, ). Although Victorians might have doubted the veracity of certain
cruelty charges, the very public accumulation of charges in the newspaper
(plus wives’ success in obtaining divorces) provided substantial evidence
that marital violence crossed class lines in ways that Victorians had failed
to apprehend. During the debates on the Aggravated Assaults Act Amend­
ment Bill (), Mr. Walter acknowledged this when he reminded mem­
bers of the House of Commons that “[i]f they looked to the revelations in
the divorce court they might well fear that if the secrets of all households
were known these brutal assaults upon women were by no means confined
to the lower classes” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ). Moreover, Parliament’s al­
teration of the evidentiary rules of the new court in  to admit petition­
ers’ uncorroborated accounts of cruelty ( Parl. Deb. s., col. )—while
corroboration remained necessary to prove adultery—indicates a surpris­
ing willingness to accept that such narratives might indeed be true. Finally,
Hammerton suggests that cruelty cases reveal a “fairly common theme of
wives’ resistance to what, in their judgment, amounted to an unreasonable
exercise of authority by their husbands”—resistance rarely extending to
any “outright rejection” of patriarchal supremacy, but suggesting that, in
practice, wives’ submission was “hedged about with limitations” (Ham­
merton, “Victorian Marriage,” , ). What is certain, then, is that the
years  to  were ones in which Victorian assumptions about wife
assault were radically unsettled. The Woman in White—with its plot that
at once reinscribes and challenges such assumptions—participates in a
wider phenomenon of ideological upheaval caused by the divorce court
and the newspaper as well as the sensation novel.
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Figure .. “The Case according to the Petitioner’s statement,” Once a Week ( March
): .
“Calculating on the Exposure”
The fulcrum on which The Woman in White (parts  to ) turns is a
baronet’s abuse of his wife. In what her solicitor calls a “flagrant breach of
trust” (WW, ), Sir Percival tries to force Laura to sign over her fortune
to him; he also attempts to strong-arm her into revealing the secret that
Anne Catherick has told her about him, bruises her arm, imprisons her in
her room with a servant as a “gaoler” (WW, ), and dismisses her maid.
In response to these examples of marital “insult and injustice” (WW, ),
Laura’s sister Marian Halcombe immediately thinks in legal terms. The
mark on Laura’s arm, she says, “is a weapon to strike [Sir Percival] with”
(WW, ). She anticipates a trial: “I may have to swear to it” (WW, ).
Finally, she says grimly that “the lawyer shall know of the bruises on your
arm, and of the violence offered to you in this room” (WW, ). Laura
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Figure .. “The Case according to the Respondent’s statement,” Once a Week ( March
): .
objects: “But, think of the exposure, Marian!” But Marian persists: “I am
calculating on the exposure. Sir Percival has more to dread from it than
you have” (WW, ). In this preoccupation with revealing secrets and cal­
culating the risk of exposure, The Woman in White is very much a product
of the divorce court era. Set in  and  (Laura marries Sir Percival in
December ), the novel appealed to a post- sensibility, as the same
readers who devoured the serial version between  and  also de­
voured the sensational revelations of the new court. Indeed, Leckie argues
that Victorian novels and the divorce court journalism had much in com­
mon, both being serial in form and both cultivating the desire of readers
“for the next installment and for a resolution to the story/trial” (Leckie,
). The Woman in White partakes even more of this resemblance, as, like
divorce court journalism, it is obsessed with the detection and uncovering
of sexual secrets and domestic cruelty. Leckie’s book focuses on adultery as
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the main secret uncovered by divorce cases, but evidence suggests that Vic­
torian men dreaded the exposure of cruelty even more. For example, dur­
ing the trial of Place v. Place, a wife’s petition for judicial separation on
grounds of adultery, cruelty, and desertion, Mr. Place’s lawyer said that his
client would not dispute the adultery charge but was “anxious to deny on
his oath that he had ever ill-treated or injured his wife” (the husband was
accused of having strapped his wife down, struck her head against the wall
and broken a canvas partition). Sir Cresswell Cresswell remarked that it
was “not the first time since he had presided in that court that he had ob­
served that some gentlemen appeared to be quite careless as to any impu­
tation on their morality, but to be very sensitive to the charge of cruelty”
(Times,  April , c).
Exposure thus held both fear and fascination for a post- reader
consuming serial fiction and serial revelations of adultery and cruelty in the
divorce columns. In the newspapers and in the divorce court, the Asmodean
desire to raise the housetops was astonishingly realized. For example, the
Times summed up Suggate v. Suggate (a wife’s petition for separation on
grounds of cruelty) as follows: “[A] multitude of details with regard to the
married life of Mr. and Mrs. Suggate for the last  years, some of them of
a very disgusting nature, were laid before the Court” (Times,  June ,
e). In , at the request of Sir Cresswell Cresswell (Times,  November
, b), the House of Commons considered authorizing divorce court
judges to sit in private (thus banning spectators and the press, and effec­
tively limiting the public consumption of salacious detail) ( Parl. Deb.
s., col. ). The attorney general highlighted cruelty cases as a particu­
lar justification for in-camera sittings, arguing that the divorce court “was
a place of resort. . . . Crowds congregated there for the purpose of hear­
ing details which could only give gratification to depraved and diseased
minds. . . . One might well imagine a lady of sensitive feelings . . . shrink­
ing from having recourse to a tribunal where she would have to relate the
story of her husband’s cruelty in the presence of a jeering, laughing, and
prurient mob” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ). Interestingly, however, the bill
failed, and the publicity continued as a key function of the divorce court.
As Mr. Ayrton articulated the deciding principle in the House of Com­
mons, “The Court undertook to investigate chiefly the conduct of husbands
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towards their wives, and he could conceive no more salutary influence than
this very publicity must exert when held in terrorem over a tyrannical hus­
band. The conviction that his cruelty, though perpetrated in domestic pri­
vacy, might be dragged to light, and made to bring upon him the scorn
and reprobation of all right-minded men must have a beneficial effect”
( Parl. Deb. s., col. –). Parliamentarians were thus, in Marian
Halcombe’s words, “counting on the exposure” of cruelty trials to deter
abusive husbands. Public exposure lay also at the heart of sensation fic­
tion, which appealed to the reader’s simultaneous desire to uncover and
fear of what might be uncovered. As many critics have noted, the genre was
quintessentially about the uncovering of domestic secrets and domestic
shame: bigamy, illegitimacy, adultery, marital cruelty, and so on. Though
The Woman in White is set before the Divorce Act came into effect, its plot
structure of domestic mystery, detection, uncovering, and dramatic pub­
lic revelation is absolutely that of the post- period.
In particular, I would suggest that the novel exposes Sir Percival’s mari­
tal conduct to public scrutiny. The various narrators gradually undermine
Sir Percival’s illusion of manly domestic virtue, revealing him to be “ill­
tempered and disagreeable, and totally wanting in kindness and good feel­
ing”; of “savage temper” (WW, , ); and, finally, violent. Laura calls
her husband “unjust and cruel” (WW, ); Anne Catherick calls him a
“cruel husband” (WW, ); Count Fosco says that Laura has been treated
with “gross indignity” and “unpardonable insult” (WW, ); Madame
Fosco says to Sir Percival that she will not remain in a house “in which
ladies are treated as your wife and Miss Halcombe have been treated here
today” (WW, ); and Mrs. Michelson resigns as Sir Percival’s housekeeper
because she objects to his treatment of his wife (WW, ). The text re­
veals the household as a forum of potential witnesses, and their narratives,
letters, and documents as potential legal exhibits. Marian’s work as ama­
teur detective is telling in this respect: she uses her place in Sir Percival’s
household to spy on and record his domestic secrets, her diary becoming
a key testimonial to his abuse of her sister. Indeed, one of the text’s jokes
rests on the confusion between private and political spying, as Laura cor­
rectly identifies Count Fosco as a spy because he deliberately eavesdrops
on her meeting with Anne Catherick. Count Fosco is indeed a political
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spy, as the sensational ending reveals. But in this drama of domestic secrets
and revelations, the political spy causes nothing like the frisson of the do­
mestic spy or court witness, from whom private conduct is never secure.
Like the sensation novel, the divorce court made public acts of “pri­
vate” cruelty covering the gamut from name-calling to violence, imprison­
ment, rude treatment in front of servants or children, and inappropriate
treatment of the wife as mistress of the house. Not all of these acts met the
legal definition of cruelty—in Sir Cresswell Cresswell’s words, the court
accepted some accounts only as evidence of “expressions and acts tending to
show a harshness of conduct which might excite a degree of alarm” (Times,
 November , d). Nevertheless, the presence of such narratives in
the newspaper and in the sensation novel lent cultural credibility to the
idea that such acts were subject to investigation in a way they had not been
previously. In February , Once a Week registered the court’s radical
intrusion into private consciousness: “Lieutenant-General Sir Cresswell
Cresswell commands an army, I say, of five millions of able-bodied ma­
trons. He is in military possession of the country: he has billeted his fol­
lowers in two out of every three houses in the land. He knows—or can
know any time he chooses—what we say, what we do, nay, what we think
about” (Once a Week,  February , ; see also ; fig. .). The
male journalist starts to see potential witnesses everywhere: “I should not
like to have that rigid looking woman with the pinched lips engaged in the
capacity of my own wife’s confidential maid.” He even imagines his own
love letters “copied out at a rate of seventy words to the folio, and deliv­
ered into the hands of those objectionable, heartless men in wigs and gowns,
that they may serve as nets of my own knitting to entrap and bind me in
my struggles” (Once a Week,  February , , ). The divorce court
and the sensation novel thus had the joint effect of constructing a com­
munity in which marital conduct was never private, and in which male do­
mestic conduct was increasingly open to social scrutiny.
Marchmont v. Marchmont: “Dutch Minuteness” in the Newspaper
The public microscope of the cruelty trial was amply demonstrated by
Marchmont v. Marchmont, an eight-day trial heard by the divorce court in
, its first year of sitting. The case was not precedent setting in anything
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Figure .. Illustration for “Divorce A Vinculo,” Once a Week ( March ): .
but its unrelenting detail: as Sir Cresswell Cresswell described it in retro­
spect, “Both parties . . . seemed anxious to bring before the Court every
unkind word spoken by one to the other during the period of cohabita­
tion” (Times,  January , b). The facts of the case were as follows: in
October , Henry Marchmont, the minister of an independent chapel,
married Caroline Maria, a tavern keeper’s widow with a fortune of £,.
By November , Caroline was petitioning for a judicial separation on
the grounds of cruelty, saying that Henry had “treated her with great
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unkindness and cruelty, and had extorted large sums of money from her
by threats and violence.” Henry both denied all allegations of cruelty and
pleaded condonation (i.e., that his wife had forgiven—and thus legally
“condoned”—any acts of cruelty, thus losing them as grounds for a sepa­
ration) (Times,  November , f, a).
Tension in the marriage stemmed from Henry’s desire to control
Caroline’s money: Caroline alleged that Henry stood over her with fist
raised until she handed over checks for £ and £, that he demanded
she pay various bills; that he demanded a separation and £,, that he
wanted half of her £,, that he wanted her to rewrite her will to leave
him £, instead of £,, that he demanded she sign over a house
lease to him, and that he said he would never leave her if she did not give
him £,. She cited various threats and acts of cruelty, including that
he told her to go and hang or drown herself; that he called her a liar; that
he said if she did not pay the “——bill” he would throw her into the sea;
that he told her to go to the devil and to hell; that he called her “hell-fire,”
“spit-fire cat,” and a “drunken faggot”; that he threatened to drown him­
self off a pier; that he broke open her locked door and tried to tear her ac­
count book out of her hands; that he struck her on the forehead; and that
he said he “would not mind swinging [i.e., hanging]” for her. Several times,
Caroline Marchmont left her husband to stay with friends (the Macken­
zies), her niece’s family (the Walm[i]sleys) or her sister (Louisa Davis).⁶
She alleged that when she went to the Walm[i]sleys’ house, Henry forced
her to go home with him in a cab, covered her mouth to stop her from
screaming, loosened her teeth, and threatened to throw her out of the cab.
A gentleman intervened and stopped the cab, and Caroline asked to be
taken to the police station. There her husband pleaded with her not to
“give him in charge,” and she yielded and went home with him. She said
that while at her sister’s house she hid in a coal cellar to avoid her husband
when he tried to fetch her home. She told the court that she also tried to
escape to the neighbors’ house, but that her husband and his brother-in­
law caught her in the garden and brought her back, bolting the doors and
windows to prevent her escape. Caroline told the court that she had whis­
pered to her sister Louisa to go to the family solicitor: “Go to Mr. Barnard
and do all you can for me.” The sister came back with the solicitor, Henry
tried to refuse them entry and was violent, the sister returned with a police­
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man, and Henry swore to keep the peace for three months (Times,  No­
vember , f, a, b).⁷ Henry in turn alleged that his wife drank too
much sherry, that she had struck him in the face with the account book,
that she was irrationally jealous and had falsely accused him of adultery,
that he had not struck her but had put up his hand to stop her from ad­
vancing, that he had not used violence against her in the cab but had put
his arm around her waist because he was “fond of her,” and that she had
condoned any cruelty by voluntarily cohabiting with him afterward (Times,
 November , e–f, a;  November , c).
The court heard numerous letters from Henry to Caroline, including
sentimental verses, love letters, and a letter in which he swore “in the name
of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, by my im­
mortal soul and by my eternal salvation” to give his future wife full control
over her income (Times,  November , a–b;  November , b;
 December , a). The reading of these letters, as the Times noted,
“occupied a considerable time and caused much amusement in the court”
(Times,  November , b). Ironically, one of the letters read aloud in
court alluded to Henry’s dread of publicity: “He begged his wife not to ex­
pose family quarrels or listen to the advice of lawyers. . . . He also spoke of
the effect of the exposures which had already taken place” (Times,  No­
vember , b). Not only Henry’s alleged cruelty, but his dread of ex­
posure; his begging of his wife not to take him before a magistrate; his
threat to “torment [her] as long as he lived” if she revealed his abuse to her
solicitor (Times,  November , a, b); and his sensation of being
“appalled and horror-struck at the . . . exposures which had now taken
place” (Times,  November , e): all became fodder for public con­
sumption in the newspaper.
The Marchmont case was, in Sir Cresswell Cresswell’s words, “the first
in which a jury had been called upon to listen to a tale of such a descrip­
tion told at such a length” (Times,  November , d). The Marchmonts
disputed fact after fact, and both sides called numerous witnesses: Caroline
Marchmont’s sister, four servants, Mr. Mackenzie, Mr. Walmisley, the cab­
driver, two policemen, a police court clerk, a house painter, two medical
men, two lodging-house keepers, a grocer, Henry’s father, a lithographic
printer, Henry’s coachman, and a shopkeeper. The trial lasted eight days,
and Henry’s lawyer summed up its dense revelations as resembling a Dutch
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painting, the ne plus ultra of realism to be invoked by George Eliot in the
realist manifesto of Adam Bede ().⁸ The court, Henry’s lawyer said, had
now “had the painful interior of this family depicted with more than Dutch
minuteness” (Times,  November , c). An American journalist ob­
serving the new British divorce court upheld the Marchmont trial in his
letter to the Times as the extreme in legal fact dredging. If anyone was con­
cerned that the new court was processing cases too fast or carelessly, he
wrote, “let them go and listen to Marchmont v. Marchmont and I will
guarantee them a complete relief ” (Times,  November , e). In the
end, the jury granted Mrs. Marchmont her separation, though not before
one juryman had “complained of the hardship of having been taken from
his business for seven days to decide a private quarrel” (Times,  Novem­
ber , d). As the Illustrated London News summarized the case,
Mr. and Mrs. Marchmont’s case has at last been decided. The jury think
that the ex-dissenting minister of thirty-five, who married the publican’s
widow of fifty for her money, behaved worse than could be permitted to
a money-hunter of the order to which he belonged, and they found for
the petitioner, who obtains a judicial separation. This, we need hardly
remark, is not a divorce; and therefore the lady is not at liberty to bless
a third husband with her liberal heart, amiable temper, elegant manners,
and refined conversation. . . . However, the public have been heartily sick­
ened of the low quarrels of a brace of vulgar people, and we may gladly
dismiss the subject. (Illustrated London News,  December , )
I have summarized the details of the Marchmont case because it offers
interesting parallels to the plot of The Woman in White: both rest on a man’s
efforts to use force to gain control of his wife’s money; both involve ab­
duction in cabs or carriages; both involve a sister and family solicitor who
run interference between the husband and wife; and both invoke publicity
as the ultimate threat against the husband. I am not suggesting that Collins
stole his plot from Marchmont v. Marchmont but that the case (which pre­
dates the novel by a full year) offers unequivocal proof that the novel’s plot
was no more sensational in its revelations of wife abuse than the contents of
contemporary newspapers. Furthermore, I would suggest that the novel ac­
tually invokes divorce court journalism as its cultural counterpart, adopting
a similar discursive form. Collins pointed out explicitly, and it has long been
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observed, that the narrative takes the form of witness statements, with every
narrator giving his/her name, age, and profession (as in court) and telling
only what he/she knows firsthand: “As the judge might once have heard
it, so the Reader shall hear it now,” Walter Hartright writes at the opening
of his narrative (WW, ). Indeed, the Observer noted that the novel dupli­
cates the form of a trial (Page, ), with each narrative giving direct, not
“hearsay,” evidence (WW, ). Yet the novel is not so much like a trial as like
a newspaper account of a trial—in particular, I would argue, a cruelty trial,
with its examination of masculine domestic conduct. The fact that Walter
Hartright, who assembles the witness statements, works for a newspaper
at the novel’s close (WW, ) only makes this resemblance more emphatic.
Thus, although the novel’s setting predates the  Divorce Act, its
structure evokes that of divorce and separation trials contemporary with
its publication in the late s, as relations, friends, the sister of the abused
wife, the friend of the accused husband, the family solicitor, a medical
man, a cook, a housekeeper, a nurse, and the woman who laid out Anne
Catherick’s body all testify to Sir Percival’s treatment of his wife. The novel’s
resemblance to a newspaper account of a trial is most intense in part , in
which the narrative fragments into a series of brief documents (the grave­
stone, the death certificate) or signed affidavits from servants and others.
In the Marchmont case, the same effect is noticeable in the Times of 
and  November : the sustained narratives of the Marchmonts give
way to multiple witness statements corroborating particular facts of the
case. From an ideological perspective, this fragmentation of the narrative
into multiple viewpoints represents a more radical version of what Eliot
achieves in “Janet’s Repentance,” in which the community discusses Janet’s
abuse from a range of perspectives, thereby giving wife abuse a multivocal
representation. In The Woman in White, evidence of Laura’s abduction and
imprisonment comes from men and women, from professionals and ser­
vants, from family members and strangers. The novel, then, consists of a
series of exposures, of family secrets made open to the reader. Critics who
noted its “ property” and its “over-minuteness” (Page, , )
were in effect noting the text’s resemblance to the “Dutch minuteness” of
divorce court journalism, in which domestic scenes were revealed in “preRaffaelite” (sic, Page, ) amplitude of detail. Indeed, the Times reviewer
compared reading The Woman in White to the “great pleasure” of reading
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about a “remarkable trial” when the public “devour[s] with unabated in­
terest whole pages of . . . evidence” although the broad details of the case are
already known. The pleasure, he noted, lay in the combination of minute
detail and the “suspense as to the verdict” (or, in The Woman in White, the
novel’s closure) (Page, ). The sensation novel, then, can be seen not so
much as a unique cultural experience of reading “strange revelations” about
cruelty in the middle or upper classes, but as sharing in the formal proper­
ties and structure, the ideological challenges, disturbances, and social revela­
tions of divorce court journalism.
Adultery and Cruelty Narratives in The Woman in White
The Woman in White resembles a divorce court trial in content as well as
form. It is remarkable how many of the complex domestic secrets of this
narrative—which the reader gradually uncovers—concern adultery or cru­
elty. First, Anne Catherick, who haunts the narrative, is the illegitimate
daughter of Philip Fairlie and Mrs. Catherick. Laura and Anne, then, are
not “twin-sisters of chance resemblance” (WW, ) but biological half sis­
ters. When Mrs. Fairlie writes her husband about Mrs. Catherick and the
“sweet little girl” who looks so much like her own daughter (WW, ), she
is unknowingly writing about his ex-lover and their illegitimate child. As
Tromp astutely notes, Anne’s presence in the text thus comments on the
Divorce Act’s assumption that “dangerous” and “spurious offspring” can
attend only a woman’s sexual liaisons, not a man’s (WW, ).⁹ Second, the
scandal surrounding Sir Percival and Mrs. Catherick also concerns illicit
sex: the couple’s rendezvous in the church vestry seems the very stuff of the
adultery trial, with its bizarre and titillating revelations of marital miscon­
duct. (In one of the text’s sexual jokes, Walter Hartright describes the church
vestry as “the strangest and most unaccountable of all places” to commit
adultery [WW, ].) Adultery turns out to be a red herring: Mrs. Cather­
ick’s and Sir Percival’s crime is to have forged his parent’s marriage record
in the register. But behind the forgery lie the marital crimes of cruelty and
adultery. The reader discovers that Sir Percival is illegitimate because his
parents could not marry: his mother had left a “husband [who] had illused her and had afterwards gone off with some other person” (WW, ),
whereupon she had formed an adulterous relationship with Sir Percival’s
father.
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In addition to these sexual crimes, the novel uncovers the secret of Sir
Percival’s cruelty to Laura, as its many narrators tell and retell accounts of
his abuse. The novel’s narrative structure thus constitutes a kind of double
exposure: Sir Percival is revealed to be technically illegitimate (i.e., not a
baronet) and figuratively illegitimate (i.e., not a proper husband). More­
over, the ghostly and ghastly figure of Anne Catherick symbolically repre­
sents both these revelations. What is the “Secret” (WW, ) that Anne
Catherick knows about Sir Percival’s “private mind” (WW, )? He thinks
she knows about his parents’ adultery; in fact, she knows about his cruelty.
Before the marriage, she predicts his cruelty to Laura: “[H]e will live to strew
with misery the path of this woman by his side”(WW, ). Afterward, she
holds herself responsible for Laura’s marriage to her “cruel husband” (WW,
): “Why did I ever let you marry him! Oh, my fear—my mad, miserable,
wicked fear!”(WW, –). As Tromp notes, Anne represents and eerily
foreshadows the novel’s revelations of adultery. That Anne Catherick should
herself be illegitimate makes her, as Tromp observes, a silent mirror of Sir
Percival’s illegitimacy—both are the bastard children of aristocrats (Tromp,
). But through her visual identification with Laura, Anne also foreshad­
ows the novel’s revelations of cruelty. Ill, exhausted, nervous, she represents
Laura as Sir Percival’s abuse will render her—she represents, in other words,
Laura as abused wife. As Walter notes, “If ever sorrow and suffering set
their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie’s face, then
. . . Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance resem­
blance, the living reflexions of one another” (WW, ). Anne’s presence in
the novel thus represents the dual revelations of the divorce court: she
stands as the living symbol of adultery and marital cruelty. Her shocking
public appearances thus figuratively represent the exposure of Sir Percival’s
private secrets to the public eye. His plots to capture, contain, or kill Anne
thus represent in gothic terms the drive to recapture as “private” the do­
mestic secrets that the divorce court, the newspaper, and the sensation
novel so relentlessly exposed.
Cruelty and Married Women’s Property Law
If The Woman in White is about exposure, it is also consummately about
disappearance—specifically, about Laura’s sensational vanishing. As many
critics have noted, this literal disappearance represents her legal erasure at
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the moment of her marriage, when she comes under the law of coverture.
Catherine Peters remarks, for example, that “Laura Fairlie has her identity
forcibly stolen from her. Largely because she is a woman, and after mar­
riage legally helpless, she becomes a non-person.”¹⁰ Marian’s narrative is
ominously prescient in this respect when she records that writing of Laura’s
marriage feels like “writing of her death” (WW, ). Barbara Leigh Smith’s
A Brief Summary, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning
Women (), written between the novel’s temporal setting (–) and
its serial publication (–), provides a useful commentary on Laura’s
legal status. Since Laura marries three months before her twenty-first birth­
day, she never becomes an independent being but moves from the guardian­
ship of Frederick Fairlie to the coverture of Sir Percival Glyde. As Smith
writes, “A woman of twenty-one becomes an independent human crea­
ture, capable of holding and administering property to any amount. . . .
But if she unites herself to a man, the law immediately steps in, and she
finds herself legislated for, and her condition of life suddenly and entirely
changed. Whatever age she may be of, she is again considered as an infant
—she is again under ‘reasonable restraint ’—she loses her separate existence,
and is merged in that of her husband.” (BS, ). One of Anne Catherick’s
many and complex symbolic functions is to stand for Laura’s erasure under
the legal death or veiling of coverture. The woman in white—elusive, veiled,
finally disappearing—thus represents the vague half status of the wife.
Notably, Smith’s discussion of coverture reveals that veiling or shadowing
were traditional metaphors for coverture. These metaphors appear in
Smith’s quotation from Judge Hurlbut’s The Lawe’s Resolution of Women’s
Rights (): “A woman as soone as she is married is called covert, in
Latine nupta, that is vailed, as it were clouded and overshadowed she hath
lost her streame” (BS, ). “Truly ‘she hath lost her streame,’” writes Smith;
“she is absorbed, and can hold nothing of herself, she has no legal right to
any property; not even her clothes, books, and household goods are her
own, and any money which she earns can be robbed from her legally by her
husband” (BS, ). In the novel, Laura’s legal helplessness is exaggerated by
her guardian’s negligence: she does not have an adequate marriage settle­
ment, that legal loophole whereby middle- and upper-class families pro­
tected their daughters from the most brutal financial effects of coverture.
In Laura’s case, the settlement fails to protect her fortune of £, from
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her husband’s control. As the middle-class solicitor Mr. Gilmore writes,
“No daughter of mine should have been married to any man alive under
such a settlement as I was compelled to make for Laura Fairlie” (WW, ).
By the simple device of a negligent guardian, Collins exposes Laura to
the full injustice of married women’s property law as it existed prior to the
Married Women’s Property Act of . And here the novel takes up a de­
bate that had been occluded by the passage of the Divorce Act. As dis­
cussed in chapter , before the  act, Barbara Leigh Smith, Marian Evans,
and others had petitioned for changes in the married women’s property
law “as a counteractive to wife-beating and other evils” (Haight, :).
Feminists argued that women’s legal nonexistence under coverture contri­
buted to a man’s sense that he owned—and could therefore beat—his wife.
Coverture, married women’s property, and wife beating were thus strongly
linked in the feminist agenda of the mid-s. However, the Divorce Act
took the wind out of feminists’ sails by addressing the limited question of
abused women. As already noted, under the act, a woman who proved cru­
elty charges against her husband could gain a judicial separation (under
which she became a femme sole with respect to property). This limited
concession, however, left the law of coverture itself very largely intact, and
The Woman in White, with its sensational scenes of Anne’s ghostly half pres­
ence and Laura’s disappearances, suggests that coverture constitutes a theft
of a woman’s identity.
The plot of the novel brings the themes of coverture and married
women’s property law strongly together. However, it does so in ways that
are interestingly incongruous with the actual law of married women’s
property at the time. As I have already pointed out, Sir Percival’s cruelty
revolves around his attempts to control Laura’s fortune: like Henry March­
mont, he has married a wife with money and intends to get his hands on
it. Henry Marchmont threatened to throw himself or his wife in the sea if
she did not give him her money, and later locked her up, as Sir Cresswell
Cresswell described it, “like a caged bird” (Times,  January , b).
Similarly, Sir Percival threatens Laura, imprisons her in her room, and re­
vokes her status as mistress of the house. It is crucial to note that locking
up one’s wife for the purpose of extortion was illegal. Although the law
permitted a husband to restrain or imprison his wife for the purpose of
moral control (a right that was clearly confirmed by the  Cochrane
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decision and not extinguished until the case of R. v. Jackson in ), the
judge in the Cochrane case made it clear that this would not apply if
the purpose of the restraint was coercion. He specifically distinguished
the Cochrane case from R. v. Lister, in which the husband had imprisoned
his separated wife to “prevail with her to part with some of her separate
maintenance.”¹¹
Sir Percival’s actions, then, are clearly illegal. But under married
women’s property law before  (which covers the novel’s publication in
– and its temporal setting in –), his actions are also pointless,
because, unlike Henry Marchmont, he has not married a woman with a
marriage settlement. As Mr. Gilmore makes clear, Laura’s fortune is not
held in trust on behalf of her or her children, so Sir Percival does not have
to imprison her, stage her death, spirit her off to an insane asylum, or in­
deed do anything at all to get her money—as soon as they are married, it
is already in his control. As the Saturday Review wrote, “[H]alf the crime
and folly in the tale has been committed in consequence of a misconcep­
tion” (Page, ).
It is notorious that Collins made a huge error in the plot of The Woman
in White. As the Times observed, “The question of a date is the pivot upon
which the novel turns” (Page, ), and Collins got the dates wrong in the
crucial period when Count Fosco and Sir Percival exchange Anne for Laura.
Repeatedly, the novel stresses that the weakness in the criminal scheme
to rob Laura of her identity is the fact that she leaves Blackwater Park on
 July, one full day after her double, Anne Catherick, dies in London (WW,
appendix C, ). However, the Times pointed out that Collins’s calcula­
tions were off by more than two weeks: “[W]e could easily show that Lady
Glyde could not have left Blackwater-park before the th or th of Au­
gust. . . . The significance of these dates. . . . render[s] the last volume a
mockery, a delusion, and a snare” (Page, ). The whole criminal enterprise
of Sir Percival and Count Fosco, then, rests on two major plot errors: the
crime was unnecessary (because the money was already under Sir Percival’s
control) and the crime was absolutely transparent, because Collins got the
timing wrong by two weeks. Of these two errors, the second has attracted
the most attention, but the first is by far the more interesting from an ideo­
logical point of view. Having introduced Frederick Fairlie’s laziness to de­
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prive Laura of a settlement, and a solicitor (Mr. Gilmore) to explain to the
reader why the lack of a settlement was so important, Collins seems not to
have fully grasped the implications of his own plot.
As I have already noted, the lack of a marriage settlement flattens the
class distinctions between Lady Glyde and a working-class woman, leaving
Lady Glyde subject to the full inequity of married women’s property law
as it operated for those who could not afford lawyers and marriage settle­
ments. That Collins was aware of the law’s injustice is apparent from Man
and Wife, his serial novel of , which was timed to coincide with the
parliamentary debates on the Married Women’s Property Bill and which
depicts an abused woman (a cook called Hester Dethridge) whose hus­
band repeatedly helps himself to her property and earnings until she kills
him. In The Woman in White, Collins apparently intended to reduce Lady
Glyde to the status of her own cook, with no settlement to stand between
her and her husband’s greed. The novel’s imagery of caged mice (Count
Fosco’s white mice are explicitly compared to Laura [WW, ]) suggests
that Collins intended to compare Laura to a pet, confined and controlled.
Yet even though his carefully constructed plot achieves just this, he seems to
have been unable to grasp that the wife of a baronet really could be power­
less in the face of her husband’s greed.
When Collins read the review in the Times, he contacted his publisher
immediately and instructed him that no more copies of The Woman in
White should be printed until he had corrected the dates in the novel (WW,
appendix C, ). By backdating the Blackwater Park events by sixteen
days, Collins made Laura’s literal disappearance possible. But he could not
correct the legal misapprehension concerning Laura’s legal nonexistence
under married women’s property law on which the whole plot rests. No
crime is necessary to get Laura’s money, and all Sir Percival’s strong-arm
tactics and Count Fosco’s sensational plotting are utterly pointless. While
the dating error was venial, this one was major: the novel’s plot really does
become (to borrow the words of the Times) “a mockery, a delusion, and a
snare” (Page, ). How then can we explain the fact that the novel re­
mained a success, that not only Collins but many Victorian readers appar­
ently overlooked the fact that Laura does not need to sign away her money
to Sir Percival but has already effectively done so by marrying him?
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E. S. Dallas recognized that it was a tribute to the power of Collins’s
novel that it survived his blunder about the dates (Page, ). That it sur­
vived the legal error about Laura’s money, I would suggest, is a tribute to the
power of Victorian class stereotyping. Even though Mr. Gilmore’s narrative
explicitly states that Laura has no marriage settlement, readers seem not to
have grasped that Sir Percival can take his wife’s money by right. His cover­
ture (signaled by Anne Catherick’s ghostly half-erasure) should render Laura
as helpless as a caged mouse. That readers nevertheless bought into the
novel’s suspense indicates how unacceptable—in fact, how unimaginable—
Victorians found the idea of upper-class women being subject to their hus­
band’s full financial control, as were lower-class women. While The Woman
in White, as Tromp notes, exposed cruelty in the houses of baronets, it
nonetheless reveals how strong were the class assumptions surrounding
property, wife beating, and coverture.
Marian Halcombe and Mrs. Jiniwin:
The “Twin-Sisters of Chance Resemblance”?
The Woman in White betrays conservatism on the subject of married
women’s property, but there is one respect in which it is signally uncon­
ventional: the subject of the woman who resists marital abuse. And in this
respect I think we can see this sensation novel as making a significant de­
parture from the realist texts that preceded it. As I have shown in previous
chapters, these realist works of fiction did show brutal lower-class marital
violence (in Oliver Twist and “The Hospital Patient”), as well as gentry
and middle-class family violence (in Dombey and Son, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and “Janet’s Repentance”). But, as I have also shown, these texts
invite negative responses to the women characters who resist such violence,
depicting them as violent and uncontrolled (like the neighbor in “The
Pawnbroker’s Shop”), monstrous (like Mrs. Jiniwin in The Old Curiosity
Shop), or castrating (like Edith in Dombey and Son). Among works written
up to the late s, “Janet’s Repentance” is in my view unique, in that it
portrays with positive emphasis the sisterly solidarity of the women of
Milby, who help Mr. Tryan to baptize Janet into new life. The Woman in
White, by contrast, develops an emphasis on sisterly solidarity by depicting
a fiercely passionate advocate of the abused woman, an advocate who ulti­
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mately emerges as a heroine. Marian Halcombe, I would suggest, is Mrs.
Jiniwin remade.
Mrs. Jiniwin, we may recall, is Mrs. Quilp’s mother and supporter in
The Old Curiosity Shop. She joins with other women friends in attacking
the “common enemy” (OCS, )—abusive men—and in inciting the pas­
sive Mrs. Quilp to resist her husband’s abuse. Developing a protofeminist
analysis of Quilp’s wife abuse, Mrs. Jiniwin and her women friends discuss
“the propensity of mankind to tyrannise over the weaker sex, and the duty
that devolved upon the weaker sex to resist that tyranny and assert their
rights and dignity” (OCS, ). However, the novel represents these women
as domineering, “shrewish” (OCS, ), and incipiently cannibalistic, as the
conflation of beheading shrimp and husbands in the following quotation
suggests: “‘When my poor husband, her dear father, was alive, if he had
ever ventur’d a cross word to me, I’d have—’ the good old lady did not finish
the sentence, but she twisted off the head of a shrimp with a vindictiveness
which seemed to imply that the action was in some degree a substitute for
words” (OCS, ). In short, The Old Curiosity Shop acknowledges the po­
litical reality of resistant women—and indeed shows a veritable sisterhood
of supportive women around Mrs. Quilp—but it simultaneously under­
cuts their resistance as vicious and shrewish, almost as distasteful and in
need of reform as Quilp himself. Women characters who protect abused
women, I would suggest, were depicted as dangerous in Victorian realist
fiction because they threatened patriarchal marriage, under which the hus­
band was constructed as the protector of the wife. If a man stepped into
the protective role that had been violated by the abusive husband, the pa­
triarchal relationship was fundamentally unchanged. But when a woman
took on this role, she became a potential feminist advocate. Marian Hal­
combe, I contend, steps into this ideologically volatile position.
Marian’s physical appearance suggests that her role as Laura’s advocate
and supporter is ambiguously gendered. Famously, her body is feminine
and her face is masculine, with a “large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw,”
“resolute” eyes, and “almost a moustache” on her lip (WW, –). She
shakes hands like a man, says she thinks little of her own sex, and even be­
fore Laura’s marriage fills the masculine role of guardian that the effemi­
nate Mr. Fairlie fulfills so badly. Before the marriage, she investigates the
allegations against Laura’s future husband; afterward, she stands up for
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Laura when her husband abuses her, threatens legal action on her sister’s
behalf, and sends for the solicitor. Even Frederick Fairlie understands that
if he fails to help Laura, the protective Marian will arrive “in a state of vir­
tuous indignation, banging doors” (WW, ). Though Marian describes
herself as a “helpless, useless woman” (WW, ), she codes her protective­
ness in masculine metaphors of physical action. “If I only had the privi­
leges of a man, I would order out Sir Percival’s best horse instantly, and
tear away on a night-gallop, eastward, to meet the rising sun” (WW, ),
she exclaims when Laura is due to arrive home from her wedding tour. In
another example of the same manly tone, she declares, “If I had been a man,
I would have knocked him down on the threshold of his own door,” when
Sir Percival tries to make Laura sign away her fortune (WW, ). She de­
clares to Walter that when the count came to the door, “My hands tingled
to strike him, as if I had been a man!” (WW, ).¹² While, as we have seen,
such protective roles for sisters of abused women were not unheard of in the
press (witness Louisa Davies’s protection of Caroline Marchmont), they
were new to fiction. Marian’s gender ambiguity thus proclaims the uneasy,
almost oxymoronic role that she occupies in the novel as Laura’s woman
protector.
Yet Marian also mouths protofeminist statements that show her to
be not only female-identified, but a women’s advocate. Published in the
s and set in the s, the novel coincides with the onset of first-wave
feminism and clearly draws on feminist discourse (including the wife-pet
metaphor) in giving Marian the feminist statement “Men! They are the
enemies of our innocence and our peace—they drag us away from our
parents’ love and our sisters’ friendship—they take us body and soul to
themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to
his kennel” (WW, ). This is not unlike Mrs. Jiniwin’s proclamation about
“the propensity of mankind to tyrannise over the weaker sex, and the duty
that devolved upon the weaker sex to resist that tyranny and assert their
rights and dignity” (OCS, ). Whereas Countess Fosco, a feminist before
marriage, is ruled as a wife by the “private rod” (WW, ) of marital power
wielded by the count, and accedes to the legal reality that she and her hus­
band have “one opinion between [them,] and that opinion is [Fosco’s]”
(WW, ), Marian, by contrast, is single, resourceful, and defiant.
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Most importantly from an ideological standpoint, Marian Halcombe
was adored by contemporary readers. Catherine Peters notes that Collins’s
masculine, resolute, mustached protofeminist achieved “instant popularity”
and that “a number of male readers even wrote asking for her address, so
that they might propose marriage” (Peters, ). It might not have been an
unambiguous compliment to Marian to have a herring lugger named after
her, as Edward Fitzgerald proposed to do (Page, ), but no one wanted
to name a fishing boat after Laura Fairlie. “Laura Fairlie fails to inspire us,”
wrote the Dublin University Magazine bluntly (Page, ), and Margaret
Oliphant declared that Laura entirely loses the “sympathies of the reader
. . . after the very first scenes” (Page, ). Passive, irresolute, dependent on
her nurse, her sister, her future husband, and her guardian, Laura personi­
fies the submissive wife promoted by conventional ideology. The first line
of the novel upholds Laura’s passivity as feminine virtue: “ is the story
of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can
achieve” (WW, ). But Victorians had neither the patience nor the resolu­
tion to endure eight months of Laura Fairlie doled out in weekly install­
ments. Instead, their loyalties rested with a woman embodying the very
characteristic—resolution—that the novel’s first line genders unambigu­
ously as male. The “resolute” Marian Halcombe (Page, ) won the public’s
heart. In terms of this study, this is highly significant: what The Woman in
White tells us about Victorian attitudes to wife abuse is that, by , the
trope of the passive abused wife was wearing thin. In Laura Fairlie, not
only Walter Hartright but Victorians at large found “something wanting”
(WW, ).
Sensational Revelations
To conclude this chapter, I turn to John Guille Millais’s account of the
genesis of The Woman in White, as recounted by his father, John Everett
Millais:
One night in the ’s Millais was returning home to , Gower Street
from one of the many parties held under Mrs. Collins’s hospitable roof
in Hanover Terrace, and, in accordance with the usual practice of the
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two brothers, Wilkie and Charles, they accompanied him on his home­
ward walk through the dimly-lit, and, in those days semi-rural, roads
and lanes of North London. . . . It was a beautiful moonlight night in
the summer time and as the three friends walked along chatting gaily to­
gether, they were suddenly arrested by a piercing scream coming from
the garden of a villa close at hand. It was evidently the cry of a woman
in distress; and while pausing to consider what they should do, the iron
gate leading to the garden was dashed open, and from it came the figure
of a young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes
that shone in the moonlight. She seemed to float rather than run in their
direction, and on coming up to the three young men, she paused for a
moment in an attitude of supplication and terror. Then, suddenly seem­
ing to recollect herself, she suddenly moved on and vanished in the
shadows cast upon the road.
“What a lovely woman!” was all Millais could say. “I must see who
she is, and what is the matter,” said Wilkie Collins, as he dashed off after
her. His two companions waited in vain for his return, and next day,
when they met again, he seemed indisposed to talk of his adventure.
They gathered from him, however, that he had come up with the lovely
fugitive and had heard from her own lips the history of her life and the
cause of her sudden flight. She was a young lady of good birth and po­
sition, who had accidentally fallen into the hands of a man living in a
villa in Regent’s Park. There for many months he kept her prisoner under
threats and mesmeric influence of so alarming a character that she dared
not attempt to escape, until, in sheer desperation, she fled from the brute,
who, with a poker in his hand, threatened to dash her brains out. (WW,
–)
This account is recognized both for its classic melodrama and for its
probable inaccuracy.¹³ What I would like to note is that, in terms of narra­
tives of abuse, it is a veritable tissue of clichés. The passive woman, the male
protector, the “brute . . . with a poker in his hand”—it is all, as Watson
would say, “perfectly familiar” (SSH, ). Let us compare this woman
in floating white drapery to Caroline Marchmont, whose sherry-drinking
habits, “snouty” manner (Times,  November , d), “provoking and
irritating temper” and “shabby” way of doling out money to her husband
(Times,  January , b) made her very unlike an ideal damsel in dis­
tress. Charles Reade claimed that he got his best plots for his sensation
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novels from the Times, and in many ways nothing could be more sensa­
tional than the Marchmont case, with its astonishing and sordid narrative
of a minister engaging in extortion, violence, threats, and domestic quar­
rels.¹⁴ Yet Mrs. Marchmont won over judge and jury with her account of
how her husband had “endeavored to extort and had extorted money”
from her (Times,  January , b). Marchmont v. Marchmont and the
legion of other cruelty cases in newspapers after  upset Victorian as­
sumptions about where, how, and by whom wife abuse was perpetrated.
Yet Millais’s account of the novel’s genesis is interesting also because it
so deftly outlines the story that The Woman in White does not tell: the nar­
rative in which abuse is wielded by “brutes” with pokers in their hands.
Like divorce court journalism after , Collins’s narrative probes the
where, how, and who of wife-abuse narratives. Indeed, what is striking
about the novel, as Tromp and others have noted, is that its characters
slide dizzyingly up and down the social scale, so that the landed baronet is
revealed as illegitimate and penniless, and his wife exchanges places with
an illegitimate and penniless woman of servant class. The novel’s most sen­
sational scenes pivot on this fragility of class identity, as when Walter sees
Laura “become” the woman in white. Jonathan Loesberg has suggested the
Second Reform Bill as a context for this radical instability of class identity.¹⁵
I would argue, however, that a rich and immediate context for this sense
of radical class slippage lay in divorce court journalism, with its narratives
of cruelty in which aristocrats and publicans, artists and barristers alike
wielded meat choppers and riding whips, pistols and furze brushes against
their wives.
On  May , Punch jokingly proposed the “Prospectus of a New
Journal: The Sensation Times, and Chronicle of Excitement” (Punch,  May
, ). This paradigmatic sensational text would, it promised, be de­
voted to “Harrowing the Mind, Making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair
to Stand on End, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System, Destroying Con­
ventional Moralities, and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic
Avocations of Life” (Punch,  May , ). One of the major sources for
the Sensation Times, the prospectus announced, would be “the proceed­
ings of the Court over which    presides” (Punch,
 May , ). The ironic implication here is that no Sensation Times
could be more sensational than the Times, which studiously documented
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the shocking revelations of the divorce court. In their revelations of mari­
tal cruelty, the sensation genre and divorce court journalism had similarly
harrowing effects of social vertigo, as Victorian readers were forced to con­
front baronets rather than Bill Sikeses in the act of abusing their wives. In
, the year before the Divorce Act was passed, J. W. Kaye could write
that “in the upper classes men rarely lift their hands against their wives”
(OW, ). After the sensational revelations of the s, however, no one
could have been certain any more that this assertion held true.
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T H E P R I VAT E E Y E A N D THE PUBLIC GAZE
He Knew He Was Right
A I   the previous chapter, divorce court journalism and sensa­
tion fiction were related cultural phenomena of the early s. The effect
of these two forms of representation, I have suggested, was to erase middleclass marital privacy in favor of a series of detections, revelations, intrusions,
and testimonials, especially concerning male domestic conduct and mari­
tal cruelty. In this chapter, I turn to a realist novel that takes as its primary
theme the intense scrutiny of marital conduct by the divorce court and the
newspaper. In Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right (), the public gaze is
ubiquitous: there is no “private” life that is not subject to the scrutiny of
the courts, the private detective, and the newspaper. In this novel’s radi­
cally modern analysis of marriage and marital abuse, the home is seen as
constructed by and through print media, a fact that is occluded in most of
the happy marriages in the text but painfully revealed by Louis Trevelyan’s
self-exposure to the imagined scrutiny of the courts and the press. At the
same time, however, the novel’s detailed representation of mental cruelty
points to the crucial role of the realist novel—in addition to the sensation
novel and the newspaper—in offering new ways of perceiving marital abuse.
Published in –, before either English or American courts recognized
mental cruelty as sufficient to meet the legal definition of cruelty, He Knew

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He Was Right unambiguously depicts the husband’s false accusation of adul­
tery as constituting psychological violence within a marriage.
He Knew He Was Right is aggressively contemporary, refusing to dis­
tance controversial issues by placing them in the past. Written in –
and set very specifically in the volatile year of , the novel establishes its
temporal setting through dozens of minor references to contemporary fash­
ion (the chignon), politics (Disraeli, Lord Darby, the Second Reform Bill,
Mr. Beales, the Hyde Park riots, and America’s Alabama claims), religious
controversy (the Colenso affair), gender politics ( J. S. Mill, women’s suf­
frage, and women’s entry into careers such as medicine), and the press
(radical penny newspapers and printed commercial advertisements for
shops). Though the novel’s archconservative character Miss Stanbury de­
plores them, the contemporary issues of “divorce bills, and women’s rights,
and penny papers” (HK, ) dominate the novel. As Miss Stanbury’s list
suggests, the novel is especially concerned with gender politics: set in the
year of J. S. Mill’s women’s suffrage amendment to the Second Reform Bill
and studded with references to women’s changing roles, its study of mar­
riage breakdown draws heavily on the major questions that animated Vic­
torian gender politics in the s.
The novel’s central plot traces the breakdown of Louis Trevelyan’s mar­
riage to Emily Rowley, daughter of the governor of the Mandarin Islands.
The Cambridge-educated Trevelyan is initially described by the narrator
as “a very pearl among men” (HK, ), and there is no question that he and
Emily love each other deeply. The rift between them occurs when Louis
becomes jealous of Colonel Osborne, a family friend and older man-about­
town. Emily refuses to stop seeing Osborne unless Louis explicitly orders
her to do so: “If [my husband] gives me any command I will obey it” (HK,
). In a lucidly argued article, Christopher Herbert points out that Louis
Trevelyan’s dilemma is central to all Victorian marriages: “how to enforce
the principle of essentially dictatorial male authority without doing vio­
lence to the ideal of ‘companionate’ conjugal affection.”¹ Trevelyan wants
his wife’s submission without having to command it; Emily says that she
will render submission only if he commands her: “I will obey him. But as
for submitting to him, and letting him suppose that I think he is right;—
never!” (HK, ). She forces Trevelyan to be explicit about his patriarchal
authority, while he prefers an ostensibly companionate marriage. Herbert
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sees the crux of the novel as its revelation of the patriarchal power under­
lying marriage: “Emily has analyzed the predicament of Victorian wives
with keen understanding, and her lucidity, which is Trollope’s own, domi­
nates the novel” (Herbert, ).
Other marriages in the text appear to follow the companionate model
(and thus provide foils for Trevelyan’s desire for male power). However, as
Herbert points out, at key moments these other relationships follow the
patriarchal model (Herbert, ), as the women joyfully discover the “pleas­
ant weight of gentle marital authority” (HK, ). For example, when Caro­
line Spalding tries to break her engagement to Mr. Glascock, she discovers
under his gentle exterior a will to command: “He was so strong that he
treated her almost as a child;—and yet she loved him infinitely the better
for so treating her.” She says to him, “You must be master, I suppose,
whether you are right or wrong. A man always thinks himself entitled to
his own way” (HK, ). The marriages of Brooke Burgess to Dorothy
Stanbury and Hugh Stanbury to Nora Rowley follow a similar model, in
which apparently egalitarian and companionate relationships are revealed
to be underpinned by male power. Herbert argues that Trevelyan’s break­
down occurs because he is “forced to take cognisance of his true role”: “He
discovers, to put his predicament in its broadest terms, that his most pro­
found identity is a function of the social institutions that he participates
in (notably that of marriage), that their inward contradictions are neces­
sarily his own, and that these contradictions are well-nigh inescapable”
(Herbert, ). In this context, Trevelyan’s flight to a deserted Italian villa
displays a kind of mad logic: he tries desperately to “divest himself ” of the
English gentlemanly identity that has so betrayed him (Herbert, ). I have
referred to Herbert’s article at length because it demonstrates that Louis
Trevelyan’s madness should be read not merely as a fascinating study in
“abnormal psychology”² but as “a concerted process of cultural criticism”
(Herbert, ) that locates Trevelyan’s tragedy in a nexus of contemporary
issues surrounding male authority and female power in marriage. Building
on Herbert’s argument, I suggest a further cultural dimension to Trevelyan’s
drama: his obsession with establishing the “fact[s]” (HK, ) of his wife’s
suspected adultery leads him into an intense—though personally abhorrent
—relationship with a private detective, and then to the imagined scrutiny
of the divorce court and the press.
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John Sutherland suggests that “it is instructive to read He Knew He
Was Right alongside the Times for , whose columns are full of reports
from the new divorce courts” (Sutherland, introduction, xvi). Instructive
indeed, for reading the divorce reports in the newspaper is exactly what
Trevelyan does obsessively: “Could it be that she was so base as this—so
vile a thing, so abject, such dirt, pollution, filth? But there were such cases.
Nay, were they not almost numberless? He found himself reading in the
papers records of such things from day to day” (HK, ). Just as his mari­
tal struggle reflects s gender politics, so Trevelyan’s preoccupation with
newspaper reporting of divorce actions links him to a central preoccupa­
tion of the s, as Victorians expressed profound anxiety about the new
institutional mechanisms (the divorce court and divorce reporting in the
newspapers) regulating family life and sexual mores. In January , Lord
Campbell, one of the judges of the newly established divorce court, sug­
gested the horrific nature of the new court in his eyes: “like Frankenstein,”
he wrote in his private journal, “I am afraid of the monster I have called
into existence.”³ Queen Victoria herself was deeply concerned about sala­
cious newspaper reporting on divorce trials, and wrote to the Lord Chan­
cellor on  December  to ask “whether no steps [could] be taken to
prevent the present publicity of the proceedings before the new Divorce
Court”: “None of the worst French novels from which careful parents
would try to protect their children can be as bad as what is daily brought
and laid upon the breakfast-table of every educated family in England,”
she wrote (QV, :). As I note in chapter , this attempt to make the di­
vorce court more private failed. Exposure remained a central principle of
the court’s operation and indeed a salient characteristic of the s gen­
erally, as sensation fiction made the revelation of domestic secrets into its
central preoccupation and most ideologically explosive effect. Trevelyan’s
obsession with the newspaper reporting of divorce cases thus reflects a more
general anxiety concerning the public scrutiny of private life. But as with
the issue of marital authority, the novel presents a highly complex analysis
of this contemporary issue. It would be too simple to say that Trevelyan is
mad to see his marriage in light of the newspapers. He is mad—but the
novel denies the reader this simple extinction of the publicity issue. Instead,
the text suggests the role of the newspapers in the construction of “private”
consciousness as a key fact of modern life. The realist novel (strongly associ­
ated with the construction of interiority, privacy, and the modern liberal
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subject) here registers the role of the public realm in the construction of
the private self. Unlike sensation fiction, He Knew He Was Right does not
exploit the revelation of domestic secrets to achieve suspense—quite the
reverse, as the reader always already knows that Emily has not committed
adultery. Rather, the novel takes as its central topic the fallacy of the very
idea of the private self after .
Trevelyan v. Trevelyan and Osborne
Publicity enters Trevelyan’s life the minute he starts to suspect his wife of
adultery. Trevelyan’s governing precept is that “one should always wash
one’s dirty linen at home” (HK, ), but as soon as he starts his marital
contest with Emily, he finds other people metaphorically inspecting his
bedsheets. Lady Milborough’s warning breaches Trevelyan’s domestic pri­
vacy first: “[I]t was intolerably bitter to him that he should be warned about
his wife’s conduct by any living human being” (HK, –). Following
this, he begins to imagine “vile whispers, and dirty slanders . . . dropped
by envious tongues into envious ears” (HK, ). Moreover, Trevelyan’s
ideal of domestic privacy is swiftly revealed to be illusory, as domestic ser­
vants observe many of his struggles with his wife. When a servant brings a
note from Osborne to the dinner table, for example, Trevelyan understands
“how impossible it was for his wife to give it up in the servant’s presence”
(HK, ):
The letter lay there till the man was out of the room, and then she
handed it to Nora. “Will you give that to Louis?” she said. “It comes from
the man whom he supposes to be my lover.”
“Emily!” said he, jumping from his seat, “how can you allow words
so horrible and so untrue to fall from your mouth?”
“If it be not so, why am I to be placed in such a position as this? The
servant knows, of course, from whom the letter comes, and sees that I
have been forbidden to open it.” Then the man returned to the room,
and the remainder of the dinner passed off almost in silence. (HK, )
Sutherland points out that this stifled conversation reveals the strangling
correctness of the Victorian bourgeois dining room (Sutherland, intro­
duction, xi). More importantly, I think, it points to servants as potential
observers and conduits of information. “Remember this, husbands and
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wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, when
you quarrel,” warns M. E. Braddon in Aurora Floyd (): “Your servants
listen at your doors, and repeat your spiteful speeches in the kitchen, and
watch you while they wait at table, and understand every sarcasm, every
innuendo, every look, as well as those at whom the cruel glances and
stinging words are aimed. They understand your sulky silence, your stud­
ied and over-acted politeness. The most polished form your hate and
anger can take is as transparent to those household spies as if you threw
knives at each other” (AF, ). The role of servants as “household spies”
was a salient feature of divorce trials, in which servants often acted as key
witnesses to cruelty or adultery (providing evidence such as fights, letters,
and visits, as well as more salacious details such as time spent by the par­
ties in bedrooms, disordered hair, and flushed faces). As Leckie writes, ser­
vants’ evidence provided a “blueprint for reading the adulterous body”
(Leckie, –), a process in which the newspapers subsequently trained
their middle-class readers. Louis’s and Emily’s restraint is thus a product
not just of their stifling social codes but of the servants’ potential role as
court witnesses.
In this respect, one sees Lady Milborough and the servants as mere
harbingers of the more piercing public scrutiny of the courts and the
newspapers. Crucially, however, the novel represents no formal trial and at
no time are the custody or power battles of Louis and Emily reported in
the newspapers. Instead, Bozzle, the private detective hired by Trevelyan
himself, introduces to the novel the public gaze that Trevelyan simultane­
ously dreads and desires. The first private detective in Victorian fiction,
Bozzle comes in for universal loathing by Trevelyan, by the narrator, and
by Victorian and modern critics. To Trevelyan, Bozzle is a “low-born, vile,
mercenary spy” (HK, ); to the narrator, “the faithless and frightened
Bozzle” (HK, ); to the Times of , a “sly, ungrammatical varlet”;⁴
and to Hammerton an “unsavoury private detective” (Hammerton, Cruelty,
). Bozzle prompts such extreme repugnance because he invokes the lan­
guage of lawyers, proof, and cross-examination, and thereby represents the
intrusion of the court system into the private home. (Crucially, too, the
lower-class Bozzle reverses the class norms in the trope we have seen hith­
erto: that is, of the upper- or middle-class journalist, detective, or judge
looking into the home.) Hired to investigate this case of suspected adultery,
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Bozzle constructs an imagined divorce case with Louis as the petitioner,
Emily as the respondent, and Osborne as the co-respondent (Trevelyan v.
Trevelyan and Osborne). Bozzle refers to people as “the parties,” and his “odi­
ous details” are the facts of his imagined case: “[T]he smallest little ‘tiddly’
things do so often turn up trumps when you get your evidence into court”
(HK, –). His evidence is secured with cross-examination in mind:
“[O]ne has to be down on a thing, sharp, you know, and sure, so that
counsel on the other side can’t part you from it, though he shakes you like
a dog does a rat” (HK, ). “That [Osborne has] been at St. Diddulph’s,
in the house from . to ., you may take as a fact,” he tells Trevelyan.
“There won’t be no shaking of that, because I have it in my mem. book,
and no Counsel can get the better of it” (HK, ). By constantly using the
language of divorce litigation, he forces Trevelyan to imagine the very thing
he most dreads—the proving of his suspicions in court.
In , Josephine Butler described divorce reporting in apocalyptic
terms: “[W]e have arrived at that period of the world’s history when we
see with our eyes the fulfillment of Christ’s words: . . . [T]here is nothing
covered which shall not be revealed; neither hid that shall not be known.
Therefore whatsoever things ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in
the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be pro­
claimed on the housetops” (qtd. in Leckie, ). Butler’s apocalyptic allu­
sions ironically capture Trevelyan’s horror as Bozzle’s easy familiarity with
court jargon suggests to him the unveiling of his marriage by the divorce
court and the press. In Culture and Adultery, Leckie analyzes how Victo­
rian newspaper reports of divorce trials “promise[d] complete narrative ex­
posure” (Leckie, ). They provided floor plans depicting the locations of
beds, sofas, and passages to various bedrooms (Leckie, ). The illustrated
tabloids printed portraits of the plaintiff, the respondent, and the co­
respondent; depicted in melodramatic detail the key scenarios in the case;
and described the exteriors of the homes that were penetrated as the trial
progressed (Leckie, –). In He Knew He Was Right, Bozzle trains
Trevelyan in the idea of public scrutiny. For Trevelyan, Bozzle comes to
embody the public gaze:
[H]e turned his thoughts upon Bozzle, and there came over him a crush­
ing feeling of ignominy, shame, moral dirt, and utter degradation. . . .
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He was paying a rogue to watch the steps of a man whom he hated, to
pry into the home secrets, to read the letters, to bribe the servants, to
record the movements of this rival. . . . It was a filthy thing,—and yet
what could he do? Gentlemen of old . . . would have taken such a fellow
as Colonel Osborne by the throat and have caned him, and afterwards
would have shot him, or have stood to be shot. All that was changed now.
(HK, –)
The title of chapter  (“A Third Party is so objectionable”) captures the
irony of Trevelyan’s situation. More commonly the lover in an adulterous
situation (whose third-party status was formalized in divorce-case titles such
as Smith v. Smith and Jones), the “third party” in this case is not Colonel
Osborne but Bozzle. He is the intruder whose movements and letters de­
stroy the husband’s confidence and love.
Ironically, Trevelyan does not resist Bozzle but becomes him, in that
he too begins to speak in the language of the divorce court. The break­
down of the private/public barrier that Bozzle’s jargon-laden speech repre­
sents infects Trevelyan, as he too starts to think in terms of legal action: “I
will put the case immediately into the hands of my lawyer, with instruc­
tions to him to ascertain from counsel what severest steps I can take” (HK,
), he tells Hugh Stanbury. In a letter to his wife, he reiterates, “I shall put
the matter into the hands of a lawyer, and shall probably feel myself driven
to take steps towards freeing myself from a connection which will be dis­
graceful to my name” (HK, ). Using free indirect discourse, the narrator
conveys the omnipresence of divorce litigation in Trevelyan’s thoughts: “If
there were any further intercourse between his wife and Colonel Osborne,
he would take the matter into open court, and put her away publicly”
(HK, ). In a telling scene, Trevelyan even starts to speak to his friend
Hugh Stanbury as if he were cross-examining him at trial: “Is it true or un­
true that he found that man down there? Is it true or untrue that my wife
received Colonel Osborne at your mother’s house? Is it true or untrue that
Colonel Osborne went down there with the express object of seeing her?
Is it true or untrue that they had corresponded?” (HK, ). He also seems
to imagine his own cross-examination: “I am not going to deny my own
words, which have no doubt been preserved in testimony against me”
(HK, ). Trevelyan’s world thus becomes a court; he himself constantly
subjects his marriage to the imagined scrutiny of the public gaze. In this
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respect, one can understand his flight out of England to the dusty hilltop
of Siena where he does not “[see] a newspaper for two months” (HK, ).
Herbert argues that he tries to cast off the masculine identity that has so
betrayed him (Herbert, ); I suggest that he also tries to escape the ubiq­
uitous public scrutiny that he has so internalized.
Bozzle is the novel’s easy scapegoat in its superficial defense of marital
privacy. The detective’s character is undercut in two significant ways. First,
the text reveals the fallacy of Bozzle’s evidence by representing interior scenes
that he investigates from outside, thus privileging the reader’s penetration
and showing Bozzle’s view to be limited. (This is the reverse of the com­
mon technique whereby authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle create
reverence for their fictional detectives by limiting the reader’s access to evi­
dence.) Readers judge Bozzle’s evidence and find it misleading: we know
that the letter to Colonel Osborne with the Lessboro’ postmark was not
from Emily; we also know that the colonel was discomfited at St. Did­
dulph’s, and did not see Emily at all. More fundamentally, the text scape­
goats Bozzle through the condemnation of Hugh Stanbury, who implores
Trevelyan to “dismiss Bozzle,” and argues that a wife who “requires watch­
ing” is not “worth watching” (HK, ). Stanbury also exhorts Trevelyan,
“Can’t you be man enough to remember that you are a man?” (HK, ),
thereby making the very hiring of the detective a sign of effeminacy and
powerlessness. Finally, we see Bozzle’s private home through Trevelyan, who
is “disgusted and revolted” by “his minister’s domestic arrangements” (HK,
). The text thus makes it easy to vilify Bozzle as “a blowfly, a filthy thing”
(Sutherland, introduction, xvii). It is also easy to conclude that Bozzle
figures the public gaze in the novel and that, once he is gone, the text is
purged of this intrusive force.
But Trollope’s text is not so simple. Even without Bozzle, the public
gaze is pervasive in He Knew He Was Right. It is almost impossible to get
away from newspapers: like chignons and public advertisements, these
hallmarks of modern life—to Miss Stanbury’s chagrin—are everywhere.
Hugh Stanbury writes for the Daily Record; at Exeter Station, as Bozzle
eavesdrops on Colonel Osborne, he has his “eyes fixed on a copy of the
[Daily Record ]” (HK, ); on the train, Colonel Osborne tries to avoid
Bozzle’s questions by “burying himself behind a newspaper” (HK, );
Hugh Stanbury pretends to read the day’s newspaper as he talks to Trevelyan
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about his marriage (HK, ); and Mr. Glascock reads the newspaper in
his dressing gown when he receives the American minister in Venice (HK,
). The novel is explicit and emphatic in indicating that the newspaper
has become the major arbiter of Victorian social life: as Hugh Stanbury
points out to the conservative Sir Marmaduke, the editor of the Jupiter
(presumably based on the Times) has far more influence on modern life
than the lord chancellor (HK, ). In a highly significant scene, the novel
deploys the formal device of stichomythia to suggest the interpenetration
of the private and the public. This occurs when Trevelyan seeks out Hugh
Stanbury to tell him about his marital troubles and finds him writing a
leading article on the Reform Bill. Stanbury, who is writing on deadline,
works as Trevelyan talks. The scene must be quoted at length for its effect
to be shown:
“I wish to be just, and even generous; and I do love her with all my
heart,” [Trevelyan] said one afternoon, when Hugh was very hard at work.
“‘It is all very well for gentlemen to call themselves reformers,’” Hugh
was writing, “‘but have these gentlemen ever realised to themselves the
meaning of that word? We think that they have never done so as long
as—’ Of course you love her,” said Hugh, with his eyes still on the
paper, still leaning on his pen, but finding by the cessation of sound that
Trevelyan had paused, and therefore knowing that it was necessary that
he should speak.
“As much as ever,” said Trevelyan, with energy.
“‘As long as they follow such a leader, in such a cause, into whichever
lobby he may choose to take them—’ Exactly so,—exactly,” said Stanbury; “just as much as ever.”
“You are not listening to a word,” said Trevelyan.
“I haven’t missed a single expression you have used,” said Stanbury.
“But a fellow has to do two things at a time when he’s on the daily press.”
(HK, )
The scene is undeniably funny, but underlying the humor is a serious ideo­
logical point about the role of the press. The stichomythia effectively
weaves together Trevelyan’s marital woes and Stanbury’s Reform Bill article,
thereby suggesting a blurring, if not an erasure, of the line between public
and private life. Though Bozzle may be the most dramatic and visible
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agent of this assault on the private sphere, the newspaper is more power­
ful and more ubiquitous, and is not so easily got rid of.
Trevelyan v. Trevelyan
Though the text vilifies Bozzle for his court jargon, it simultaneously con­
ducts its own trials of Trevelyan for marital cruelty and insanity. The per­
vasiveness of the legal lens is felt on a comic level first, as the novel’s
subplots parody the legal preoccupations of the main plot. The novel’s
main plot, for example, focuses obsessively on letters: Bozzle reports to
Trevelyan about Colonel Osborne’s letters to Emily, and Trevelyan weighs
the implications of Osborne addressing his wife as “Dear Emily” (HK, ).
Meanwhile, Colonel Osborne considers for half an hour and tears up two
sheets of paper as he decides whether to write “Dear” or “Dearest” Emily
(HK, ). (Such details were actually featured in the  trial of Wood v.
Wood and Stanger, in which an older family friend was the co-respondent
and the judge weighed the importance of a letter beginning “My dearest
Fanny,” and ending “Yours most devotedly, George” [Times,  March ,
f ].) In the novel, the subplot parodies this obsession with letters via
“The Stanbury Correspondence” (HK, ), in which Priscilla and Miss
Stanbury exchange letters that reveal not adulterous intimacy but sheer
stubbornness. Similarly, Mr. Gibson’s letter to Camilla is represented as pos­
sible legal evidence (“public property” [HK, ]) in a breach-of-promise
action.
But these parodies of the main plot’s legal issues are incidental com­
pared to the novel’s main critical thrust, which is to construct what was
termed a “cross suit” to Trevelyan’s imagined divorce case of Trevelyan v.
Trevelyan and Osborne—that is, the suit of Trevelyan v. Trevelyan, with Emily
as plaintiff and Trevelyan as defendant against the charge of legal cruelty
for his false accusation of adultery. I say “false” here for it is a key feature
of the novel that we know Emily to be innocent. The reader is given de­
tailed descriptions of all her encounters and conversations with Colonel
Osborne, showing Trevelyan’s suspicions of adultery to be mistaken be­
yond any doubt. For the reader of this realist text, there is no sensational
mystery, no domestic secret (as in the “Secret” [WW, ] of Sir Percival
Glyde in The Woman in White) to be investigated. Yet the novel nevertheless
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represents in an almost unparalleled degree the capacity of the public gaze
to penetrate private life. For the reader is encouraged by the narrator to in­
vestigate Trevelyan’s marital behavior as constituting either legal cruelty or
legal insanity, or both. The novel thus does not dispense with Bozzle in
order to drop a veil over the home, but instead redirects the scrutiny of the
investigative gaze toward male domestic conduct. Indeed, Hammerton
specifically identifies this text as exemplifying the “increasing public pre­
occupation with standards of manliness and men’s marital conduct” as the
late-Victorian critical focus tended to shift to “abuse of authority by hus­
bands” (Hammerton, Cruelty, –).
A key scene that signals the re-directing of the text’s critical scrutiny is
the one in which Trevelyan enters Bozzle’s house. He finds the ex-policeman
in his shirtsleeves holding his baby and discussing his detective business with
his obviously astute wife. As I have noted, Trevelyan is “disgusted” by “his
minister’s domestic arrangements” (HK, ), and the scene might seem to
degrade Bozzle in the reader’s eyes. I would suggest, however, that it holds
more complex possibilities. For while every other marriage in the novel is
underpinned firmly by male power, this marriage is the salient exception. In
a series of short and fascinating glimpses, the text invades the working-class
ménage of the Bozzles and finds it surprisingly egalitarian, as Mrs. Bozzle
makes penetrating comments to her husband about Trevelyan’s case:
“That’s all very well, Maryanne; but when a party has took a gent’s
money, a party is bound to go through with the job.”
“Gammon, Bozzle.”
“It’s all very well to say gammon; but his money has been took,—and
there’s more to come.”
“And ain’t you worked for the money,—down to Hexeter one time,
across the water pretty well day and night, watching that ere clergyman’s
’ouse like a cat? What more’d he have? As to the child, I won’t hear of it,
B. The child shan’t come here. . . .”
“The paternal parent has a right to his hinfants, no doubt.” That was
Bozzle’s law.
“I don’t believe it, B.”
“But he have, I tell you.”
“He can’t suckle ’em;—can he? I don’t believe a bit of his rights.”
(HK, )
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There are two key aspects to this exchange. The first is Mrs. Bozzle’s pithy
critique of the  Custody of Infants Act, under which only mothers
against whom adultery was not proved could apply for custody of their
children under seven. The second is that, although marital equality is other­
wise nonexistent in this novel (as Herbert has shown), we find it here, as
Mrs. Bozzle challenges her husband about his job, and he accepts her criti­
cism. (The tone of the exchange is vigorous but not aggressive.) Indeed,
the narrator tells us that Mr. Bozzle no longer answers Trevelyan’s telegrams
because “Mrs. Bozzle was opposed to the proposed separation of the mother
and the child, and that Bozzle was a man who listened to the words of his
wife” (HK, ).
This scene functions as the fulcrum on which the novel’s critical
scrutiny shifts. Up to now, the main focus of investigation has been female
sexual misconduct (i.e., Emily’s alleged adultery), and its main agent has
been Bozzle. But here the paradigm of investigator/investigated is re­
versed, as the detective’s own private life is scrutinized. The reader swiftly
realizes that Bozzle provides a telling contrast to Trevelyan. He too has an
infant son, and as opposed to Trevelyan’s distant and obsessive fatherhood,
the novel depicts Bozzle as sharing child care quite naturally with his wife:
“[H]er husband stood before her reading for the second time a somewhat
lengthy epistle which had reached him from Italy, while he held the baby
over his shoulder with his left arm” (HK, ). The following chapter jux­
taposes this with Trevelyan’s strained relationship with his own son, as he
awkwardly places the child on his knee, and talks to him “in a voice that
was dismal beyond compare” (HK, ). The point here is that the inves­
tigation of the detective’s home life turns the novel’s critical scrutiny onto
Trevelyan’s own conduct as father and husband. Bozzle (the novel’s super­
ficial scapegoat in its anxiety about the investigation of private conduct) is
exorcized from the novel, but the investigating gaze is not. The text redi­
rects this gaze toward Trevelyan and invites the reader to participate in a
sustained investigation of Trevelyan’s marital conduct.
This investigation derives its structure from that of a legal trial. This
structure is indicated in the titles of chapter  (“Verdict of the Jury—
‘Mad, my Lord’”) and chapter  (“Acquitted”), which use legal metaphors
to refer to the two major themes in the narrator’s investigation: Trevelyan’s
insanity and his cruelty. In arguing that the novel derives its form from a
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legal trial, I draw on David D. Oberhelman’s article on He Knew He Was
Right and the insanity defense. Oberhelman situates the novel within de­
veloping nineteenth-century jurisprudence on criminal insanity, especially
the  M’Naghten case, the trial of a laborer who shot Robert Peel’s per­
sonal secretary because he was under the delusion that the Tories were per­
secuting him.⁵ This case established the legal definition of insanity as the
inability to distinguish “right and wrong in a specific case” (Oberhelman,
–). As Oberhelman argues, the narrator’s account of Trevelyan’s mar­
ital conduct proceeds “as though it were a calculated defense of the jealous
husband’s insanity delivered to a jury of readers” (Oberhelman, ). This
defense, Oberhelman argues, identifies Trevelyan as meeting the “Com­
mon Law criteria for insanity established by the  M’Naghten Rules in
which a defendant could be [deemed] insane and therefore irresponsible for
his actions if he did not know right from wrong” (Oberhelman, ). In
this context, the novel’s title—He Knew He Was Right—refers to Trevelyan’s
inability to distinguish right from wrong as a fundamental alienation from
himself. Oberhelman concludes that in chapter  (“Verdict of the Jury—
‘Mad, my Lord’”) “the narrator explicitly states that Trevelyan’s antithetical
concepts of right and wrong in marital relations constitute legal insanity”
(Oberhelman, ). Oberhelman’s argument is bolstered by Sutherland,
who states that Trevelyan’s character is “quite evidently” based on Jean
Etienne Esquirol’s influential early nineteenth-century research on mono­
mania (Sutherland, introduction, xiv), the disease that formed the clinical
basis for the first medical insanity defense. (Near the end of Trevelyan’s
life, the doctor explicitly says that Trevelyan is “perhaps mono-maniacal”
[HK, ], and the reviewer in the British Quarterly Review recognized the
novel as a “psychological” portrait of “the rise and development of a jeal­
ous monomania” [Smalley, ]). Monomania was described as a condi­
tion in which the sufferer could appear to be sane in most areas and yet be
insane on a particular issue, as Trevelyan is about his wife’s adultery. As the
narrator remarks, “Thought deep, correct, continued, and energetic is quite
compatible with madness” (HK, ). Sutherland also points out (intro­
duction, xv) that the text appears to refer to the M’Naghten case in chapter
, when the narrator reflects, “There is perhaps no great social question
so imperfectly understood among us at the present day as that which refers
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to the line which divides sanity from insanity” (HK, ). This is just be­
fore the narrator bluntly declares to his jury of readers that Trevelyan is “in
truth, mad on the subject of his wife’s alleged infidelity” (HK, ).
But if Trevelyan is defended on the grounds of insanity, of what is he
accused? Oberhelman states vaguely that the narrator conducts “a defense
similar to those heard in Victorian criminal proceedings to have a defen­
dant declared irresponsible” (Oberhelman, ). I submit that Trevelyan
is implicitly accused of marital cruelty, and that this forms the novel’s “cross
suit” to Trevelyan’s imagined divorce suit on the grounds of Emily’s adul­
tery. “Cross suits” were divorce cases in which each party accused the other
of marital offenses: an example is that of Yeatman v. Yeatman—Yeatman v.
Yeatman, Dempsey, and Blackburn (Times,  December , d). In this
case the wife petitioned for a judicial separation on the grounds of desertion,
and the husband petitioned for divorce on the grounds of his wife’s two
counts of adultery. Another cross suit was that of McNamara v. McNamara
and Metcalf (Times,  July , d), in which the husband sought a di­
vorce on the grounds of adultery and the wife charged him in turn with
adultery plus cruelty.
The legal definition of marital cruelty in England in  was strict,
and it is important to know that Trevelyan’s conduct does not meet it. The
main definition of matrimonial cruelty in England during the nineteenth
century had been established by Sir William Scott in Evans v. Evans (),
and it included only physical violence (actual or threatened), as opposed
to mental suffering: “What merely wounds the mental feelings is in few
cases to be admitted where they are not accompanied with bodily injury,
either actual or menaced” (Evans v. Evans, ; qtd. in Hammerton, “Vic­
torian Marriage,” ). The Divorce Act of  retained Scott’s definition
of matrimonial cruelty. However, as Hammerton observes, in common law
the definition of cruelty underwent a gradual shift after , as judges ex­
panded it to include nonviolent acts of cruelty such as violence to children
in front of their mother (Suggate v. Suggate, ); treating one’s wife so
that onlookers mistook her for a prostitute (Milner v. Milner, ); and a
combination of drunkenness, reveling with the servants, entertaining a
prostitute in the house, and urinating throughout the home (Swatman v.
Swatman, ). The novel just predates the landmark case of Kelly v. Kelly
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(–), which recognized the husband’s mental cruelty to his wife
as constituting a threat to her health (Hammerton, “Victorian Marriage,”
–).
Characters in the novel persist in referring to Trevelyan as “cruel,”
which was the Victorian legal term for marital violence sufficient to justify
separation or divorce. Colonel Osborne is the first to raise this possibility:
“[W]hat if Mrs. Trevelyan were to divorce herself from her husband on the
score of her husband’s cruelty?” (HK, ; my emphasis throughout this
paragraph). The novel does not give much moral weight to the frivolous
Osborne, but other, more reliable characters reiterate this accusation against
Trevelyan. Hugh Stanbury says to Trevelyan, “I regard your wife as a woman
much ill-used, and I think you are punishing her, and yourself, too, with
a cruel severity for an indiscretion of the very slightest kind” (HK, );
Emily sees “no end to the cruelty of her position” (HK, ); Mr. Outhouse
says to Trevelyan that he is “surprised . . . at your gross cruelty to your un­
offending wife” (HK, ); Hugh calls Louey’s kidnapping “the cruellest
thing I ever heard” (HK, ); Sir Marmaduke resolves to “protect [his]
poor girl against the cruelty of [her] husband” (HK, ); and Emily de­
mands, “Why do you treat me with such cruelty?” (HK, ). Even the
narrator uses the term: “One does not become angry with a madman; but
while a man has power in his hands over others, and when he misuses that
power grossly and cruelly, who is there that will not be angry?” (HK, ).
The magistrate consulted by Sir Marmaduke, however, points out
that Trevelyan has done nothing that “could be shewn to be cruel before a
judge” (HK, ). Trevelyan is never physically violent to Emily, even at
the height of his madness and jealousy. One of the novel’s most reliable
characters, Mr. Glascock, attests that “[t]here is a glimmer of sense in all
his madness, which will keep him from any actual violence” (HK, ).
When Emily comes to see her son, Mr. Glascock says he is “confident”
that Trevelyan will “do no harm to her” (HK, ). Indeed, the crux of
Trevelyan’s dilemma seems to be how to exert control without force: “[H]ow
was he to proceed when she refused to obey the plainest and most necessary
command which he laid upon her? Let a man be ever so much his wife’s
master, he cannot maintain his masterdom by any power which the law
places in his hands. He had asked his wife for a promise of obedience and
she would not give it to him! What was he to do next?” (HK, –).
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Trevelyan returns to this problem obsessively: “He could not confine his
wife in a dungeon. He could not save himself from the disgrace of her mis­
conduct, by any rigours of surveillance on his own part. As wives are man­
aged now-a-days, he could not forbid to her the use of the post-office” (HK,
). Hammerton points out that this anxiety concerning male authority
characterizes divorce cases after midcentury, in which “the untrammelled
rights of husbands became an increasing focus of public scrutiny,” and
male behavior “reflected a close knowledge of and preoccupation with
their marital rights, which some plainly understood to be under attack”
(Hammerton, Cruelty, ).
The novel’s investigation of Trevelyan rests on the cruelty of his non­
violent methods of control: specifically, on his treatment of his wife before
the servants, his forcible claim to the child, and his false accusation of
adultery. (As I have already pointed out, the last two are related because
legally, a woman against whom adultery had been proven could not obtain
access to her child.) Emily’s treatment in front of the servants may not
strike the modern reader as weighty in comparison to the last two, but
Hammerton’s study of nineteenth-century divorce cases points out that
judges perceived a role reversal between middle-class mistress and servant
as a form of “domestic outrage” (Hammerton, Cruelty, ). In Curtis v.
Curtis (), for example, the judge found cruelty in John Curtis’s “dis­
placement of his wife from her proper position in her house” when he
made her apologize to him in front of her servant, served the servant bread
at breakfast before he served her, and gave control of the children to a ser­
vant (see Hammerton, “Victorian Marriage,” ). In this context we may
grasp Emily’s humiliation when Trevelyan instructs the cook not to allow
Colonel Osborne in the house:
[W]hen Mrs. Trevelyan heard what had been done—which she did from
Mrs. Prodgers herself, Mrs. Prodgers having been desired by her master
to make the communication,—she declared to her sister that everything
was now over. She could never again live with a husband who had dis­
graced his wife by desiring her own cook to keep a guard upon her. Had
the footman been instructed not to admit Colonel Osborne, there would
have been in such instruction some apparent adherence to the recog­
nised usages of society. (HK, )
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Emily’s resentment seems to rest precisely in the inversion of hierarchy
that formed the central issue in the Curtis case (Hammerton, “Victorian
Marriage,” ). Had Trevelyan instructed the footman, it would have
been relevant to the footman’s duties in knowing whom to admit and
whom not to admit to the house. In instructing the cook not to admit
Colonel Osborne, however, Trevelyan (perhaps inadvertently) puts Mrs.
Prodgers in the position of moral judge of his wife’s behavior, an inversion
that Emily finds intolerable.
The narrator further suggests that Trevelyan’s taking Louey away from
Emily constitutes cruelty. Both upper- and lower-class characters identify
this as cruel. Lady Rowley calls it a “dastardly deed,” and Hugh Stanbury
says it “is the cruellest thing I ever heard” (HK, ). Mrs. Bozzle is suc­
cinct and scathing: “He can’t suckle ’em,—can he? I don’t believe a bit of
his rights” (HK, ). The most powerful commentary comes from the
potboy and the barmaid, who see Hugh carrying Louey for a short visit
with his father at the Full Moon. Their cryptic exchange combines grim
realism with condemnation: “‘There’s a young ’ooman has to do with that
ere little game,’ said the potboy. ‘And it’s two to one the young ’ooman has
the worst of it,’ said the barmaid. ‘They mostly does,’ said the potboy”
(HK, –). This chorus of commentary—spanning social perspectives
from the gentry to the journalist, the hotel potboy to the barmaid—guides
the reader’s sympathies toward Emily and subtly guides the reader to see
Trevelyan’s action not as a claiming of custody but as an abduction. Using
a centrifugal technique whereby commentary is embedded in dialogue
rather than in the narrative voice, the novel establishes Emily as victim of
her husband’s violent rupture of the mother-child relationship. Both son
and mother are seen as victims of this cruelty: the text depicts Emily as
“desolate” (HK, ) and Louey as silent and “cowed” (HK, ). However,
Emily’s health is not threatened, which was the legal test for marital cru­
elty in the British courts in .
The novel represents Trevelyan’s worst action as his false accusation of
adultery, described by Mr. Outhouse as “gross cruelty” (HK, ). Here
the narrator’s language escalates to metaphors of physical violence, de­
scribing Trevelyan’s behavior as “tortur[e]” and “scourg[ing]” (HK, –).
If we accept that the narrative constructs a case against Trevelyan for mari­
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tal cruelty, then it is clear that the text expands beyond the current legal
definition provided by the magistrate. Trevelyan may have done nothing
that can “be shewn to be cruel before a judge” (HK, ), but the narrative
indicts him by employing a broader definition of cruelty, one that includes
a false accusation of adultery. In this respect the novel is ahead of the
British courts; it recognizes purely mental cruelty even when there is no
impact on the physical health of the victim.
R. L. Griswold’s study of the doctrine of mental cruelty in the
nineteenth-century United States points out that in the later nineteenth
century American judges broke from their British counterparts by grant­
ing “that mental cruelty might warrant a divorce even in the absence of
observable damage to the health of the victim.”⁶ Trollope wrote part of He
Knew He Was Right while traveling in the United States, and while this in­
fluence is most obvious in the depictions of the Spaldings and Wallachia
Petrie, it may be that he derived his recognition of a wider basis for marital
cruelty from his American experiences. In the United States, cases involving
false accusations of adultery were, after , “decisive in legitimating the
legal standing of mental cruelty in the absence of somatic harm” (Griswold,
). Griswold finds strong ideological reasons for this: in a culture that
valued women’s sexual purity, such accusations “inverted the Victorian
world view by debasing its moral exemplar” (Griswold, ). As the Cali­
fornia Supreme Court ruled in Morris v. Morris (), a “woman prizes
virtue dearer than life itself, and he who attempts deliberately to rob her
of her good name, saps the foundation of her happiness and inflicts a deeper
wound than the ruffian does by his repeated blows” (qtd. in Griswold, ).
Trollope, however, does not represent Emily as a moral exemplar. She
has not committed adultery, but, as Herbert argues, it is crucial to the plot
that she is less than ideal (Herbert, ): proud, recalcitrant, unreasonable.
It is easy to create moral outrage on behalf of a moral exemplar, less so on
behalf of a flawed and “self-willed, haughty, steely woman” (the descrip­
tion is from the Spectator’s  review of the novel [Smalley, ]). There
are parallels here to Caroline Marchmont, who was found to have been
treated with cruelty even though she drank too much sherry, showed ill
temper, and was “shabby” with her money (Times,  January , b).
The narrator’s rhetoric—largely withheld thus far in favor of the panoply
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of other voices condemning Trevelyan’s cruelty—emerges strongly at the
end of the novel, as Trevelyan is condemned for his cruelty and simulta­
neously declared not responsible for it. The narrator’s definitive statement
recognizes both: “And he was mad;—mad though every doctor in England
had called him sane. Had he not been mad he must have been a fiend,—
or he could not have tortured, as he had done, the woman to whom he
owed the closest protection which one human being can give to another”
(HK, ). In this context, Emily’s wearing mourning garb (“as a woman
who mourned for her husband” [HK, ]) symbolizes that the false accu­
sation of adultery constitutes the death of the marriage, and that Trevelyan’s
madness constitutes another kind of death.
The penultimate chapter (“Acquitted”) ends both Trevelyan’s imag­
ined trial of Emily and the novel’s trial of Trevelyan’s conduct. But reading
the text in terms of counternarratives (Trevelyan’s imagined divorce suit
against Emily and the narrative’s trial for legal cruelty of Trevelyan, who is
exonerated by his madness) complicates the question of exactly whom the
novel acquits. Emily feels herself “acquitted” of the false charge of adultery
by Louis’s deathbed gesture, which, like the deathbed scene in “Janet’s
Repentance,” is represented with great ambiguity:
“I have not been a harlot to you;—have I? . . .
Kiss my hand, Louis, if you believe me.” And very gently she laid the
tips of her fingers on his lips. For a moment or two she waited, and the
kiss did not come. Would he spare her in this last moment left to him
either for justice or for mercy? . . . [A]t length the lips moved, and with
struggling ear she could hear the sound of the tongue within. (HK, )
While Emily declares to Nora, “[A]t last he trusted me” (HK, ), the
reader witnesses a scene left open to interpretation. Emily interprets it as
she desires, but readers may well be unconvinced that a deathbed recon­
ciliation has occurred. This leaves us with a grim vision of Louis’s wordless
death: “Trollope,” Sutherland writes, “denies his hero even that sympathy
one might feel for a dying dog” (Sutherland, introduction, x). Moreover,
the following paragraph reiterates that Trevelyan had been both cruel and
mad, describing him as a “maniac” who had “cruelly misused” his wife
(HK, ). Thus if Louis is acquitted by the reader and narrator, it is only
on the grounds that his monomania exonerates him of cruelty.
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The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Court
I argue, then, that this realist novel is, like The Woman in White, structured
like a trial. Whereas Collins’s novel foregrounds its formal resemblance to
a trial (with the narrative divided into witness statements), the trial-like
structure of Trollope’s novel is more subtle. Yet if we accept that He Knew
He Was Right is structured around two trials—Trevelyan’s obsessive trial of
his wife, and the narrator’s trial of Trevelyan—this has a significant effect
on how we understand the text. The conventional interpretation of the
novel sees Trevelyan’s private life as contaminated by the interference of
the private detective, who induces Trevelyan to see Emily’s conduct as a
case to be examined and proven. To quote Sutherland, Bozzle “soils all that
is holy and private in Trevelyan’s life. Some of the finest—and the most
painful—episodes in the novel are those describing Trevelyan’s maddened
employment of vulgar Bozzle to torment him, by bringing back ‘evidence’
of his own cuckolding” (Sutherland, introduction, xvii). Sutherland’s
reading relies on a Victorian construction of the home as properly “holy
and private” (Sutherland, introduction, xvii)—that is, distinct from the
intrusive gaze of the public institution of the courts. It also cements the
view of the realist novel as constructing the liberal subject as private and
individual. But as I have shown, the text itself intrudes into the privacy of
the home when it puts Trevelyan’s conduct on trial. Moreover, it suggests
the radical permeation of private and public spheres when it shows the
newspaper as ubiquitous throughout the text.
Trevelyan’s death might appear to arrest this investigation of the pri­
vate. Superficially it does so, as the novel closes with a plethora of marriages
(Nora to Hugh, Dorothy to Brooke, Bella French to Mr. Gibson) and an
engagement (Giles Hickman to Martha). This very conventional conclu­
sion might appear to re-enshrine the domestic sphere, reinstate marital
privacy and happiness, and thus reassure readers that the scrutiny of the
Trevelyans’ marriage is an aberration, not the rule. Yet at the heart of this
happy ending is the journalist (and by extension the newspaper). When
Hugh and Nora get married at Monkhams, the celebration is not just of
their nuptials but of the new status of the newspaper as well. The narrator
writes, “It is our opinion that Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Stanbury will never
want for a beef-steak and all comfortable additions until the inhabitants of
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London shall cease to require newspapers on their breakfast tables” (HK,
). The novel thus reinstates the public gaze even more centrally, by
making a journalist with a penny newspaper its exemplar of the modern
Englishman.
Like Oliver Twist, He Knew He Was Right takes as its central themes
marital cruelty and its investigation. Oliver Twist established the paradigm
of the passive and loyal victim as defender of marital privacy, simultaneously
licensing and resisting the investigation of marital violence. In contrast, in
He Knew He Was Right the investigation of marital conduct permeates the
novel, and the novel shows the newspaper as having a central role in the
construction of “private” consciousness. The text thus takes as its main
theme the public investigation of marital conduct, representing this as a
central preoccupation of both the newspaper and the novel. Tromp pro­
poses that the sensation novel prompted the cultural shift whereby marital
cruelty became more widely recognized and visible in the later nineteenth
century; He Knew He Was Right, however, indicates that the newspaper
and the novel were far less distinct than her analysis suggests. This text
represents a highly complex interaction among the courts, the newspaper,
and the novel, whereby the newspaper reporting of court trials became a
major agent in the construction of private life, and yet the novel was able
to anticipate court decisions on key issues such as the recognition of mental
cruelty. What is salient is that since the early nineteenth century the per­
ception of public investigation of the private had signally shifted. Whereas
in Oliver Twist the agent of investigation is clearly external to the private
(i.e., represented by a doctor, a journalist, a magistrate), in He Knew He
Was Right the major agent of investigation is the internalized private con­
sciousness of the public gaze. The newspaper had entered the home.
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7
| |
M A R I TA L V I O L E N C E A N D THE NEW WOMAN
The Wing of Azrael
T    of this book turn to the Victorian fin de siècle
—a period identified with widespread gender crisis, the interrogation of
masculine and feminine roles, the forging of the social identity of the
homosexual, and the rise of the New Woman. Part of this ideological up­
heaval consisted of a widespread questioning of marriage and a concern
that—despite considerable legal reforms—the issue of marital abuse had
not been resolved. These legal reforms had occurred between  and
, and had achieved many of the key changes sought by midcentury
feminists. The Married Women’s Property Act () had granted to mar­
ried women the right to “[e]arnings, specially registered investments, and
certain inherited property” (Holcombe, ). The Matrimonial Causes Act
() had given abused wives the right to an automatic separation order
if the husband was convicted of aggravated assault and if the court felt that
the wife’s safety was in peril; in such cases it also gave the wife the right to
spousal maintenance and the custody of children under ten. The Married
Women’s Property Act () had given to married women the same prop­
erty rights as a femme sole; and the Guardianship of Infants Act () had
further increased women’s custody rights, by specifying that after divorce
the welfare of the child should be taken into consideration in custody

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decisions. Of all these changes, Mary Lyndon Shanley highlights the 
act as “arguably the single most important change in the legal status of
women in the nineteenth century.” It was hailed in the final report of the
Married Women’s Property Committee as a “bloodless and beneficent revo­
lution,” the “first great victory of the principle of human equality over the
unjust privilege of Sex” (qtd. in Shanley, ).
While some of the upheavals of the fin de siècle arose from an anti­
feminist backlash following these legal changes, feminists themselves faced
an ideological crisis as they realized that liberal reform had not, after all,
eliminated the problem of marital violence.¹ In the Westminster Review of
, Matilda Blake asked, “Are Women Protected?” and vehemently an­
swered in the negative: “It is to be remarked that under the male supremacy
—which is defended on the ground that it shelters women from the rough
struggle for existence, and so gives them opportunity to develop a refine­
ment and gentleness otherwise unattainable—their lives are not even secure!
Their so-called protectors daily beat, torture, and violently assault them,
often with such violence that death results” (AWP, ). Late nineteenthcentury feminists widened their critique of male violence to include sexu­
ally transmitted diseases and the husband’s conjugal rights as significant
forms of abuse. In her  treatise Marriage As It Was, As It Is, And As It
Should Be, Annie Besant argues that a wife’s sexual subjection violated her
fundamental human rights: “A married woman loses control over her own
body; it belongs to her owner, not to herself; no force, no violence, on the
husband’s part in conjugal relations, is regarded as possible by the law; she
may be suffering, ill, it matters not; force or constraint is recognised by the
law as rape, in all cases save that of marriage” (MIW, ). The end of the
nineteenth century, then, reshaped but did not resolve the wife-abuse issue,
and the last two chapters of this book examine two contrasting fictional
responses to the fin-de-siècle concerns about assault and sexual violence
within marriage. In this chapter, I argue that Mona Caird’s little-known
novel The Wing of Azrael () represents the ideological impasse of the
New Woman facing the failure of liberal reform. The final chapter turns to
the famous figure of Sherlock Holmes, who, I argue, assuages late-Victorian
concerns about marital assault by modeling ideal manliness and policing
aberrant masculinity in the late-Victorian home.
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Fin-de-Siècle Allegory: The Wing of Azrael
The Wing of Azrael was one of the earliest of the New Woman novels of the
fin de siècle, preceded and probably influenced by Olive Schreiner’s The
Story of an African Farm () and Sarah Grand’s Ideala (), while an­
ticipating George Gissing’s The Odd Women (), Grand’s The Heavenly
Twins () and The Beth Book (), George Egerton’s Keynotes ()
and Discords (), Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (), Thomas
Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (), and Caird’s own highly successful The
Daughters of Danaus (). Almost all of these novels address issues of
marriage reform, free love, and women’s right to sexual consent within
marriage. Together they constitute a significant critique of marriage, in
which feminists ask the question that most liberal reformers of the early
and mid-nineteenth century had very conspicuously not posed: Was mar­
riage by its very nature violent to women? The Wing of Azrael, in particu­
lar, takes as its central themes marital abuse and marital rape.
The novel centers around the interior life of the heroine, Viola Sedley
Dendraith. She is trapped in an unhappy marriage to Philip Dendraith,
whom she has married out of familial duty. Viola’s resistance is encouraged
by Harry Lancaster, the man she truly loves, and by their mutual friend,
the New Woman Sibella Lincoln. When Viola tries to leave her marriage
to have an adulterous relationship with Harry, Philip tries to rape her as a
means of enforcing his marital control. Viola stabs Philip and then disap­
pears into the “pitch-black, rayless, impenetrable darkness” (WA, ) of
the cliffs at night, presumably to commit suicide by plunging into the sea.
Like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The Wing of Azrael is an allegory of
historical transition, and like Brontë, Caird represents national change on
a domestic scale: both novels depict women’s domestic lives as exemplify­
ing key shifts in gender relations for their respective eras. Whereas Helen
Huntingdon stands between the Georgian and the Victorian eras, Viola
(“a symbol of the troublous age” [WA, ]) stands between the Victorian
and the modern worlds. She and the other prominent female characters
in The Wing of Azrael allegorize mid-Victorian, late-Victorian, and New
Woman/feminist responses to unhappy or abusive marriages. Notably, the
novel does not depict marriage as being in a state of renewal or transition;
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on the contrary, it depicts violent marriage as a recurrent feature of a heredi­
tary cycle. What does change within the fictional time frame is women’s
response to this abuse. Thus Viola’s mother, Mrs. Sedley, represents the
mid-Victorian ideology of wifely submission, an ideology that the novel
condemns as “drawing out” the “evil nature” in her husband (WA, ). Her
death represents the symbolic demise of the Victorian woman. Viola, “the
child of her generation” (WA, ), embodies the woman on the verge of
the modern era, whose sense of familial duty and fading faith tie her to the
ideals of the past, but whose soul will not bear the humiliation of cover­
ture (which Caird depicts as leading naturally to abuse, as she sees absolute
power leading to tyranny [WA, ]).² Finally, the text represents the New
Woman in Sibella Lincoln, separated wife. The novel depicts Sibella as “the
high-water mark of human development” (WA, ) and Viola’s mentor in
the birth of new selfhood. In an appeal that makes explicit Viola’s allegori­
cal significance, Sibella implores her to leave her marriage for the sake of
all women: “Are women who come after you to be heavier hearted because
of you?” (WA, ). The heroine, however, is paralyzed, and the text depicts
this impasse as disastrous: the wing of Azrael (or wing of Death) hangs over
this late-Victorian woman as a kind of inexorable doom.
Very significantly, Caird’s historical allegory is set in a Gothic land­
scape that is seemingly timeless. A passing reference to the Parnell divorce
case—“You know this case that’s in all the papers!” (WA, )—seems to
indicate that the text was set as well as published in , but the remote
castle that is Viola’s married home otherwise removes the novel’s world
from markers of late-Victorian time. In striking contrast to the explicit
contemporaneity of He Knew He Was Right, The Wing of Azrael returns to
the Gothic mode of the late eighteenth century. In novels such as Horace
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto () and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of
Udolpho (), remote and isolated castles signify abusive male power.
Indeed, Caird’s narrator tells the reader that the Dendraith castle has stood
empty for a hundred years, thus collapsing the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and implicitly refuting Victorian liberal claims to marital reform.
A similar collapse of time occurs as the text moves from tennis games to
Gothic ruins within pages. In her later novel The Daughters of Danaus,
Caird uses radical temporal shifts to suggest the historical contingency of
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patriarchy, but in The Wing of Azrael Viola moves only within the time
frame of patriarchal marriage, not outside it.³ (Sibella Lincoln, by con­
trast, collects prehistoric bronze figures and thus seems to gesture to more
remote and perhaps more liberating historical possibilities.) The text thus
deploys fin-de-siècle Gothic as an explicitly ideological mode of represen­
tation, refuting progressive narratives of liberal reform and suggesting in­
stead the historical cycle of violence in women’s lives. Notably, it also moves
the text away from the public world and the media, which formed so cen­
tral a part of Trollope’s realist text.
“Is Marriage a Failure?” The New Woman and the Violent Home
Paradoxically, however, while The Wing of Azrael uses a Gothic and seem­
ingly timeless mode of representation, in its preoccupation with marital
rape, the novel is thoroughly rooted in the print culture and politics of the
late-Victorian period. In the s, feminist campaigns to repeal the Con­
tagious Diseases Acts, W. T. Stead’s “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”
campaign of , and the Whitechapel murders of the autumn of , as
well as feminist critiques of marriage—including Caird’s own provocative
public questioning of whether marriage itself was a failure—made sexual
violence against women into central media preoccupations. In , the
year before she published The Wing of Azrael, Mona Caird published in the
radical Westminster Review an article simply entitled “Marriage.” Deriding
modern marriage as a “vexatious failure” (Marr., ), Caird terms it “the
worst, because the most hypocritical, form of woman-purchase” (Marr.,
) and traces the origin of male possession in marriage back to primitive
hunter raids (Marr., ). Modern marriage, she argues, began during the
Reformation, and is linked to commerce, competition, and the rise of the
bourgeoisie (Marr., ). Its hallmark is that the wife is “figured as the
legal property of a man” (Marr., ) and it developed, she claims, con­
currently with systematic prostitution, these two parallel and complemen­
tary classes of women existing to serve the sexual needs of men. Under
bourgeois capitalism, she argues, women are thus divided into wives (the
sexual property of one man) and prostitutes (the sexual property of many)
(Marr., ). Caird’s article advocates a system of free marriage founded
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on the basic freedom of the individual. Fundamental to such a marriage is
the woman’s right of sexual consent: “[T]here must be a full understand­
ing and acknowledgment of the obvious right of the woman to possess her­
self body and soul, to give or withhold herself body and soul exactly as she
wills. The moral right here is so palpable, and its denial implies ideas so
low and offensive to human dignity, that no fear of consequences ought to
deter us from making this liberty an element of our ideal, in fact its fun­
damental principle” (Marr., –).
Caird’s critique of marriage as legalized prostitution participated in an
important polemic of the s in which feminists asserted women’s right to
control their own bodies. As early as , Mill had argued in The Subjection
of Women that even slaves possessed a right denied to Victorian women—
that of refusing unwanted sexual intercourse:
Above all, a female slave has (in Christian countries) an admitted right,
and is considered under a moral obligation, to refuse to her master the
last familiarity. Not so the wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfor­
tunately be chained to—though she may know that he hates her, though
it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it im­
possible not to loathe him—he can claim from her and enforce the low­
est degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of
an animal function contrary to her inclinations. (CW, :)
Fin-de-siècle feminists focused on this aspect of women’s subjection with
particular intensity. In Marriage As It Was, As It Is, And As It Should Be,
Annie Besant argues that enforcing conjugal rights against a man’s or
woman’s consent constituted “legalised rape” (MIW, ). A flashpoint for
feminists was the proposed Criminal Code amendment of  that defined
rape as “the act of a man, not under the age of  years, having carnal
knowledge of a woman, who is not his wife, without her consent” (qtd. in
Shanley, ). As Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy wrote in a paper presented
to the Social Science Association, the effect of this exception was to “de­
grade every English wife to the legal position of the purchased slave of the
harem, and to reduce her to a bodily slavery for which earth offers no
other parallel” (qtd. in Shanley, ). (Notably, Wolstenholme Elmy also
believed that menstruation was an unnatural process, a bleeding caused by
millennia of “persistent and inconsiderate excess and wrong usage by the
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male portion of the race,” and looked forward to a Utopian future in
which emancipated women would be free from this sign of bondage [qtd.
in Shanley , ]). From Josephine Butler’s assertion of women’s right
not to suffer the medical rape of the speculum, to Sarah Grand’s portrayal
of marital celibacy in The Heavenly Twins, late nineteenth-century feminists
demanded sexual and bodily integrity, including the right to use birth
control (as opposed to suffering what Wolstenholme Elmy called “enforced
maternity” [qtd. in Shanley , ]). By corollary, many considered re­
cent advances in married women’s property law, education, employment,
and political action to be vitiated by women’s sexual subjection. Edward
Aveling and Eleanor Marx’s assessment of the liberal feminist agenda in
“The Woman Question” () is scathing: “We will suppose all women,
not only those having property, enabled to vote; the Contagious Diseases
Act repealed; every calling thrown open to both sexes. The actual position
of women in respect to men would not be very vitally touched. . . . For not
one of these things, save indirectly the Contagious Diseases Act, touches
them in their sex relations” (WQ, ).
This perception that woman’s liberation rested on her sexual freedom
was fundamental to Caird’s analysis in the Westminster Review article. As
Judith Walkowitz observes, however, the issue of coercive marital sex is
strikingly absent from the widespread public discussion of the question “Is
marriage a failure?” conducted in the pages of the Daily Telegraph between
 August and  September .⁴ This discussion of Caird’s proposition,
one of the best-known examples of the new mass journalism, drew twentyseven thousand letters to the editor representing a huge range of profes­
sions and walks of life: barmaids and clerks presented their views alongside
Emile Zola, lawyers, bishops, and physicians. Writing under pen names
such as “   ,” “  ,” “ ­
  ,” and “   ,” corre­
spondents debated the merits and flaws of marriage and offered their own
experiences as examples. The Great Marriage Debate illustrates that Caird’s
feminism was not isolated to an intellectual elite but was debated and cir­
culated in an astonishingly democratic fashion. That the entire newspaper
correspondence contains not one reference to marital rape or sexual consent
in marriage is a notable omission, considering that this topic is a major
focus of Caird’s original analysis (Walkowitz, ). Indeed, contemporary
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members of the radical Men’s and Women’s Club (founded in  by Karl
Pearson to debate issues surrounding human sexuality) speculated that the
“correspondence must have been expurgated,” because any letters address­
ing the “delicate and unexplored territory” of marital sex had seemingly
been suppressed (qtd. in Walkowitz, ).
As Walkowitz points out, this silence in the Daily Telegraph’s other­
wise far-reaching debate on marriage is all the more remarkable because of
the high visibility of rape narratives in other social contexts in the s and
s. Antivivisectionists had plastered London streets with “posters of mu­
tilated and tortured bodies of innocent ‘feminized’ laboratory animals,”
while feminist opponents of the Contagious Diseases Acts had distributed
graphic accounts of medical sexual violence (Walkowitz, –). These in­
cluded detailed accounts of “instrumental rape” (qtd. in Walkowitz, ),
such as the following account by a prostitute describing a vaginal exami­
nation by speculum: “It is awful work; the attitude they push us into first
is so disgusting and so painful, and then these monstrous instruments and
they pull them out and push them in, and they turn and twist them about;
and if you cry out they stifle you” (Walkowitz, ). However, Walkowitz
argues that the accounts of rape and sexual violence that attracted sensa­
tional media attention coverage in the s (the “Maiden Tribute” series
and the Jack the Ripper murders) did not deploy a female point of view
(Walkowitz, ). Instead, W. T. Stead’s accounts of girls sold into prostitu­
tion, for example, place the reader in the position of male rapist, procurer,
or voyeur (Walkowitz, , ). Similarly, although the Whitechapel mur­
ders of  eerily recalled the themes of medical violence of the anti–
Contagious Diseases Acts and antivivisection campaigns, Walkowitz con­
tends that the “dark . . . fantasy” of Jack the Ripper produced by the media
showed little empathy for the female murder victims, characterizing them
as object lessons for a “morality tale of stark proportions” (Walkowitz, ).
Feminists such as Florence Fenwick Miller and Frances Power Cobbe tried
to use the Whitechapel murders to draw attention to the wider issue of vio­
lence against women, but Walkowitz demonstrates these were “isolated
interventions in an overwhelmingly male-dominated event” (Walkowitz,
–). She also notes that where marital coercion was openly discussed
(in the radical Men’s and Women’s Club), women found their views brushed
aside, while the club’s men ignored what Maria Sharpe called the “grave
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personal consequences” of sex for women (qtd. in Walkowitz, ). As
Walkowitz observes, the marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph ( August–
 September ) coincided with the first Whitechapel murders (
August ,  September ,  September ). Hence the silence of
the Daily Telegraph ’s correspondence on marital sex was juxtaposed with
graphic accounts of murder and mutilation of women in London’s East
End (Walkowitz, ). I have summarized Walkowitz at length because
her research suggests a telling media silence on the topic of marital sexual
coercion, even while the press was filled with images of violence against
women. The Wing of Azrael—published by Caird in , on the heels of
the marriage debate and the Jack the Ripper murders—addresses this con­
spicuous silence, taking as its central topics marital consent and rape, and
representing these contentious topics from the woman’s point of view.
Notably, however, while Caird’s novel fills a media void concerning
marital rape, The Wing of Azrael eschews the representation of print media
per se. In contrast to He Knew He Was Right and the Sherlock Holmes sto­
ries, in which the newspaper has a tangible presence, The Wing of Azrael
turns away from modern England and the newspaper, choosing Gothic
timelessness as its mode of representation. Apart from the fleeting refer­
ence to the Parnell divorce case, the text depicts Viola’s abusive married
life as radically severed from print media. This isolation is all the more
forceful coming on the heels of the Daily Telegraph marriage debates, and it
would seem to imply Caird’s disillusionment with the press as an instru­
ment of reform or at least her interest in experimental fiction as an alter­
native organ for change.
Alone with her husband in a ruined castle on the edge of a sea cliff,
Viola is depicted in isolation from the law, the journalist, the detective,
and other modern devices of control and surveillance. This is a signal re­
versal of the Trevelyans’ relationship, which at its most private is always
constructed by the public gaze. Caird’s characters, by comparison, stand
symbolically on the edge of eternity. As Sibella says, looking at the novel’s
key symbol, the sea, “We stand shivering between two eternities; we came
out of the darkness, and we see the darkness waiting for us a little way
ahead—such a little way!” (WA, ). Here Caird deploys the temporal ex­
pansion typical of late-Victorian fiction, seen, for example, in Hardy’s
novels. In Hardy’s fiction, this large time scale reduces the importance of
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human affairs, as, for example, it diminishes the tragedy of Tess’s pregnancy:
“[T]ime would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if they
had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten” (TD, ). In
contrast, Caird uses “the eternal boom of the waves” (WA, ) to reduce
social conventions but to heighten the importance of the individual life
passionately lived:
Creeds, doctrines, social laws—all seemed to lose form and substance
in that wild darkness; they trembled and waned when brought thus face
to face with nature—face to face with the inexorable facts and the un­
utterable sadness of life.
Harry was right—these stars, this darkness, that unappeasable sea
confirmed him: this pain, this failure and disappointment, confirmed
him. He pinned his faith to realities, to the great Facts and Passions of
our Life, and he flung conventions to the winds. (WA, )
Viola’s isolation is, then, both sinister and potentially liberating. The Wing
of Azrael turns away from Victorian realism, in which private life is explic­
itly depicted as constructed through the public voice of the newspaper, to­
ward an experimental use of fin-de-siècle Gothic and a focus on elemental
forces. Here, human life is both diminished and paradoxically intensified
by its juxtaposition with vast physical and temporal distances.
Selfhood and Sexual Consent in The Wing of Azrael
Appropriately, then, The Wing of Azrael begins its exploration of sexual
consent in an expansive setting. The heroine is alone, at midnight, look­
ing out of her bedroom window onto an avenue of trees leading over a hill
to the sea. The domestic setting gives way to vast imagined space:
The child peered forth eagerly into the still, passionless mystery of the
night. Throngs of bewildering thoughts were stirring the little soul to its
depths:—what was it, and whence this strange world that does 
come to an end at the top of the avenue, at the boundary of the park?—
this world that goes on and on, field after field, till it comes to the sea,
and then goes on and on again, wave after wave, till it comes once more
to the land, and then—? then the realms of the air, and the great cloudregions, and beyond these—Nothing, a great all-embracing Nothing
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that will not stop, that goes on, and on, and still on, till the brain reels
at the thought of it—. (WA, )
In this expansive temporal and spatial setting, Viola Sedley poses a series
of metaphysical questions relating to selfhood, questions that introduce the
novel’s central theme of self-integrity: “Was this being, this self a reality in
the strange, cold region of Nothingness? . . . Am I, this thought and feel­
ing, Viola Sedley? Will the thought that I shall think, and the feeling that
I shall feel to-morrow, be Viola Sedley too?”(WA, ). These questions are
an important prelude to the text’s representation of sexual violation and
marital rape. They place the reality and integrity of the self at the incep­
tion of the text, prior to characterization, plot, familial or domestic setting.
Caird’s fiction is thus radically philosophical, establishing self-identity as a
foundational precept.
Crucially, the novel predicates this self-identity on the body: “The
child touched herself tentatively. Yes, she was, she must be real; a separate
being called Viola Sedley,—with thoughts of her own, entirely her own”
(WA, ). This is a salient philosophical move. First, it is anti-Cartesian, lo­
cating reality in the body, rather than in the mind. Second, it is feminist,
as it locates selfhood in the body of a young girl, and thus suggests a meta­
physical rather than a legal basis for conceiving female identity. According
to the text’s logic, Viola’s sense of separateness and possession of self arise
from the essential and inalienable truth of her physical existence. Yet this
foundation of certitude rests in a girl’s body, soon to be a woman’s and
then a wife’s. Hence the key question: “Will the thought that I shall think,
and the feeling that I shall feel to-morrow, be Viola Sedley too?”(WA, ).
The question posed by the novel, then, is: What happens to selfhood when
the body is no longer under the woman’s control and volition, but subject
to the will and control of the husband?
In this context it is important to remember that, under Victorian law,
a woman was considered to consent to sexual intercourse with her hus­
band at the time of marriage and was unable to withdraw that consent
thereafter. For while the Gothic setting and the existential nature of the
novel’s opening scenes deliberately draw the reader’s attention away from
social realism, the text is firmly rooted in Victorian legal reality, specifi­
cally the doctrine of the wife’s implied consent. This doctrine had a long
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history before the nineteenth century: legal historians trace it back to Sir
Matthew Hale’s statement in the seventeenth century (quoted in chapter
) that “a husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon
his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the
wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she can­
not retract” (qtd. in M. Anderson, ). Although Victorian courts did
recognize exceptions if the couple mutually agreed to separate, or if the
wife’s health was endangered by intercourse, the basic common-law princi­
ple stood in Britain until the late twentieth century (M. Anderson, –).⁵
The Victorian female body thus represented a tenuous foundation for self­
hood, its integrity threatened by the wife’s legal inability to refuse consent
to sexual relations. Importantly, then, while the novel’s Gothic mode seems
to sever its plot from the late-Victorian present, its central themes of bodily
integrity and sexual consent are rooted in contemporary—and controversial
—legal realities for women.
The Wing of Azrael lays out the conditions for tragedy in the opposi­
tion between Viola’s sense of metaphysical selfhood and her degradation
in what Besant terms the “legalised prostitution” (MIW, ) of a loveless
marriage. This tragedy occurs as a series of escalating sexual violations bat­
ter her instinctive claim to selfhood. Crucially, these scenes are repetitive:
that is, Viola’s bodily integrity is violated in girlhood, then again before her
marriage, and then finally by marital rape. (Victorian literary tact dictates
that the girlhood scenes do not depict actual rape, but they unmistakably
represent sexual violations.) The repetition, I would suggest, is significant
for two reasons: first, it fits into the text’s representation of marital violence
as occurring in hereditary and generational cycles. Philip is represented as
the nineteenth-century incarnation of his ancestor, Andrew Dendraith,
who murdered his wife. The repetition is a clear violation of realist princi­
ples, and it points to Caird’s interest in the experimental use of time in her
fiction, in this case to indicate how violence between men and women re­
peats itself in the lifetime of an individual and in the history of a society.
The repetitions in Viola’s life echo within a personal time frame this larger
generational cycle of violence; interpersonal violence then, is depicted as
paradigmatic, not exceptional. Second, the novel’s device of repetition is
significant because it means that these sexual violations of Viola take place
before (as well as after) marriage—that is, they initially occur when she is
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still deemed free to refuse men’s sexual advances. This aspect of the novel’s
unconventional plot structure is thus highly feminist in its import, as it
suggests that Viola’s self-integrity survives marriage, despite the Victorian
doctrine of the wife’s consent.
The first of these scenes of violation occurs when Philip meets the
very young Viola and asks what color her eyes are. In reply, she shuts the
lids tightly and covers her face. The young girl’s “unexpected terror” and
“strange distress” (WA, ) in this scene give it unmistakable sexual over­
tones. In the second incident, Philip’s father demands a kiss from Viola,
and she almost flings herself out of a carriage in order to avoid his touch,
narrowly escaping serious injury. This time Philip’s father relates the inci­
dent directly to her future sexual conduct: “What a fierce little maiden it
is! I hope you won’t treat your lovers in this fashion in the time to come,
or you will have much to answer for” (WA, ). In the third incident,
which swiftly follows this, Philip kisses Viola “in spite of her violent re­
sistance” (WA, ). She hits him with a clenched fist and bursts into tears.
The first scenes of the novel—and, significantly, the first scenes involving
Viola’s future husband—are thus suffused with the issue of sexual consent.
By page , the novel has come full circle, with Viola again at her bedroom
window at night looking up the same avenue of trees. But the bodily in­
tegrity that constituted the basis of her selfhood has been violated:
When all was quiet, and Viola found herself alone, she crept out of
bed, went to the window and drew up the blind. There stood the avenue,
stately and beautiful in the moonlight, wreathed with mists.
The vision brought the tears welling up again from the depths of the
child’s wounded soul. Her grief was all the bitterer because she could not
express it in words even to herself; she could only feel over and over again,
with all a child’s intensity, that she had been treated with insolence, as a
being whose will was of no moment, whose very person was not her own;
who might be kissed or struck or played with exactly as people pleased,
as if she were a thing without life or personality. Her sense of individual
dignity—singularly strong in this child—was outraged. (WA, )
Irony suffuses this scene, because the girl’s discovery that her “will was
of no moment” represents the inception of womanhood. As every lateVictorian reader would know, Viola has more right of sexual refusal as an
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adolescent than she will have as a married woman. While the bildungsro­
man and romance genres portray woman as coming into selfhood at sexual
maturity and marriage, this text depicts the reverse: as Viola approaches
marriageable age, she finds her ability to control her body progressively
diminished.
The final and most important scene of sexual violation directly pre­
figures Philip’s sexual violence within the marriage itself, as well as Viola’s
murder of Philip. In this densely proleptic episode, Viola meets Philip and
some male friends at a castle near the cliffs. Philip tortures her dog, Bill
Dawkins, by tying the poodle’s legs together diagonally and throwing rocks
at him. (The trope of the animal as symbol of the abused woman is bla­
tantly obvious here: Viola says tellingly, “I wouldn’t forgive that man if I
were he” [WA, ].) When Viola comes into the castle to rescue the dog,
Philip (who is sitting in an aperture over a steep drop onto the cliffs) chal­
lenges her to forgive him for the earlier kiss and promises a “mixed kiss,
combining the ideas of punishment and betrothal”—that is, sexual domi­
nation and possession (WA, ). Viola’s response is aggressive: she flings
herself at him in rage, whereupon he loses his balance, falls out of the win­
dow, and is nearly killed on the cliffs below. The episode closely parallels
the novel’s key scene, in which Philip discovers Viola’s plan to leave him
and attempts marital rape as “tender punishment” (WA, ); Viola then
stabs and kills him. On both occasions sexual consent is the most impor­
tant issue; moreover, the episodes almost precisely parallel one another in
location (the castle) and action (attempted sexual violation followed by
Viola’s assault on Philip). What is curious is the narrative repetition: Why
should the novel represent its pivotal episode twice over? In terms of con­
temporary law, the function of such repetition is clear: legally, it is crucial
that the first instance precedes and the other follows Viola’s wedding, when
her consent to sexual intercourse with Philip becomes legally binding for
life. By establishing the parallel between the two assault episodes, the text
strongly implies that no such distinction applies, that the outrage of the
“fierce little maiden” (WA, ) is the same as that of the wife. In other
words, this text does not distinguish between the girl and the wife in their
right of sexual refusal, but suggests that they have the same right to sexual
integrity.
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The Victorian law of implied consent also underlies the novel’s some­
what confusing wedding scene. Legally, the ceremony marks Viola’s sexual
submission; in it, she gives consent to Philip’s marital coverture and to his
conjugal rights. Yet Viola explicitly refutes the validity of the vows: she
says to Philip at the ceremony, “Please do not forget that what I say to-day
is said with my lips only!” (WA, ), a statement that Philip understands
as a “repudiation of the whole service” (WA, ). The immediate reason
given is that Viola considers the marriage to have been forced (she marries
Philip because of social pressure and her parents’ debt) and therefore in­
valid. But if we consider her disavowal in the context of the common-law
principle of the wife’s implied consent, it has far-reaching implications, for
it suggests that her independent will survives marriage and that she never
enters into legal coverture.
The text symbolizes Viola’s continuing independence by the antique
knife, her wedding gift from Harry Lancaster, presented to her before the
ceremony. On an obvious level, the knife represents Viola’s soon-to-be
adulterous love for Harry. But more profoundly, because Harry offers it
before the ceremony but Philip objects to it afterward, the knife draws at­
tention to the distinction between woman and wife. “I accepted this gift
not as your wife,” Viola tells Philip, “but as myself. I was not your wife
then, in fact. Will you not leave me even a little remnant of individuality?
Am I always to be your wife, never myself?” (WA, ). Significantly, Viola
does keep the knife, thus taking with her into marriage a potent symbol of
her independent, unmarried self. This split between self and wife opens
further via the narrative device of the secret room in the castle’s west wing
(a traditional feature of Gothic texts in which a heroine is persecuted by a
male villain). This “region of silence and shadows” (WA, ) becomes
Viola’s sanctuary, the place where she hides the knife, and thus a symbol of
her inalienable selfhood.
Despite this assertion of selfhood surviving marriage, there remains a
conservatism in the text, as if its bold proposition of an inalienable meta­
physical self wavers in the face of Victorian marriage law. Were the text
consistent in its claim of inalienable selfhood, presumably Viola’s marriage
should be irrelevant to the issue of consent. Yet the odd scene in which
Viola disavows her marriage vows suggests the reverse: it implies that if the
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vows were valid, her consent would be valid too. This does not diminish
the urgency of the text’s claim to the right of sexual integrity and bodily
control, but it does indicate the powerful cultural hold of the commonlaw doctrine.
Interestingly, although the idea of the wife’s implied consent remained
powerful in the late s, Caird’s was not the only challenge to this legal
doctrine. The most significant nineteenth-century legal challenge to Hale’s
doctrine was R. v. Clarence, a case that was in the courts in  and ,
the years of the Great Marriage Debate in the Daily Telegraph, the White­
chapel murders (), and the novel’s publication (). In April ,
Charles James Clarence was charged with one count of inflicting grievous
bodily harm on his wife Selina, and with one count of assault. The injury
to Selina was caused by Charles’s having sex with her when he knew he
had a venereal disease, and the key issue of the case was the wife’s right to
sexual consent. Selina Clarence claimed that she would not have consented
to intercourse if she had known that her husband had gonorrhea. If
her consent was invalid, was the intercourse rape? A jury found Charles
Clarence guilty, but the trial judge, who had directed that the jury could
find him guilty “notwithstanding the fact that Selina Clarence [was] the
prisoner’s wife” (R. v. Clarence, ) nevertheless requested that the Court
of Crown Cases Reserved determine whether the fact of the marriage pre­
cluded a conviction on assault. The conviction was quashed, the majority
in the higher court holding that marital rape did not exist as a crime. What
is significant, however, is the doubt that the case reveals: not only did a
jury of common men convict Charles Clarence of assaulting his wife, but
the higher court reserved judgment because of a “serious difference of opin­
ion” among its thirteen judges (Times,  June , b). Moreover, even
some judges who wrote for the majority in quashing Charles Clarence’s
conviction did not eliminate the possibility of marital rape. Mr. Justice
Wills, for example, said he did not believe that rape was impossible be­
tween married persons (R. v. Clarence, ), and Mr. Justice Field stated,
“There may, I think, be many cases in which a wife may lawfully refuse in­
tercourse, and in which, if the husband impose it by violence, he might be
guilty of a crime” (R. v. Clarence, ). In the end, Charles Clarence went
free, but the case shows that the doctrine of the wife’s consent was open to
question by , when The Wing of Azrael was published. However, de­
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spite this questioning, when Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy campaigned
to change the criminal law to include marital rape, she failed completely.
In  she wrote, “[I]t is within the personal knowledge of the present
writer that one woman, deeply indignant at the iniquity of the existing
marriage law of England . . . has, during the last fourteen years, in vain
asked some forty to fifty different Members of Parliament to introduce a
Bill . . . for the abolition of this infamy.” Although many MPs were sym­
pathetic, she could not find a sponsor for such a bill: “The plain truth,”
she complained, “is that . . . none of them dared face the ridicule and op­
position of his male colleagues in the sex-privileged House of Commons”
(qtd. in Shanley, ).
While Wolstenholme Elmy’s political campaign failed, New Woman
fiction, on the other hand, prominently featured the issue of sexual consent.
Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (), for example, weaves together
three loosely related plots, two of which revolve around the right of con­
sent. In the first, Evadne Frayling refuses to consummate her marriage to
Major Colquhoun when she discovers his sexually profligate past. In an­
other plot, Edith Beale, the daughter of a bishop, marries the syphilitic Sir
Mosley Menteith, gives birth to a diseased child, and dies. Grand’s novel
was notorious for confronting the question of sexual consent in the con­
text of sexually transmitted diseases. The issue of consent between Viola
and Philip in The Wing of Azrael, by contrast, is more mundane and thus
more radical than either Grand’s fiction or the Clarence case. There is no
special pleading here: Philip has neither venereal disease nor a sexually
profligate past. The question is thus purely one of freedom, as it was to
Wolstenholme Elmy: Should the wife be free to refuse sexual intercourse
simply because she so chooses, as an independent being? And if she does
refuse, and intercourse nevertheless occurs, does it constitute rape?
The Wing of Azrael leaves little doubt about its position on this issue,
since it depicts marital intercourse between Viola and Philip as a repeated
act of rape. In highly emotive language, and with heavy use of psychonar­
ration, the novel represents this nightly violation from the wife’s point of
view:
There was no respite. The day was dull and weary and filled with a
thousand trials and annoyances great and small; but the night—the time
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for stillness, solitude, and repose, the time to build up strength and draw
in new hope and peace—the night was a living hell!
She might never be alone, never feel that she possessed herself; her
very thoughts were scarcely free. “Freedom” was an unknown word; the
only words that ruled in that red-hot purgatory were “right,” “duty,”
“submission.”
What inmate of the harem, she used to wonder, ever endured slavery
more absolute than this? (WA, )
The salient point here is that marital intercourse is represented as violent
because Viola has no right of refusal. In this context, her sexual submis­
sion becomes slavery, an analogy drawn several decades earlier by Mill in
The Subjection of Women. (The Wing of Azrael deploys the same metaphor
when Philip declares to Viola: “[Y]ou bear my name, . . . it is branded
upon you, and by that brand I can claim you and restrain you wherever
you may be so long as you live” [WA, ].)
Thus, despite its traditionalism in deploying well-established Gothic
tropes to convey marital violence (the castle, fog, rain, even Philip’s family
history of violence against women), the novel is thoroughly contemporary
in the issues it addresses. For it is crucial that (at least until the final rape
scene) the text does not suggest that Philip uses violence to enforce his
sexual rights. Rather it implies that intercourse without consent is in itself
an act of violence. Written a year before the decision that found Charles
Clarence not guilty of assault when he had knowingly infected his wife
with gonorrhea, this depiction of the inherent violence of nonconsensual
marital sex is surprisingly radical. Despite its Gothic mode of representa­
tion, therefore, The Wing of Azrael is highly topical and polemical in ad­
dressing the question of marital rape and sexual consent. Its Gothicism
does not, in fact, remove it from contemporary issues, but suggests that
Caird found realism insufficient as a mode in which to represent her cri­
tique of women’s sexual submission in marriage.
“Between the Devil and the Deep Sea”
It is important that, as I have already mentioned, The Wing of Azrael de­
picts the violence between Viola and Philip as paradigmatic, not excep­
tional. Whereas most mid-Victorian reformers had perceived violence as a
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problem in marriage or in men that had to be fixed to preserve the ideal of
middle-class domesticity, this late-Victorian text implies forcefully that
the violence of female submission is inherent to marriage. This inference
can be drawn by the parallel between Viola and her mother, a kind of face­
less everywoman who exemplifies the ethos of female passivity so force­
fully upheld by Dickens earlier in the century. The narrator of The Wing
of Azrael unequivocally attributes the husband’s brutality to the wife’s
selflessness: “this unfailing submissiveness, this meek and saint-like en­
durance, had now succeeded in turning a man originally good-hearted
into a creature . . . selfish, . . . thick-headed and . . . brutal” (WA, ). The
novel thus acknowledges in a sweeping gesture Mill and Taylor’s con­
tention that the idea of male possession in itself breeds cruelty. Mrs. Sed­
ley’s death is highly symbolic, as it represents the passing of the selfless
Victorian ideal. However, the novel anticipates no easy transition to a new
model of female selfhood; indeed, the shadow of pessimism hangs over the
whole text, whose front and back covers were embossed with the wings of
death, linked by book’s spine. The source of this pessimism seems to lie in
Caird’s strong sense of the materiality of women’s lives. Thus, even as the
novel gestures toward a kind of existential freedom (represented by the
sea), it also recognizes that women are deeply embedded in history, social
convention, and materiality. Indeed, the text increasingly limits—or per­
haps even contradicts—its own initial ecstatic premise concerning selfidentity. Whereas the opening scene of the novel suggests that Viola’s truest
selfhood exists through contact with vast spaces and existential forces, ele­
ments of social realism in the text forcefully imply that women’s selfhood
is also constrained by the material conditions of their particular historical
moment.
This constraint is implied by the fact that so many of the novel’s natu­
ral scenes are interrupted or framed by the social, even as the text implies
that Viola’s true selfhood exists outside domestic structures. Hence, while
Viola is consistently shown as finding genuine selfhood in natural places
like the forest or the sea, these spaces are in turn interrupted or destroyed.
In girlhood, for example, Viola finds “Life and Liberty” in a forest bower
and “servitude and death” in the drawing room (WA, ). Later, just before
she pushes Philip from the castle window, the sea symbolizes her shining po­
tential. The following passage, with its ecstatic tone and movement toward
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orgasmic climax, suggests how powerfully the novel associates Viola’s desire
for self-realization, freedom, and sexual pleasure with the sea:
How far away the sea might be, Viola did not know; she made straight
for it, as if she had been a pilgrim bound for a shrine. . . .
Here the sea came clearly into sight, acting upon the heart of the lit­
tle pilgrim as a trumpet-call. . . .
If inland the sunshine had seemed brilliant and all-pervading, here
on the open downs, with the gleaming of the sea all round, its glory was
almost blinding. . . . Viola started into a run. . . .
The saltness of the ocean was in the air; the fresh wind stung the child’s
cheeks to crimson. At last the end of the journey was reached. . . .
Oh the marvel of that sunshine! How the air thrilled and trembled
with the splendour of it! Surely one could feel it reeling through the re­
gions of space, a joy-intoxicated creature! (WA, –)
Finally, and very significantly, for a brief space before Viola’s marriage, the
text represents her relationship with Harry in similar erotic and natural im­
agery. The promise of selfhood and that of heterosexual union seem briefly
realized as Viola and Harry drift out to sea in a boat:
Her pulses beat faster as the boat swung out to sea; she too thrilled at
the sight of those heaving miles of green water. She leant over the boatside to watch the sculls dipping with even recurrence into the deep; and
her face seemed to grow every moment more beautiful as the bondage
was unloosed and the half-released spirit fluttered out—as a panting
bird from its cage—into the sweet bewilderment of sudden freedom. Her
hat, which threatened to be blown off, had been discarded, and she had
no covering for her head but her own thick hair, which was fluttering in
the wind.
“I need no help now to believe you are a spirit of the sea!” exclaimed
Harry. “You only want a crown of sea-weed to make the resemblance
perfect.”
He caught a spray as it floated by and handed it to her, and she smiled
and blushed and laid it dripping among the coils of her hair. A wild poetic
beauty was in her face; all trace of the “young lady” had disappeared; her
womanhood was uppermost now. She was like some dark-eyed sea queen,
daughter of the twilight; some mystic, imaginary figure, with all the love­
liness of ocean and evening in her eyes. (WA, )
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Repeatedly, however, the novel shows these symbols of personal liberty as
intruded on or destroyed by social forces. Viola’s forest bower, for exam­
ple, is destroyed by a gardener only six pages after she feels violated by
Philip’s first kiss. The obliteration of selfhood is graphically represented, as
the gardener tears and cuts into the “magnificent sheets of clematis” (WA,
). Similarly, the sea imagery is disrupted by seagulls, a potent symbol
of Philip’s ruthlessness: “They seemed cold, able, finished creatures, but
they had no feeling, they were utterly pitiless—like Philip Dendraith, she
thought” (WA, ). Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Viola herself
puts an end to her ecstatic sea trip with Harry: “Why are you talking like
this and making me feel so wicked?” she asks him. “What would my mother
say to it? . . . Mr. Lancaster, please take me home” (WA, ).
The location of Philip’s castle on the edge of the sea cliffs illustrates both
the radical and tenuous nature of Viola’s claim to independent selfhood.
The claim is radical because, as the castle’s juxtaposition with the sea sug­
gests, her selfhood develops in opposition to the domestic. This contrasts
with much of Victorian discourse on female selfhood, which constructs
the woman through marriage, maternity, and domesticity. In the novel,
Adrienne Lancaster, Harry’s sister, represents this view when she tells
Viola, “I do believe firmly . . . that the domestic life and its interests call
out a woman’s best qualities; that before she marries she has scarcely lived”
(WA, –). The Wing of Azrael, in contrast, suggests that the woman’s
—even the wife’s—most genuine selfhood lies outside domestic structures.
This claim is tenuous, however, not only because Philip’s castle overlooks
the sea (thus overhanging the novel’s most potent symbol of female free­
dom, selfhood, and sexuality) but also because the text increasingly suggests
that to define selfhood outside social constraints and heredity is difficult,
and perhaps even illusory. Caleb Foster, the novel’s philosopher—and, im­
portantly, Viola’s friend—voices this pessimistic view as a general law of
existence: “[W]e must admit that our freedom can only exist, if at all, in a
certain very modified degree. We are conscious of an ability to choose, but
our choice is, after all, an affair of temperament, and our temperament, a
matter of inherited inclinations, and so forth, modified from infancy by
outward conditions” (WA, ). Moreover, the novel represents Viola as in­
extricably tangled in Victorian social mores: she has passed her whole life
under their “shadow” and so is “unable to conceive a state of things where
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they were absent or different” (WA, ). Viola’s sanctuary in the castle’s west
wing—a room inhabited by generations of Dendraith women—suggests
the truth of Caleb’s statement, as it positions her finally not by the sea but
looking out on it from the symbolic framework of social structures.
Viola’s room in the west wing points to the importance of history in
the text’s understanding of gender relations. Here Viola finds the detritus
of women’s lives: a collection of “letters written in the last century” to­
gether with “a bit of faded ribbon; a silver thimble; and a piece of dim
silken embroidery . . . the threaded needle stuck into the silk, as if the
work had been just laid down” (WA, ). These contrast profoundly with
the treasures of Viola’s girlhood bower—“plants, snail-shells, oak-apples,
and strange insects” (WA, )—which linked her to the natural world. The
relics in the west wing room are connected with female domesticity. From
an ideological perspective, they indicate a deeply materialist view of gen­
der roles: these symbols of domestic sewing, feminine dress, and kinship
writing symbolize women’s insertion into the social world of gendered labor.
This has positive and negative implications: on the one hand, it implies
that patriarchy is constructed and historically contingent (a point that
Caird made explicitly in her essay “Marriage”). On the other hand, these
symbols of women’s material realities constitute the historical context
from which Viola looks out on the novel’s most potent symbol of free­
dom. In her later work The Daughters of Danaus, Caird experiments with
temporal dislocations in which female characters are transported to other,
potentially liberating historical periods. Here, however, Viola’s west wing
room reminds us of women’s long history of domesticity under capitalism,
a history that Caird traces back to the founding of the bourgeoisie in the
age of Luther. The room, then, offers no promise of freedom in other times
or spaces; instead, it symbolically limits Viola’s ecstatic vision of uncon­
strained selfhood, just as its window literally frames her vision of the sea.
If Mrs. Sedley represents the Victorian domestic woman, and Viola
the woman struggling to articulate selfhood, the text represents the New
Woman in Sibella Lincoln, separated wife. While Sibella’s affinity with the
ocean identifies her as Viola’s spiritual double, her unconventional cloth­
ing signifies a “radical difference of temperament” (WA, ). She has left
a marriage in which her husband looked to her as a “possession” and pro­
ducer of heirs, and thus rescued herself from “unbearable self-loathing”
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(WA, ). In an appeal to female solidarity, Sibella urges Viola to leave
Philip for the sake of all women: “Are you going to make successful an­
other of these villainies? Are women who come after you to be heavier
hearted because of you?” (WA, ). But the solidarity that Sibella invokes
is nowhere in sight in her own case. Female gossip is the primary agent of
Sibella’s social rejection: she is seen as the “dreadful Mrs. Lincoln” and “bad
for the neighbourhood” (WA, ). That Viola’s meetings with Sibella take
place on the narrow strip of beach between the cliffs and the sea indicates
that society has little place for this new model of independent female self­
hood. Yet despite this bleak outlook and her liminal social position, the
novel surrounds Sibella with gorgeous visual imagery. In contrast to the
dim spirit of the submissive wife, the New Woman is linked to blazing
color, light, and oceanic forces: “Deeper and deeper grew the blood-red
stain upon the waters; and the land seemed to have caught fire. The
swiftest cloud-streaks were overtaken, and their cool white turned to gold.
At the wet wave-line upon the sands a figure clad in red [Sibella] was
slowly strolling, stooping now and again with swift movement to snatch
some feathery sea-weed from the tide” (WA, ). Like Viola, Sibella is in­
extricably inserted in the materiality of human history. Her “dear little room
. . . looking onto the sea” (WA, ) contains, like Viola’s west wing retreat,
reminders of human history: “sundry antique vases and glass bottles of
strange shapes” and “prehistoric things in bronze” (WA, ). These his­
torical objects—her mementi mori, as she calls them—symbolically repre­
sent the “the force of generations and the weight of centuries” (WA, ).
Yet unlike the domestic, feminine objects that fill the west wing, these
prehistoric objects suggest Sibella’s associations with a period before mod­
ern marriage and patriarchy. The text does not elaborate on the nature of
the vases and bronzes, but in the context of Caird’s evolutionary social
views, Sibella’s associations with primitivism point to the historically con­
tingent nature of patriarchy and the possibility of genuine selfhood under
some other social system.
Yet the text never points to what this other social system might con­
sist of, or what possibility for sexual partnerships might exist. Unlike The
Daughters of Danaus, which represents the union of Algitha and Wilfrid as
an ideal partnership of work, human service, and shared socialist politics,
The Wing of Azrael depicts not a single happy couple in the text to provide a
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model for another type of marriage or partnership. Viola’s loveless marriage
seems paradigmatic and unexceptional, as the text’s other marriages are
equally empty. One thinks of Mrs. Sedley, whose husband is drunken and
violent; Sibella, whose husband uses her as a vehicle for an heir; Adrienne
Lancaster, who accepts the farcical Bob Hunter because her family has no
money (a crisis that the otherwise spotless Harry does absolutely nothing
to alleviate); and Philip’s ancestor Andrew Dendraith, who murdered his
wife. Little wonder that the narrator describes the bells at Viola’s wedding
as having “usher[ed] in the sorrows of the ceaseless generations” (WA, )
and that Viola conflates her wedding day and her mother’s funeral in her
mind (WA, ). The men in the novel are hardly shining lights: Viola’s fa­
ther is brutal, Philip a modern Nero, Caleb a bloodless and cold philoso­
pher, and Harry, Viola’s lover, an ineffectual radical who cannot save his
own sister—let alone Viola—from a loveless marriage. Indeed, Viola’s very
relationship with Harry seems fantastic and unreal, as their longest conver­
sation takes place in a boat that drifts, harborless and directionless, until
they turn it back to where they started. Though Sibella represents the “the
high-water mark of human development” (WA, ), even she seems to face
her own entrenchment in the social order when she feigns sexual interest
in Philip in order to facilitate Viola’s elopement with Harry Lancaster.
This metaphorical prostitution of the novel’s most ideal and most rebel­
lious female character indicates the deeply materialist—if not downright
pessimistic—thread in its construction of femininity: material and social
conditions limit Sibella’s ability to make changes for herself or other women.
In turn, Sibella sees women’s solidarity and mutual help as imperative for
creating a new material reality for woman. She tells Adrienne, “[W]e are
sisters. . . . We are one; we are human” (WA, ). As she says this, she
looks out to sea.
Viola, then, stands poised between her mother and Sibella, the old
woman and the new. Symbolically, she stands on the narrow strip of beach
between the land and the sea. But even when Viola’s mother dies, the nar­
rator questions whether, despite her early and forceful assertion of meta­
physical selfhood, Viola will be able to defy both convention and Philip’s
legal power:
Viola was awake at last; loving to her utmost, hating to her ut­
most. . . .
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Had she sufficient force to hold on to the end? Once resolved, would
she fling behind her all weak remorse, free herself from the clinging rem­
nants of abandoned motives? Would she eschew fatal hesitations and
prove herself to be made of the stuff which produces great deeds of hero­
ism or of crime? would she act boldly and consistently as she had re­
solved, or would she show herself the child of her circumstances,
stumbling fatally under the burden of her sad woman’s heritage of inde­
cision, fear, vain remorse, untimely scruples? (WA, )
Indeed, the novel’s materialist view of gender roles would suggest that these
questions are almost purely rhetorical. In other words, Viola’s plan to leave
Philip might be possible, but her plan to elope with Harry by sea (which
intimates that this late nineteenth-century wife and her lover could escape
patriarchy itself into some ecstatic union of selves) is visionary rather then
practical, and the reader cannot be surprised by its failure.
The Wing of Azrael, then, is highly unconventional in its construction
of female selfhood, seeing women as attaining their truest selves outside
domestic structures. Yet it also represents this vision of ideal selfhood as
practically unattainable, showing women embedded in time, history, and
material reality, as Viola’s position in the west wing so potently symbolizes.
(The novel’s most vivid image of the force of history on women is Mrs.
Dixie wearing her cameo brooch, which the narrator describes as “her an­
cestor . . . at her throat” [WA, ]). The tension between visionary and
material feminism also exists with respect to the text’s representation of
sexuality. On the one hand, the text registers a powerful autoerotic drive,
a sense of female sexuality as sufficient unto itself. The association of Viola
and Sibella with the orgasmic imagery of the sea suggests that the phallus
might be irrelevant to their pleasure.⁶ To this extent, the text suggests an
alternative to the “legalised prostitution” (MIW, ) of marriage. More­
over, the novel contradicts the pervasive nineteenth-century construction
of marriage and sexuality as private matters. Instead, the text shows sexu­
ality as always constructed by the social. As if to emphasize this, the text
plays out the key proleptic scenes involving Viola’s sexual consent in public.
This dissolution of the private is represented as agonizing for the heroine.
Viola discovers after her marriage that Mrs. Pellet and other neighboring
women offer “anecdotes and allusions” concerning her sex life over tea as
part of their social calls (WA, ). Hence the nightly violations of her
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marriage are made more difficult for her, as women themselves participate
in symbolic rape by preaching Viola’s conjugal duty to her husband and by
gossiping salaciously about her sex life. Moreover, no woman except Sibella
helps Viola to resist Philip; all others throw the weight of their social ap­
probation and support behind him.
The community plays the role that Miller identifies in his discussion
of Middlemarch: it separates the narratable from the nonnarratable by iden­
tifying an ideological threat (Miller, Narrative, –). Viola, as a threat to
marital conventions, is narratable and thus condemned by the community
voice, which Caird deploys as an overwhelmingly conservative force in the
text. When Harry says that Viola should not be forced to marry Philip
against her will, Lady Clevedon says tellingly, “Pooh! What is a woman’s
will?” (WA, ). After the marriage, even Harry’s sister Adrienne takes
part in this community voice, joking pleasantly with Philip about how
Viola manages him, when really she perceives Philip’s violent domination
of his wife: “He rules her with a rod of iron,” she says to herself, “and she
lives in deadly fear of him” (WA, ). Viola’s public appearance in her
wedding gown (a common Victorian convention) is thus loaded with sig­
nificance, as this symbol of “private” sexual union is displayed relentlessly
to public eyes. Viola’s “sickening fury” (WA, ) at the public discussion
of her sex life almost equals her rage with Philip. Heightened emotive
language and carceral imagery mark the key scene in which Viola con­
demns Mrs. Pellet for her arch comment about the “patter of little feet”:
“Like frantic prisoners, shaking their prison-bars, the words came clam­
bering for egress to the closely set lips. ‘You are a fool, you are an idiot,
you are intolerable’” (WA, ). In contrast to “Janet’s Repentance,” which
depicts gossip as the first means by which the community pierces the
private home, The Wing of Azrael represents Viola as crucified by women’s
gossip and—by extension—by women’s tacit support of male sexual
violence.
Caird’s construction of the public nature of sexuality has complicated
ideological implications. First, it contravenes the Victorian ideal of mar­
riage, which enshrined sexuality as private, belonging to the home, the
couple, the interior self—the “Holy of holies,” as Adrienne Lancaster puts
it in the text (WA, ). This accounts for the fact that the newspaper—
that great Victorian symbol of the public eye—plays almost no role in the
text. Whereas for Trollope and Collins the newspaper symbolizes the in­
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trusion of the public eye into the private sphere, Caird’s text represents the
private sphere as a bourgeois illusion. The divorce court is utterly irrele­
vant to the glare of publicity that always surrounds Viola’s marriage. Second,
the novel deeply indicts women for their support of patriarchy. Other
Victorian feminist texts may represent women who support patriarchy as
dupes or victims, but this text actively vilifies them. Sibella says damn­
ingly, “The average woman . . . spends her energies in making all these
time-honoured social inequities possible and successful, encouraging the
repetition of these profitable old crimes” (WA, ). Finally, the fact that
Philip’s domination is enforced—as Caleb rightly perceives—by both the
nineteenth-century woman and the “great immoveable middle class” (WA,
) means that Viola’s ecstatic vision of erotic union with the sea will re­
main just that—a vision. As the narrator remarks in a deeply ironic revivi­
fication of a cliché, a woman thus “stands always between the devil and the
deep sea” (WA, ).⁷
Over His Dead Body
The novel’s climactic scene occurs when Philip surprises Viola just as she
tries to elope with Harry. The setting of their confrontation—the secret
room—has accrued meaning as a symbol of Viola’s independent person­
hood and indicates that this confrontation is at least as much about self­
hood as it is about adultery. Moreover, when Philip finds Viola she is
holding Harry Lancaster’s knife in her hands. More than a literal weapon
(which it subsequently becomes), at this stage the knife symbolizes Viola’s
reclaiming of her independent selfhood as woman, not wife. But Philip
turns the scene into yet another instance of enforced intercourse, this “ten­
der punishment” (WA, ) signifying his reassertion of marital power. In
a replay of the premarital assault at the castle, Philip once again enforces his
sexual power over Viola. Now that she is married, however, her resistance
is illegal. Under Victorian law, then, what follows is not a rape, although
the text clearly portrays it as such. Significantly, the assault is narrated
from a female point of view, a perspective made current by the campaigns
against the Contagious Diseases Acts. I quote the scene at length because,
although the sexual content is somewhat oblique, the motifs of sexual pos­
session and marital sexual rights are ubiquitous and leave the reader in no
doubt of Philip’s intended assault:
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“Ah! you may shrink, but shrinking will not help you. . . . You have
got to learn, once and for all, to whom you belong. I am not a man to
be trifled with, believe me. What is mine is mine. You were about to
make a vast mistake upon that interesting point, which I am happily in
time to rectify. Now is the time for an impressive lesson. . . . A fond hus­
band parted for two days from his wife—” He smiled in a way that al­
ways maddened her, as he advanced quickly, and took her in his arms,
bending down to kiss her as she struggled violently to free herself. “It’s
no use struggling,” he said, “for I am considerably stronger than you are,
and I intend to stand no nonsense. If it pleases me to kiss you I shall kiss
you. It is my right.” . . .
“And how are you going to avoid it, my dear?” asked Philip. . . . “What
power on earth can protect you now against me? Besides, who would
help a wife against her husband?”
“Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, or—!” The rest of that sentence
was lost in a sound of loathing and horror, for Philip had disobeyed her.
Advancing until she was driven against the corner of the window, and
there was no possible loop hole of escape, he took her in his arms delib­
erately. . . .
His touch, constraining, insolent as it was, forcing her in spite of all
her resistance towards the door, excited her to very madness. His lips
touched her cheek; his hand was seeking hers to seize the knife, when in
an instant—a horrible instant of blinding passion—the steel has flashed
through the air with a force borne of the wildest fury—there was a curse,
a cry, a groan, a backward stagger, and Philip lay at his wife’s feet mor­
tally wounded. (WA, –)
Philip’s death is not a victory for Viola, and it does not secure her either
selfhood or freedom. Apart from Philip’s curse and Harry’s immediate
moral recoil, it brings the “moan and lamentation” of the waves (WA, ),
as if nature itself were mourning for her, as well as the vision of a “bottom­
less grave where she would fall and fall, weighted with her crime and her
curse, through the darkness forever and ever!” (WA, ). Viola destroys
herself as she stabs her husband, since the text denies that one can achieve
selfhood by destroying another being. A pacifist, Caird saw no solution in
meeting violence with violence. In her  essay “Punishment for Crimes
against Women and Children,” she implores, “Do not let us increase the
sum of the deeds of vengeance and violence that fill the world with groans,
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nor brutalise ourselves by dooming a fellow-creature to the degradation of
inflicting a brutal indignity on another” (PC, ). This remark comes as
part of her consideration of flogging penalties for wife and child abusers,
but her argument applies precisely to Viola’s savage act of reprisal.
The novel’s imagery indicates clearly that Viola’s prized selfhood is
destroyed by the murder of Philip. The chapter title (“Darkness”), the
“lamenting” wind, the “tumult” of the trees, the blackness of the night,
and finally the image of black clouds that rise in a “phalanx” to blot out
the moonlight (WA, –)—all prepare the reader for the novel’s con­
cluding image: “The scene was obliterated; darkness everywhere; over the
interminable uplands, in their profound solitude, in the shrouded heavens,
and over the sea: pitch-black, rayless, impenetrable darkness” (WA, ).
Viola’s disappearance into this “pitch-black, rayless, impenetrable dark­
ness” has traditionally been read as suicide.⁸ Certainly Viola’s final isola­
tion contrasts strongly with George Eliot’s almost ecstatic depiction of an
abused woman baptized into community. However, the fact that Viola
disappears into the sea means that it is just possible to compare the novel’s
conclusion to that of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (): it lets us see
Viola’s end as a possible dissolution of selfhood into the ocean rather than
total obliteration. Given the novel’s consistently ecstatic association between
the sea and healing, peace, eternity, the sea’s positive symbolic resonances
mitigate the desolation of Viola’s suicide. Nevertheless, the fact remains
that the certainty of selfhood with which the novel opens, and that it pits
against the legal disappearance of selfhood suffered by the married woman,
dissolves at the conclusion of The Wing of Azrael.
The bleak ending of the novel in effect represents an ideological impasse
—that is, the impasse of liberal reform on the issue of violence against
women. For this text suggests that to envisage violence as the exception in
marriage is inadequate and naive. Whereas most mid-Victorian writers
celebrated marriage and looked to reform wife abusers, Caird asserts like
Besant that marriage itself represents “legalized rape” (MIW, ). Yet at the
same time the text arrives at a dead end. Having shifted the violence from
the individual to the institution, The Wing of Azrael is unable to envisage
any viable reform of marriage. Viola’s dissolution and disappearance thus
symbolically mark the dissolution of the liberal project itself.
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8
| |
“A R E W O M E N P R O T E C T E D ? ”
Sherlock Holmes and the Violent Home
“A    Holmes stories must recognize that, whatever else
the tales are doing, they are, above all else, celebrating the power of reason,
venerating the human intellect and its ability to penetrate the mysterious
surfaces of the world and explain the workings of the universe as rational
and fully knowable,” writes Christopher Metress in his article “Thinking
the Unthinkable: Reopening Conan Doyle’s ‘Cardboard Box’” (Metress,
). His statement summarizes much of the criticism on Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle’s highly popular Sherlock Holmes stories, largely published in the
Strand Magazine between  and , stories that regularly assured
late-Victorian and Edwardian readers that the world was knowable and
therefore controllable. Metress notes, however, that “The Adventure of the
Cardboard Box,” published in the Strand in January , does not fit the
pattern. On the contrary, Metress contends, this text subverts “everything
. . . Conan Doyle is trying to achieve” in the Holmes tales (Metress, ).
Doyle himself seems to have recognized this, and attempted to suppress
the tale: it was excluded from the collection assembled by the Strand ’s
publisher George Newnes under the title The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
(), and was not collected and republished in book form until 
(Metress, ). What was there about this story that threatened the textual

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world of Sherlock Holmes, that rational, knowable, controllable world that
so attracted late-Victorian and Edwardian readers? It should not surprise
the reader of this book to discover that “The Adventure of the Cardboard
Box” is about wife murder.
In this story, Holmes is asked to investigate a bizarre parcel sent to an
elderly spinster, Miss Susan Cushing. The cardboard box contains two sev­
ered human ears, one a man’s and the other a woman’s. Reliably, Holmes
unravels the semiotics of this grotesque message. He discovers that Susan
Cushing had two sisters, Sarah Cushing and Mary Browner, the latter mar­
ried to Jim Browner. The ears belong to Mary Browner and Alec Fairbairn,
both murdered by Jim because he believed that Alec was Mary’s lover. This
explanation seems a triumph for Holmes—and by extension a triumph for
rational intellect—as he reads an entire human drama in two severed ears.
The text ends with a confession from Browner confirming all that Holmes
deduced. However, as Metress notes, “‘The Cardboard Box’ does not end
here, and the way it ends takes this wonderfully straight and typical story
and twists it all out of shape” (Metress, ). Instead of ending with the tri­
umph of reason, the narrative concludes with a series of disquieting and
unanswered questions. “What is the meaning of it, Watson?” asks Holmes,
as he reads Browner’s confession that he murdered his wife: “What object
is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to
some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable.
But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which
human reason is as far from an answer as ever” (SSH, ).
The “perennial problem” to which Holmes refers was, of course, wife
abuse, and just as marital violence posed an impasse to Mona Caird in The
Wing of Azrael, so it seems to have threatened to stymie Doyle, her con­
servative male contemporary. For “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box”
radically departs from Doyle’s standard narrative paradigm, one that reas­
sures readers of the knowability and stability of their world by means of a
simple sleight of hand. This customary sleight of hand is based on a narra­
tive slippage whereby the solution to a particular case stands for the solution
to the larger problem. According to this narrative logic, when Holmes solves
the mystery of the speckled band, he simultaneously controls aberrant fa­
therhood; when he works out who severed the engineer’s thumb, he prom­
ises to control the German threat to late-Victorian Britain. But in “The
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Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” Holmes’s disquieting questions isolate
the particular case (the murder of Mary Browner and Alec Fairbairn) from
the larger social problem (wife assault or wife murder). Holmes may have
worked out who killed Mary Browner and why, but his questions serve no­
tice that he is powerless to solve the “perennial problem” of marital violence,
a problem that he represents as circular, recurring, and unfathomable by
human reason.
In Sherlock’s Men, his recent study of Sherlock Holmes and masculin­
ity, Joseph A. Kestner argues that while the Sherlock Holmes stories act as
manuals for “modelling manliness,” they also reveal “fissure[s] in the pu­
tative stability of Victorian conceptions about maleness.”¹ In particular,
Kestner notes, Watson’s wound (received at the  battle of Maiwand)
and Holmes’s defeat by Irene Adler signal the precarious nature of male
hegemony over empire and women, respectively (Kestner, , ). I submit
that “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” reveals another such fissure:
the threat posed by wife assault to the ideology of the protective male, of
which Holmes is perhaps the most outstanding late-Victorian exemplar.
For, as Anna Clark notes, wife assault “potentially undermined the legiti­
macy of the patriarchal sexual contract, in which men’s dominance was
justified by their protection of their wives” (A. Clark, “Humanity,” ).
In the previous chapter I suggest that Caird and other feminists faced an
impasse in the s. Many of the legal reforms demanded by midcentury
feminists had been achieved—married women had control of their money,
better access to infant custody, and the right to a judicial separation from
an abusive husband—yet wife abuse did not seem to have diminished.²
Many late-Victorian feminists—and others—came to the conclusion that
marriage itself was, in Caird’s terms, a “failure” (Marr., ; see fig. .).
The Strand and the Sherlock Holmes stories of the early s similarly
register marital violence as a threat to marriage and late-Victorian manliness
—indeed, one might argue that rather than the vague criminal threat of
Moriarty, one of the main specters that stalk Sherlock Holmes is violence
against women. However, these texts seek ultimately not to undercut mar­
riage but to restore it. While “The Cardboard Box” reveals anxieties sur­
rounding male violence, the turn-of-the-century serial “The Hound of the
Baskervilles” () tries to put such problems to rest. The excessive Gothic
trope of the phosphorescent hound, I will argue, represents the problem of
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Figure .. “Is Marriage a Failure? As a Rule—Yes,” Illustrated Police News ( April
): .
marital violence, and the hound’s demise suggests Doyle’s overdetermined
attempt to dispel the specter of wife assault.
Moreover, while the Sherlock Holmes stories sought to model ideal
masculinity and to control male violence, they encouraged readers to par­
ticipate as surrogate detectives in this policing of the public sphere. As I
will show, Doyle exploited the popularity of sensational journalism (of
which his hero is an avid consumer). His stories often start with a news
story as a source of information (or misinformation). Very significantly,
newspapers often provide a means of ostensibly whiling away the time as
Holmes and Watson wait to be called out on a case. And when the men
are called out, it is often to go to the site of a news story, to dig deeper
than, and correct the misapprehensions of, the police and the journalist.
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In other words, Doyle offered his readers the thrill of entering the news­
paper itself and bettering its investigative methods. Not only, then, did the
Holmes narratives seek to dispel late-Victorian gender anxieties, but they
did so in a way that fused the pleasures of fiction with the policing role of
the newspaper.
The Strand Magazine, Sherlock Holmes,
and Violence against Women
In its popularity, its broad appeal to middle-class taste, and its implicit role
as guardian of the social status quo, the Strand provides an illuminating
counterpoint to Caird’s little-read and radical novel The Wing of Azrael.
For while it is undeniable that Caird considered marriage to be a failure,
and while the Great Marriage Debate in the Daily Telegraph reveals deepseated anxieties about this issue, the institution of marriage nevertheless
survived the crisis of the late s and early s. In the Strand of the
s generally and the Sherlock Holmes stories in particular, we can see
the ways in which anxieties concerning marital violence are both reflected
and alleviated.
The Strand Magazine started publication in , and swiftly became
the best-selling magazine in Britain, achieving a circulation of over three
hundred thousand copies of its first issue alone.³ Its editor, George Newnes,
targeted a middle-class male reader, with additional features for family
reading (fashion items, romance, and children’s stories). Newnes was no
radical; he bluntly described himself and his target audience as the average
man. “I am the average man,” he announced. “I don’t have to put myself
in his place. I am in his place. I know what he wants” (Pound, ). In his
history of the Strand, Reginald Pound argues that “the middle-classes of
England never cast a clearer image of themselves in print than they did in
The Strand Magazine” (Pound, ). The Sherlock Holmes stories were very
much part of this success, as Doyle’s name had the potential to add one
hundred thousand copies to the Strand ’s monthly circulation.⁴
According to an interview in the Strand of August , Doyle’s fic­
tion offered readers “ up to date” (Day, ). A perusal of the
Strand from the early s reveals the contemporary issues that preoccu­
pied the magazine’s readers and in response to which Doyle would deploy
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his modern detective. The early volumes of Newnes’s new magazine are
embedded in s politics, fashions, and social phenomena: they allude
to the women’s suffrage movement, anarchism (including the bombing
of Scotland Yard), fears of crime generally, the state of the law courts,
photography, ballooning, bicycles, bluestocking women, and Girton and
Newnham, the women’s colleges at Cambridge founded in  and ,
respectively. The early Strand also focused repeatedly on the crime of wife
assault, both in fiction and in nonfiction prose (such as satire or political
criticism). The first allusion to wife assault occurs in July , in a reformist
article titled “The State of the Law Courts.” The text (which criticizes the
swift judgments of ignorant magistrates and the resultant injustice to the
accused) features illustrations of courtroom scenes that include various
criminals. One of the illustrations depicts a stereotypically degenerate man
in the dock “   ” (State, ; fig. .). Interestingly,
the written text does not refer to wife assault at all. It seems that the illus­
trator worked without, or at least in tangential relation to, the written text.
What is important here is that the artist seems to have set out to depict
representative court scenes—and that a salient example in this visual album
of s crimes is wife assault.
Two years later, in May , the Strand registered concern over inade­
quate sentences for wife assault in “The Judge’s Penance.” As we have seen,
this issue had been raised by Matilda Blake in the radical Westminster
Review. In her article “Are Women Protected?” (January ), Blake ar­
gues that “male judges, appointed by a Government chosen by an exclu­
sively male electorate, punish the offenders in a most inadequate manner,
holding a woman’s life at a less value than a purse containing a few shillings”
(AWP, ). Similarly, in the Westminster Review of March , Mabel
Sharman Crawford deplores “the many cases of murderous assaults on
wives, and the lenient sentences passed on brutal husbands recorded in the
papers from day to day” (MW, ). Crawford notes that magistrates were
not using the clause in the Matrimonial Causes Act () that enabled
them to grant an automatic judicial separation to women whose husbands
were convicted of assault (MW, ). In the Strand, the suffrage argument
and feminist edge are missing, but “The Judge’s Penance” clearly registers
concern over inadequate sentences for wife murder. In this satire (which
draws on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol), a judge is confronted by
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Figure .. “For Assaulting His Wife,” Strand Magazine  ( July ): .
the spirits of all the crime victims betrayed by his lenient sentences. The
first is the ghost of “a woman who had been murdered by her husband
after his release from the seven days [the judge] had given him for break­
ing both her arms and legs” (JP, ). This s version of the Spirit of
Christmas Past is one of several who drag the judge before a tribunal,
which sentences him to “assist in all the crimes resulting from [his] own le­
niency” (JP, ). The implication is inescapable: judges who inadequately
punish wife abusers participate in male violence against women.
A fascinating tale in the Strand from October  reflects these
contemporary concerns about male violence and suggests its medicaliza­
tion as a treatable condition. “The Triumph of Love” depicts a handsome
nineteen-year-old who suffers from melancholia. In separate fits of “homi­
cidal mania,” he assaults his mother and the woman he loves (TL, ).
When he assaults his lover, she brings him to himself by her “pure love and
devotion” as she faces him wielding a knife: “Gerald, you will not hurt your
Ella” (TL, ; fig. .). His subsequent delirium cures him of his mania,
and the doctor/narrator assures him that his condition is not hereditary.
Like “The State of the Law Courts” and “The Judge’s Penance,” “The
Triumph of Love” suggests profound contemporary concern about male
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Figure .. “He Fell Senseless to the Ground,” Strand Magazine (October ): .
violence, and a brand new response—the medicalization rather than the
criminalization of this problem.
However, other stories in the Strand actively distance wife assault from
the reader and/or diminish its seriousness. In “The Prince’s Crime: A True
Romance of India,” published in the Strand in February , marital vio­
lence is relegated to “the banks of the Orsing River, which flows through
Oodeypor, and finds its way into the Gulf of Cambay in the Arabian Sea”
(Prince, ). The text represents wife abuse as a phenomenon of the ex­
otic, depraved East, where a noblewoman is “little better than a captive”
(Prince, ) and women are beaten like “bullocks” (Prince, ; fig. .).
In “The Toilers of the Rocks” (Strand, December ), domestic abuse is
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once again geographically removed from the reader, this time to “a ridge
belonging to the Noric Alps . . . between Austria and Styria the Green”
(TR, ). Here the daughter of a peasant suffers abuse from her step­
father, who “beats [her] continually” (TR, ). Finally, the Strand gothi­
cized wife abuse: “The Vision of Inverstrathy Castle” (December )
represents a man who dreams repeatedly of the same horrific wife murder,
a vision which is confirmed by the discovery of Lady Betty Colquhoun’s
corpse (she was murdered several centuries before) by the modern protago­
nists. Yet paradoxically this Gothic tale also brings wife murder close to
home by suggesting that the modern-day Miss Craig resembles Lady Betty
and that the horrible murder may repeat itself. When the narrator sees the
murderer in modern London and learns that he has “recently returned
from India” (VIC, ), the ending of the story exchanges Gothicism for
Orientalism as its mode of signalling wife abuse.
Wife abuse is minimized in some Strand stories of the early s by
their comedic tone. “A Vision of the Night” (December ) paints a
light-hearted picture of a jealous French husband who locks his wife into
her bedroom. The fact that the wife escapes and kisses an unknown man
on the lips, as well as the fact that this man and the jealous husband sit so­
ciably down to lunch together at the end of the tale, indicates that this
account of domestic imprisonment is not to be taken very seriously (VN).
The sketch “He and She” (July ) also presents marital discord in a
comedic manner. The piece consists of a monologue by a discontented
wife who resents her husband coming home past midnight on her birth­
day. The humor relies on the husband’s inability to get a word in edgewise
as her escalating accusations move from lateness to adultery to wife abuse:
“Do you mean to use personal violence? Ah! That is right! Quite right!
I won’t prevent you!” (HS, ). Her frantic monologue is completely
undercut when he presents her with jewelry engraved “From her devoted
husband”—the purchase of which has made him late home from work
(HS, ).
The Strand of the early s, then, registers a range of concerns about
marital violence, but it also works to alleviate these concerns to some de­
gree by suggesting reforms (medical and legal), by distancing the problem
from the middle-class British reader, and (at times) by treating marital dis­
cord as more humorous than tragic. This mélange of anxieties and reas­
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Figure .. “She Fell Quivering to the Ground,” Strand Magazine  (February ): .
surances formed the context for the now-famous figure of Sherlock Holmes.
Like Kestner, I suggest that we read the figure of Sherlock Holmes his­
torically, as situated in a very particular late nineteenth-century moment.
Kestner argues that the early Holmes is embedded in the gender crisis of
the fin de siècle (Kestner, ), and I agree. The salient point is that the
late-Victorian Holmes of the Strand responded to and promised to control
the particular anxieties of the late-Victorian moment, one of which, as we
have seen, was violence in the home.
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A striking number of the Sherlock Holmes stories deal with abuse of
women, ranging from coercion and imprisonment to assault and murder.
Interestingly, in a number of cases this abuse is nonviolent, involving co­
ercion of women for money. “A Case of Identity” (September ), “The
Adventure of the Speckled Band” (February ), “The Adventure of the
Copper Beeches” (June ), and “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist”
(January ) capitalize on the Married Women’s Property Acts of 
and , which allowed women to own and inherit property indepen­
dently of their fathers and husbands. Each of these texts belonging to what
one might call the “Married Women’s Property Act Group” revolves around
the attempt by an older man to steal an inheritance from a young woman.
The women in question are not wives but single women, whose new legal
right to earn and possess money as femmes soles provokes the men’s attempts
either to stop them from marrying at all (thereby keeping the money in
the family home) or to force them to marry a particular person, who will
benefit from the inheritance. As Rosemary Hennessy and Rajeswari Mohan
note, these texts reflect a fear of women’s new economic and social position:
“[T]he subject position most endangering the patriarchy—both sexually
and economically—was the femme sole, a position . . . threatening to elude
the discourses of male protection that secured the feminine as other.”⁵
Hennessy and Mohan also observe that other legislative reforms of the late
nineteenth century, such as the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 
(which raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen), mobilized a
counterdiscourse of protection that reinscribed women as weaker and in
need of male protection (Hennessy and Mohan, –). According to
their logic, texts that centered on crimes against women (and the protec­
tive obligations of men and society) paradoxically played a reassuring role
at the fin de siècle. For while such texts raised anxiety about crime levels,
they simultaneously alleviated anxiety about feminism and the new sub­
ject position of the femme sole.
The Sherlock Holmes stories, I suggest, participate in this reassuring
discourse whereby the threat of female independence is countered by a
crime narrative in which the woman needs male protection. A salient ex­
ample is the case of Violet Smith, who, in “The Solitary Cyclist” (January
), is attacked as she bicycles to work from the train station and then
forced to marry an unknown man. Violet’s position as New Woman is
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suggested by her independent work and her bicycling (a potent symbol of
women’s emergent independence). However, her status as crime victim
and her appeal to Holmes for protection substantially mitigate this inde­
pendence, as does her eventual marriage to Cyril Morton. Another exam­
ple would be Mary Sutherland in “A Case of Identity” (September ).
Mary’s occupation as a typewriter girl makes her an exemplar of fin-de­
siècle female independence, yet her victimization by her stepfather renders
her in need of Holmes’s protection.
A common feature in these texts is the aberrant male—the man
whose abuse of patriarchal power necessitates Holmes’s intervention. Mr.
Windibank, who practices fraud on his own stepdaughter, Mary Suther­
land, is one such man. Another is Grimesby Roylott, the stepfather in “The
Adventure of the Speckled Band” (February ). I refer to him in particu­
lar because he brings together many of the key late-Victorian signs sur­
rounding aberrant and abusive manhood: he is associated with the Orient,
having lived in India most of his life and having returned to an estate sur­
rounded by Gypsies. He is also associated with animals, a Darwinian sign
that points to his degeneracy or closeness to the bestial world. Like Caird,
Doyle seems to associate male violence with heredity—“Violence of tem­
per approaching to mania has been hereditary in the men of the family”—
but also hints at the medicalization of such violence, by calling it a “mania”
(SSH, ). Roylott, then, is a hodgepodge of signifiers, an overdetermined
character who embodies the late-Victorian fear of the violent and degen­
erate male. Most signally, he is Sherlock Holmes’s counterpoint. Holmes,
then, not only polices aberrant men like Roylott but embodies their ideal­
ized opposite. Self-controlled, reasoning, protective of women, the lateVictorian Holmes reassured Strand readers that male violence was amenable
to social control, and indeed that readers, occupying the place of surrogate
detectives, could participate in that control. This joint activity of protection
—by Holmes, and by extension by Watson, and then, through the act of
reading, by the reader—stands in strong contrast to Caird’s almost despair­
ing portrait of women isolated from either male or female support. But
whereas Caird’s text looked to support that would help the heroine forge
a new self-identity outside conventional patriarchal structures, Holmes’s
role as “strong” and “masterful” (SSH, ) protector of abused women
intimated to Strand readers that women were still in need of protection, that
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the feminism of the s had not made redundant the male protective
role that formed the basis of patriarchal society. Holmes thus worked to
police aberrant men and to protect women, but also (more subtly) to po­
lice aberrant—that is, independent or feminist—women.
“The Great Standing Perennial Problem”:
Sherlock Holmes and Wife Assault
As I have noted, “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” (January )
stands out as an anomaly among the Sherlock Holmes stories, sympto­
matic of the impasse of male rational control over the problem of violence
against women. However, the issue of wife abuse recurs in a number of the
subsequent Holmes stories, published in the Strand after Holmes’s death
at Reichenbach Falls: “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” (Novem­
ber ), “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” (September ), “The
Adventure of Black Peter” (March ), and, most saliently, “The Hound
of the Baskervilles” (August –April ). In these texts, I will argue,
Doyle attempts to resurrect his hero’s control over the crime of wife abuse,
that control that so signally wavers in “The Adventure of the Cardboard
Box.” Thus I follow Kestner’s suggestion that we read the figure of Sher­
lock Holmes not as one unchanging character but as a series of manifes­
tations belonging to various epochs: hence we may consider separately
the Victorian Holmes, the Edwardian Holmes, and the Georgian Holmes
(Kestner, ). With respect to wife assault, it is clear that the Victorian
Holmes revealed a serious fissure in his putative control over aberrant men
and over the knowable world. The Edwardian Holmes, I will suggest, plas­
ters over that fissure, retroactively reassuring readers that the “perennial
problem” (SSH, ) of wife assault can and will be laid to rest.
In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” and “The Adventure of
Black Peter,” abuse of women is not the main crime being investigated but
is crucial to what we might term the “criminalization” of key characters.
What I mean by “criminalization” is the way in which certain characters
become vilified in the Holmes stories, whether or not they have committed
the crime being investigated. One thinks, for example, of “The Adventure
of Charles Augustus Milverton” (April ), in which a noblewoman
shoots her blackmailer in full sight of Holmes and Watson. In this case,
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the detective and sidekick do nothing to arrest the murderer, but actively
help her to escape while they burn the contents of the blackmailer’s safe.
The narrative judges the crime of blackmail and implicitly decriminalizes
murdering a blackmailer, suggesting that such a crime should be judged
leniently, if at all. In this text, blackmail functions as the hot-button issue
that steers the reader’s sympathies away from the murder victim. In “The
Adventure of the Norwood Builder” and “The Adventure of Black Peter,”
the hot-button issue is abuse of women, actual or potential.
In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” a young solicitor called
John Hector McFarlane is charged with the murder of Jonas Oldacre, a
builder in Norwood. McFarlane appeals to Holmes to save him, saying that
Oldacre (whom he had never met) asked him to draft his will and made
him his heir. After their meeting, there is a fire at the Oldacre property, and
authorities discover “charred organic remains” (SSH, ), together with
some trouser buttons, which they take to be the burned corpse of Oldacre.
Holmes’s investigation starts, then, with Oldacre apparently murdered and
McFarlane charged with the crime. But Oldacre’s “brutal cruelty” (SSH,
) to animals, and his implied threat to his ex-fiancée, McFarlane’s
mother, provide Holmes and the reader with clues that reverse the identi­
ties of criminal and victim. Mrs. McFarlane tells Holmes that she was en­
gaged to the Norwood builder until he turned a cat loose in an aviary, after
which she “would have nothing more to do with him” (SSH, ). When
she married Mr. McFarlane instead, she tells Holmes, Oldacre sent her back
her own photograph, “shamefully defaced and mutilated with a knife”
(SSH, ). In the face of almost overwhelming evidence pointing to John
Hector McFarlane’s guilt, the cat in the aviary and the mutilated photo­
graph stand as evidence of Oldacre’s sadistic traits. It remains for Holmes
to find the secret room in which Oldacre has hidden himself while he waits
for the police to hang his ex-fiancée’s son for murder. Once he appears,
flushed from his hiding place by the cry “Fire!” Oldacre’s criminal nature
is confirmed by his physiognomy: his face is “odious . . . crafty, vicious,
malignant” (SSH, ). The point here is that abuse of women provides
the narrative clue that puts the reader one satisfying step ahead of the
police, who still believe McFarlane to be guilty. Even before we know that
Oldacre has tried to get McFarlane hanged for murder, his “crimes” against
Mrs. McFarlane and his cruelty to animals mark him as criminal in the
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reader’s mind. In this case, the only surprise is where Oldacre has con­
cealed himself (in a hidden room built into a corridor of his house). In
other words, the question in the reader’s mind becomes not “Whodunit?”
but “How did he do it?”
In “The Adventure of Black Peter,” wife abuse serves not to arrest the
criminal but to criminalize the victim. In this story, the murdered man is
Captain Peter Carey, a retired seal and whale fisher. One of the first things
Holmes and Watson hear from the investigating officer is that Carey was
“an intermittent drunkard” and a “perfect fiend” (SSH, ) when drunk.
“He has been known,” the officer tells them, “to drive his wife and his
daughter out of doors in the middle of the night, and flog them through
the park until the whole village . . . was aroused by their screams” (SSH,
). This information affects the reader’s reaction to the account of Carey’s
corpse, discovered “pinned like a beetle on a card” by a steel harpoon
(SSH, ). No sympathy is accorded to Carey in this text, but much is ac­
corded to the two suspects (for it seems that there are several people who
have reason to murder Peter Carey). The prime suspect is John Hopley
Neligan, whose father was murdered and robbed by Carey, and the real
murderer is Patrick Cairns, a harpooner, who witnessed the father’s mur­
der and attempted to blackmail Carey over it years later. Holmes arrests
Cairns and saves John Neligan from being hanged.
Notably, however, the saga of domestic abuse reduces Carey’s murder
investigation to a purely intellectual exercise. No one cares that he is dead,
not even Holmes, who seems to participate vicariously in the murder when
he spends the morning stabbing at a pig’s carcass with a harpoon, trying to
ascertain how strong the murderer might have been. Carey, then, is vicari­
ously skewered by Holmes, the reader’s surrogate in this and many other
instances. In this visceral act—like the horsewhipping of Mr. Windibank
in “A Case of Identity” or the mauling of Mr. Rucastle by the hound in
“The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”—Strand readers imaginatively
separated themselves from the abuser of women as loathed other. Of these
acts of control over aberrant manhood, however, perhaps none stands out
as saliently as the moment in “The Hound of the Baskervilles” when
Stapleton, a wife abuser and murderer, is hunted until he is sucked down
into the “green-scummed pits and foul quagmires” and “obscene depths”
(SSH, ) of Grimpen Mire. I will suggest that this text, serialized in the
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Strand from August  to April , functions in many respects as
Doyle’s repackaging of “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” of —
that is, his attempt to close down the disquieting issues left open by that
early and supremely disconcerting Holmes narrative.
The Dog, the Fog, and the Bog: Gothicism and Wife Abuse
in “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
When Doyle published “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” the figure of Sher­
lock Holmes was at the peak of its public popularity. William Gillette’s
play had revived interest in Holmes when it opened in England in Septem­
ber , having first toured in America for more than a year (Stashower,
). But the Holmes revived by Doyle for the new century differed in
salient ways from his Victorian counterpart. “The Hound of the Basker­
villes” introduces a more markedly Gothic mode than the stories that
preceded it, with the “foul quagmires” (SSH, ) of Grimpen Mire, the
“shadowy sea” of fog (SSH, ), the suggestive moans and cries that haunt
the moor and Baskerville Hall, and of course the phosphorescent hound
itself, with “fire burst[ing] from its open mouth,” and “its muzzle and
hackles and dewlap . . . outlined in flickering flame” (SSH, ). Unlike in
the Holmes narratives of the early s, here mystery is signalled not as
intellectual adventure but as Gothic thriller. Indeed, there is almost an ele­
ment of gimmickry about the narrative devices in the story, or at least a
sense that Gothicism has been pushed to an extreme.
This excess of Gothicism comes to rest and is defeated in the over­
determined symbol of the hound. I say “overdetermined” because it is clear
that Doyle mobilized a number of narrative clichés to create this figure of
evil. In the text, the hound is associated with violence against women,
as Doyle clearly establishes by means of the legend of “the Curse of the
Baskervilles.” Here the hound appears as retribution for the crime of Sir
Hugo Baskerville, who at the time of the Great Rebellion carried off a young
village maiden (presumably to rape her). The hound symbol is redeployed
in modern times by Stapleton, another man whose salient trait is his abuse
of women: he brutally beats and abuses his wife and thus stands as the
symbolic heir to Sir Hugo’s misogynistic violence. Very importantly, the
hound draws on the early Holmes stories, in which a mastiff hound is
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associated with aberrant manhood or violence against women. In “The
Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” as I have already mentioned, the abu­
sive Rucastle is killed by the mastiff he keeps to police his estate, his ani­
mal nature signaled metonymically by the ferocious beast. More generally,
the figure of the hound draws on well-established—even clichéd—Gothic
tropes. Doyle’s biographers record that Bertram Fletcher Robinson told
him the legend of a large ghostly hound, a piece of Devon folklore, during
a golfing holiday (Stashower, ). Stashower points out that “British folk­
lore has many phantom dogs and hellhounds” (Stashower, ); indeed,
just such a phosphorescent phantom is mentioned in The Wing of Azrael,
a text that precedes “The Hound of the Baskervilles” by more than a
decade. In Caird’s novel, the conservative Lady Clevedon describes Harry
Lancaster as a radical, and a radical, in turn, as a “creature . . . with the soul
of a demon” who after dark “becomes phosphorescent and emits from his
mouth and nostrils green fire” (WA, ). Caird’s radical demon and Doyle’s
hound, then, draw on well-worn Gothic conventions. The hound, like the
figure of Grimesby Roylott in “The Speckled Band,” is a conglomeration
of signs, an overdetermined symbol of evil. Moreover, the evil that it rep­
resents is social. Just as the fog in the story signals the “threat of chaos in
the culture” (Kestner, ), so the hound clearly represents the social prob­
lem of violence against women. Yet at the same time, the hound is an empty
symbol, a straw dog, as it were, set up for Holmes to strike down. If “The
Adventure of the Cardboard Box” disconcerts by severing the particular
from the general social problem, “The Hound of the Baskervilles” most
obviously strains this relationship of the particular to the general, setting
up the hound as an easy object for Holmes to triumph over.
Christopher Metress usefully outlines the typical structure of a Sher­
lock Holmes narrative, and in applying this paradigm to “The Hound of
the Baskervilles,” we see that the text both conforms to and indeed exag­
gerates this pattern. Metress identifies three stages to a classic Holmes story.
The first stage (which usually takes place in the Baker Street flat) estab­
lishes Holmes’s reason, either by his display of logic in solving a minor
problem (as in the reading of Peterson’s hat in “The Blue Carbuncle”) or
by Watson’s reminding the reader of a past case that Holmes has solved. The
text thus “quickly establishes Baker Street as a place where reason con­
fidently discovers or recovers order” (Metress, ). The first stage also in­
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troduces the new, “seemingly inexplicable mystery” to be solved (Metress,
). Metress notes that the opening of a Holmes story thus introduces
“two competing versions of reality: one, that the world is a great chain of
order which is knowable to the competent inquirer, and two, that the world
is a mysterious place where the inexplicable threatens to throw our lives into
disorder” (Metress, ). The middle stage of the story, which typically
takes place away from Baker Street, develops the theme of disorder. The
mystery deepens, more and more seemingly inexplicable events occur, and
the reader and Watson are cast into confusion and doubt. We may think
of this as the dark center of a Holmes narrative, when reason seems in dan­
ger of defeat, and crime, illogicality, and violence appear to hold sway. The
presence of Holmes (the exemplar of reason and control) is the only sign
that reason still prevails, but typically, in this stage of the narrative, Holmes
does not reveal to Watson the significance of the clues he gathers or what
his theories are. In the final stage of Metress’s paradigm, “the inconceivable
once again becomes conceivable,” the text returns to Baker Street, and
“Holmes explains how he arrived at his solution, thus erasing any doubt”
(Metress, ). “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” I suggest, follows and
magnifies this paradigm, darkening the second stage and heightening the
rational triumph of the third, thus producing an overdetermined Gothic
threat for Holmes to defeat.
The first stage of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” follows this typical
pattern, with Holmes brilliantly elucidating the mystery of the walking stick
and dating a manuscript by the corner sticking out from Dr. Mortimer’s
pocket. The second stage begins when these powers are challenged by the
apparently illogical crime of the stolen boots, and by the elusive watcher
who presumptuously tells the cab driver that he is Sherlock Holmes, thus
sending Holmes a signal that his antagonist is someone to be reckoned
with. The mysteries of the second stage darken after Baskerville and Watson
leave Baker Street and before they (and the reader) realize that Holmes has
in fact accompanied them to the moor. As the two men leave the train and
drive to Baskerville Hall, they enter a gothicized section of the narrative in
which crime, violence, horror, and mystery deepen. Watson and Baskerville
arrive at night to find a “gloomy” moor, “jagged and sinister hills,” “chill­
ing wind,” and a “darkling sky” (SSH, –). Soldiers stand guard look­
ing for the notorious Notting Hill murderer, who has escaped from a nearby
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prison; local farmers fear having their throats cut by the escaped convict.
The Baskerville estate lodge is “a ruin of black granite and bared ribs of
rafters” (SSH, ); Baskerville Hall itself is gloomy and vast; the only two
servants are eager to depart as soon as possible. In the night, Watson hears
“the sob of a woman, the muffled, strangling gasp of one who is torn by an
uncontrollable sorrow” (SSH, ); by day, he hears the screams of moor
ponies as they are swallowed by the bogs of Grimpen Mire. All of this fits
Metress’s description of the dark second stage of a Holmes narrative, when
reason seems to succumb to crime, illogicality, and violence. Importantly,
however, in “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” all of this occurs in Holmes’s
(apparent) absence. We have the illusion, then, of Watson operating with­
out Holmes, who normally functions during the second stage as a key sym­
bol of reason and order, even though he does not reveal that order until the
close of the story. In “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” the palpable ab­
sence of Holmes in the second stage and the excessive Gothic trappings
mean that the “dark fears and vague surmises” (SSH, ) of this section
are exceptionally disturbing and impenetrable.
Yet even without Holmes, Watson and Baskerville manage to solve
one mystery—the mystery of the convict Selden and his relationship to
the Barrymores. We may in fact call this the “false mystery,” because it is
represented as being so obvious that even Watson can solve it. Indeed, I
would argue that Selden functions in the narrative to represent a legible
and obvious public criminal—the kind of criminal, the text suggests, who
is easily identified and thus does not pose a terrible social hazard. In con­
trast, Stapleton represents the real threat, the one that Holmes is required
to neutralize, and the one around which the text’s Gothic trappings even­
tually coalesce.
What, then, makes Selden effectively a nonthreat? He is, after all, a no­
torious murderer, whose crime was so atrocious that he escaped the death
penalty on suspicion of insanity. However, I would argue that he is essen­
tially nonthreatening because he is so obviously deviant. The text invokes
a plethora of late nineteenth-century discourses on atavism, reversion, race
development, and devolution, all of which come to center on Selden and
unambiguously identify him as criminal. These discourses are initiated in
stage one of the narrative, when we learn that Dr. Mortimer writes scien­
tific papers on reversion and atavism, studies skulls and phrenology, dis­
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cusses “the comparative anatomy of the Bushman and the Hottentot” (SSH,
), and looks closely at Holmes’s “supra-orbital development” (SSH, ).
In stage two, the Dartmoor landscape, dotted with neolithic huts, simi­
larly invokes the possibility of reversion to a more primitive state. When
Selden is finally found, he seems the living embodiment of atavism and
bestiality:
Over the rocks . . . there was thrust out an evil yellow face, a terrible ani­
mal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions. Foul with mire, with
a bristling beard, and hung with matted hair, it might well have belonged
to one of those old savages who dwelt in the burrows on the hill-sides.
The light beneath him was reflected in his small, cunning eyes, which
peered fiercely to right and left through the darkness, like a crafty and
savage animal who has heard the steps of the hunters. (SSH, )
Selden, then, represents crime that is readily identified by contemporary
science and controllable by brave but ordinary men like Baskerville and
Watson (men with whom the Strand reader identified). Had he not died,
it seemed acceptable to simply ship Selden off to South America. Yet the
discovery—and even the death—of Selden do not put the Gothic trappings
of the story to rest. On the contrary, they become more vivid and more vio­
lent, centering instead on Stapleton, wife abuser and murderer. And it is
Stapleton who really threatens the rational and protective masculine order
that Holmes represents.
Unlike Selden’s, Stapleton’s crimes are unheralded by his appearance.
Neither bestial nor atavistic in appearance, he is flaxen-haired, slim, small,
prim, nondescript, well educated, and scientific. In short, whereas Selden’s
crimes locate themselves outside the middle-class home (in the servant class,
on the moor, in prison, in the urban space of Notting Hill), Stapleton’s
crimes reside firmly in the bourgeois home, even as they are anathema to
the bourgeois manhood that Holmes so fiercely polices. More complexly,
Stapleton’s earlier statement that he is Sherlock Holmes announces that he
shares Holmes’s defining features: class, education, and scientific knowl­
edge. Selden, then, is Holmes’s obvious antagonist; Stapleton is, metaphori­
cally speaking, his near neighbor. Because Stapleton’s crimes are private
and bourgeois, unheralded by criminal typology or physiognomy, they are
invisible to Baskerville, to Watson, and to the reader. Holmes alone can
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elucidate and defeat them. Moreover, the narrative symbol that represents
these crimes—Grimpen Mire—suggests that this illegibility is intrinsic to
their horror. For what is horrifying about the bog is that it cannot be lo­
cated (its margins spread unpredictably), it cannot be plumbed (its bot­
tom is unknown), and it cannot be navigated (except by Stapleton, with
whom it is closely identified). Stapleton’s crimes are similarly horrifying
because they are invisible to the scientific discourses (of atavism, bestiality,
and race degeneration) that dominated the criminology of the late nine­
teenth century.
The bog thus represents pure horror, and the text returns almost ob­
sessively to this symbol, describing its “green-scummed pits,” “foul quag­
mires,” “[r]ank reeds,” “decay,” “heavy miasmic vapour,” “tenacious grip,”
and “obscene depths” (SSH, ). Its impenetrability recalls the conclusion
to the “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” when Holmes described a
metaphorical mire of violence and fear that his reason could not penetrate.
Evoking the “perennial problem” (SSH, ) of “The Adventure of the
Cardboard Box,” the quagmire stands for uncontrolled masculine aggres­
sion, especially aggression against women. In short, the quagmire represents
the irrational and aberrant masculine urges that defy Holmes’s rational
ability. (Stapleton, as I have mentioned, stands as symbolic heir to the
Baskerville inheritance of violence toward women; Holmes points out that
Stapleton closely resembles Sir Hugo.) In the context of late-Victorian
anxieties concerning wife abuse and male violence, it is crucial that Staple­
ton be marked as aberrant. The text’s ideological work, then, is to define
male violence as anomalous, recognizable, and controllable, thus avoid­
ing Caird’s conclusion that gender relations of the time were inherently
violent. This work accounts for the importance of the phosphorescent
hound.
In the text, the second key symbol (the dog) replaces the first (the
bog). Put simply, the hound is associated with the mire because its howls
and moans seem to emanate from the mire’s center. In more complex terms,
the hound—which consists of blackness made visible by phosphorescence
—renders the invisible visible. Whereas the bog is illegible and ill-defined,
the phosphorescent hound is strikingly visible, and thus defeatable. The
hound, then, makes Holmes’s triumph possible, and the text thus offers
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the reader the reassurance so notably absent from “The Adventure of the
Cardboard Box.”
In the final defeat of the hound, Holmes, Watson, and Baskerville tri­
umph, and the aberrant masculinity of Stapleton is banished back to the
bog. (The more obvious criminal, Selden, has already been dealt with, his
neck broken in his flight from the hound.) We should note that the hound
is not easily defeated—the fog rises as the mastiff is released, threatening
to make the text’s key symbol of aberrance invisible and unassailable. As
Holmes himself says, if the fog had covered the path before Baskerville had
set off home, he could not have seen clearly enough to shoot the hound:
Every minute that white woolly plain which covered one half of the
moor was drifting closer and closer to the house. Already the first thin
wisps of it were curling across the golden square of the lighted window.
The farther wall of the orchard was already invisible, and the trees were
standing out of a swirl of white vapour. As we watched it the fog-wreaths
came crawling round both corners of the house and rolled slowly into
one dense bank, on which the upper floor and the roof floated like a
strange ship upon a shadowy sea. Holmes struck his hand passionately
upon the rock in front of us, and stamped his feet in his impatience.
“If he isn’t out in a quarter of an hour the path will be covered. In half
an hour we won’t be able to see our hands in front of us.” (SSH, )
Once the hound is dead (a “gaunt, savage” creature as “large as a small
lioness” [SSH, ]), the scene shifts to the interior of the Stapleton home,
to give the reader a clear view of what evil the monster represented. Signi­
ficantly, this narrative shift points the reader not to Stapleton’s two mur­
ders (of the late Sir Charles and Selden) or his attempted murder (of the
present Sir Henry) but to evidence of wife abuse. (This shift recalls texts
such as “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” in which one
crime takes emotional precedence over another.) In “The Hound of the
Baskervilles,” I suggest, wife abuse takes a kind of visceral precedence over
murder, as the first scene that confronts the reader after the hound’s defeat
is that of Mrs. Stapleton beaten, bruised, whipped, and gagged, tied to a
post in the museum of Stapleton’s etymological specimens (fig. .). The
narrative thus comes full circle as the reader realizes that the original Sir
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Hugo’s aberrance (his violence against women) had found its modern
counterpart and heir in Stapleton. (The text supports this theme with
Laura Lyons, another abused wife. The moor indeed seems to be peopled
with ill-used women.) Ironically, in using the legend of the hound of the
Baskervilles for his own gain, Stapleton has unwittingly unleashed the
symbol of his own aberrance.
The defeat of Stapleton and the hound, then, reassures the reader that
male violence is aberrant, knowable, and conquerable. It also clears the
way for the ideal manliness of the new Sir Henry, whose North American
colonial experience adds vigor to the Baskerville line. Holmes’s role as po­
liceman of the private home is thus complete. Or is it? Stapleton’s disap­
pearance back into Grimpen Mire leaves the perceptive reader with a sense
that the hound’s defeat represents a too-easy narrative solution. For we
should notice that once the hound is dead, the mire swiftly reassumes the
role of the text’s key symbol, and once again its most prominent feature is
its illegibility. Though Holmes can surmise that Stapleton drowned in the
bog, he cannot read the mire: “more than that we were never destined to
know, though there was much which we might surmise. There was no
chance of finding footsteps in the mire, for the rising mud oozed swiftly in
upon them” (SSH, ). The spectacular defeat of the hound is thus under­
cut to some extent by the suggestion that aberrant manhood—as repre­
sented by Stapleton—might somehow have survived.
In the gender crisis of the late s, The Wing of Azrael and the
Sherlock Holmes stories stand at almost opposite ideological poles. Caird’s
fiction questions the future of bourgeois marriage, finding it inherently vio­
lent toward women, as her novel seeks without success for a viable alter­
native. The vivid colors and light associated with the New Woman, Sibella
Lincoln, invite the reader to imagine a more optimistic future, but finally
this novel fails to imagine with any specificity what this future might hold.
Liberal feminism fails Caird—marriage, in her terms, is an unambiguous
failure—and Viola’s disappearance over the sea cliffs into darkness repre­
sents the resulting ideological impasse. The much more popular and influ­
ential Sherlock Holmes stories respond to the same crisis, deploying the
idealized masculine figure of the detective as the policeman of private
crime, especially violence against women. Holmes upholds and supports
bourgeois marriage, banishing violent masculinity (which the text strenu­
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Figure .. Sidney Paget, “Mrs. Stapleton Sank upon the Floor,” illustration for Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Strand Magazine (April ).
ously defines as aberrant, and not, as Caird would have it, inherent in
marriage) and inviting readers to participate with him in penetrating and
investigating the private home. The anxieties surrounding violent marriages
are, then, ones that the Holmes stories repeatedly assuage, through the
s, in “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” and, finally, in “The Adven­
ture of the Abbey Grange,” published in the Strand in September .
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Conclusion
Let us now turn back to where this book began: with Sherlock Holmes,
the Brackenstalls, and the Abbey Grange. As I note in the introduction,
Doyle’s text is a story about how stories of wife assault are created and cir­
culated: it is about when, how, by whom, to whom, and about whom nar­
ratives of marital assault are told. But it is also preeminently a text about
investigation itself. From the first page, when Holmes tells Watson, “The
game is afoot” (SSH, ), the reader is invited not just to watch passively
as Holmes investigates but to penetrate imaginatively the facade of the
Brackenstall home; to enter the morning room, then the dining room; to
look at frayed cords and sip bees-wing; to ponder the garden pond and
contemplate what might be hidden in its depths. The text’s illustrations
actively invite the investigative gaze; all show Holmes looking at bodies and
objects, modeling for readers the active investigative role that they should
assume. In this activity of investigation, the reader may be physically alone,
but he or she is never unique. As Benedict Anderson points out, there is a
powerful communal component to such activity, which, due to the very
nature of mass publishing, is shared and replicated by thousands.⁶ In this
instance, thousands of Strand readers shared the activity of policing do­
mestic conduct—that is, the public activity of policing the private.⁷
In the context of this study it is important to note that this shared in­
vestigative activity did not replace but supplemented the policing role of
the newspaper. As we have seen, over the course of the nineteenth century,
the newspaper assumed a key social role in defining and controlling private
spaces. By his own almost obsessive reading of the newspaper—especially
the crime and court news and the agony column⁸—Sherlock Holmes
is elided with the newspaper, and indeed, the newspaper, as much as
Baker Street, functions as the starting point for most Holmes narratives.
Repeatedly, Holmes reads an account of a crime in the newspaper, seeks
background information in the newspaper, runs advertisements in the
newspaper, or consults the agony column there. He recognizes the typeset
of the major dailies (and in “The Hound of the Baskervilles” can immedi­
ately identify a letter made of cut-up newspaper as having been gleaned
from the leading article of that day’s Times). In the Holmes narratives, as
in He Knew He Was Right, the newspaper is ubiquitous. But the Holmes
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Figure .. Sidney Paget, “A Wild-Eyed and Frantic Young Man Burst into the Room,”
illustration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,”
Strand Magazine (November ).
stories offer a further thrill: they invite the reader to go into the crime stories
themselves, to enter the scene of the crime, to meet the accused, to examine
and then reexamine the evidence. The most salient example of this is “The
Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” in which John Hector McFarlane
enters the Baker Street flat just as Holmes is starting to read the Daily Tele­
graph that features the (inaccurate) story of McFarlane’s arrest. The illus­
tration parallels the open newspaper on Holmes’s knee with the open door
through which McFarlane enters: it is as if the newspaper article has come
to life in the Baker Street rooms (fig. .). Doyle invited Strand readers,
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then, to supplement the newspaper’s policing role by imagining themselves
as investigators of the private sphere.
Moreover, the reader is not spared this scrutiny. In “The Adventure of
the Abbey Grange,” there is only one illustration in which Holmes is ap­
parently not looking at a clue, a suspect, or a body. It is an illustration en­
titled “I Could See by Holmes’s Face That He Was Much Puzzled” (fig. .),
and it marks the moment when Holmes decides to get off the train and
double-check Lady Brackenstall’s fabricated narrative of poker-wielding
villains. But it also marks the only moment when Holmes gazes out of the
frame of the illustration and looks at the reader. The classic side profile of
Holmes (which dominates the Sidney Paget illustrations and directs the
detective’s gaze away from the reader and into the text) is disrupted in
favor of a full facial view. This direct gaze signals the basic premise of the
detective narrative: ultimately, this investigation is about you—your life,
your dining room, your wine, your poker, your spouse, your marital con­
duct. The “imagined community” (B. Anderson, ) that the novel or the
newspaper creates is one in which the investigation of private conduct
comes full circle to the reader.
Does this investigation of wife beating undermine the institution of
marriage itself? As Anna Clark observes, this is the question that haunts
the Victorian debates on wife assault (A. Clark, “Humanity,” ). On the
contrary, “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” maps the general trajec­
tory of Victorian fiction away from this fundamental questioning of bour­
geois marriage. For although the story begins with the wife’s black eye and
leads to the cudgel-wielding husband, it does not rest with the husband’s
criminalization. Instead, Holmes’s telegram produces a kind of vir ex
machina in the form of Captain Croker himself. “[T]all,” “young,” “ac­
tive,” and “strong,” with blue eyes and a golden mustache (SSH, ), he
is quintessentially manly, and indeed is described explicitly by the narra­
tor as being “as fine a specimen of manhood” (SSH, ) as ever walked
into the Baker Street flat. What purpose is served by this fine specimen of
manhood? It would appear that he makes it possible for the text to evade
its own seemingly inevitable conclusion. Were the narrative to reach its
appropriate legal closure, Croker would be arrested as the murderer of Sir
Eustace, whom he admits to having killed because the baronet had “welted”
Mary across the face with a cudgel (SSH, ). Instead, the narrative
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Figure .. Sidney Paget, “I Could See by Holmes’s Face That He Was Much Puzzled,”
illustration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,”
Strand Magazine ().
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exonerates Croker, with Holmes as judge and Watson as jury. In this extra­
legal solution, they decide to let the murderer go free after a private trial in
their flat, in which Watson (as jury) declares him “Not guilty” (SSH, ).
Their silence about Croker’s murder of Sir Eustace (a silence that involves
Watson, Holmes, the narrator, and the reader) reinstates the ideology of
male as protector—indeed, excuses a murderer in this capacity—and sets
Croker free to marry Mary. “[M]ay her future and yours justify us in the
judgment which we have pronounced this night,” Holmes tells the captain
(SSH, ).
Not only, then, does the text evade its legal conclusion (the arrest of
Croker), but it evades its own logic also. For, having engaged in a thorough
investigation of the Brackenstalls’ marriage, and having found—to use
Caird’s words, “something very ‘rotten in the state of Denmark’” (Marr.,
)—the reader, the narrator, Holmes, and Watson concur in avoiding an
investigation of marriage per se. The “not guilty” judgment that they pro­
nounce on Croker makes almost invisible the judgment that they do not
render: the conclusion that marriage itself might be guilty. For if Doyle
were to follow Caird’s logic, “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” would
end very differently: Croker’s murder of Sir Eustace Brackenstall might be
seen to participate in the same type of male violence that Brackenstall him­
self represents. But the text does not choose to explore male violence in
general. Instead, the narrative’s closure points forward to a new, presum­
ably happy marriage that will replace and redeem the flawed union of the
Brackenstalls. In this, “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” is paradig­
matic, not exceptional: while Victorian newspapers and novels invited indepth scrutiny of wife assault, they rarely sought to overturn marriage per
se, but rather sought to reform and reinvent it.
This book has traced the newfound publicity surrounding wife assault
in the nineteenth century, from the daily appearance of working-class
spousal assault cases in the newspapers after the  Offenses Against the
Person Act, through the wife-assault debates of midcentury, to the s’
divorce debates and their aftermath, when middle-class cruelty was regu­
larly exposed in divorce reporting in newspapers. It has concluded with
the very public discussion of marriage and male violence in the late s
and early s. It has been my goal to suggest that Victorian novelists
were deeply cognizant of these debates surrounding wife assault. Their
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narratives, I argue, were not only embedded in these debates but actively
contemplated the significance of the new public visibility of wife assault,
variously recoiling from, embracing, and participating in this public scru­
tiny of “private” behavior. The Victorian domestic novel, then, actively in­
vestigated the relationship of the private and public spheres, exposing the
regulation of private behavior—even the construction of the private sphere
itself—by public media such as the newspaper. Hence the  act initiated
the promulgation of models and antitypes of domestic conduct during the
nineteenth century through what Benedict Anderson terms the “imagined
communities” of the newspaper and the novel (B. Anderson, ).
Representations of wife assault in nineteenth-century fiction and pub­
lic discourse are fascinating precisely because they reveal fissures in the
ideology of marriage, that cornerstone of Victorian gender relations. They
point to moments when the ideals of marriage and male protection were
questioned, challenged, or even shattered, moments when writers and read­
ers were forced to repair such ideals or to contemplate their undoing. Many
Victorian texts reveal ambiguous or contradictory impulses: Oliver Twist
endorses intervention in abusive relationships while simultaneously cele­
brating women’s domestic loyalty; Dombey and Son advocates reformed
ideals of domestic manliness while paradoxically celebrating the healing
power of the wounded woman; The Woman in White offered Victorian
readers sensational visions of women’s legal nonexistence—somehow not
noticing that the plot revolves around the noncriminal act of a husband
taking his wife’s money—while conducting its own investigation of upperclass male domestic conduct; He Knew He Was Right scrutinizes mental
cruelty as a form of marital violence; and “The Adventure of the Card­
board Box” depicts Sherlock Holmes catching a wife murderer even while
acknowledging that the “perennial problem” of wife abuse is one that he
can neither fathom nor solve.
Of the texts in this study, the fin-de-siècle fictions in particular reveal
the extent to which the issue of marital violence brought Victorians to an
ideological crux or impasse. Caird and Doyle, writing from very different
points on the political spectrum, both found themselves mired in this
dilemma, and the conclusions of their texts offer readers potent symbols
of its difficulty and depth. The Wing of Azrael ends with the heroine’s dis­
appearance over the cliffs into “pitch-black, rayless, impenetrable darkness”
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(WA, ), revealing the impasse at which the text arrives when it tries to
imagine a future beyond marriage. “The Hound of the Baskervilles” simi­
larly ends with the “foul quagmires” and “obscene depths” (SSH, ) of
Grimpen Mire, even as the text celebrates the triumph of Holmes over the
hound, that exceedingly visible symbol of male violence and its social de­
structiveness. Strangely, then, Caird’s feminism and Doyle’s upholding of
marriage bring them both to a symbol of illegibility, ambiguity, and un­
certainty. Such imagery measures the potency of marital violence to under­
mine the Victorian gender system and threaten to throw readers and writers
into a mire of ideological uncertainty about the viability of marriage as an
institution. However, whereas Caird’s little-known and unpopular text looks
squarely at this darkness and uncertainty, Doyle became popular with
Strand readers by very largely eschewing such contemplation. Instead,
Doyle deploys the hound as a symbol of male violence that is knowable,
visible, and defeatable. Through this overdetermined symbol, Sherlock
Holmes promised Victorian readers that the mire of gender uncertainty
could be identified, challenged, and put to rest. Doyle’s narrative thus ex­
emplifies the ideological work of most Victorian novels in this study:
while they invited almost relentless public investigation of male violence
and marital conduct, they rarely rejected marriage itself, but reinvented
it as an ideal—an ideal that has persisted, like many others, beyond the
Victorian era and into our own.
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N O T E S
Introduction
. As Mary Lyndon Shanley notes in Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victo­
rian England, –, Kaye was a military historian who succeeded John Stuart Mill
at the India Office. She conjectures that he was inspired by Mill to write this article.
The immediate event that prompted the article was Mr. Dillwyn’s introduction in the
House of Commons of a bill authorizing flogging as a punishment for violent assaults
on women and children (Shanley, n).
. Victorians most commonly used the terms “wife beating” or “ill-usage” to de­
scribe marital assault; the OED cites the first use of the term “wife beating” in the
s (Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky, The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in
Mid-nineteenth-Century Literature, n). “Cruelty” was a legal term denoting spousal
violence sufficient to obtain a judicial separation or (after ) a divorce.
. In “Domesticity and the Problem of Wifebeating in Nineteenth-Century
Britain,” Anna Clark observes that radicals inspired by the French revolution pointed
to “the discrepancy between harsh penalties for property crimes and leniency toward
violence” as revealing the law’s operation on behalf of the rich. She notes that in 
Parliament for the first time made attempted murder and grievous bodily harm pun­
ishable by the death penalty (A. Clark, “Domesticity,” –).
. Anna Clark, “Humanity or Justice? Wifebeating and the Law in the Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Centuries,” .
. Although it had been possible for women to prosecute husbands in the Old
Bailey (the London higher court, where judges could impose sentences of several years’
duration), they appear to have been loathe to do so. Anna Clark speculates that the
Old Bailey judges intimidated women, and the expense, trouble, and long delays dis­
couraged women (A. Clark, “Humanity,” ).
. Maeve E. Doggett, Marriage, Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England, .
. Shani D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women,
and Barbara Leckie, Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law.
. John M. Biggs, The Concept of Matrimonial Cruelty ; Margaret May, “Violence
in the Family: An Historical Perspective”; A. Clark, “Humanity”; A. James Hammerton,
“Victorian Marriage,” .
. Nancy Tomes, “A ‘Torrent of Abuse’: Crimes of Violence between WorkingClass Men and Women in London, –,” ; Ellen Ross, “‘Fierce Questions and
Taunts’: Married Life in Working-Class London, –”; A. Clark, “Domesticity”;

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Allen Horstman, Victorian Divorce; and A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Compan­
ionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life.
. See Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the
Novel, .
. The references to James Conyers’s brutality were added to the stereotyped edi­
tion of Aurora Floyd, presumably by Braddon herself (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora
Floyd, n).
Chapter 
. Sikes was commonly misspelled as “Sykes”: see Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora
Floyd (), which refers to the “noble sentiment entertained by the Nancys of mod­
ern romance for the Bill Sykeses of their choice” (AF, ).
. For references to Bill Sikes and Nancy, see Punch,  March , , and
 July , ; see also the Echo,  January , .
. See Tromp, –. The Newgate Calendar recorded notorious crimes from 
to its publication date of c. . Subsequent compilations of crime narratives included
The Newgate Calendar (–) and The New Newgate Calendar ().
. Kathryn Chittick, Dickens and the s, .
. Michael Slater, introduction to The Amusements of the People and Other Papers:
Reports, Essays and Reviews, –, by Charles Dickens, xi.
. For example, in his review of J. B. Buckstone’s play The Dream at Sea, Dickens
made a jab at the notoriously harsh Allan Stewart Laing, magistrate since  at the
police court in Hatton Garden. Later, in the July  installment of Oliver Twist, he
parodied Laing as “Mr Fang” (Slater, ).
. M. J. D. Roberts. “Public and Private in Early Nineteenth-Century London:
The Vagrant Act of  and its Enforcement,” .
. This case was also reported in the Morning Chronicle ( November , e)
under the ambiguous title “Caution to Wives.” The headline might suggest the news­
paper’s criticism of the magistrate; it might also simply reflect White’s cautionary
message.
. On the sales of The Old Curiosity Shop, see Sue Zemka, “From the Punchmen
to Pugin’s Gothics: The Broad Road to Sentimental Death in The Old Curiosity Shop,”
.
. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, vii–ix.
. In its review of Sketches by Boz, Second Series, the Weekly Dispatch quoted “The
Hospital Patient” to illustrate Dickens’s shifting reputation from humorist to writer of
pathos (Chittick, ).
. The patient’s last words suggest that she has been a prostitute as she asks God
to forgive her for the life she has led. She also says she wishes—as does her father—
that she had died as a child. This resembles the coded moment in David Copperfield
when David wishes that Little Emily had drowned in childhood rather than become
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Steerforth’s mistress. In both cases, the nostalgia for childhood suggests (at least) a mis­
use of adult sexuality.
Chapter 
. See Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics
in Early Victorian Literature and Art, .
. In fact, as Doggett points out, the reverse was true (Doggett, ).
. Flogging, however, continued to be an issue for several decades: in , ,
, and , bills authorizing flogging sentences for wife assault were introduced in
Parliament. However, all failed, as the majority of MPs considered flogging retrograde
and unacceptable for a modern society (Doggett, –). Moreover, the  flogging
bill was opposed by the women of Leicester, who feared that flogging would lead to a
backlash against women ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ).
. See Re Cochrane ()  Dowling . The case stood as a legal precedent
until it was overturned by R. v. Jackson ()  QB .
. Dickens draws the figure of Asmodeus from Alain René Le Sage’s Le Diable
Boiteux; or, The Devil upon Two Sticks (). In this text, the demon Asmodeus says
to a scholar that he will “lift off the Roofs of the Houses, and . . . clearly expose to your
View whatever is now under them” (). The scholar sees a miser counting his gold
and silver; his heirs consulting a witch as to when he will die; an aging coquette re­
moving her make-up, eyebrows, and teeth; and an “amorous Dotard of sixty just come
from making Love” ().
. Gail Turley Houston, Consuming Fictions: Gender, Class, and Hunger in Dick­
ens’s Novels, .
. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England, –.
. Colette Colligan, “Raising the House Tops: Sexual Surveillance in Charles
Dickens’s Dombey and Son,” –; Michael Steig, Dickens and Phiz, .
. We should note that the novel does not endorse male passivity: the limp and
unlikable Cousin Feenix is positioned as Dombey’s opposite, and Paul Dombey, in his
gentleness, seems doomed to extinction.
. Notably, in David Copperfield, Betsey Trotwood’s estranged husband—whom
the family strongly suspects of having beaten her—appears as a “beggar” (DC, ), a
phantom of the streets, as if his assaults have permanently alienated him from middleclass domesticity.
. Robert Clark, “Riddling the Family Firm: The Sexual Economy in Dombey
and Son,” .
. Patricia Ingham, Dickens, Women and Language, .
. Arlene M. Jackson, “Reward, Punishment, and the Conclusion of Dombey
and Son,” .
. Kate Flint, Dickens, .
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Chapter 
. Juliet McMaster, “‘Imbecile Laughter’ and ‘Desperate Earnest’ in The Tenant
of Wildfell Hall,” –.
. For Moore’s critique of the narrative structure, see George Moore, Conversa­
tions in Ebury Street, .
. While Anne Brontë owed a debt to Thackeray, Andrés G. López observes that
“Brontë’s satiric method was different from Thackeray’s; she purposely chose to ‘lash’
and not ‘laugh’ at vice and vicious characters—to present evil in its ugliness and not
in its most ‘agreeable manner’” (López, “Wildfell Hall as Satire: Brontë’s Domestic
Vanity Fair,” ).
. In his introduction to the Clarendon edition of Tenant, Rosengarten suggests
that Brontë’s roués are largely literary, drawn from the pages of Richardson, Smollett,
and Fielding (TWH, xiv–xv).
. For the Rambler and Spectator quotations, see Miriam Allott, ed., The Brontës:
The Critical Heritage, , . McMaster notes that most Victorian editions after
 bowdlerized the swearing of Arthur Huntingdon and his companions (McMas­
ter, n).
. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in The Riverside Shake­
speare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), act , scene , lines
–.
. Margaret Smith, introduction to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë, xx.
. Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Ed­
wardian England, .
. For a full discussion of human and animal cruelty in Wuthering Heights, see
Surridge, “Animals and Violence in Wuthering Heights.”
. Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property
Law in Nineteenth-Century England, appendix , .
. Elizabeth Langland, Anne Brontë: The Other One, –.
. It is surprising to find Linton, later known for her stringent antifeminist views,
protesting against marital coverture here.
. William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore
Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), act , scene , line .
. Quoted in M. Anderson, “Lawful Wife, Unlawful Sex—Examining the Effect
of the Criminalization of Marital Rape in England and the Republic of Ireland,” .
. Juliet Barker, The Brontës, .
Chapter 
. Gordon S. Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, :.
. In his article on the Divorce Court in George Eliot’s fiction, Andrew Dowling
notes that the volume publication of Scenes of Clerical Life coincided with the open­
ing of the Divorce Court in January  (Dowling, “‘The Other Side of Silence’:
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Matrimonial Conflict and the Divorce Court in George Eliot’s Fiction,” ). I find the
coincidence of the serial version with the debates on the Divorce Bill more interesting,
as it suggests the possibility of the text actively intervening in the public debate.
. Simon Dentith, George Eliot, .
. Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family
Violence, Boston, –, .
. This view of wife assault is also reflected in an  legal case highlighted by
Mill, in which the magistrate admonished a woman not to make “such free use of her
tongue in abuse of her husband” as he released the man accused of beating her and
trying to slit her throat with a razor (CW, :).
. Carol A. Martin, George Eliot’s Serial Fiction, .
. Kerry McSweeney, George Eliot (Marian Evans): A Literary Life, .
. See Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and
Fictional Form; Mary B. Coney, “The Meaning of Milby in ‘Janet’s Repentance.’” –.
. In contrast, Victorian investigators such as Henry Maine and F. D. Maurice
“found in the family the basis of society” (Horstman, ).
. The act allowed a husband divorce on the grounds of adultery alone, while a
wife had to prove adultery plus incest, bigamy, rape, sodomy, bestiality, cruelty, or de­
sertion (Horstman, ).
. One might compare this to J. W. Kaye’s article “Outrages on Women,” in
which he attributed wife abuse in part to lower-class women’s lack of “cleanly and tidy
habits—habits of order, and habits of punctuality” (OW, ).
. Kathleen Blake, “George Eliot: The Critical Heritage,” –.
. Jennifer Uglow, George Eliot, .
. See, for example, The Daily News: “Mr. Eliot writes as a man who has dined at
country clerical clubs” ( February , qtd. in Martin, ); also the Saturday Review:
“George Eliot is an assumed name, screening that of some studious clergyman, a
Cantab” ( May , qtd. in David Carroll, ed., George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ).
. Luke :– (King James Version).
. W. E. Vine, Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, –.
. Xavier Léon-Dufour, Dictionary of the New Testament, .
Chapter 
. Barbara Leckie, Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law,
–, –.
. Hammerton’s research shows that  percent of divorce petitions by wives be­
tween  and  cited cruelty in addition to adultery (Hammerton, Cruelty, ).
. The fictional Dundas separation case referred to by Holmes and Watson is a
judicial separation on grounds of cruelty.
. Hammerton’s research shows that between  and  the percentage of
women’s divorce and separation petitions citing cruelty increased dramatically, from
 to  percent (Hammerton, Cruelty, ).
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. Tromp, ; Norman Page, Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, , .
. The spelling of “Walmisley” in the Times is inconsistent.
. On the use of Articles of the Peace by abused wives, see Doggett –.
. See chapter : “It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight
in many Dutch paintings” (Eliot, Adam Bede, ).
. She is mistaken, however, in saying that Anne is the illegitimate daughter of an
adulterous peer (Tromp, ): Philip is not yet married when the child is conceived.
. Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, .
. R. v. Lister ()  Str. ,  ER ; Re Cochrane, .
. Tromp argues that Marian’s masculine characteristics manage the social fear of
women’s retaliative violence by “shrouding her in a ‘masculine’ identity and interpret­
ing her anger and explicit desire for retributive violence as male identified—a desire
she cannot fulfill as a woman” (Tromp, ).
. John Sutherland, appendix B to The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins, ;
Peters , .
. On Charles Reade getting his best plots from the Times, see Patrick
Brantlinger, “What Is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” .
. Jonathan Loesberg, “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction,” .
Chapter 
. Christopher Herbert, “He Knew He Was Right, Mrs. Lynn Linton, and the Du­
plicities of Victorian Marriage,” .
. Robert Polhemus, The Changing World of Anthony Trollope, .
. Quoted in the Honourable Mrs. Hardcastle, Life of John, Lord Campbell: Lord
High Chancellor of Great Britain, :.
. Quoted in Donald Smalley, ed., Trollope: The Critical Heritage, .
. David D. Oberhelman, “Trollope’s Insanity Defence: Narrative Alienation in
He Knew He Was Right,” .
. R. L. Griswold, “The Evolution of the Doctrine of Mental Cruelty in Victo­
rian American Divorce, –,” .
Chapter 
. On the fin-de-siècle antifeminist backlash, see Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anar­
chy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, .
. As Caleb Foster, the novel’s philosopher, remarks, “[I]rresponsible power, ab­
sence of control—lessons of life artificially withheld—result, a Nero” (WA, ).
. On the use of temporal shifts in Caird’s later novel, see my article “Narrative
Time, History, and Feminism in Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus.”
. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in
Late-Victorian London, –.
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. Melisa J. Anderson points out that the Sexual Offenses (Amendment) Act of
 defined rape as “unlawful sexual intercourse with a woman” and that in “several
subsequent cases . . . the justices decided that, based on the wording of the statute, the
exemption was alive and well in England” (). In , however, three cases in Eng­
land overturned the marital rape exemption (M. Anderson, –).
. Ann Heilmann notes the eroticism of sea scenes in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book
(), which symbolize “sexual energy” and “operate as signifiers of sexual intercourse
and orgasm itself ” (Heilmann, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner,
Mona Caird, ).
. Obviously a forceful expression for Caird, this is repeated in her Daughters of
Danaus () to describe women’s lot.
. John Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, .
Chapter 
. Joseph A. Kestner, Sherlock’s Men: Masculinity, Conan Doyle, and Cultural His­
tory, , .
. In fact, most social historians now agree that wife assault diminished over the
nineteenth century (Doggett, –; Tomes, ).
. Reginald Pound, Mirror of the Century: The Strand Magazine, –, .
. Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, .
. Rosemary Hennessy and Rajeswari Mohan, “‘The Speckled Band’: The Con­
struction of Woman in a Popular Text of Empire,” .
. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism, .
. The circulation of the Strand peaked at the turn of the nineteenth century at
half a million copies per month (Sutherland, Stanford, ).
. The column of the newspaper which contains personal advertisements, espe­
cially for missing family members.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Public Documents
Great Britain, Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, rd series.
First Report of the Commissioners Appointed by Her Majesty to Enquire into the Law of
Divorce, and More Particularly into the Mode of Obtaining Divorces A Vinculo
Matrimonii. In Marriage and Divorce, vol.  of Irish University Press Series of
British Parliamentary Papers. Shannon: Irish University Press, . Originally
published .
Newspapers and Periodicals
Daily Telegraph 
Echo 
Illustrated London News 
Illustrated Police News 
Morning Chronicle , , 
Once a Week 
Punch , , , , , , , , , , , 
Times , , , , , , , , , , , 
Legal Cases
Curtis v. Curtis ()  ER , 
Evans v. Evans ()  ER –
Kelly v. Kelly (–) LR  P&D –
Marchmont v. Marchmont (),  Sw.  tr. ,  ER 
Milner v. Milner ()  ER 
Morris v. Morris ()  California Reports 
Re Cochrane ()  Dowling 
R. v. Clarence. Law Times, n.s.,  ( January ): –
R. v. Jackson ()  QB ; Re Jackson ()  JP 
R. v. Lister ()  Str. ,  ER 

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Suggate v. Suggate ()  ER –
Swatman v. Swatman ()  ER 
Letters, Books, and Articles Written or Published before 
Anon. “The State of the Law Courts. IV. The Criminal Courts.” Strand Magazine 
(): –.
Atherley-Jones, L. A. “The Triumph of Love.” Strand Magazine  (): –.
Aveling, Edward, and Eleanor Marx. The Woman Question. London: Swan Sonnen­
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Benham, W. Gurney. Cassell’s Book of Quotations. London: Cassell, .
Benson, Arthur Christopher, and Viscount Esher, eds. The Letters of Queen Victoria:
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Besant, Annie. Marriage As It Was, As It Is, And As It Should Be: With a Sketch of the
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———. Daughters of Danaus. New York: Feminist Press, . Originally published
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———. “Punishment for Crimes against Women and Children.” Westminster Review
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———. The Wing of Azrael. Montreal: John Lovell and Son, .
Cobbe, Frances Power. “Wife-Torture in England” (). In “Criminals, Idiots, Women,
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Cornwallis, Caroline Frances. “The Property of Married Women.” Westminster Review
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Crawford, Mabel Sharman. “Maltreatment of Wives.” Westminster Review  ():
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I N D E X Abbott, James, 
Act for the Better Prevention and Punish­
ment of Aggravated Assaults upon
Women and Children (), , , ,
, 
Adam Bede (Eliot), , n
adultery, , , –, , ; and
child custody, , ; and divorce,
, , , n, n (chap. );
exposure of, ; false accusations of,
, –; law on, , , 
Aggravated Assaults Act Amendment
(), 
agony column, , n
Alabama claims, 
alcoholism: and abuse, –, ; in
“Janet’s Repentance,” , , ; in
The Pickwick Papers, ; in The
Stroller’s Tale, ; in The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall, , ; in wives, 
alienation, , , , , 
allegory, , , –
Allen, Grant, 
Allott, Miriam, 
Anderson, Benedict, , 
Anderson, Melisa J., , , n
animal abuse, , , , –; and murder,
; symbolism of, , , ; in
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, –, ;
in Victorian fiction, , –, ,
; and wife abuse, , , –; in
The Wing of Azrael, ; in Wuthering
Heights, , , n
antivivisection campaigns, , , 
“Are Women Protected?” (Blake), , ,

Armstrong, Nancy, , 
Articles of the Peace, n
Asmodeus, , n
atavism, –
Atherley-Jones, L. A., 
Aurora Floyd (Braddon), , , n;
marital cruelty in, , n (chap. )
Aveling, Edward, 
Ayrton, Mr. (parliamentarian), 
Barker, Juliet, 
Besant, Annie, , , 
bestiality, , , , n
bigamy, , , , n
Biggs, John M., 
Blackstone, Sir William, 
Blackwell, Anna, 
Blackwood, John, 
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, , ,

Blake, Matilda, , , 
Bleak House (Dickens), , 
Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith. See Smith,
Barbara Leigh
bourgeois manhood, ; in Dombey and
Son, ; and Sherlock Holmes, 
bourgeois marriage, ; Caird on, –,
; and Sherlock Holmes, 
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, , , ,
n, n (chap. )
Brantlinger, Patrick, n
breach of promise, 
British Quarterly Review, 
Brontë, Anne, , –, nn–; on
Victorian law, 
Brontë, Charlotte, 
Brontë, Emily, 
Brontë, Patrick (Rev.), 
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 
brutality, male, , , , ; acts of, –,
; in Aurora Floyd, n; com­
plaints of, ; defiance of, ; and fe­
male selflessness, ; and manliness,
; Mill on, ; penalties for, , 
Busfeild, William, 
Butler, Josephine, , 

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 | Index
Cain, , , 
Caird, Mona, –, , , ; on do­
mestic violence, –; and feminism,
, ; on marriage, –, , ,
; on selfhood, –, ; on
sexual consent, –
Campbell, Lord John, , 
capitalism, effects on women, , 
Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 
castration, symbolism of, , 
child abuse, , , , n; and alco­
hol, ; Caird on, –; in Dickens,
; legislation on, –, ; Mill on,
–, ; penalties for, , , ;
and wife abuse, , 
child custody, , , –, ; double
standard in, ; in He Knew He Was
Right, ; laws on, , , ; in
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 
Chopin, Kate, 
Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 
Clark, Anna, , , n, n; on mari­
tal violence, , , ; on the middleclass home, 
Clark, Robert, , 
class: comparisons, ; and the courts, ;
and domestic violence, –, , ,
–, ; and marriage, –;
stereotypes on, –, ; values of, 
closed-home doctrine, –, –; in
Dombey and Son, ; in “Janet’s Re­
pentance,” ; in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, . See also Re Cochrane ()
Cobbe, Frances Power, , , 
Cochrane, Alexander, . See also Re
Cochrane ()
Cochrane, Cecelia Maria, –, , . See
also Re Cochrane ()
Colenso affair, 
Collins, Charles, 
Collins, Mrs. (wife of curate), 
Collins, Wilkie, –; and awareness of
law, ; plot error by, –
combative marriage, , , , ; inter­
vention in, ; tradition of, . See also
companionate marriage
combative women, , , 
companionate marriage, , , , ; and
marital violence, . See also combative
marriage
Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur. See Doyle, Sir
Arthur Conan
Coney, Mary B., 
conjugal rights, , ; enforcement of,
–, ; law on, , , –. See
also Re Cochrane ()
consent, age of, 
Contagious Diseases Acts, , , ; vio­
lence and, 
Contemporary Review, 
Corder, William, , 
Cornwallis, Caroline Frances, 
coverture, , –, , , ; definition
of, ; legal reform of, ; and marital
violence, , ; and nonexistence,
–. See also nonexistence, legal
Crawford, Mabel Sharman, , 
Cresswell, Sir Cresswell, , , ; on
cruelty, ; on Marchmont v. March­
mont, , , ; Once a Week on,
; Times on, 
Criminal Law Amendment Act (), 
cross suits, , 
cruelty, marital: , , , –; after
, , , , –, , n,
n; before , ; cases, number
of, –, n (chap. ), n
(chap. ); and class, , –; and
the closed home, –; and divorce,
–, –; exposure of, , ;
legal definition of, , , –,
, n; in Place v. Place, ; and
property law, –. See also marital
violence
cruelty, mental, , ; legal recognition
of, , , –, ; in U.S., ,

Cruikshank, George, 
Culture and Adultery (Leckie), 
Cushman, Charlotte, 
custody, of wives, , , . See also Re
Cochrane ()
Custody of Infants Act (), , 
D’Cruze, Shani, , , , , –
Daily News, , n
Daily Telegraph, , ; marriage debate in,
–, , 
Dallas, E. S., 
Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 
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Index | 
David Copperfield (Dickens), , n,
n
Davidoff, Leonore, , , 
Daughters of Danaus (Caird), , n
(chap. ); temporal shifts in, , ,
n (chap. )
de Saar, Ferdinand (“The Toilers of the
Rocks”), 
deathbed scenes, –, –, 
delirium tremens, –, 
Dentith, Simon, 
desertion, ; and divorce, , , ,
, n
Dewes, Alfred (“The Injustice of the Eng­
lish Law”), 
Dickens, Charles, , –, ; analogies
in, ; on combative marriage, ; on
Eliot, –; on female passivity, ,
; highest sales by, ; as reporter
for the Morning Chronicle, –, ;
as reporter for the Mirror of Parlia­
ment, ; reviews by, n; role
in shifting ideals, , ; shifting
reputation of, n; on women’s
loyalty, 
Dillwyn, Lewis, –, , n
Disraeli, Benjamin, 
divorce, , , , –; adultery and, ;
cross suits for, ; cruelty and, , ,
–, , n (chap. ); double
standard in, , n; grounds for,
, n, n, n (chap. );
legislation on, , –, , –;
servants’ role in, . See also judicial
separation
Divorce Act (), , –, , , ;
double standard in, ; marital cru­
elty and, , . See also Matrimonial
Causes Act ()
divorce court, –; opening of, , ;
marital cruelty and, –, , –
divorce court journalism, , –, ; re­
actions to, ; and revelation of wife
abuse, , 
Doggett, Maeve E., 
Dombey and Son (Dickens), –; adultery
in, –, ; Asmodeus in, n;
and marital cruelty, –; domestic
violence in, , –, –, ,
; influences on, ; male passivity
in, n; middle-class home in, ,
; serialization of, 
domestic violence: , , –; and the
Brontës, ; and class, –; in fiction,
; legislation on, ; and manliness,
; and values, –. See also child
abuse; marital violence
domesticity, , , ; Caird on, –; as
ideal, , , , ; and marital vio­
lence, , 
double standard, legal, , , , n
Dowling, Andrew, n (chap. )
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, –; popular­
ity of, , 
Dreyfus, Abraham (“He and She”), 
Dublin University Magazine, , 
Dutch realism, –, , n
Ecclesiastical Courts, 
Echo, n
Egerton, George, 
Eliot, George (Marian Evans), , , –,
n (chap. ); feminism of, ;
identity of, , n
English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth
Century (Norton), , 
eroticism, , n (chap. )
Esquirol, Jean Etienne, 
evangelicalism, , 
Evans, Marian. See George Eliot
Evans v. Evans (), 
Exposition of the Laws Relating to the Women
of England, An (Wharton), , 
female solidarity, , , 
feminism, –, , , , –; in
Dickens, , ; Eliot on, ; and fic­
tion, ; history of, , , , , ;
in “Janet’s Repentance,” ; and mar­
riage, ; opposition to, , n,
n (chap. ); in Sherlock Holmes
stories, , ; in The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall, ; and wife abuse,
–, , ; in The Wing of Azrael,
, , , ; in The Woman in
White, –
femininity, , , ; in Dickens, –,
; ideals of, –, ; nature of, 
femme soles, , ; and property rights,
, , 
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 | Index
Field, Mr. Justice (judge), 
fin-de-siècle period, , , , , ;
concerns of, ; fiction of, , 
First Report of the Commissioners Appointed
by Her Majesty to Enquire into the Law
of Divorce (), 
Fitzroy, Mr. (Home Department undersec­
retary), –, , ; and the “Good
Wives’ Rod,” –
Flint, Kate, 
flogging, , n, n; Caird on, ;
and class assumptions, –; as
penalty for domestic assault, , ,
–, 
forgiveness, –, ; and divorce, ;
and male authority, –
free marriage, –
Gaskell, Elizabeth, 
gender relations, , , , , ; history
and, ; inequity in, ; male role in,
; violence in, 
Georgian period, –
Gillette, William, 
“Gin Shops” (Dickens), , 
Gissing, George, 
Gladstone, William Ewart, , , 
gossip, , , 
Gothicism, –, , , ; and mari­
tal violence, , , –; and real­
ism, , 
Grand, Sarah, , , , n (chap. )
Granville, Earl (parliamentarian), 
Great Marriage Debate, , , , , 
Greenacre, James, 
Griswold, R. L., 
Guardianship of Infants Act (), 
Haight, Gordon S., , 
Hale, Sir Matthew, , , 
Hall, Catherine, , , 
Hammerton, A. James, , , ; on
divorce, –, –, , n
(chap. ); on marital cruelty, , ,
n (chap. ); on marital violence,
, ; on standards of middle-class
manliness, , ; on working-class
women, 
Hardy, Thomas, , –
“He and She” (Dreyfus), 
He Knew He Was Right (Trollope), ,
–; adultery in, , , –;
child custody in, , ; companion­
ate marriage in, –; marital cru­
elty in, , –, –, ; legal
metaphors in, ; mental cruelty in,
, , ; social barriers in, 
Heilmann, Ann, n (chap. )
Hennell, Sara Sophia, 
Hennessy, Rosemary, 
Herbert, Christopher, , , ; on mar­
riage, –
Hogarth, William, 
Holcombe, Lee, 
homosexuality, 
Horstman, Allen, , n; on divorce, ,
, , n; on divorce reform,
–
“Hospital Patient, The” (Dickens), , –;
domestic assault in, –; last wishes
in, n; loyalty of abused wives in,
; redemption in, 
Household Words, 
Houston, Gail Turley, 
How, Harry (Day), 
husband: authority of, –, ; as protec­
tor, , –, , , , ,
–, 
Hyde Park riots, 
illegitimacy, –, n; and class iden­
tity, ; in sensation fiction, ; sym­
bolism of, 
Illustrated London News, , 
imagery: animals, , –, –, –;
birds, –, , ; in Oliver Twist,
–; sea, –, –, , n
(chap. ); wives as pets, , –,
–, , 
implied consent, law of, –, , –
incest, , , n
Ingham, Patricia, , 
insanity defense, , –, 
intervention, , , ; in Dickens, –,
; in Dombey and Son, , ; legal,
–, –; in Oliver Twist, , ,
; refusal of, –
Jack the Ripper, , 
Jackson, Arlene M., 
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Index | 
James, Henry, 
Jameson, Anna, 
“Janet’s Repentance” (Eliot), , , –,
; animal abuse in, –; clergy­
man, as author, ; coverture in, ,
; divorce in, ; marital cruelty in,
, ; mental cruelty in, 
Jewsbury, Geraldine, 
Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 
“Judge’s Penance, The” (Sullivan), –
judicial separation, , , , n
(chap. ); and cruelty, , , ,
; grounds for, , , ; vs. di­
vorce, . See also divorce
jury trials, , , ; for divorce, –;
lack of faith in, ; manipulation of,
–
Kaye, J. W., , n; on Bleak House, ,
; on wife abuse, –, , , ,
n
Kelly v. Kelly (–), –; and mental
cruelty, 
Kestner, Joseph A., , , ; on mas­
culinity, 
Laing, Allan Stewart, n
Langland, Elizabeth, 
Lansbury, Coral, , 
Laurie, Sir Peter, , 
Lawson, Kate, ; on domestic abuse, ; on
“Janet’s Repentance,” , ; on The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall, –
Leckie, Barbara, , , ; on publicity of
divorce, , 
Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cran­
worth’s Divorce Bill, A (Norton),
–, 
letters, as evidence, , , , ; and
servants, 
Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit,
The (Dickens), , ; loyalty of
abused women in, 
Linton, Eliza (Eliza Lynn), –, n
Loesberg, Jonathan, 
Lynn, Eliza. See Linton, Eliza
M’Naghten rules, 
magistrates’ courts, , , , ; and
closed-home doctrine, ; injustice
and, ; summary judgments in, ;
and wife abuse, , –, –
Maine, Henry, n
Man and Wife (Collins), 
manliness, , –, , , ; ideals of,
, ; new model of, –; in Re­
gency period, –
manslaughter, , ; penalties for, . See
also murder
Marchmont v. Marchmont, –, , ,
, , ; protective role in, 
marital violence, , , , –,
–; alleviation of, , –, ,
, ; assignment of blame for, ,
n, n; and culture, , ; defi­
nition of, , , n; in Dickens,
–; exposure of, , –, –,
–; frequency of, n; history
of, –; leniency toward, –,
n; link to other forms of violence,
; and middle-class culture, ; and
patriarchy, , ; penalties for, n,
n; public awareness of, . See also
cruelty, marital; domestic violence
marriage: ideology of, ; nature of, ,
; as prison, ; reform of, , ;
supremacy of men in, , , , ;
violence in, 
“Marriage” (Caird), –, , , , 
Marriage As It Was, As It Is, And As It
Should Be (Besant), , , 
marriage settlement, –, , , 
Married Women’s Property Act: of ,
, , ; of , , 
Married Women’s Property Committee, 
married women’s property law, , , ,
, , –; inequity of, ; re­
form of, , , –, , 
Marsh, Richard (“A Vision of the Night”),

Marten, Maria, 
Martin, Carol A., 
Martineau, Harriet, 
Marx, Eleanor, 
Matrimonial Causes Act (), , , ,
n; and marital cruelty, 
Matrimonial Causes Act (), , ,
, 
Maurice, F. D., n
May, Margaret, , 
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 | Index
McMaster, Juliet, , n
McSweeney, Kerry, 
medicalization, of male violence, –, 
“Meditations in Monmouth Street” (Dick­
ens), , –
melancholia, 
melodrama, , , , , 
Men’s and Women’s Club, 
metanoia, –
metonymy, , , 
Metress, Christopher, –, –
middle-class home: authority in, ; selfregulating system of, 
middle-class marriage: intervention in, ,
, ; privacy in, ; violence in, ,
–, , 
Middlemarch (Eliot), , 
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare),
n
Mill, Harriet Taylor. See Taylor, Harriet
Mill, John Stuart, , , , n, n;
and reform campaign, , –; on
coverture, , ; on marital violence,
, , , ; on right of refusal, ,
; on sentencing, ; and suffrage,

Millais, John Everett, , –
Millais, John Guille, , 
Miller, D. A., , , , ; on policing, 
Miller, Florence Fenwick, 
Milner v. Milner (), 
Mohan, Rajeswari, 
Moore, George, , n (chap. )
Morning Chronicle, , , , , , ,
n; cultural shift in, ; court
reporting in, , –; Dickens at,
–; politics of, , , 
Morris v. Morris (), 
Muddock, J. E. Preston (“The Prince’s
Crime”), 
murder, , , , , , –, ; and
animal abuse, ; in Dombey and Son,
; penalties for, , n; publicity
of, ; Punch on, ; in Sherlock
Holmes stories, , , , –,
–, ; in The Wing of Azrael,
. See also manslaughter
nemesis, of death, 
New Woman, –, , ; fiction, 
Newnes, George, , , 
nonexistence, legal, , , , , –;
connections to, , , ; symp­
toms of, ; in The Woman in White,
, 
nonnarratable, , 
Norton, Caroline, , , , –, ;
on double standards, –, 
Norton, George, 
Norton-Melbourne trial, 
obedience, of wife, –
Oberhelman, David D., –
O’Brien, P. O., 
Offenses Against the Person Act (), ,
; and exposure of abuse, , , ;
penalties under, 
Old Bailey, n
Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens), –,
–; female roles in, –, ;
sales of, , n (chap. )
Oliphant, Margaret, , ; on legal re­
form, 
Oliver Twist (Dickens), –, , ,
n, n; animal abuse in, ;
combative marriage in, , ; com­
bative women in, ; companionate
marriage in, ; dog analogy in, ,
; domestic assault in, –, ;
loyalty of abused women in, ; mid­
dle class in, ; Mr. Fang as parody,
n; murder in, –, ; passive
women in, –, –, , ;
selflessness in, 
Once a Week, , –, 
“Outrages on Women” (Kaye), –, , ,
, , 
Othello (Shakespeare), n
Paget, Sidney, 
Palmerston, Viscount (parliamentarian), 
parable of the lost sheep, –
Parkes, Bessie Raynor, 
Parnell, Charles Stewart, 
passivity, female, –, , , , , ;
vs. combativeness, ; as ideal, , ,
, ; sympathy for, –, 
passivity, male, n
patriarchy, , –, , ; marital vio­
lence and, –, , ; reform and,
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Page 269
Index | 
–; support of, ; supremacy of,
; in The Wing of Azrael, , 
“Pawnbroker’s Shop, The” (Dickens), ,
–; loyalty of abused women, ;
man as protector, 
Pearson, Karl, 
Peel, Robert, –, 
Peters, Catherine, , 
Petition for Reform of the Married Women’s
Property Law (), , , 
Phinn, Mr. (parliamentarian), , 
Pickwick Papers, The (Dickens), ; deathbed
scene in, , –; and passive re­
sponse to violence, 
Pilleau, F. Startin (“The Vision of Inver­
strathy Castle”), 
Poor Law Amendment Act (), 
Poovey, Mary, , ; on alienation, 
pornography, 
Pound, Reginald, 
primitivism, 
privacy, –, –, , ; erasure of,
; loss of, through gossip, 
private sphere, , , , ; as illusion,
; inviolability of, –. See also
public sphere
prostitution, , ; under capitalism, ;
marriage as, , , 
psychonarration, 
public sphere, ; policing of, , . See
also private sphere
Punch, , , , , ; on assault penal­
ties, –; on divorce, ; on marital
violence, , –, –, –; Orien­
talism in, 
Quarterly Review, 
racist depictions: of Irish, , ; as Orien­
talism, , , ; in Punch, 
Radcliffe, Ann, 
Rambler, , n
rape, marital, , , –, –; and
divorce, , n; law on, –,
–, , n (chap. ); in The
Wing of Azrael, , 
Raynham, Viscount (parliamentarian), 
Reade, Charles, , n
realism, –, , ; in fiction, ,
–, , ; as insufficient mode,
; role of, , , , , ; so­
cial, , 
rebirth, , 
Red Barn Murder. See Corder, William
Redesdale, Lord (parliamentarian), 
Reform Bill: of , ; of , , 
Re Cochrane (), , –, –, n;
closed-home doctrine, ; and Dombey
and Son, , , ; and “Janet’s Re­
pentance,” , ; Norton on, –;
restraint of wives, –; and The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall, –, 
Regency period, 
Regina v. Clarence (–), –
Regina v. Jackson (), –, , n
Regina v. Lister, 
repentance, , , 
repetition, –
reversion, –
Roberts, M. J. D., 
Robertson, James Craigie (Rev.), 
Robinson, Bertram Fletcher, 
Rosengarten, Herbert, , n
Ross, Ellen, , 
Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals (RSPCA), –, , 
Ruskin, John, 
Sanger, C. P., 
Saturday Review, , , n
Scenes of Clerical Life (Eliot), , , ,
n (chap. ); authorship of, ,
; marital violence in, ; women
in, 
Schreiner, Olive, 
Scott, Sir William, 
self-control, masculine, , , , , 
self-sacrifice, , 
sensation fiction, –, , –, –;
as cultural phenomenon, ; exposure
through, , ; heart of, ; role
of, , , , , ; The Woman in
White as, –
sentences, for wife assault, –, , –,
n, n; and murder, –; re­
form of, –
separate spheres, doctrine of, , , 
serial fiction, , , –; cultural influ­
ences of, , , , –, ; tim­
ing of, , , –, 
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 | Index
servants: divorce and, –, , ; in­
version of hierarchy, –; role rever­
sal, ; treatment of, , 
“Seven Dials” (Dickens), 
sexual consent, , –; law on, –.
See also marital rape; Re Cochrane
()
Shakespeare, William, n, n
Shakinovsky, Lynn, ; on domestic abuse,
; on “Janet’s Repentance,” , ;
on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, –
Shanley, Mary Lyndon, ; on women’s legal
status, n
Sharpe, Maria, 
Sherlock Holmes stories (Doyle), –;
“The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,”
–, , , –; The Adventure
of Black Peter,” , ; “The Adven­
ture of the Cardboard Box,” –,
, , , , ; “The Adven­
ture of the Copper Beeches,” , ;
“The Adventure of the Norwood
Builder,” , –, ; “The
Adventure of the Speckled Band,”
, ; “A Case of Identity,” ,
; conceptual revelations in, ;
and female independence, –;
“The Hound of the Baskervilles,” ,
, , –, ; ideology of,
–; and male violence, , ,
; and manliness, ; and marital
abuse, –, –, ; popularity
of, , ; typical structure of, –;
and women’s property rights, 
Shirley (C. Brontë), 
Showalter, Elaine, n (chap. )
Sketches by Boz (Dickens), , , , n
Slater, Michael, 
slavery, , 
Smith, Barbara Leigh, , , 
Smith, Margaret, , 
Society for the Protection of Women and
Children from Aggravated Assaults,

sodomy, , , n
Spectator, , , n
Stead, W. T., , 
stichomythia, 
Strand Magazine, –, ; Doyle and,
, , , –, ; popularity
of, , n (chap. ); readers of,
, , –; on wife assault, 
Stuart of Dunleath (Norton), , 
submission, female, , –, , , ;
court recommendation of, , ; as
ideal, , –, , ; ideology of,
; sexual, ; and violence, –,

suffrage, women’s, , 
Suggate v. Suggate (), , 
suicide, , 
Sullivan, James F. (“The Judge’s Penance”),
–
Sutherland, John, , , , , 
Swatman v. Swatman (), 
symbolism, of bicycles, 
Taylor, Harriet, , , ; campaign for
reform, , –; on coverture, ,
; on marital violence, , ; on sen­
tencing, 
Taylor, Helen, 
temperance literature, 
Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The (A. Brontë),
–; adultery in, , ; animal
abuse in, –, ; child custody in,
, , ; combative marriage in, ;
conjugal rights in, –, ; coverture
in, , , ; female submissiveness
in, ; gender relations in, ; law and,
; and marital cruelty, –; marital
violence in, –; symbolism in, ,
; women’s rights in, 
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy), –
Thackeray, William Makepeace, , n
Times, , , , , n (chap. ); book
reviews in, –; cultural shift in, ;
court reporting in, –, –; on
divorce, , , –, , –;
on domestic violence, , , –,
, , ; as plot source, , ,
n; , ; politics of, , , 
“Toilers of the Rocks, The” (de Saar), –
Tomes, Nancy, ; on danger of legal re­
dress, ; on ideal marriage, 
torture, , , , , ; wife abuse as,
, , 
transportation, sentence of, , , 
“Triumph of Love, The” (Atherley-Jones),

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Index | 
Trollope, Anthony, , –, 
Tromp, Marlene, , ; on domestic abuse,
; on Oliver Twist, , –, ,
n; on sensation fiction, , ,
, , ; on The Woman in White,
–, , –, n, n
turning. See metanoia
Uglow, Jennifer, , 
universal salvation, , 
upper class: marital violence in, , ,
–, , 
utilitarianism, 
Vagrant Act (), 
Victoria, Queen, , 
“Vision of Inverstrathy Castle, The” (Pil­
leau), 
“Vision of the Night, A” (Marsh), 
Walkowitz, Judith, –
Walpole, Horace, 
Walter, Mr. (parliamentarian), 
Westminster Review, , , , , , 
Wharton, J. J. S., , 
White, Mr. (magistrate), , n
wife, ideology of, 
wife beating. See marital violence
“Wife-Torture in England” (Cobbe), , 
Wills, Mr. Justice (judge), 
Wing of Azrael, The (Caird), , –,
–, , n (chap. ); adultery
in, ; animal abuse in, ; conjugal
rights in, ; coverture in, , ;
Gothicism in, ; marital violence in,
; ideological impasse in, ; ideol­
ogy of, –; popularity of, ,
; woman vs. wife in, 
wives: restraint of, –; submission by, 
Wolsteholme Elmy, Elizabeth, –, 
Woman in White, The (Collins), –;
adultery in, –; animal abuse in,
; class identity in, ; coverture in,
–; and marital cruelty, , ,
–; and the divorce court, ; ille­
gitimacy in, ; marital assault in,
; plot error in, –
woman’s body, as evidence, , 
working class: beliefs about, , , n;
marital violence in, , –, , 
working-class marriage, –, , ; inter­
vention in, 
working-class women, –, n; defiance
in, , , ; maltreatment of, 
Wuthering Heights (E. Brontë), , ; ani­
mal abuse in, , , n; cruelty in,
n
Zemka, Sue, n (chap. )
Zola, Emile, 
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