Bleak Houses

<div> <p>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? <i>Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction</i> traces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century.<br> <br> Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads <i>Dombey and Son</i> and Anne Brontë's <i>The Tenant of Wildfell Hall</i> in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot's <i>Janet's Repentance</i> in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins's <i>The Woman in White</i> and Anthony Trollope's <i>He Knew He Was Right.</i><br> <br> 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 <i>Daily Telegraph</i> Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. <i>Bleak Houses</i> 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.</p> </div>