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Alice Arden to Bill Sikes: Changing Nightmares of Intimate Violence in England, 1558–1869

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Martin J. Wiener
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Let us begin with two scenes of intimate violence. First, consider a man, a woman, and three male “guests” in a well-furnished locked room. Suddenly one of the men strikes the host, and another stabs him, and he falls to the floor. At this moment the woman steps forward (she had previously tried to poison him), seizes the knife, and plunges it home, crying, “Take this for hind'ring Mosby's love and mine.” Alice Arden, with the help of her new lover, a servant, and his avaricious accomplices, has murdered her landowner husband. So climaxes Arden of Feversham, a powerful play (frequently attributed to Shakespeare) first performed in 1592 and based upon an actual murder that took place in 1551. This murder “assumed an almost totemic significance in early modern culture,” reappearing in a great variety of forms over the following century (even as a puppet show), with Alice, among other things, ranked with the classical uxoricides Clytemnestra and Livia.

Consider another scene, set several centuries later: this is a starker setting, only two figures in a bare and shabby room. A ragged woman is pleading with her lover for her life, and she is urging him that it is not too late for both to repent of their former lives. Her lover, a fierce and powerful man, stands over her, nostrils dilated, grasping a pistol. Fearful of being heard, he does not fire, but instead strikes her twice with the handle, then seizes a heavy club and beats her down.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , April 2001 , pp. 184 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2001

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References

1 Orlin, Lena Cowen, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), p. 68Google Scholar. For further examples of the play's popularity, see Helgerson, Richard, “Murder in Faversham: Holinshed's Impertinent History,” in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain, ed. Kelley, Donald R. and Sacks, David Harris (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 133–58Google Scholar, who draws upon M. L. Wines's stage history of the play in the introduction to his 1973 Revels edition of the play.

2 8 January 1869; quoted in Charles Dickens: The Public Readings, ed. Collins, Philip (Oxford, 1975), p. 468Google Scholar. Helen Small has interestingly located these public readings within the contemporaneous concern for the moralization of the working class, the upper reaches of whom had just been enfranchised. See Small, Helen, “A Pulse of 124: Charles Dickens and the Pathology of the Mid-Victorian Reading Public,” in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. Raven, James, Small, Helen, and Tadmor, Naomi (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar.

3 This picture has dominated Victorian cultural studies for some years. In the sphere of criminal justice history, the most important (albeit problematic) works along these lines are Clark, Anna, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845 (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Doggett, Maeve, Marriage, Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England (Columbia, S.C., 1993)Google Scholar; Knelman, Judith, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (Toronto, 1997)Google Scholar; and D'Cruze, Shani, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women (London, 1998)Google Scholar.

4 See, for instance, Sharpe, James A., Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 (London and New York, 1999), pp. 59–63Google Scholar, and “Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England,” Historical Journal 25 (1984): 29–48Google Scholar.

5 On the discretionary nature of the system at least until restructuring from the 1820s began to reduce it, see King, Peter, Crime, Justice and Discretion: Law and Social Relations in England, 1740-1820 (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar. Intriguing questions concerning the reliability of criminal statistics even later are raised in Taylor, Howard, “Rationing Crime: The Political Economy of Criminal Statistics since the 1850s,” Economic History Review 51 (1998): 569–90Google Scholar. Some of the more obvious areas in which recorded figures are highly dubious are killings of newborns, killings of unidentified or friend-and-family-less persons (e.g., freelance prostitutes), and killings by poison.

6 Important recent work on the history of gender and crime in England has been incorporated into new editions of two authoritative surveys: Sharpe, , Crime in Early Modern England, pp. 154–60Google Scholar; Emsley, Clive, Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900 (London, 1996), chap. 6Google Scholar.

7 For example, Sharpe, (Crime in Early Modern England, p. 155)Google Scholar found women to form 16 percent (49 of 310) of the accused in noninfanticidal homicide cases in Essex between 1620 and 1680. Extensively sampling Surrey from 1660 to 1800, John Beattie found only 9 percent (30 of 334). See Beattie, John, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, N.J., 1986), p. 33Google Scholar. Examining the Black Country prosecutions from 1835 to 1860, David Philips did not provide a gender breakdown for homicide prosecutions (perhaps because they were so few), but he did for other forms of crime; for offenses against the person, women formed 11 percent of the accused (136 of 1,226). See Philips, David, Crime and Authority in Victoran England: The Black Country, 1835–1860 (London, 1977), p. 148Google Scholar. As for domestic homicides, Anna Clark found men charged in 89 percent of marital homicides that came to the Old Bailey from 1780 to 1845. See Clark, Anna, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), p. 148Google Scholar. Her figures are strikingly similar to those I have derived in examining all marital murder trials reported by The Times for the period immediately following Clark's (1840–1905), when the newspaper sought to cover all murder trials throughout England and Wales: men were charged in 788 of 869 such prosecutions, or just over 90 percent. Other studies, for France, Germany, and the United States, past and present, have produced similar findings.

8 This article is based on information from several rich bodies of material: first, the broadside collections of the British Library (BL), and also of St. Bride's Printing Library, the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, and the Library of Congress, which yielded information on several hundred cases of murder between intimates (lovers or spouses) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (unless otherwise noted, broadsides and chapbooks cited below are to be found in the BL); second, newspaper reports; and third, official files, unusual for murder before 1837, but gradually thereafter coming to be opened almost as a matter of course for persons so convicted. Newspaper reports have been an underused source, and not only in criminal justice history. For example, the published Old Bailey Sessions Papers are invaluable and have been drawn upon a great deal in recent scholarship. Yet, while typically fuller than newspaper reports, they are also less informative in a number of ways: they omit judicial summings-up, which became in the nineteenth century a characteristic and frequently crucial part of such trials, and they lack the additional description of related activities in and outside the courtroom, the commentary and the “color” usually provided by newspaper reporters.

9 Broadsides and even chapbooks were printed inexpensively and in large quantities from the seventeenth century to the 1870s. Of course, such publication can only be a very approximate mark, but it is by far the best available. Much evidence exists that “street” publishing was highly competitive, and printers who survived in the trade were those who became expert at divining what would interest potential buyers.

10 We can only measure those broadsides and chapbooks that have survived, but there is no reason to think their survival has been biased by subject.

11 Wiltenburg, Joy, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville, Va., 1992)Google Scholar; Lake, Peter, “Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Sharpe, Kevin and Lake, Peter (Oxford, 1994), pp. 257–83Google Scholar; Dolan, Frances, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994)Google Scholar.

12 Examining total reported homicides in Kent from the Elizabethan era onward, James Cockbum noted that more than two-thirds of the victims of conjugal homicide were women. See Cockburn, James, “Patterns of Violence in English Society: Homicide in Kent, 1560–1985,” Past and Present, no. 130 (February 1991): 70–106Google Scholar. Moreover, despite the impressive archival work done by Cockbum in particular, all such figures are incomplete: the extent of the “dark figure,” even for homicides, remains beyond scholarly grasp; the possibilities for categorizing what we would consider killings as accidents or as “cause unknown” were ample, even in the much more organized nineteenth century. It is very likely many more wife-killings than husband-killings were never officially recognized as such. One indicator of this possibility is the fact that as the apparatus of criminal justice later became more elaborate and systematic, the “official” ratio of wife-killings to husband-killings rose, strongly suggesting an earlier undercounting.

13 The Bodleian collections are the John Johnson and the Harding collections. A search of St. Bride's Printing Library uncovered an additional seventeen cases dating between ca. 1800 and ca. 1842, fourteen of which were male-female murder and three female-male.

14 For the British Library, the ratio of nine female to thirty-five male perpetrators in the period 1800–24 changes to a ratio of five to forty-three in 1850–76 (after 1876, broadsides virtually ceased to appear, driven out by newspapers). On the similarly marked growth of interest in early nineteenth-century America in murders of women, see Cohen, Daniel A., “The Beautiful Female Murder Victim: Literary Genres and Courtship Practices in the Origins of a Cultural Motif, 1790–1850,” Journal of Social History 31 (1996–1997): 277–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Lake, , “Deeds against Nature,” pp. 263–65Google Scholar.

16 See (Reverend) Batteston, Philip, God's Revenge against Murder and Adultery: Remarkably Displayed in Thirty Tragical Histories (London, 1778)Google Scholar. This pattern seems to have been shared by old regime France: Sabine Juratic has described a similar eighteenth-century French collection of celebrated murders, which contained five cases in which wives killed husbands, but none in which husbands were the aggressors. See Juratic, Sabine, Constraintes conjugates et violences feminines: Epouses meurtrières au dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1986)Google Scholar.

17 “Serious Admonition to Youth, in a short account of the life, trial, condemnation and execution of Mrs Mary Channing, who, for poisoning her husband, was burnt at Dorchester … March 21, 1706, with practical reflections” (London, 1706, BL, C.121.g.9).

18 “A narrative of the barbarous and unheard of Murder of Mr John Hayes by Catherine his wife, Thomas Billings, and Thomas Wood … at night” (London, 1726, BL, 1131.h33.1).

19 “Authentick memoirs of the wicked life and transactions of Elizabeth Jeffryes, spinster, who was executed on Saturday, Mar 28, 1752, on Epping-Forest, near Walthamstow, for being concern'd in the murder of her late uncle, Mr. Joseph Jeffryes” (BL, London, 1752), p. 3. Quotations in the following paragraph are also from this chapbook. See also “The Case of Miss Blandy and Miss Jeffreys Fairly Stated and Compared, In Which The Natural Passions, Premeditation, and Consequences of Murder are considered; With proper Cautions to Parents, Guardians, Mistresses of Boarding-Schools, etc, who are Intrusted with the Education of Young Ladies, Also Some General Reflections on the Passion of Love, Addressed immediately to the Fair Sex (1752)” (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Md.).

20 “Authentick,” p. 8. Similar tension between older “siren” and newer “innocent” images of women in a sensational trial the year following Jeffryes's is shown in Straub, Kristina, “Heteroanxiety and the Case of Elizabeth Canning,” Eighteenth Century Studies 30 (1997): 296–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Dolan, , Dangerous Familiars, p. 98Google Scholar.

22 See Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar.

23 If space permitted, also considered here would be the evangelical revival and its own contribution to the growing effort to “reform” men in the direction of how women were now seen. On this, see Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago, 1987)Google Scholar; and Walker, Pamela, “‘I live but not yet I for Christ liveth in me’: Men and Masculinity in the Salvation Army, 1865–90,” in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Tosh, John and Roper, Michael (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

24 See Prochaska, Frank, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes; and Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar.

25 I am not persuaded by the contrary view put forth by Johnson, Claudia L. in Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar that sensibility worked primarily against women by allowing men to “appropriate the feminine” and leave women with even less voice than before. Long after the 1790s, the “feminine” voice of sentiment remained clearly available to, and much used by, women. Certainly, the influence of the notions, feelings, and stylistic modes bound up in the term “sensibility” had diverse influences and could be put to many purposes; nonetheless, one overriding cultural influence over much of the following century was to intensify and crystallize concerns about women's mistreatment by men.

26 “Circumstances of the Death of Mr. Scawen” (London, 1775, BL), p. 6Google Scholar. See also “The Trial of Jane Butterfield for the wilful murder of William Scawen, Esq.” (London, 1775, British Trials microfiche series, Chadwyck-Healey, no. 619)Google Scholar.

27 Campbell, Ruth, “Sentence of Death by Burning for Women,” Journal of Legal History 5 (1984): 44–59Google Scholar: significantly, burning also ceased to be applied to servants who murdered their masters. The offense of petty treason itself lingered unapplied on the books until 1828, when it was swept away along with a variety of now outmoded criminal legislation. See also Harvey, A. D., “Research Note: Burning Women at the Stake in Eighteenth-Century England,” Criminal Justice History 11 (1990): 193–95Google Scholar.

28 See King, Crime, Justice and Discretion, chap. 8. The argument advanced in McGowen, Randall, “The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of Modern History 59 (1987): 651–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the changing meanings of bodily punishment may perhaps be seen in a gendered light: it was not just individuals but most especially females who were coming to appear increasingly “violated” by such punishment.

29 Clark, , Women's Silence, Men's Violence, p. 76Google Scholar.

30 In “The Sex Panic of the 1790s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (1996): 409–34Google Scholar, Katherine Binhammer sees in the upsurge in that decade of writings and legal actions concerned with adultery a shaping of “the new domestic woman.” While she does not say much about it, her evidence also shows a shaping of a new concern about “predatory men.”

31 Anne Brontë attested in her preface to the Haworth edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (London, 1900), p. xxiiiGoogle Scholar, to the fundamental moral aim of her novel: “If I have warned one rash youth from following in [the steps of the villain and his friends], or prevented one thoughtless girl from falling into the very natural error of my heroine, the book has not been written in vain.” Despite (or because of?) the intense criticism her melodramatic novel sparked, it was an immediate success, going into a second edition soon after publication (Mrs. Humphrey Ward, introduction to the Haworth edition, pp. xiv–xv).

32 Jones, Ernest, Women's Wrongs (London, 1852)Google Scholar.

33 Quoted in Clarke, Micael, Thackeray and Women (DeKalb, Ill., 1995), p. 52Google Scholar.

34 In such widely read novels as Adam Bede, Sorrow on the Sea and Lady Audley's Secret, Matus notes, “the aberrant mother was readily conceived of as a victim” (Matus, Unstable Bodies, p. 188). For an introduction to the sensation novel, see Pykett, Lyn, The “Improper” Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (New York, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 As Virginia B. Morris has argued, “from Dickens to Doyle, with incremental resonance, novelists sympathized with the [female] killers even if they did not openly advocate their decisions and invariably punished them for their assertiveness.” See Morris, Virgina B., Double Jeopardy: Women Who Kill in Victorian Fiction (Lexington, Ky., 1990), p. 52Google Scholar.

36 “Lancaster Summer Assizes,” The Times, 23 August 1832.

37 She, nonetheless, went to the scaffold (“Oxford Circuit,” The Times, 30 December 1843). It is interesting, though, that it was in this year that the Home Office began keeping a record of the gender of condemned murderers.

38 Very few mercy petitions for women in cases of murder have so far been found in the eighteenth-century pardon files. See King, Crime, Justice and Discretion.

39 “Execution of Catherine Foster,” Bury and Norwich Post, 21 April 1847. On her trial, see “Norfolk Circuit,” The Times, 29 and 31 March 1847. One broadside announced that “Under the authority of the Secretary of State for the Home Department this day … A YOUNG GIRL is to be PUBLICLY STRANGLED in front of the county jail, Bury St Edmonds … and if the neck of the wretched victim be not by this shock broken, the said MORAL TEACHER will pull the legs of the miserable girl until by his weight and strength united he Strangles Her” (“Grand Moral Spectacle!” Chelmsford, 1847, BL). After Foster's hanging, it became even harder to convict a woman. Three other wives were tried later that same year: one, Elizabeth Johnson, was convicted but reprieved, and the other two, Mary Lennox and Anne Mather, were acquitted. Ann Fisher, on trial at Exeter in 1848 for poisoning her elderly husband three months after they married (his will gave her everything he had, the impressive sum of £500), was acquitted despite the testimony of a fellow-prisoner that she had confessed the deed to her. She dressed at her trial in deep widow's mourning and obtained the defense services of a Queen's Counsel. The trial lasted an unusually long time: twenty-nine hours. See Western Times (Exeter), 1 April 1848Google ScholarPubMed.

40 “A particular account of the trial and execution of Ann Barber” (London, 1821, BL, 1490.C.41)Google Scholar. One broadside, “A brief account of the trial and execution of Ann Barber” (London, 1821, Bodleian Library, John Johnson collection)Google Scholar, noted that no woman had been executed in York for husband-murder since 1776. Wilson, Patrick, in Murderess: A Study of the Women Executed in Britain since 1843 (London, 1971)Google Scholar, has collected much useful information on the sixty-eight women hanged since the Home Office began recording the gender of those executed. Knelman (Twisting in the Wind) has much of interest to say about the public image of female murderers in the nineteenth century, although in my judgment she concentrates overmuch on horror and repulsion (traditional sentiments in cases of murder, and equally present in accounts of murders by men) and neglects or downplays the more novel growth of sympathy for the female defendant and discomfort with subjecting her to severe punishment.

41 “Cornwall Assizes,” The Times, 15 August 1820. See the observations on this case in Short, R. M., “Female Criminality 1780–1830,” Oxford University, M. Litt. thesis, 1989Google Scholar. Short's chief argument—that a significant amount of female aggressiveness and violence existed in the early nineteenth century but was underplayed in press coverage—though aimed elsewhere (at uncovering “hidden” female assertiveness and agency) supports the argument here that the old fear of female violence was waning, submerged under a sharpening image of woman as victim of male violence and brutality. Even if much female violence survived into the nineteenth century, as Short maintains, fears of it are ever harder to find in popular literature.

42 Star, 6 August 1825. See also “Summer Assizes—Leicester,” The Times, 6 August 1825.

43 “Midland Assizes,” The Times, 11 August 1831.

44 Before then, those convicted of murder, if not reprieved by their judge, had to be executed on the second day after their trial.

45 See Wilson, Murderess; the 1835–42 cases are drawn from my database of spouse-murder trials, 1835–1905. These numbers exclude multiple murders, such as familicide. Approximately 221 men were hanged in England and Wales for wife-murder in the same period. These numbers (and others later in this article) were arrived at by correlating annual criminal statistics published as part of the Parliamentary Papers with newspaper reports and Home Office capital case files.

46 Several scholars have written on this panic. See Knelman, Judith, “The Amendment of the Sale of Arsenic Bill,” Victorian Review 17 (1991): 1–10Google Scholar; Bartrip, Peter, “A ‘Pennurth of Arsenic for Rat Poison’: The Arsenic Act, 1851 and the Prevention of Secret Poisoning,” Medical History 36 (1992): 53–69Google Scholar; Robb, George, “Circe in Crinoline: Domestic Poisonings in Victorian England,” Journal of Family History 22 (1997): 176–90Google Scholar; Burney, Ian, “A Poisoning of No Substance: The Trials of Medico-Legal Proof in Mid-Victorian England,” Journal of British Studies 38 (1999): 58–92Google Scholar.

47 Twenty-two out of thirty-six women known to have been convicted of murder of a man in England in the period 1840–1900 were so recommended. Most of the remainder were women who had, or were believed to have had, killed others (usually by poison) besides their husband (Sarah Dazeley in 1843, Sarah Freeman in 1845, and Mary Ann Geering in 1849, or such mass murderers as Mary Ann Cotton in 1873). In the case of husband-murderers with no other victims, if they, increasingly unusually, failed to receive a mercy recommendation, often large-scale reprieve efforts were mounted for them, e.g., for Catherine Foster and Charlotte Harris, described below; Elizabeth Martha Brown (in 1856); or, most famously and successfully, Florence Maybrick (in 1889). V. A. C. Gatrell has noted the appearance, in the early nineteenth century, of a new concern with “wronged women” facing execution. See Gatrell, V. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994), esp. pp. 336, 339Google Scholar.

48 “Western Circuit,” The Times, 27 March 1848. See also Bell's Life, 2 April 1848.

49 Knelman, Twisting in the Wind.

50 “Western Circuit,” The Times, 1 August 1849.

51 Public Record Office (PRO), Home Office (HO) 18/274/1. This was despite the thundering of The Times about “a specimen of murder which, in its sublimated atrocity, transcends anything we have yet recorded” (8 August 1849). Similarly, one disgruntled male correspondent to the Home Office sourly dissented to the reprieve: “What reliance,” he asked the Home Secretary, “can a man place in his wife on whom he depends for comfort, tenderness and affection in sickness and sorrow when perhap she may take that as the opportunity of terminating his existence?” (HO 18/274/1). Writing also to The Times (19 November 1849), he complained there about the female petitioners: “It is very probable, from the part they are acting, that the ladies of Somersetshire and Devonshire think that murdering a husband in cold blood, and for a sordid purpose, were not a crime … deserving of extreme punishment—a source, no doubt, of satisfaction to their husbands.” However, the Home Secretary did not reply, and neither The Times's leader nor his letter to it drew any further correspondence.

52 “Midland Assizes,” The Times, 31 July 1849.

53 Mary Ann Geering (see “Home Circuit,” The Times, 2 August 1849). She was, it was noted in the Annual Register of 1849 (London, 1849)Google Scholar, “a woman of masculine and forbidding appearance” (p. 88).

54 See Krueger, Christine L., “Literary Defenses and Medical Prosecutions: Representing Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Victorian Studies 40 (1996–1997): 271—94Google Scholar. See also Arnot, Margaret, “Gender in Focus: Infanticide in England, 1840–1880” (Ph.D. thesis, Essex University, 1994)Google Scholar.

55 Knapp, Andrew, ed., The Newgate Calendar (London, 1824), 1:81–85Google Scholar. A work of fiction immediately inspired by Hackman's story is Croft, Herbert, Love and Madness (London, 1780)Google Scholar.

56 “Central Criminal Court,” The Times, 27 November 1862. For a case two years later where a wife-killer's brilliantly sentimental speech after being convicted helped win him a reprieve from the gallows, see Wiener, Martin J., “The Sad Story of George Hall: Adultery, Murder and the Politics of Mercy in Mid-Victorian England,” Social History 24 (1999): 174–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 See Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility; and Kalikoff, Beth, Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1986)Google Scholar. Of course, such preoccupation with female victimization was not necessarily feminist. Patricia Anderson, studying early Victorian illustrated periodicals, has pointed to the sadomasochistic overtones of the image of the female murder victim: “What is most disturbing about this image,” she has argued, “is not just the passivity of the victim, but the suggestion that she may have enjoyed her victimization.” See Anderson, Patricia, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860 (Oxford, 1991), p. 195Google Scholar. This is a complex issue of interpretation that can only be touched upon here. Recent feminist thinking has been much concerned with sorting out the positive and negative aspects of a focus on female victimization. For a particularly insightful treatment that places this issue in the wider context of the “double bind” of humanitarian reform, see Halttunen, Karen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Reform,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 303–34Google Scholar.

58 On the character and history of melodrama, see Booth, Michael R., English Melodrama (London, 1965)Google Scholar. On its role in Victorian culture, see Joyce, Patrick, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar. On its relation to crime literature, see Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay; and Walkowitz, Judith, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar. From its birth, melodrama was well suited to highlight female victimization: an early piece of melodramatic popular literature was a play entitled Clari; or the Maid of Milan that premiered at Covent Garden Theatre on 8 May 1823. The title figure is an innocent girl lured from her rural home by a duke's false promise of marriage (it was also the source of the immensely popular and long-lasting song “Home, Sweet Home”). See Behlmer, George, Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850–1940 (Stanford, Calif., 1999), p. 12Google Scholar.

59 Previously there had also been fear of females killing their stepchildren: such cases appear to have become rarer in the course of the nineteenth century.

60 Gillis, John R., For Better or For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (Oxford, 1985), p. 123Google ScholarPubMed.

61 As best as can be determined, the illegitimacy ratio in England rose from around 2 percent in 1700, to around 3 percent in 1750, to around 6 percent in 1800, and to a bit higher immediately thereafter, peaking in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and then entering a long decline. See Wrigley, E. A.et al., English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 On stagnant job opportunities in the countryside and the widening gap between urban and rural wages, see Boyer, George R., An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 167CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 How many killers fled the country will probably never be known, but not a few wanted men were apprehended in Liverpool, the chief port of embarkation for America.

64 Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches, chaps. 4–5.

65 See Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1977)Google Scholar. This claim (by no means original with Stone) has been subject to many criticisms and qualifications, but it is endorsed in the main by Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes.

66 I have found only a bare handful of such publications for eighteenth-century England, as compared with dozens for the first half of the nineteenth century (a precise figure for the pre-1800 broadsides cannot be arrived at, since a significant number are both undated and without sufficient other markers to locate them chronologically).

67 See “Warwick Summer Assizes,” The Times, 11 and 25 August 1817. This case has been discussed at length by Clark, Anna in her article, “Rape or Seduction? A Controversy over Sexual Violence in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men's Power, Women's Resistance by the London Feminist History Group (London, 1983)Google Scholar.

68 The Times, 25 August 1817, quoting verbatim from a Lichfield paper.

69 “A Report of the Proceedings against Abraham Thornton” (London, 1817, BL) p. 171Google Scholar.

70 “A full and particular account of a most barbarous and cruel MURDER committed upon the body of Mary Thomson, by her sweetheart David Gaston, who seduced her under pretence of marriage, and how she became pregnant—showing how the Villain murdered her, and threw her body into a pond” (BL, 1880.C.10). Another example among quite a few extant is “An account of a most horrid, barbarous and cruel murder, that was committed by Henry Cummins (a respectable farmer's son residing near Wells) on the body of Mary Price (a servant in his father's family) … given in the following affecting copy of verses” (BL, 1880.C.10). Anne Rodrick has found that “a large proportion of the cases printed in both [the Chartist paper the Northern Star and the more middle-class and less explicitly political Illustrated London News] in 1846 were murders of young women by their lovers, many of whom were men married to other women and who sought to avoid exposure of an unexpected pregnancy.” See Rodrick, Anne, “‘Only a Newspaper Metaphor’: Crime Reports, Class Conflict, and Social Criticism in Two Victorian Newspapers,” Victorian Periodicals Review 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 4Google Scholar.

71 “Chester Autumn Assizes,” The Times, 16 September 1824.

72 The Times, 9 August 1828. For an example of the intense coverage, see “The trial of William Corder, for the wilful murder of Maria Marten, by shooting and stabbing her, and afterwards burying her body in the Red Barn, at Postead, in the county of Suffolk. Containing a full account of every particular connected with the awful catastrophe, the evidence of the witnesses, the prisoner's defense, and behaviour before, at, and after his trial. His conviction, sentence, confession, and execution. Together with a copy of the advertisement, by which he obtained his wife” (London, 1828, British Trials microfiche series, no. 798).

73 Untitled leader, The Times, 11 August 1828.

74 Booth, Michael R., English Melodrama (London, 1965), p. 139Google Scholar. See also Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay.

75 “Central Criminal Court,” The Times, 16 May 1842; as with Corder and Greenacre, a large number of broadsides on Good survive.

76 Essex Herald, 25 March 1851; The Times, 19 October 1850 and 8 March 1851; I have seen five different broadsides on this case.

77 “Executions at Chelmsford,” The Times, 26 March 1851.

78 Annual Register, 1851 (London), p. 416Google Scholar.

79 At least eight different broadsides on Holloway survive. See on some of these and other murder broadsides, Collison, Robert, The Story of Street Literature: Forerunner of the Popular Press (London, 1973)Google Scholar.

80 “An Authentic and Faithful History of the Atrocious Murder of Celia Holloway” (London, 1832, BL, 6495.b.56)Google Scholar.

81 One petition focused on his wife's supposed bad character, the other on his susceptibility to violent fits. Neither moved the home secretary, Lord Normanby. See “Execution,” The Times, 17 December 1839; see also The Times, 30 November and 14 December 1839; “Sorrowful Lamentation of William Lees, now under sentence of death at New-gate” (BL, 1881.d.8); “EXECUTION! William Lees” (BL, 1888.C.3); the petitions are in PRO, HO 18/9/17.

82 Annual Register, 1856 (London), p. 530Google Scholar. Contemporary reaction can be gauged for both from the Annual Register and for Dove from Lloyds's Weekly Newspaper, 16 March and 17 August 1856.

83 The Times, 31 October, 1 November 1862; Annual Register, 1862 (London), pp. 440–45Google Scholar.

84 See, e.g., Stone, Harry, The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Columbus, Ohio, 1994)Google Scholar, as well as the classic work by Collins, Philip, Dickens and Crime, 3d ed. (Basingstoke, 1994)Google Scholar.

85 This is not to mention an Othello: early Victorian productions of Shakespeare's Othello, which were numerous, increasingly focused on the play's climactic violent act, portrayed ever more realistically. One noted critic complained that Othello was being reduced from a complex and noble figure to the kind of one-dimensional killer—“fiery, splenetic, tiger-like”—already familiar in melodrama. The stage directions for the murder scene by Dickens's favorite director, Fechter, this critic went on, by spelling out in detail a violent struggle “make one think rather of the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes, than of Othello and Desdemona.” See SirMartin, Theodore, “Shakespeare, and His Latest Stage Interpreters,” Fraser's Magazine 64 (1861): 783, 785Google Scholar. Mid-Victorians on both sides of the proscenium, unlike earlier generations, were coming to see this tragedy as first and foremost a story of a wife-murderer and his violent act. Whether or not Dickens went so far in his readings as to endow Sikes with Othello-like qualities, in the hands of Dickens's friends, Othello was certainly appearing more of a Sikes.

86 There were fifteen murder verdicts in English wife-killing trials in the period 1860–62, versus only four in the period 1840–42, and in general prison sentences for manslaughter, of all kinds, were getting longer.

87 Was wife-beating epidemic like smallpox, asked the Manchester City News of 11 July 1874, as this offense appeared to be far in excess of what it had been only a few years earlier. The Times noted that “the ordinary occurrence of brutal assaults by the strong upon the weak [referring to wife-beating] is one of the most shocking facts of the day” (30 September 1874), and a few years later that newspaper observed that domestic violence remained the single greatest flaw of English workingmen (The Times, 1 November 1879).

88 See Radzinowicz, Leon and Hood, Roger, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750, vol. 5, The Emergence of Penal Policy (London, 1986), pp. 693–94Google Scholar.

89 Punishments for crimes against property or authority dramatically eased during the century, while those against the person did not.

90 See Auerbach, Nina, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1982)Google Scholar.

91 See Gilmore, David D., Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven, Conn. 1990)Google Scholar; Counts, Dorothy Ayers, Brown, Judith K., and Campbell, Jacquelyn C., eds., Sanctions and Sanctuary: Cultural Perspectives of the Beatings of Wives (Boulder, Colo., 1992)Google Scholar; Harvey, Penelope and Gow, Peter, eds., Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and Experience (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; and Levinson, David, Aggression and Conflict: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia (New York, 1994)Google Scholar. Levinson concluded his encyclopedia by declaring that in all places at all times in human history men have been far more likely to murder than have women.