Bleak Houses – Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction Surridge Paperback

Bleak HousesMarital Violence in Victorian Fiction\nAuthor(s): Lisa Surridge\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Ohio University Press, United States\nImprint: Ohio University Press\nISBN-13: 9780821416433, 978-0821416433\nSynopsis\nThe 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? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century.\n Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads Dombey and Son and Anne Bront's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot's Janet's Repentance in light of the parliamentary de.