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
Results 1-5 of 39
... debates in the Victorian 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 ...
... 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 ...
... 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 ...
... debates surrounding wife assault in the Victorian public press? My analysis will proceed chronologically from the early s, through the intense debates on wife assault in the late s and early s, to the s ...
... 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 ...
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 |