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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... 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. You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press ...
... 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 ...
... 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 ...
... spousal assault, I found that legal and so- cial historians had amassed a rich and growing body of research on marital breakdown, marital cruelty, and marital violence in Victorian England, research that proved invaluable to my own. In ...
... spousal assaults; however, while Tromp argues that sensation fiction anticipated legal developments later in the century, I see a more reciprocal and interlocutory relationship between the law and the novel on this issue. I also ...
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 |