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  • From William Morris: Building Conservation and the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity, 1877–1939
  • Peter Stansky (bio)
Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660–1857, by Elizabeth Foyster; pp. 283. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, £40.00, £15.99 paper, $70.00, $27.99 paper.

Perhaps surprisingly, this is the first book to examine seriously the history of marital violence in England over the nearly two-century period preceding, and running into, the somewhat better-charted Victorian era. More precisely, this book examines not marital violence per se, but attitudes and arguments about it, as recorded not only in books, sermons, pamphlets, and literary works but in the legal cases generated by conflicts over violence in marriage. Given the difficulty of establishing anything firm about past private activity "in itself," Elizabeth Foyster's "cultural" approach makes much sense; virtually excluding questions about behavior as opposed to how behavior was understood, however, raises problems, to which I will return later.

Following other recent scholars, Foyster finds the records left by suits for marriage separation or restitution in church courts, suits for child custody at King's Bench, and criminal prosecutions for assault at petty and quarter sessions to provide a rich source for charting contemporary understandings, popular as well as elite, of marital and gender roles. She reasonably puts the relatively exceptional cases of homicide aside, preferring to deal with "everyday" violence. She also seeks to widen the understanding of violence beyond the purely physical, to embrace an entire spectrum of cruelty and mistreatment. She is thus able to place physical violence in a context of ongoing social relations; doing so, however, also blurs the book's focus: "mistreatment" is a far more subjective concept than physical violence, and it is not always clear what the precise subject of an argument about it is. Further, while physical violence was highly one-sided, employed far more often, and with more serious consequences, by men, "mistreatment," even "cruelty," was something women could, and were, taxed with almost as much as were men.

In admirably clear and organized prose, Foyster traces over this long period the discourse surrounding marital violence, a discourse that, as she stresses, in some ways changed very little and in other ways changed markedly. Discussion during these centuries revolved more around the proper employment and limitation of violence in marriage, normally by the husband, than its existence as such. Another striking difference from more recent times was the lack of concern shown for the consequences for children of growing up in a violent household. Wives could and did resist violence, of course, and some of the strategies they employed are carefully examined. Crucial in such resistance was appeal to others outside the marital couple—kin, neighbors, and "professionals" such as clergy or police. Foyster emphasizes that contrary to frequent assertions, family life was not undergoing "privatization" in this period, but remained as embedded as ever in wider social networks, which often served to arbitrate marital disputes, violent and otherwise. One growing form of intervention in family life, she points out, particularly in the latter part of the period, was the secular law. Increasingly, wives and their friends or kin appealed to police constables and magistrates for aid against violent husbands.

Foyster particularly seeks to make two major points. The first is that marital violence was seen as a problem long before the Victorian era, and that many of the Victorian notions of "true manliness," such as self-control, and of "companionate marriage" were frequently articulated in the eighteenth and even the late-seventeenth centuries. The second major point is that, if criticism of husbandly violence was long-standing, what [End Page 375] did change was the social localization of such violence: "class became the main interpretive framework through which marital violence was understood and represented" (32). Increasingly, she emphasizes, marital violence came to be seen as something found almost exclusively among the working classes.

Both points are true, though in the way put by Foyster they can easily lead to misunderstanding. First, although many moralists were prone to lecture husbands on their violent inclinations long before the Victorians, it was only in the course...

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