Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian FictionThe Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates’ courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat “private” family violence? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists’ engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century. |
From inside the book
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... Bill. 3rd ed. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855. Mona Caird. “Marriage” (1888). In “Criminals, Idiots, Women, andMinors”: Victorian W/riting by Women on Women, ed. Susan Hamilton, 271—86. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1995 ...
... 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 ...
... Bill Sikes, the criminal who brutally murders the prostitute Nancy in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist.1 The Punch cartoon of 1848, published in a period ofprotest concerning inadequate penalties for wife assault, suggests the extent to ...
... Bill and “poor wretched Mrs. Bill Sikes” became cultural icons of the spousal abuse problem with which Victorians struggled from the s to the end of the century.2This first chapter examines the cultural context that made the ...
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Contents
1 | |
15 | |
Domestic Violence and MiddleClass Manliness Dombey and Son | 44 |
From Regency Violence to Victorian Feminism The Tenant of Wildfell Hall | 72 |
The Abused Woman and the Community Janets Repentance | 103 |
Strange Revelations The Divorce Court the Newspaper and The Woman in White | 132 |
The Private Eye and the Public Gaze He Knew He Was Right | 165 |