Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

by Lisa Surridge (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2005

  $28.85

  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. This book traces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century.