Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

by Lisa Surridge

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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Victorian

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 2005

Reviews

[Lynnee Argabright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surridge has certainly done her research on marital violence--she blends history with literary criticism with analysis of literature of her selected time period of Victorian England. She quotes primary literary and media sources as well as secondary sources and has prompted my interest in much further research in fields she refers to, like bills/laws, without going off topic. She did a good job giving brief summaries of the books that she looks into, but because many of the books she used I hadn't read, it was hard for me to really get into the book. Furthermore, she didn't give as much explanation/discussion of the fin de siecle novels/period she spent two chapters on as I may have needed as well as some major events such as the Whitechapel Murders, so I plan to read a historian's book she sourced--City of Dreadful Delights by Judith Walkowitz. Surridge's argument, however, I really was pleased with because it stated exactly what I was hoping would exist--the prevalence of marital violence in contemporary literature. She not only analyzes the violence instances within each novel she uses but places the novel within the context of history, suggesting that it used influence from the time as well as striking influence in the time with its printing. The books she chooses represent different thematic aspects to marital violence in Victorian literature--but it also extends through decades, beginning extensively with Charles Dickens's various thematic examples and ending with Arthur Conan Doyle's and Mona Caird's novels at the end of the 19th century. This is significant because it follows the development of legal bills throughout the century. Thematically, it sometimes jumps around because she analyzes the wife as pet in many of the novel chapters. I enjoyed this book as a good beginning to understanding the culture and the subject of violence in the period.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only skimmed the entirety of the novel but concentrated on her last chapter, "Are Women Protected? Sherlock Holmes and the Violent Home." Naturally is was very well written, but it lacked personal opinion. Surridge clearly did extensive research and incorporated her findings into the book, but she refers to other writers so consistently that she looses her voice. I believe in her points, but not in the way she delivered them. It lacks passion, it's more of a lengthy research tool to use as reference than something I would consider to be a 'goodread.'