Primary Sources

• Parliamentary Papers, Bill for the better prevention and punishment of aggravated assaults upon women and children (1853)
• Popular ballads on domestic violence and specifically on the 1853 Act (from the Bodleian Collection of Broadside Ballads)
• Frances Power Cobbe, 'Wife-Torture in England', Contemporary Review, April (1878)
• Furneaux Jordan, Character as Seen in Body and Parentage (1886), especially chapter 1
• R. v. Jackson, Queen's Bench, 1891
• Cases from the Old Bailey Online (see for example, the case of Timothy McCarthy)

Key Reading

• Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, chapter 4

Secondary Sources

Further reading on domestic violence may be found here.

• Jo Aitken, 'The horrors of matrimony among the masses" : Feminist Representations of Wife Beating in England and Australia, 1870-1914', Journal of Women's History, 19 (2007), pp. 107-31
• Joanne Bailey, 'English Marital Violence in Litigation, Literature and the Press', Journal of Women's History, 19 (2007), pp. 144-53
• J. Carter Wood, Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England, especially pp. 61-70
• Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches, especially chapter 5
• Anna Clark, ‘Humanity or Justice? Wife-beating and the Law in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Carol Smart, Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality

• Elizabeth Foyster, Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660-1857
• Drew D. Gray, Crime, Prosecution and Social Relations: The Summary Courts of the City of London in the Late Eighteenth Century, especially chapter 5.
• S. Hamilton, 'Making History with Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminism, Domestic Violence and the Language of Imperialism', Victorian Studies, 43 (2001)
• James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life
• M. Hunt, ‘Wife-Beating, Domesticity and Women's Independence in Eighteenth-Century London’, Gender and History, 4 (1992), pp. 10–33.
• Gail Savage, '"A State of Personal Danger": Domestic Violence in England, 1903-22', in Katherine D. Watson (ed.), Assaulting the Past: Violence and Civilization in Historical Context
• Greg T. Smith, 'Expanding the Compass of Domestic Violence in the Hanoverian Metropolis', Journal of Social History, 41 (2007), pp. 31-54
• N. Tomes, ‘A Torrent of Abuse: Crimes of Violence between Working-Class Men and Women in London, 1840-75’, Journal of Social History, 11 (1978), pp. 328-45
• Martin Wiener, 'Alice Arden to Bill Sikes: Changing Nightmares of Intimate Violence in England, 1558-1869', Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001), pp. 184-212

Questions

• Why was domestic abuse so prevalent in Britain?
• Was it just a working-class phenomenon?
• Did the state legitimise violence within the home?
• What were the connections between campaigns against domestic abuse and feminism?
• What do we learn about power relations in the family from studying domestic violence?
• How do attitudes to domestic violence change over the period?