Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction (review)

Lisa Surridge's Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction is an intriguing and penetrating analysis of fictional representations of domestic violence and marital cruelty by authors as various as Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Mona Caird, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Richly informed by a detailed analysis of the shifts in divorce, assault, custody, and property laws over the course of the nineteenth century – as well as by several of the more notorious court cases – Surridge deftly traces the evolution of this social evil from its relative invisibility in the fiction of the 1830s to its conspicuousness by the 1890s.

Many of the book's most trenchant observations are grounded in maintaining a fruitful tension between two distinct questions: how 'print journalism accorded new visibility to wife assault' and how 'the middle-class domestic novel treat[ed] the phenomenon of "private" family violence.' Marlene Tromp has explored some of this ground before in The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain (2000); however, Surridge broadens the scope of inquiry beyond the sensation novel to the whole range of domestic fiction, including not only obvious sources such as George Eliot's 'Janet's Repentance' and Trollope's He Knew He Was Right but also lesser-known texts such as some of Dickens's early stories and Caird's The Wing of Azrael.

Queen Victoria herself, we are told, asked her Lord Chancellor in 1858 if newspapers could not be prevented from publishing the sordid details of the cases being heard in the (then new) Divorce Court: 'None of the worst French novels ... can be as bad' as the shocking stories in the newspapers, she claims. Such suppression was impossible. Newspapers provide graphic, detailed, and shocking accounts of marital discord, accounts that Surridge puts to effective use in her readings of individual novels. For example, He Knew He Was Right is read as evidence to be presented at a notional divorce trial, Trevelyan v. Trevelyan and Osborne, with the detective Bozzle invoking law and the rules of evidence as he haunts Emily's steps throughout the novel. One of Surridge's most striking conclusions is that this novel 'takes as its central topic the fallacy of the very idea of the private self after 1858.' Dombey and Son (with its bizarre scene of Florence asking her father for forgiveness after being struck by him) is analysed by Surridge as part of the larger debate in the 1840s and 1850s about the ideal of manliness and how it must be constructed to preserve a 'closed home' – closed off, that is, from prying and critical outside eyes. Her analysis of the 1853 parliamentary debates on the Bill for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults upon Woman and Children, as well as the 1840 Cochrane decision (in which husbands were given the power to confine their wives), sheds a fascinating light on the novel's portraits of both male aggression and women's duty to advance manly virtue.

Surridge's concern with visibility leads her on occasion perhaps to underestimate the nature and effect of invisibility, at least earlier in the century. For example, she argues that Nancy's utter passivity and loyalty in Oliver Twist represent 'a projection of emergent middle-class domestic ideology onto a working-class character.' This claim has a good deal of truth, but it works to underestimate the concomitant problem: that middle-class domestic violence itself was therefore unrepresentable, invisible, in 1837–39. Yet in the fine connections that Dickens draws between Nancy and Rose Maylie (e.g., the white handkerchief), or analogously in the change of clothes that links the battered brickmaker's wife to Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, there is a suggestion of important links between women of different classes. These gestures towards female solidarity anticipate by two decades its explicit acknowledgment in 'Janet's Repentance.'

Surridge concludes her book by saying that 'the ideological work of most Victorian novels' in her study...