Of Victorian scandals, the fog of morality and the unequal status of women

There is something about the great mid Victorian moralistic paintings which I like.

They tell a story and while I don’t always like what they say there are nevertheless a wonderful insight into a period I write about a lot.

So to the painting or strictly speaking the triptych, painted in 1858 by Augustus Leopold Egg.

It tells the story of a wife’s infidelity and the repercussions on her, her husband and their children.

The title uses an imaginary diary entry, August the 4th - Have just heard that B— has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents.

I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!

The central panel is the moment that the affair comes out into the open while to the left is the fate of the mother and youngest daughter under the arches by the Thames, and to the right the scene of the older children alone in a room consoling themselves in prayer.

Here then are the three key episodes with Misfortune in the centre, Despair to the left and Prayer to the right.

And all three are rich with symbolism if you know what to look for and can make the links.  So while the drama unfolds, two girls are momentarily distracted from the fragile house of cards they are building balanced on a book by the French novelist Honire de Balzac.

A half-eaten apple that emblem of temptation lies near the wife and the remaining half sits on the table by the husband  stabbed through with a knife.  And there is much more on all three paintings.

Now I do not pretend to have picked these details up and came across the references in Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace The Private Diary of A Victorian Lady* which I am rereading after a break of a few years.

It is my beach book for the week and tells the story of woman’s brief affair with a younger man who then runs a mile when the case the aggrieved husband sues for divorce using the new divorce laws.

The 1850s were still very much a period when married woman had few rights. .

 She had “no legal existence, her being is absorbed into her husbands.”**"

She could not undertake legal proceedings or keep her earnings or spend her own money, and “has no legal right even to her own clothes or ornaments; her husband may take them and sell them as he pleases.”***

Divorce had been made easier in 1857 and the new Divorce Act included provisions for the protection of married women’s property, allowed wronged wives to keep their earnings and relaxed the standard of proof for adultery.

It was a step forward and in the first five months of 1858 180 petitions were brought before the Divorce Court. The Lord Chancellor announced himself pleased and commented that “Now all classes of people are placed upon the same footing.”

All of which might have been fine for the Brighton solicitor, but was of little use for the factory hand in Manchester or the agricultural labourer here in Chorlton.

And there is the rub.  The new law continued to reflect the needs and interests of the propertied and moneyed classes.

Not only was a recourse to law still expensive but it remained weighted I favour of men.  “The new law stipulated that to secure a divorce, a husband needed to establish just his wife’s infidelity, where as a woman needed to prove that her husband was not only unfaithful but also guilty of desertion, cruelty, bigamy, incest, rape, sodomy or bestiality.  

Because she might bear another man’s child, the unfaithful wife threatened certainties about paternity, kingship, succession and inheritance, the underpinnings of bourgeois society.”****


Now I will not tell you what happened, mainly because I haven’t finished it but it is as they say a good read.

And for me it is full of references to life in mid Victorian Britain, so in the course of the story you are taken down the medial theories about sexual health, the fad with water cures and much more.  Added to this there are rich references from the writers of the period including Darwin.

And for me it is a perfect balance to the work I have done on the history of our own rural township at the same time.

Pictures; from the triptych, Past and Present by Augustus Leopold Egg, 1858

*Summerscale Kate Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace The Private Diary of A Victorian Lady, Bloomsbury 2012,
**Mrs Norton, Letter to the Queen, 1855
***ibid Mrs Norton
**** ibid, Summerscale, page 123