Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

Lisa Surridge's main goal in this carefully argued study is to "enhance the modern reader's understanding" (p. 4) of Victorian novels and short stories about marital violence by suggesting their intense engagement in the debates about marital law staged in Parliament, in courts of law, and in the media between 1828 and the end of the nineteenth century. When "newspapers like the Morning Chronicle and the Times, which habitually reported on police and judicial news" prior to 1828, report so frequently following the 1828 legislation on marital violence cases that "working-class wife assault became an 'every-day story'"; when coverage of "middle-class assaults" began to receive comparable levels of publicity in British newspapers following the 1857 Divorce Act, a "revolution in print culture" can be said to have occurred, Surridge claims (p. 8).