More Marital Violence

It seems that the marital violence in the Victorian era is a subject of growing academical interest in recent years, even months. The last issue of Brontë Studies contained a paper on the legal status of women in the times in which Anne Brontë placed The tenant of Wilfeld Hall. Last summer, a book called Marital Violence. An English Family History 1660-1857 was published on the same subject, but in a more general context, as we posted some weeks ago.

Now we highlight another book that covers the same subject but this time focused on the literature: Bleak Houses. Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction, written by Lisa Surridge and published last month by the Ohio University Press.

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 Fiction traces 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 reads Dombey and Son and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot’s Janet’s Repentance in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right. (...)

Categories: Books, Scholar, Victorian_Era,The_Tenant_of_Wildfell_Hall, Anne_Brontë