0521831989 cambridge university press men of blood violence manliness and criminal justice in victorian england jan 2004

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Men of Blood
This book examines far more thoroughly than ever before the treatment
of serious violence by men against women in nineteenth-century England.
During Victoria’s reign the criminal law came to punish such violence more
systematically and heavily, while propagating a new, more pacific ideal of
manliness. Yet this apparently progressive legal development called forth
strong resistance, not only from violent men themselves but from others who
drew upon discourses of democracy, humanitarianism, and patriarchy to
establish sympathy with “men of blood.”
In exploring this development and the contest it generated, Professor
Wiener, author of several important works in British history, analyzes the
cultural logic underlying shifting practices in nineteenth-century courts and
Whitehall and locates competing cultural discourses in the everyday life of
criminal justice. The tensions and dilemmas highlighted by this book are
more than simply “Victorian” ones; to an important degree they remain
with us. Consequently this work speaks not only to historians and to students
of gender but also to criminologists and legal theorists.
Martin J. Wiener is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of History at Rice University. His previous books include Between Two Worlds: The Political Thought of
Graham Wallas (1971), English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1980;
2nd ed., 2004), and Reconstructing the Criminal (1990).



Men of Blood
Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice
in Victorian England
Martin J. Wiener

Rice University


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© Martin J. Wiener 2004
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for Rebecca and Vivian



Contents

page ix
xi

List of Figures and Tables
Preface

xv

Acknowledgments

1

Introduction
1 Violence and Law, Gender and Law

9

2

When Men Killed Men

40

3

Sexual Violence

76

4

Homicidal Women and Homicidal Men: A Growing Contrast

123

5 Bad Wives: Drunkenness and Other Provocations

170

6

Bad Wives II: Adultery and the Unwritten Law

201

7

Establishing Intention: Probing the Mind of a Wife Killer

240

Conclusion: The New “Reasonable Man” and
Twentieth-Century Britain

289

Index

293

vii



Figures and Tables

Figures
1: Victorian Era: Justice

page 33

2: The ‘Satisfaction’ of a ‘Gentleman’
3: Cruel Treatment of a Boy on Board the Ship Magera
4: The full account and latest parts of the awful, inhuman and
barbarous MURDER OF A FEMALE . . .
5: Apprehension of Good for the Barbarous Murder of Jane Jones

140
141

6: Sorrowful Lamentation of William Lees, Now Under Sentence
of Death at Newgate
7: A Wife Beater Lynched Near Rotherham

145
159

8: Dreadful Murder Near Bolton
9: Domestic Tragedy in Manchester

168
182

10: Wife Murder at Wolverhampton
11: The Finsbury Murder
12: The Stockwell Tragedy

46
71

252
273
281

Tables
1: (Virtually) All Wife Murder Prosecutions, England and Wales

2: Disposition of Wife Murder v. of Husband Murder
3: Disposition of All Murder Other Than of Wives

166
167
167

4: Unfaithful Wife Murder Trials – Legally Married
5: Murder Trials with Unsupported Claim of Unfaithful Wife –
Legally Married
6: Percentage of Murder Charges Resulting in Murder
Convictions

206

7: Percentage of Murder Charges Resulting in Executions

207

ix

206
206



Preface

This book is located in the imprecise but vital realm in society where cultural
representations and public actions meet; more exactly, the space in the life of

the criminal law where discourse and dispositions come together. In exploring
this space, I hope to bring cultural and criminal justice history closer together,
and to demonstrate how much each can contribute to the other. In recent
years historians have begun to appreciate how intertwined representations
and actions are, how discourse is not just talk but structures action, is a mode
of action; how, conversely, action always happens within some discursive
frame. Yet it is one thing to appreciate this in principle, quite another to
carry it through in practice, without privileging one or the other. How well
I succeed in this challenging task will be for readers to judge.
In a previous work I attempted a cultural history of criminal policy in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, describing patterns of thought surrounding
and helping to shape the central government’s construction and treatment
of criminal offenders. In one sense, this book extends that enterprise, moving
from the general to the more particular – from crime in general to homicide
(and rape) in particular – and from national policymaking to the disposition
of particular cases; in locale, from Parliament, the Home Office, and the
organs of the national “intelligentsia” to the assize courtrooms of England,
and to the popular reporting and discussing of what went on there, in newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and broadsides, as well as, again, the rooms
of the Home Office. The present work is chiefly based on two “archives”:
one of them public – newspaper and other published accounts of killings
and the legal proceedings that followed them – and one private – discussions
between Home Secretaries, their civil servants, and judges, together with appeals from condemned prisoners and others for mercy. The first archive was
immediately and widely known to contemporaries, the second confidential
and closed, presumably forever. The hundred-year, then seventy-five-, and
finally fifty-year rule has opened this second archive. Taken together, both
with their own specific agendas and biases, they afford a fuller view than has
previously been possible of what was thought and what was done about men
committing major violence in Victorian England.
In this sphere, as others, what was thought and what was done were, as
already suggested, not neatly separable, and they are not treated separately
xi

xii

Preface

here. The law was at the same time both precise and compelling, and open
(even by judges devoted to precedent) to interpretation, especially in questions
of “crimes against the person,” and most especially when strong feelings were
roused, as was almost always the case when charges of homicide and rape
were raised.
One aim of this work is simply to better understand the meaning and
treatment of serious violence by men, especially against women, in Victorian
England. Another, more general, is to more closely connect cultural and
criminal justice history. Yet a third aim is to contribute to the understanding
of the roles played by gender in criminal justice history and by criminal justice
in gender history. Even as scholarly work has begun to link the two fields, it
has suffered from a marked imbalance: nearly all of it has been focused on
the treatment and experiences of women; the other half of the population has
only just begun to be examined as a gender. Scholarly work on the relations
of men, as men, to the criminal justice system is much needed, particularly
for the nineteenth century, which formed a watershed not only in criminal
justice but in gender constructions and relations, and the two watersheds
were in fact, as I will argue, closely connected. “Masculine criminality” was
undergoing significant reconstruction in this era.
As such an observation suggests, this work has a thesis. Simply put, it is that
men’s violence, particularly against women, became in this period a matter
of greater import than ever before, evoking strong but complex and often
conflicting sentiments and legal actions and that in the end, for all the complexity, contradiction, and conflict that went on around it, such violence was
viewed with ever-greater disapproval and treated with ever-greater severity.

The story told here is one of both contestation and change, and both facets
have their place. Yet, ultimately, it is argued, the most important thing about
the story is the change that took place, in the way such violence was understood and, inseparable from this, in the way in which it was dealt with by the
organs of the law.
To highlight change in this realm, in particular change in the direction
of diminished tolerance of men’s violence against women, is to risk being
accused of glossing over the continuing mistreatment of women in this era.
This would be a serious misreading. This book does not seek to evaluate
the Victorians by the standards of the early twenty-first century. It attempts
to understand them, not to judge them, and to understand them more in
relation to their predecessors than to their successors. How did they differ, in
both their contradictions and their changes, from the generations that went
before them? What kind of legacy did they leave the twentieth century?
Within the field of criminal justice history, this book is unusual in that rather
than examining one county or one judicial circuit over a more limited period
of time, it ambitiously (or foolhardily) takes the entire nation, over nearly a
century, for its subject. In so doing, of course, it must sacrifice some degree of
thoroughness and “definitiveness.” At the same time, it does not attempt, even


Preface

xiii

superficially, to cover all aspects of male violence and the law, but confines
itself to the crimes of homicide and rape. Nor does it examine all levels of the
system, but confines itself to the highest courts of original jurisdiction, the
assizes, where such serious charges were tried. It draws, as noted, upon both
published and unpublished sources, some of which have never been made use
of before. It is both quantitative and qualitative, making general statements

based on wide and in one area virtually complete data while closely reading
texts from both archives to elucidate the contours and complexities of what
might be called “discourses of male violence.” It is built upon a unique
database of detailed information on several thousand Victorian criminal
cases, including virtually every case of spouse murder that went to trial, a
large sample of spouse manslaughter, and other homicide and rape cases
from this period and for some years earlier and later.?? Of course, cases
officially noted and dealt with did not include all cases of “actual” homicide
and certainly not of “actual” rape, as we (or even Victorians) would define
them.?? Contemporaries were well aware of this: as the Times noted in 1876,
“the absolute numbers of murders tells us nothing. It only says how many
murderers have been brought to justice.”?? Therefore, quantification can only
take us part of the way. Much of this work is “qualitative,” closely examining
discourses and dispositions that defined and interpreted men’s violence. The
sources for such examination are vast, very much more extensive than for
earlier periods, and far beyond the ability of any one person, or group of
persons, to fully read. The Victorian era saw an explosive growth in both
the public and private archives – newspapers grew in number and multiplied
their circulation, and after an 1836 Act allowing time after murder convictions
for consideration of appeals the relevant Home Office files greatly expanded.
Selectivity and discrimination are inevitable, as in most scholarship that
attempts to address significant issues. Certainly the patterns uncovered here,
both of change and of conflict, are not the only ones that can be found in this
material, nor are they immune from challenge. They are, however, patterns
that have for the most part not hitherto been noted, or much examined.
They need to be.



Acknowledgments

Over the decade of its composition, parts of this argument were tried out
in many venues: American Society for Legal History; Australian Victorian
Studies Association; Australian Modern British History Association; Balliol
College, Oxford; British Criminology Association; Third Carleton Conference on the History of the Family; Catholic University of America; First
European Social Science History Conference, Amsterdam; European University Institute, Florence; George Washington University; Georgetown University Law Center; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Institute for Crime and
Policing at the Open University; International Conference on the History
of Violence, Liverpool; Keele University; Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies; Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris; North American Conference
on British Studies; Princeton University; University College, Northampton;
Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada; Victorians Institute; and
the Western Conference on British Studies. I am greatly in the debt of those
who hosted me, listened to my thoughts-in-process, and most of all to those
whose responses led me to revise them to the point where I can send them
into the world on their own. In particular I greatly profited from the advice,
assistance, and criticism of John Archer, Roger Chadwick, Carolyn Conley,
Joel Eigen, Clive Emsley, Vic Gatrell, Jim Hammerton, Tom Haskell, Martin Hewitt, Peter King, Helena Michie, Randy McGowen, David Philips,
George Robb, Gail Savage, Greg Smith and Michael Willrich. I wish also to
thank Carolyn Conley, Barry Godfrey and Stephen Farrall, Peter King, Louis
Knafla, Greg Smith, Howard Taylor, and John Carter Wood for allowing
me access to as-yet unpublished work.
For support at a critical time, and encouragement that what I was doing
was indeed social science history, I am deeply grateful to Erik Monkkonen,
James Q. Wilson and Harmon Hosch, the open-minded director of the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Sciences Division. I am also
most appreciative of the faith the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars and its former director, Charles Blitzer, placed in my capacity to
say something worthwhile about such an “eccentric” subject.
A number of my students over the years have rendered invaluable assistance: Jim Good, Susan Hanssen, Bill Jahnel, Melissa Kean, Krisztina
Robert, Kim Szatkowski, Elaine Thompson, Martin Wauck, Katie Wells
xv

xvi

Acknowledgments

and Tammy Whitlock. I would have been at sea without the computing
knowledge of Katy McKinin and Carolynne White and the editing skills of
Catherine Howard. I am greatly indebted to the staff of the Fondren Library
at Rice, most of all those in the Interlibrary Loan office, who dealt with my
numerous requests with friendly efficiency. Two Deans of Humanities –
Judith Brown and Gale Stokes – steadily supported my work, as did my
departmental chairs, Tom Haskell and Jack Zammito. In the members of
my department I have always found collegiality and comfort. I am also in
the debt of former Rice President George Rupp, for giving strong backing
when it was most needed to research in the humanities.
Some of the material in chapter 4 has appeared in the Journal of British
Studies vol. 40, n0. 2; in chapter 6 in Social History vol. 24, no. 2; in chapter 7
in Law and History Review, vol. 17, no. 3.
My wife, Meredith Skura, has given me steadfast advice, support, and
understanding, and our daughters, to whom this work is dedicated, have
ensured that in my absorption with dreadful family crimes in the nineteenth
century I did not forget the happier world of family love and warmth.


Introduction

Whatever else may be included in the education of the people, the very
first essential of it is to unbrutalise them; and to this end, all kinds of
personal brutality should be seen and felt to be things which the law is
determined to put down.

. . . . J.S. Mill and Harriet Taylor, 18531
The Problem of Male Violence
In the modern world, one of the most fundamental obstacles to social order
and peace has been the nature of males. A mass of scientific study has established that from birth, males on average tend to be more aggressive, restless
and risk-taking than females, and in general less amenable to socialization.
History as well as anthropology bears out the implications of the scientific
studies, for it would appear that all settled societies, past and present, have
been faced with the twin tasks of putting to use and reining in these male
propensities.2
This book addresses one such propensity: with greater physical strength
combined with greater aggressiveness, men are and have always been far
more seriously violent than women. Perpetrators of homicide, excepting the
special case of infanticide, have in almost all times and places been largely
male, often overwhelmingly so. It is in fact a cliche of criminology that violent
criminals are far more likely to be male than female.3 The problematic nature
1
Remarks on Mr. Fitzroy’s Bill for the More Effectual Prevention of Assaults on Women and
Children (London, 1853) [published anonymously].
2
For a stimulating survey of this question, James Q. Wilson, “On gender,” The Public
Interest no. 112 (Summer 1993), 3–26.
3
As David Levinson summarized the findings of many studies in 1994, “in all places at
all times in human history men have been far more likely to murder than have women,
and men have been far more likely to kill other men than women have been likely to
kill other women.” Levinson, Aggression and Conflict: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia (New
York, 1994), p. 4. Also see David Levinson, Family Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective
(New York, 1989). Recent statistics for the United Kingdom are analyzed in Gender
and the Criminal Justice System (London: Home Office, 1992).

1


2

Men of Blood

of this male propensity has if anything grown in modern times, with the
emergence of a way of life very different from that in which male inclinations
to violence developed. As evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists
have argued, this is a trait that has lost much of its former functionality, but
because of its long gestation, it is not one that is easy to banish.4
Thus, it is safe to say that homicide, whether the victims are female or male,
is and as far as we can ascertain always has been highly gendered behavior
and ought to be looked upon from that angle more than it has been. The
obverse of this claim is that how homicide is treated by society, both today
and in other times and places, can reveal much about notions of masculinity
and their changes, just as the excavation and elucidation of such notions help
in turn to make sense of homicide’s treatment. Even though of course killing
is highly unusual behavior, fortunately peripheral to everyday life, “what is
socially peripheral,” the cultural historians Peter Stallybrass and Allan White
have reminded us, is “frequently symbolically central.”5 This book argues that
this was certainly true of nineteenth-century homicide, especially homicides
adjudged to be intentional. Putting such claims into practice, this book attempts to demonstrate how intertwined criminal justice, gender and the wider
culture were in one particular place and period – Britain in the Victorian age.
In recent decades, education, legislation and the media have all been invoked and employed to discourage male violence. Yet social intervention to
reshape this sort of male behavior has not been a phenomenon of only the
past generation. It has a history, a neglected one, reaching back at least several centuries, and was especially prominent in nineteenth-century England,
a society undergoing the most rapid transformation experienced since the
invention of agriculture. The age of Victorianism, despite some of the staid

associations that still cling to the term, was anything but static.
Victorian England and Homicide
Over this era, several broad changes took place in the recorded incidence
and treatment of homicide. Most significant for this work’s concern, public,
This appears to be true for the past as well as the present, for example Hertfordshire
in Shakespeare’s time: Carol Z. Wiener, “Sex Roles and Crime in Late Elizabethan
Hertfordshire,” Journal of Social History (1975), 38–60, and Peter Lawson, “Patriarchy,
Crime and the Courts: The Criminality of Women in Late Tudor and Early Stuart
England,” in Criminal Justice in the Old World and the New, ed. Greg T. Smith, Alyson N.
May and Simon Devereaux (Toronto: Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto,
1998).
4
The best single work on our subject from this perspective remains Martin Daly and
Margo Wilson, Homicide (Hawthorne, N.Y., 1988). For a recent study of gender and
evolutionary psychology, see David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, Gender Gap: The
Biology of Male-Female Differences (New York, 2002).
5
Peter Stallybrass and Allan White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1986), p. 5.


Introduction

3

normally male-on-male, killing apparently was declining markedly, while
“private,” domestic or other intimate killing was failing to show clear evidence of diminution. Along with these trends went a trend in treatment
by the criminal justice system towards greater punishment for major crimes
against the person and easing punishment for crimes against property, and
within the treatment of crimes against the person a shift in severity of punishment from public to private violence, most especially murder. What might

such shifts mean? Several things. For one, as has been much discussed by
historians of crime, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century decline in
recorded violence was part of a long-term social tendency for life-threatening
violence to diminish, at least in public, under both the pressures of authority
against such “disorderliness” and the gradual rise in material standards of
living and social standards of self-discipline and “civility.”6 The Victorian era
greatly developed its inheritance from previous eras, racheting up the pressures of authority and, along with improving material conditions, raising the
social standards of self-discipline. By its later years these efforts were being
rewarded by a sustained rise in most indices of “civility.” This move against
interpersonal violence meshed with a second trend to shape the treatment
of male violence, particularly that directed against women.
This second trend was a “reconstruction of gender,” begun in the eighteenth century but only coming to fruition in the nineteenth. Women were
increasingly seen as both more moral and more vulnerable than hitherto,
while men were being described as more dangerous, more than ever in need
of external disciplines and, most of all, of self-discipline. This re-imagining of
gender played a crucial if as yet unappreciated role in criminal justice history,
just as developments in the latter were contributing to the former. From this
re-imagining, as it joined with the increasing intolerance of violence, came a
tendency to see women as urgently needing protection from bad men, which
brought acts of violence against women, more often than not taking place in
the home, out from the shadows.
During the sixty-four-year reign of a woman, the treatment of women in
Britain and in the burgeoning empire became a touchstone of civilization and
national pride. As a young queen came to the throne in 1837, and after her
marriage and the start of childbearing, there was much talk of her reign as a
6

The locus classicus for theoretical discussions of this is Norbert Elias, The Civilizing
Process [orig. pub. Zurich, 1939; Eng. trans. 1978 & 1983] (rev. ed., Oxford, 2000). The
broad process of “pacification” has been examined by many historians: in particular

see Lawrence Stone, “Homicide and Violence,” in The Past and the Present Revisited
(London, 1987); James A. Sharpe, “The History of Violence in England: Some Observations,” Past & Present 108 (August 1985), 206–215; Jean-Claude Chesnais, “The
history of violence: Homicide and suicide through the ages,” International Social Science
Journal 44.2 (May 1992), 217–234. The most authoritative study of this long-term trend
and discussion of its possible causes is Manuel Eisner, “Modernization, Self-Control
and Lethal Violence: The Long-Term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in
Theoretical Perspective,” British Journal of Criminology 41 (2001), 618–638.


4

Men of Blood

new age in which “family” values would spread their influence. One writer in
praising the Queen after her marriage typically depicted a “beautiful chain,”
not the traditional one of hierarchy from Sovereign down to subject, but one
of common family life: “which should be fastened at one end to the cottage, at
the other end to the palace, and be electric with the happiness that is carried
into both.”7 Indeed, when seeking a symbol of the nation’s humanity and
morality, the use of the female national symbol, “Britannia,” was given a new
life. After Victoria’s accession several new coins were minted carrying the image of Victoria as Britannia, and the new bronze penny of 1860 had Victoria
on one side and an older version of Britannia on the other. Elsewhere, Britannia appeared more often in magazine cartoons as “the apotheosis of values
central to the dominant elites, Justice, Liberty and The Empire,” and by the
end of the century had become a matriarch conflated with Victoria herself.
Britannia became, in Peter Bailey’s phrase, “the Angel of the House, made
the Matron at large and On Guard.”8 One way it was felt in which the new
era distinguished itself from what went before was in the heightened moral
influence of women and attention to their protection (at home and around
the world) from a variety of evils, not least among them the violence of men.9
Of course, as many scholars have pointed out, this kind of protection often amounted to little more than rhetoric, and even when it did make a real

difference in ordinary lives, it conferred its benefit at a price: abroad, by
7

Quoted in John Plunkett, “Queen Victoria: the Monarchy and the Media 1837–
1876” (Ph.D. thesis, University of London 2000), in turn quoted in Regenia Gagnier,
“Locating the Victorians,” Journal of Victorian Culture 6, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 118.
8
For further information, see Roy Matthews and Peter Mellini, “John Bull’s Family
Arises,” History Today (May 1987), 20, and “From Britannia to Maggie,” History Today
(September 1988), 18.
9
One of the chief rationales of empire was its protection of women in other societies
against their own menfolk; the abolition of suttee in India being only the most famous
of many examples cited throughout the century. From another angle, the uncovering
of female suffering itself helped justify empire: as Cannon Schmitt has argued about
“Gothic” themes in Victorian writing, “women are [repeatedly] figures whose victimization calls forth Englishness from (implicitly male) spectators. This configuration,
whereby women must suffer to produce or confirm Englishness [in men], is intensified and generalized as the century progresses, reaching something of an apogee
during the Indian Rebellion.” Alien Nation: Nineteenth Century Gothic Fictions and English
Nationality (Philadelphia, 1997), p. 161.
The Victorian era also saw revived interest in the legendary national hero, King
Arthur, which focused particularly upon Arthur’s efforts to transform a warrior
society based upon bloodthirsty conquest into a realm based upon a gentler, less
combative code of conduct. Indeed, as Stephanie Barczewski has observed, “nineteenth century authors often utilized the legend to explore definitions of a new kind
of masculinity capable of functioning in an increasingly domestic sphere” – while
at the same time anxious that such a “new man” might be an emasculated one.
[Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth Century Britain (London and New York, 2000),
p. 169.]


Introduction

5

justifying the domination of other peoples, and at home, by similarly justifying male paternalism – widening gender distinctions and making the home
almost the only proper place for women, while men ran politics, business and
much of the rest of public life. This is not to mention that it also produced
new pressures on women to shape themselves behaviorally to fit the ideal
of “true womanhood” worthy of such care and protection. Yet for all this it
will not do to simply dismiss the ideal of protecting women as nothing but a
hypocritical instrument of a new kind of white male domination. As scholars
of class have shown, “Victorian values” did not simply tighten social controls;
they also challenged and reconfigured existing relationships of power. It is
past time for gender historians to heed what historians of class have painfully
learned – while not ceasing to show how ideas and ideals can be employed
to support existing distributions of power, at the same time to appreciate the
multiple effects of values and sentiments, and how they sometimes create the
conditions for real change in social relations.
In nineteenth-century Britain the seemingly endless (and well-studied)
discussions of true womanhood were paralleled by a similar (if less studied)
preoccupation with true manhood. Ill-defined terms like “manly” and “unmanly” appear everywhere in Victorian discourse, hinting at a continual
gnawing on this indigestible bone.10 If women were having their “nature”
delimited, so too in some significant ways were men.11 The concern of respectable persons to protect women more effectively easily allied with the
other concern already in evidence – to reduce violence and “civilize” men
in general (especially, though not exclusively, working-class men) in all their
social relations. In the eighteenth century manliness’ close association with
bearing arms or fighting upon insult had already loosened; the gentry for the
most part ceased carrying weapons and became more reluctant to get into
duels or other affrays. Gentlemen dramatically yielded their once-prominent
place in the rolls of violent offenders, while at the same time even plebeian
men were resorting less often to lethal violence.12 In the nineteenth century

10
See J.A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester, 1987); Michael Roper and John
Tosh, eds., Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991); Stefan
Collini, “Manly Fellows: Fawcett, Stephen, and the Liberal Temper,” in Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 170–196;
John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New
Haven, 1999).
11
On nineteenth-century restriction of male “nature,” see the brilliantly suggestive
remarks of Alain Corbin, “The ‘Sex in Mourning’ ,” in his Time, Desire and Horror:
Towards a History of the Senses (Cambridge, Mass., 1995): “the range of masculine gestures
shrank . . . tears went out of fashion. The photographic pose emphasized the calm,
gravity and dignity of men. . . . We need to listen carefully; we then perceive the depth
of male suffering. . . . The unhappiness of women flowed from the misery of men.”
12
See Robert Shoemaker, “Male Honour and the Decline of Public Violence in
Eighteenth-Century London,” Social History 26 (2001), 190–208.


6

Men of Blood

this decline continued, and efforts to reduce it further both broadened and
became more specifically gendered. More kinds of violence came to fall
within the circle of condemnation and punishment, including, more than
ever before, those directed against women. While men’s prerogatives in relation to women expanded in certain directions, they narrowed in others. In
particular in nineteenth-century England, even as much traditional tolerance
continued towards violence against women, especially wives, such violence
was increasingly investigated, censured and punished by more active – or
intrusive – agents of criminal justice. In this way, the protection of women

came to pose the question of the “reconstruction” of men, and the criminal
justice system became a site of intense cultural contestation over the proper
roles of and relations between the sexes.
Indeed, not only was male violence coming more and more to be denounced as a relic of benighted ages and a practice of barbaric peoples, but
more generally, the elevation of the family values ever more associated with
women’s natures (such as religiosity, nurturing, sensitivity to the feelings of
others and of course sexual self-denial) fed a questioning (even in the face
of a surge of imperial enthusiasm in the late decades of the century) of the
values of bravery, self-assertion, physical dominance and others traditionally
associated with masculinity. The ideal of the “man of honor” was giving way
to that of the “man of dignity,” which required in place of a determination to
avenge slights whatever the danger involved the qualities of reasonableness,
forethought, prudence and command over oneself.13 The newer expectation
for men, to manifest peaceableness and self-restraint in more and more areas
of life, well established among gentlemen by the end of the eighteenth century,
was extended in the following century in two directions: from gentlemen to all
men, and from public, male-on-male violence to “private” violence against
subordinates, dependents and the entire female gender. Both extensions met
strong resistance, from customary notions of masculinity among much of the
populace in which violence had an essential place, from similarly customary
notions of social hierarchy, and from related notions of gender relations, in
which women’s weapon of the tongue was met by men’s weapon of the fist.
Nonetheless, by the end of the nineteenth century newer standards of manliness had made great headway. In these movements and contestations, the
Victorian era was witness to a powerful “second stage” in the centuries-long
reconstruction and, to a degree, “domestication” of male ideals and, to a
lesser but nonetheless significant extent, of male behavior – one that has not
as yet received its due.14
13

See John Tosh, “The Old Adam and the New Man: Emerging Themes in the

History of English Masculinities, 1750–1850,” in English Masculinities 1660–1800, ed.
T. Hitchcock and M. Cohen (London, 1999), pp. 217–238.
14
This is not of course to argue that Victorian criminal justice victimized men or
favored women. The actual circumstances of women and men in the dock often


Introduction

7

At the same time however “Victorianism” itself was conflicted, and had
no simple approach to the “problem of men.” This was particularly so in
regard to the mistreatment of “bad” women, for heightened expectations of
female virtue and domesticity, when unmet, could mitigate the otherwiseheightened offensiveness of male violence against members of the opposite sex. In addition, the idealization of the family home made intrusion
into it by the state or other social actors even more questionable. Thus, efforts to “civilize” men often encountered cross-currents generated not simply
by a persistence of older values but by parallel changes in expectations of
women and of domestic life, making their advance a good deal less than
straightforward.
This effort to change men’s behavior, along with its accompanying conflicts
and contradictions, was played out in the working of the criminal justice
system.15 Legal institutions are of course also cultural institutions. In the
everyday implementation of the law can often be seen put into practice the
generalizations of preachers and moralists as well as of ordinary people. As
the law has a cultural dimension, cultural history also has a legal dimension.
The cloth of cultural history is woven from diverse fabrics, some of these
legal – discourse in the courtroom, among lawyers and officials, and in the
press as well as in essays and conduct books, fiction and art. A crime, a trial,
a reprieve effort, and public and private accounts of them are all potentially
revealing cultural texts. We shall attempt to see what they can suggest of

notions of violence and conceptions of manliness, and how these were put
into practice in the century of the “pax Victoriana.”
This book deals only with one area of the law – the criminal – and within
that area only one statistically minor part – the treatment of major crimes
of violence, chiefly homicide (predominantly that which had female victims)
and also rape. Homicide embraces only a very small proportion of crimes of
violence, and even rape only a part of sexual offenses. Moreover, recorded offenses, even of homicide, by no means represented all such acts, and certainly
the number of rape prosecutions in the nineteenth century only hinted at
the total amount of sexual violence against women. Yet very little can be
said with any confidence about unrecorded violence, beyond the claim that
differed sufficiently to justify differential treatment. The actual behavior of men may
possibly have merited even more punishment, and that of women less, than was
actually handed out, then and now, as Susan Edwards, among others, has argued.
[Sex and Gender in the Legal Process (London, 1996), pp. 371–372.] However, this study
is not concerned with rights and wrongs, but with historical developments and their
explanation.
15
As James Sharpe has noted, “historians are only just beginning to study how masculinity was socially and culturally constructed in early modern England, yet it would
seem that male criminality would offer a relatively well-documented way into this
problem.” [Crime in Early Modern England (rev. ed. 1999), p. 159.] This is true of more
recent periods also, as this book hopes to demonstrate.