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. |
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... 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 ...
... brutal husbands. Indeed, the texts that openly question mar- riage—such as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, “Janet's Repentance,” and The Wing ofAzrael—are the exception, not the rule. However, any representation of wife assault in ...
... 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 which the figures of Sikes and ...
... brutally violate your honeymoon? (Morning Chronicle, September , c) The tone is changed, however, by ... brutality (the wife's eye was permanently injured) and the magistrate's seriousness gradually become almost irrelevant ...
... 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 ...
Contents
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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 |