Bleak Houses Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction [Paperback]

The 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 Fictiontraces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century.

Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and readsDombey and Sonand Anne Brontë'sThe Tenant of Wildfell Hallin the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot'sJanet's Repentancein light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins'sThe Woman in Whiteand Anthony Trollope'sHe Knew He Was Right.

Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in theDaily Telegraph, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny.Bleak Housesthus demonstrates how Victorian fiction was concerned about the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century, debates which both constructed and invaded the privacy of the middle-class home.