There is a strangeness in the way we think about our Victorian ancestresses.
Accustomed as we are to reading about them in spirited popular biographies,
and encountering them on film and TV screens in costume dramas with
production values so high that every eyelet of every corset is faithfully
rendered, it is impossible not to think of them as just like us, only with
longer skirts and no mobile phones.
The illusion is fostered by the fact that those of us who are not trained
historians will have gleaned much of what we know about 19th-century life
from novels, a literary form whose currency is human sensibility: love,
grief, fear, avarice, disappointment, hope, dread. These things are
instantly familiar to us; we read them across the centuries and convince
ourselves that in apprehending the feelings of the characters with whom we
sympathise, we fully understand their situation. In this, however, we are
mistaken.
Like Queen Victoria, the imagination resents being addressed as though it were
a public meeting. Politically engaged novelists have always understood this
and turned it to their advantage: narrative is sweeter than polemic, and so
Dickens has his Oliver Twist, George Eliot her Dorothea Brooke, and so the
message spreads from the readers’ hearts to their heads.
Or so it would have done, to contemporary readers. Less so to us. For however
much we in the 21st century may remind ourselves of a lost child in the days
before ChildLine, of an intelligent, passionate woman shackled by marriage
to a spiteful old pedant determined to control his wife, our freedoms, our
instinctive claim on equality and justice is so strongly established that
our imagination cannot easily sustain the feeling of what it might be like
to be, in citizenship terms, not a person but a thing.
Part of our difficulty in trying to cram ourselves into the constrained social
space inhabited by 19th-century women is the impression that political
emancipation for women began to stir in the late 18th century and has been
proceeding ever since in a steady (if slow) arc of progress, via votes for
women and equal pay towards the sunlit uplands of universal childcare and
equal numbers of male and female MPs.
You can even put a date on the moment when a modern sensibility is supposed to
have begun to inform the condition of women. 1792: the year in which Mary
Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,her feminist
vision of a future society in which the rights of men and women were a
single coherent entity. 1792, the year in which in revolutionary France
liberal divorce laws were passed, allowing for divorce by mutual consent or
by one party on grounds of abandonment, infidelity, madness or
“incompatibility of temper”. These laws made humane provision for the
welfare of children and the division of property after the dissolution of a
marriage. But a few years after they were passed complaints began to be made
that women were abusing their new freedom to extricate themselves from
intolerable marriages. In 1816, the reforming laws were repealed.
In 19th-century England, while social reformers such as William Wilberforce
argued for the abolition of slavery, the condition of married women (and
their children) as nonpeople engendered nothing like the same level of
debate. “By marriage,” explained the jurist, Sir William Blackstone, “the
husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal
existence of the woman is suspended during her marriage.” The property
brought by a woman to her marriage passed to her husband, he was the sole
guardian of the children of that marriage. A married woman could not sue or
be sued: she had the same status in law as a child, a criminal or a lunatic.
Nor, once married, could a woman easily reclaim her legal existence. Divorce
was a cumbersome process, involving a private Act of Parliament, available
in practice only to a tiny minority of very rich people.
Marital misery was not, of course, confined to this elite group, and so we
arrive at the fascinating state of sexual and financial tension that
provides the dynamic of so much Victorian fiction and turns on the brutal
and (to us) almost incomprehensible legal truth that a wife was a thing, and
an estranged or rebellious wife less than that: a nothing. It took an
unhappily married woman to initiate the reversal of this state of affairs.
In 1827 Caroline Norton, 19, the granddaughter of the playwright Richard
Sheridan, married a barrister, George Norton, 26, heir to Lord Grantley.
Caroline was beautiful, clever and penniless. The marriage was unhappy from
the start.
Norton resented his wife’s cleverness, drank and was violent. Money was short.
Nevertheless three sons were born of the match and Caroline had established
herself as a writer and the hostess of a lively political salon and close
friend of the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, before the marriage ended and
Norton removed his children from their mother and in 1836 brought an action
against Melbourne for criminal conversation, or adultery.
The action foundered in a comic muddle of drunken servants and suborned
witnesses. Yet even when it was over and her name cleared, Caroline, having
no independent legal existence, was unable to regain access to her children.
So she undertook to change the law, lobbying lawyers and politicians and
putting out a pamphlet in which she argued that in broken marriages,
children younger than 7 should be looked after by their mother, and the fate
of older children decided in court, rather than by their father. In 1839, a
year after Queen Victoria’s accession, the Infant Custody Bill was passed,
allowing equal access by both parents to children of 12 years and younger.
It was too late for Caroline, whose children never permanently lived with her
again and whose son, William, died after an accident in his father’s care.
Nor was the Bill the end of her political campaigning on behalf of women
whose marriages had broken down. In financial difficulty (as a married
woman, all her property belonged to her husband) in 1855, at the age of 48,
she wrote an Open Letter to the Queen On Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s
Marriage & Divorce Bill, following it up with a pamphlet advocating the
payment of alimony, the abolition of “criminal conversation”, desertion as
ground for divorce and the restoration to a divorced wife of power over her
own property.
Against furious opposition from the bishops in the Lords, and in the Commons
from Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Divorce and Matrimonial
Causes Act became law in 1857. Henceforth, as well as being allowed access
to her young children, a married woman might retain possession of her
earnings, inherit or bequeath property like a single woman, enter into
contracts, and sue and be sued as though she were a man.
No longer the legal equivalent of a criminal, a child, a simpleton or a
possession, she now existed as a citizen.
While providing for unhappy couples to obtain a divorce for a cost of about
£100 (within reach only of the prosperous middle classes), the law continued
to extract from women a higher emotional tariff for an intolerable marriage
than it demanded of men. Husbands could sue for divorce on the ground of
adultery. A wife must prove that her husband was guilty of an extra fault:
bestiality, bigamy, cruelty, desertion, incest, rape or sodomy. A husband
might claim damages against the adulterous third party; a wife might not.
There was no consensual divorce.
Despite these inequalities, a great change took place with the Divorce Act,
and it was this: that marriage afterwards existed in law not just as a
religious and financial, but also as an emotional transaction.
Caroline Norton’s lobbying was undertaken not from ideology or political
conviction, but from great personal unhappiness and, although the
legislation she promoted involved the effort of many campaigners, the genius
of what Lord David Cecil, in his biography of Melbourne, patronisingly
called her “warm, crude, Irish good nature” was to grasp the notion, so
fashionable in 1960s women’s movement, that the personal is political.
“Why write?” she asked in her pamphlet on divorce. “Why struggle? It is the
Law! You will do no good! But if everyone lacked courage with that doubt,
nothing would ever be achieved in this world. This much I will do, woman
though I be. I will put on record what the law for women was in England in
the years of civilisation and Christianity, 1855, and the eighteenth year of
the reign of a female sovereign!”
Across a century and a half her voice reaches us: the voice of a pretty,
clever, high-spirited woman who turned personal misery into political
change.
