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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... violence—assumptions that wife beating occurs in the kitchen rather than the dining room; that black eyes belong to the East End, not the east wing; and that commonplace rogues rather than baronets cudgel their wives. “The Adventure of ...
... wife-assault 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 ...
... wife has suffered grievous bodily harm at the hands of a ruffianly husband, who, not considering 'scourges and clubs ... assault. As these debates reveal, wife beating stood at the vortex of some of the most urgent issues of the period ...
... wifeassault cases on an almost daily basis. Not that newspapers had been free of wife murder and manslaughter cases prior to the act. On the contrary, newspapers in the late s featured horrendous crimes of assault on wives and ...
... wife assault, how did the middleclass domestic novel treat the phenomenon of “private” family violence? How did Victorian novelists participate in and respond to the urgent debates surrounding wife assault in the Victorian public press ...
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 |