Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

by Lisa Surridge

Overview

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.

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 the Daily Telegraph, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. Bleak Houses thus 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821416433
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,005,913
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lisa Surridge is Professor of English and Associate Dean Academic of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Victoria. She is author of Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction. With Mary Elizabeth Leighton, she coedited the Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose, 1832-1901 and was coeditor of the Victorian Review. Her articles and book chapters appear in Victorian Studies, Victorian Periodicals Review, Dickens Studies Annual, Victorian Literature and Culture, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, and elsewhere.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	vii
	Acknowledgments	ix
	List of Abbreviations	xi
	Introduction	1
1	Private Violence in the Public Eye: The Early Writings of Charles Dickens	15
2	Domestic Violence and Middle-Class Manliness: Dombey and Son	44
3	From Regency Violence to Victorian Feminism: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall	72
4	The Abused Woman and the Community: "Janet's Repentance"	103
5	Strange Revelations: The Divorce Court, the Newspaper, and The Woman in White	132
6	The Private Eye and the Public Gaze: He Knew He Was Right	165
7	Marital Violence and the New Woman: The Wing of Azrael	187
8	"Are Women Protected?" Sherlock Holmes and the Violent Home	216
	Notes	247
	Bibliography	255
	Index	263

Editorial Reviews

"A carefully researched and lucidly written investigation of literary portrayals of domestic violence.... Surridge's precise historicizing reveals fictional subtleties with new clarity."--Victorian Studies

"From a historian's perspective, Surridge's interpretations of individual texts are persuasive, yet it is her contextualization of these works of fiction within ongoing reform movements and newspaper reporting that makes this a truly remarkable book."--CLIO

"Professor Surridge exhibits a clear and persuasive historical sense as well as sensitivity to the novels and stories. I believe this study will have lasting value because of its careful historical research and corresponding interpretation of the texts."--Naomi Wood, Kansas State University

From the Publisher