Intimate Violence and Victorian Print Culture

Representational Tensions

Suzanne Rintoul

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137491121
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura general

Suzanne Rintoul identifies an important contradiction in Victorian representations of abuse: the simultaneous compulsion to expose and to obscure brutality towards women in intimate relationships. Through case studies and literary analysis, this book illustrates how intimate violence was both spectacular and unspeakable in the Victorian period.

PART I

Intimate Violence and Understandings of Class

CHAPTER 1

Sensational Crime Street Literature, 1817–1880

In 1817, a group of broadsides describing the rape and murder of twenty-year-old Mary Ashford signaled a new direction in British street literature that indicated a growing interest in intimate violence against women, especially among the poor.¹ Intense emotional responses to the case meant financial success for many broadside publishers; higher prices were justified as a means of financing a retrial when Ashford’s alleged murderer was acquitted in spite of popular belief in his guilt (Wiener, Men 135). Perhaps in part as a result of this financial boon, and certainly in part as a result of new legislations and debates about intimate violence, more broadsides like the Mary Ashford ones began to appear, and soon cheap newspapers also began to report on and illustrate the grisly assaults and murders of women with unprecedented regularity. The emergence of this material about outrageous and highly graphic crimes against women was an economic move—an effort to produce the most shocking narratives possible and commodify the battered woman’s experience in a manner that drew attention away from political responsibilities regarding intimate violence in favor of the excitement and catharsis of violent spectacle. Yet, tensions between what can and cannot be seen in these texts enabled what appears to consist largely of cheap thrills, played out on the degraded bodies of the poor, to undertake the important cultural work of challenging normative views of interpersonal relationships and sociomoral hierarchies.

While street literature, broadly speaking, refers to diverse forms of printed material sold on the streets by patterers to poor and wealthy readers alike,² in this chapter I explore a particular subset consumed largely by literate members of the working class: cheap broadsides and newspapers that focus on shocking and violent depravity in graphic detail, or what I refer to as “sensational crime street literature.” This material is itself diverse. Not only does it include more than one physical format, it also consists of poetry and prose as well as both fictional and nonfictional accounts of crimes. (Though both newspapers and broadsides were typically based on actual current events recorded in court reports and police records, broadside publishers in particular would print accounts of infamous crimes that occurred years prior to publication, or crimes that were similar, but purely invented.) My conclusions are based mainly on materials made available through the British and Bodleian Libraries that meet two criteria: one, they were published between 1817 and 1888; and two, they deal with intimate violence against women. This timeframe concentrates my research on shifts that occurred in sensational crime street literature about woman abuse between the impact of the Mary Ashford case and the Married Women’s Property Act, the latter of which brought major changes to the doctrine of coverture. Both events are important clues regarding attitudes about the treatment of women, and between them we can identify a significant change regarding how class, in particular, was represented in terms of this issue. Studying this particular period also allows me to account for the supplanting of broadsides with tabloid style newspapers, a significant shift in publishing that brought with it subtle developments in an ongoing movement toward imbricating middle-class life in intimate violence.

The approximately ninety broadsides that I consulted represent the work of at least seven publishers, though mainly Henry Disley, John Pitts, and James Catnach. These three prolific houses worked out of the impoverished Seven Dials district of St. Giles’s parish in London, providing one of only a few sources of affordable reading for many of the people who lived in the area. According to James Hepburn, Pitts and Catnach in particular “established the Seven Dials as the center of the broadside trade in the nineteenth century” (34), and their material, much of which featured shocking tales of murdered working-class wives and sweethearts, made up a large part of what working-class readers consumed in terms of the sensational crime street literature market—particularly involving violence against women. There was, of course, additional material that dealt with criminal violence available to working-class readers at the time: penny periodicals like The Terrific Register (1823–1825) included gruesome accounts of murder among its harrowing and often exotic tales, and there was undoubtedly some mutual influence between such cheap magazines and early crime broadsides, not to mention gothic chapbooks that flourished at the beginning of the century about the cruel imprisonment and murder of women, such as The Inhuman Husband and The Genuine and Pathetic Tale of Poor Mary.³ The broadsides stand apart, though, insofar as they functioned as something more recognizably akin to modern-day news. While each of the aforementioned genres was more public than, say, a novel—the content was literally the “word on the street”—broadsides possessed a distinct sense of community and immediacy. Not only were they initially written to be sung aloud to well-known tunes, they increasingly referred to crimes currently under investigation or to criminals currently on trial. In crime broadsides especially, we can also see claims to fulfill the moral imperatives often associated with journalism. The news purports to tell us what we need to know, and though these papers were far from being considered highly respectable forms of investigative journalism, many were framed as crucial warnings against reckless behavior—how to avoid becoming a victim and, perhaps more often, how to avoid the temptations associated with victimizing others. As a case in point,“The Young Man’s Dream: A Warning to the Dissolute and Profane” (published by Catnach some time between 1813 and 1839) begins by imploring “Give ear ye gay deluded youth / whom vice has led astray,” positioning its narrative of robbery and violence as an example of why crime never pays.

This pretense of moral purpose can easily be read as a means of justifying the existence and sale of lurid stories, but it nevertheless positions the genre as socially important reading material. By extension, it authorizes many of the broadsides’ more subtle implications. And, though the violent material may seem to merely affirm the idea that the graphic, criminal, and brutal is specifically appropriate for “lower” orders of readers, it also includes references beyond the explicitly displayed bodies of poor women to middle-class life, such that the tension between the patent and unspoken underscores relations, and even commonalities, across social echelons. If sensational crime broadsides were the main “news” about intimate violence for the poor, they were also a major source regarding the centrality of the bodies of their women to understanding cross-class moral failings—at least, that is, until the emergence of the cheap newspaper.

Before mid-century, there were few, if any, popular newspapers written at an appropriate level for most working-class readers, and the duty levied on newspapers made them too expensive for most poor families (though many shared) until its reduction in 1836 and eventual abolition in 1855 (Collison 9–10). The emergence of penny and halfpenny newspapers in the late fifties, though, provided members of the working class with new material through which to explore themes of violence against women and social structures. Such papers drew on the broadside’s format: they included several large illustrations, bold and sometimes crude headlines, and often dark tales of romance and murder. My focus in this chapter is on the Illustrated Police News because, with a run of seventy-four years (1864–1938), a circulation that peaked at approximately 300,000, explicit appeals to a working-class readership,⁴ and singular attention to intimate violence, it stands out not only in contrast to papers like the Illustrated London News (1842–1989) or the Illustrated Times (1855–1872), which, intended for middle-class readers, cost up to five cents more per issue, but also to comparably inexpensive papers published contemporaneously like The Penny Illustrated Paper (1861–1870). The more expensive papers avoided overly graphic representations of intimate violence, once more enforcing the idea that this intense physicality was not appropriate for a genteel readership, but the frequency and detail with which the Illustrated Police News reported on intimate violence compared even to cheap tabloids—as Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor have noted, the Illustrated Police News contained “countless pieces on domestic violence” (303)—made it a text of great historical importance for exploring the complexity and persistence of representational tensions surrounding battered women, particularly how this tension negotiated dominant ideas about the relationship between domestic virtue and social status over time and across genres intended for the working class.

Of course, on the surface none of the primary sources used for this chapter seem particularly complex or subversive. Narratives of intimate violence in the sensational crime street literature of the Victorian period often depict either working-class couples or illicit affairs between impoverished women and wealthy gentlemen. They therefore appear to function mainly in two ways: first, they seem to condemn the working class as inherently violent and affirm a stereotypical pairing of poverty and barbarism; second, when dealing with cross-class affairs, they seem to construct poor women’s attempts to improve their social status as the root cause of brutal middle-class male violence. As such, substantial criticism on crime street literature focuses on its conservative didacticism. V. A. C. Gatrell, for instance, sees in broadside ballads on crime, a narrative voice that identifies with the legal system (156), and David Cooper argues that the crime broadside’s primary function was to teach readers the lessons learned by penitent criminals at the gallows (26). Similarly, Beth Kalikoff understands the crime broadside’s detailed descriptions of how criminals were treated as cautionary tales serving the interests of law and order (15).

However, sensational crime street literature did much more than condemn or control the behavior of the poor. Because, as Hepburn points out, street literature in general was more affordable, read more often by a broader range of classes and across a broader geographical area than novels (65), it embodied a version of shared experience and community that in many ways transcended social boundaries.⁵ Moreover, the affordability and availability of broadsides facilitated literacy among the poor and, thus, helped pave the way for a more politicized, mobile group of working-class subjects (Shepard 13). In this context, it should not be particularly surprising that the content of sensational crime street literature often gestures toward the instability of social hierarchies even as it indicts and objectifies members of the working class, a point made by Ellen O’Brien in her assertion that the body of the poor, condemned criminal was often a trope in crime broadsides that consolidated working-class identity by critiquing the violent and classist Victorian judicial system (32, 47). This acknowledgment of how sensational crime street literature functioned in apparently contradictory ways resonates with Michel Foucault’s framework for theorizing earlier broadsides in Discipline and Punish. Though referring to prerevolutionary France, Foucault acknowledges dualities in crime reporting similar to that which I have been describing; he argues that broadsides depicting the executions of criminal men are “two-sided” discourses that disciplined the public, yet, signaled a “political interest” in rebellion (68). In these broadsides, according to Foucault,

The condemned man found himself transformed into a hero by the sheer extent of his widely advertised crimes, and sometimes the affirmation of his belated repentance. Against the law, against the rich, the powerful, the magistrates, the constabulary or the watch, against taxes and their collectors, he appeared to have waged a struggle with which one all too easily identified. (67)

Foucault emphasizes the ways in which the “double discourse” of eighteenth-century gallows literature served both as a warning against criminal activity and as a celebration of criminal rebelliousness. It therefore undermined its own agenda by creating spectacles out of crimes, and heroes out of criminals.

What O’Brien and Foucault have to say about the duality of sensational crime street literature is important for understanding the field’s relationship to class and crime. It echoes, though, the overarching focus on men’s bodies found in (equally important) critical histories like Hammerton’s Cruelty and Companionship and Robert Collison’s The Story of Street Literature. While the study of violent men is obviously highly valuable to contemporary understandings of a broad range of Victorian issues, this approach consistently overshadows one of the most predominant sites of meaning in papers about violent crime—the injured woman’s body—and, by extension, many of the contributions that the depiction of vulnerable femininity has made to Victorian class consciousness.⁶ Reading the battered woman’s body in sensational crime street literature allows us to locate yet another form of duality, one that moves beyond condemning and encouraging criminal behavior or aligning with and rebelling against the law, to affirming and testing the validity of common perceptions about class-based behaviors and morality. Many intimate violence broadsides appear to bolster class stereotypes, but reading through their suffering and dead women’s bodies allows us to see that even as they do this, they underscore the limitations of those stereotypes.

In this way, many crime broadsides offer an alternative paradigm for duality when it comes to the female body, one that differs radically from the problematic binaries that have historically been used to oppress women. Elizabeth Grosz synthesizes this history in Volatile Bodies, arguing that the dualism of mind/body has been particularly dangerous for women since they have been relegated to the purely physical side of this either/or binary—as the weak, unpredictable, and chaotic—while men have enjoyed association with the cerebral—as the rational and reliable. As such, by the very nature of their bodies, the patriarchal control of women has been justified. This of course bears on a second binary of male/female, whereby a body references either one or the other sex category (13–14). Feminist scholars have worked to transcend such dualism and define women in terms other than the bodily, which may be, Grosz suggests, the reason for “hostility among feminists” to academic emphasis on the body and the physically or emotionally experiential (14), and, I would add, a cautiousness when it comes to binary thinking generally. Indeed, an important point of Grosz’s book is the need to find useful ways to theorize through the body without resorting to a patriarchal mind/body opposition. I humbly take up Grosz’s challenge here; my analysis of sensational crime street literature is an effort to understand women’s bodies in terms of a bothness rather than an either/or binary such that they can signify doubly (at least doubly, particularly in terms of their class status) because of the ways in which their bodies are arranged—on display and while hidden.

Early Sensational Crime Street Literature: Seduction/Murder Broadsides

Until the early 1830s, representations of intimate violence in sensational crime street literature consisted largely of broadsides with poetry, songs, short articles, and small images with little detail, which often depicted the dying moments of condemned male working-class murderers of women. Identical images were often used to depict completely different cases, supporting the notion that the working class consisted of a homogenous group of violent reprobates. Due largely to the fact that domestic violence was generally expected to occur among working-class families, there are relatively few references to middle-class abuse recorded in early Victorian broadsides. This does not mean, though, that middle-class intimate violence was never referenced in them. Rather, although it is not always immediately discernible, narratives and images of intimate violence enacted on the bodies of working-class women often allude to and encode aspects of the middle-class domestic, and in this respect the tension between showing and not showing bourgeois intimate violence in early sensational crime street literature worked both for and against perceived sociomoral hierarchies.

The seduction/murder broadside is perhaps the most obvious example of this phenomenon. Typically, these depictions of the murders of poor and often pregnant women by their gentlemen lovers take place beyond the confines of the home—perhaps in the woods, by a pond, or in a barn. The murderer is frequently required to kill his lover because he is already married to a woman who shares his social status. If he is not married, he usually kills his lover to avoid an inferior connection or because she rejects him. As the middle-class husband’s lover, the working-class victim of intimate violence is an image that symbolizes a threat to middle-class domesticity. Her injury or death, in turn, signals the violent but reassuring protection of a privileged group. As Martin Wiener suggests, papers depicting women being beaten or killed by their wealthier gentlemen lovers seem to secure class distinctions by implying that there will be violent consequences for poor women who attempt to transcend their social position; narratives of violent relationships between poor women and wealthy men ostensibly constitute public warnings against relationships that transgress class boundaries (Men 137). Wiener cites one particular broadside, for example, in which George Caddell—a fictional archetype of the violent, gentleman seducer of poor women—cuts the throat of his working-class sweetheart because she made the error of considering herself to be “an equal match for one of Mr. Caddell’s rank of life” (136). In other broadsides, even involuntary cross-class entanglements are framed as origins of violence. One (likely nonfiction) account, “A Copy of Verses made on the unfortunate Mr. Brown, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Struggle to Represent Intimate Violence against Women
• Part I   Intimate Violence and Understandings of Class
• Part II   Intimate Violence and Authorship
• Part III   Intimate Violence and Institutional Authority
• Conclusion: The Limits of Oppositionality through Victorian Representations of Intimate Violence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index