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.

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Hardcover: 272 pages
Author: Lisa Surridge
Publisher: Ohio University Press (November 10, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0821416421
ISBN-13: 978-0821416426

CONTENTS
Introduction
Private Violence in the Public Eye: The Early Writings of Charles Dickens
Domestic Violence and Middle-Class Manliness: Dombey and Son
From Regency Violence to Victorian Feminism: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
The Abused Woman and the Community: “Janet’s Repentance”
Strange Revelations: The Divorce Court, the Newspaper, and The Woman in White
The Private Eye and the Public Gaze: He Knew He Was Right
Marital Violence and the New Woman: The Wing of Azrael
“Are Women Protected?” Sherlock

INTRODUCTION
IN "THE ADVENTURE OF THE ABBEY GRANGE" (1904), Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are called to investigate a murder in an upper-class home. Sir Eustace Brackenstall lies dead in his dining room, felled by a blow from his own poker. Lady Brackenstall, also injured, has a "terrible mark upon her brow" and two "vivid red spots" on her arm.

When Holmes and Watson arrive, she tells them what happened. The night before, she had been making a last tour of the house before bedtime. She entered the dining room, surprising three thieves who were coming in through the French windows. One man grabbed her by the wrist and throat; when she tried to scream, he struck her a "savage blow with his fist over the eye". When she came back to consciousness she was gagged and bound to a chair with the cord from the bell pull. Her husband rushed into the room with his cudgel in his hand.

One of the thieves dealt Sir Eustace a deadly blow with the poker, whereupon Lady Brackenstall fainted again. When she came to, the thieves had collected up the silver and were helping themselves to the Brackenstallsˇ best wine. ...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lisa Surridge is associate professor of English at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. She is coeditor of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and has published on Victorian fiction in many journals, including Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Review, Dickens Studies Annual, Victorian Newsletter, and Victorians Institute Journal.

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