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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... Nancy Basmajian. Special thanks to Judith Mitchell for her critical acumen and warm encouragement and to John Adams, who has been a strong and loving source of support in this work and in all things. Permissions Some of the material in ...
... 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 ...
... 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 ...
... 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 which the figures of Sikes and Nancy became a kind 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 ...
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 |