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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... 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 improved housing being among his ...
... wife. The wife, a decent-looking woman, who gave her evidence with manifest reluctance against her husband, said ... abuse had become an “every-day story” in Victorian newspapers (OW, ). As Kaye's article attests, “marital oppression” ...
... domestic animals. Moreover, Victorians linked wife and child abuse as two related forms of violence. The Act for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults upon Women and Children raised penalties for both ...
... wife abuse, conjugal rights, and marital rape is of particular relevance to anyone interested in nineteenth-century marital violence. Finally, A. James Hammerton melds social and legal history in his article “Victorian Marriage and 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 murder scene in Oliver Twist so powerful to its original readers of the ...
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 |