At the recent Social History Society online conference, a question was posed to me as to how easy it was to evict a lodger from one’s home in Victorian England. The answer this appears to be variable. Certainly, those vulnerable could find themselves rapidly dislodged upon the whim of their landlord or landlady, with little, if any, notice given. Yet, the process of evicting a lodger was not always straightforward, with landladies/landlords facing resistance and even retaliation in their attempts to remove a lodger from their home. And, if a lodger refused to leave despite being given written notice, there was little legal recourse they could take to have the lodger forcibly removed. Therefore, it is not unsurprising to find tragic outcomes to such cases.

In August 1894, shoemaker Thomas Walker and his wife took up lodgings in the Hackney home of James and Mary Whitton.^[1] It rapidly transpired that the Walkers were going to be troublesome lodgers. ‘Contempt’ grew between Mrs Walker and her landlady after they ‘had some words’. These words, however, soon became coupled with violent actions. Three weeks into their lodgings with the Whittons, ‘On [a] Saturday morning Mrs Walker came into the kitchen, and insulted [her landlady] by throwing a pail of water over her head’. After a further exchange of words, Mary Whitton ‘struck’ her lodger. Unable to tolerate the conduct of Mrs Walker in their home any longer, Mr Walker was informed by his landlady that evening that, ‘You must find another place for your wife, for she is a dangerous one’. Responding, Mrs Walker ‘spat’ in her landlady’s face and stated, ‘I’ll leave when I like’. James Whitton then handed Thomas Walker ‘a written notice to quit’. However, this merely served to fuel the fire that was already getting out of control.

After an evening of drinking, the Walker’s returned to their lodgings at around one o’clock on the Sunday morning. Having disturbed their landlord  at this late hour, most likely having risen from bed to let the lodgers into the house, Mr Walker then directed ‘beastly language’ at James Whitton before retiring to bed. The following day, after causing a disturbance and quarrelling with the Whitton’s other lodgers, James Whitton entered the Walker’s room and remonstrated Thomas Walker for his behaviour. Retorting his landlord, Walker, ‘like a wild animal’, challenged the 33-year-old Whitton to a fight. Brushing off this request, James Whitton returned downstairs. Antagonising his landlord/landlady further, Thomas Walker ‘took two pails of water and threw them on the floor of his room’, aware that the water would come down ‘in a perfect pour’ into the Whitton’s room below. Increasingly fearful of the behaviour of their lodgers, they called in two policemen. Unfortunately for the Whittons, while the policemen expressed the opinion that Walker was ‘a rascal that ought to be punished’, they did not have the power to remove the Walkers from their home. No more than an hour after the policemen’s visit, James Whitton would be dead.

After the Police departed, the situation rapidly escalated. Thomas Walker pushed his landlady out of the back passage and into the yard, ‘[striking] her on the nose with his fist’. Screaming for her husband, who ran to her aide, he was seized by Walker who ‘struck him unmercifully about the head with a salt box’. Believing their lodger intended to kill her husband, Mary Whitton ‘seized a tin can and struck Walker about the head’. Domestic objects thus being used to commit and resist domestic violence in this instance.

The Whittons and at least one other lodger then fled to the parlour, locking the door behind them. In homes accommodating lodgers, such a lock was intended to prevent the ‘light-fingered’ lodger from stealing the household’s most valuable objects.^[2] Nonetheless, this lock did little to prevent the access of the most determined lodger. Walker ‘kicked at the door until he broke the panel in’. Convinced that his lodger meant to murder him, James Whitton jumped out of the window to get help. However, crossing a low fence, Whitton ‘overbalanced and fell’—’He was picked up dead’. At the ensuing coroner’s inquest, steering the jury, the coroner, Mr Richards, stated ‘that the case was clearly one of manslaughter. The deceased, while trying to escape from the illegal violence of the accused, and while labouring under the fear of being murdered, had lost his life’. Such a steer from the coroner was not entirely unusual and following his recommendations, ‘after a short consultation’, the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter. A warrant for Thomas Walker’s arrest was issued, whereby he was charged with ‘feloniously killing and slaying his landlord’ and sent to Newgate to await trial.^[3]

Whitton’s case was far from unique. When Mrs Mary Allen, of 17 Lomas Street, Burnley, Lancashire, informed one of her lodgers (with whom a sexual relationship had also taken place) that he was to find new lodgings on account of his behaviour making her other lodgers uneasy—“I am not going to have my house emptied for the sake of you, and this is the last meal you will have here”, he reacted by beating her to death in full view of her lodgers sat round the table eating the midday dinner Allen had prepared for them. Convicted, William Crossley was executed by hanging at Strangeways.^[4] The same fate, however, was not shared by the Whitton’s lodger. On Thursday 22^nd September 1870, in the Fourth Court of the Central Criminal Court, before Robert Malcolm Kerr, Esq., 36-year-old Thomas Walker was found ‘Not Guilty’. The defence, conducted by Mr Montagu Williams, argued that the fall and not the blows received at the hands of Walker was ultimately the cause of death.^[5] Running at the same time in another court was the infamous Waters baby farming trial and, clearly deeming Walker’s case not worth the copy, the various London newspapers reporting daily on the proceedings of the Central Criminal Court omitted any summary of Thomas Walker’s hearing

Notes

[1] Several other newspaper reports spell their surname is Whitting and, at the Old Bailey trail is referred to as Walter Whitting. However, for the sake of consistency, the name used is that given in the most detailed account of the coroner’s inquest.

[2] Charles Dickens, Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings, London: Hesperus (1863); Lesley Hoskins (2011) Stories of Work and Home in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Home Cultures, 8:2, 151-169, DOI: 10.2752/175174211X12961586699720

[3] London Evening Standard, Sept 8, 1870, p, 7; The Day’s Doings, Sept 24, 1870. p.10

[4] Manchester Evening News, Jul 31, 1894, p. 2; Manchester Courier & Lancashire General Advertiser, June 14, 1894, p. 8.

[5] Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court, 19^th September 1870, p. 60 http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/images.jsp?doc=187009190060

The week’s episode of A House Through Time ventures out of 10 Guinea Street to follow the story of its former maid-of-all-work, Hester, who upon leaving service found herself trapped in a violent marriage. For many such women, in a society that largely tolerated marital violence (to a point), their stories, like Hester’s, only come fully to light after a tragic death—in this case, her sister-in-law’s fatal fall. The coroner’s court, as this episode showed, revealed to the public intimate details of her marriage that would have otherwise remained behind closed doors. Coroners’ records are a great source for understanding Victorian working-class marriage, as the coroner was the one public body at the time who could gain unprecedented access to these homes during their investigations. Their thorough questioning, not always sticking to the matter in hand, bequeaths the researcher rich and detailed documents pertaining to all aspects of working-class marriage.

Like Hester’s experience, the coroner’s inquests I have used in my own research revealed that no room provided a sanctum from domestic violence. The bedroom served as a key arena for such abuse. As Shani D’Cruze found, working-class wives were sometimes ‘dragged’ to the bedroom for a beating after an argument broke out in the kitchen.[1] When grievances that had begun in the day overflowed into the night, as married couples came together in bed, their quarrels even deprived them of sleep.[2] Sleeping wives, having retired to bed before their husband’s return from an evening’s drinking, perhaps in an attempt to avoid strife, could find themselves hauled from their slumber by an ‘inebriated’ husband.[3] Equally, as Bourke finds, some ‘husbands might find themselves sleeping in bed alone every night if they refused to obey their wives’ or returned home drunk.[4] And, in the following case, I reveal how the marital bed itself could be used as a tool of abuse and control, its violation symbolising a complete breakdown of marital relations.

When 17 year old Rudd Wilson was found drowned in the River Gipping in December 1861, the ensuing inquest held by the Ipswich Coroner demonstrates the extent to which the bed as an object could be used by a working-class husband to assert dominance over both his wife and children. Called before the coroner’s court to provide testimony as to the events that led up to her son’s suicide, Sarah Wilson detailed the family’s tumultuous Christmas. It emerges from Sarah’s testimony that her husband, milkman Henry Wilson, had been depriving her of sleep for some time. Sarah stated, ‘He would frequently draw away the bed and the mattrass [sic] so that I should have nothing to lie on’. Sleep deprivation was, and still is, a common tactic used by abusive spouses.[5]

As the abuse escalated, Henry Wilson continued to violate the marital bed through its physical destruction. The various local newspaper reports pertaining to his son’s suicide state that on December 22, Henry Wilson had returned home ‘the worse for drink and began to ill-treat his wife, giving her several blows’.[6] When their son, Rudd, attempted to intervene, his father—having found a knife despite the best efforts of his wife to lock them away in a cupboard[7]—turned on him before proceeding upstairs to ‘rip the feather bed open’.[8] Sarah then told the coroner’s court, ‘While he was cutting open the bed my son did not hit him, but he pushed him down onto the bed, and my husband got up and swore he would kill my son’. At this point, Rudd escaped the family home and Henry Wilson turned his attention to his children’s bed, with Sarah informing the coroner’s court, ‘He even tore the children’s bed-clothes up to prevent them from sleeping’. Turning on children, as Elizabeth Foyster states, was ‘an additional tool of cruelty that husbands used against their wives’.[9] Thus, having violated both the marital bed and his children’s bed, Henry Wilson’s actions were not one of symbolised sexual violence upon his wife but an assertion of his total dominance over the domestic space and his entire family.

In such extreme cases of violence, wives and their children in working-class communities would flee to neighbours who were frequently all too willing to provide temporary shelter.[10] The coroner’s court discovered that Rudd Wilson, having fled the family home, had been taken in by friends in nearby Globe Lane that Christmas week. Another of Ipswich’s frequently abused wives, Mary Chapman of Cooper Street, stated at the coroner’s inquest held after her husband’s suicide in 1873 that he was ‘much addicted to drink [and] was very violent. [I] had often to flee for protection. [I] often ran away to escape [his] violence, and had sometimes hidden under the hedge’. However, Mary Chapman usually found a bed for the night in the nearby home of her brother-in-law, while her husband slept off ‘his drunken fit.’[11] Yet, Sarah Wilson and her other children, despite having no bed in which to sleep, remained in the house—‘I and my husband occupied the same bed until this week … I have not been undressed since Monday night last week. I have not been in the bed-room’. Where and on what she slept during this time is not noted. Nonetheless, her absence from the marital bed revealed to all those present in the coroner’s court the Wilson’s complete breakdown of marital relations.

As well as berating Henry Wilson over his ‘unfatherly manner’—which the jury concluded had played a significant role in his son’s suicide—the court, though not there to investigate the marital relations of the Wilsons, also verbally reprimanded Henry Wilson as to his conduct towards his wife. Pushing notions of the domestic ideal and reframed manliness, the middle-class coroners and their ‘respectable’ juries, like those of the magistrate courts, implored working-class men to refrain from unreasonable levels of violence against their wives. Thus, directed by the jury, the coroner addressed Henry Wilson, ‘You have shown great brutality towards your wife when you were in drink … We think you have acted a most unkind part to your wife’. Violence, they stated, was not the means by which the working-class male asserted control over his household: ‘If it were possible that I could say anything that would make an impression on you it would be to never indulge in drink to excess, and never lift your hand against your wife or against your children. You can only exercise influence over them by kind and considerate conduct and by good example … Let it be the means of making for a future of a comfortable home’. In his reply to the coroner, Henry Wilson excused himself, as did many other working-class men in defence of the violent conduct towards their wives, by stating that ‘there [was] fault on both sides’ and that his wife had provoked his actions. Provocation was a common and often successful defence of violent husbands called before the criminal courts.[12]

On hearing this, Mrs. Wilson was called again before the coroner who stated to her, ‘I hope you will take a word of advice. He is impatient: do you be conciliatory. Don’t return evil for evil. Endeavour not to check or reproach him’. Such a remark from the coroner is fairly typical, as Anna Clark asserts, ‘Women often found themselves blamed for the violence they endured’ to some measure, at least.[13] Nonetheless, in light of the ‘great brutality’ that had been heard and acknowledging Mrs. Wilson as mostly the victim in this case, the coroner did advise her to seek the readdress of the magistrates if her husband continued his violent ways. This she duly did the following month, after her husband once again assaulted her and, in consequence, Henry Wilson found himself imprisoned for six weeks.[14] Henry returned to Sarah after his imprisonment, as revealed in the coroner’s inquest held into his daughter’s suicide just four years after her brother’s suicide and by the same means. Rumours were abound regarding her father mistreating her and while he admitted to slapping her, the coroner’s court concluded that she was mostly ‘kindly treated’ by her father and that, unlike the case of her brother, he was not accountable for her suicide.[15] However, in a prior newspaper report regarding an assault upon his wife, Henry was recorded as saying he ‘told his daughter she might go and drown herself as the other b—- (meaning his son) had done’. Despite all this violence and tragic loss, Sarah, like Hester, remained with her husband. But where else could these women and their children go?

More accounts of Victorian working-class marriage can be found in my book – In Bed with the Victorians. Google preview. Publishers website.

Notes

[1] Shani D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women (UCL Press, 1998), 75-76.

[2] Amanda Vickery, “The Bed,” A History of Private Life. BBC Radio 4, Sept 28, 2009. Also see Joanne Bailey (Begiato), Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 121.

[3] D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage, 75-76.

[4] Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890-1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (Routledge, 1994), 74, 77.

[5] D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage, 68. Similarly, Joanne Begiato’s work on the marital power balance in the long eighteenth century provides an example of a violent husband ‘forc[ing] his wife to sit up at night when she was heavily pregnant’, Bailey, Unquiet Lives, 116. In D.H. Lawrence’s Son and Lovers (1913), Walter Morel in a drunken stupor throws his pregnant wife out of the house into the cold night, bolting the door. Only when he woke from his slumber did he unbolt the door. Also see, Caroline McGee, Childhood Experiences of Domestic Violence (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000), 81.

[6] Judith Rowbotham, “‘Only when drunk’: The Stereotyping of Violence in England, c. 1850-1900,” in Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850-1950: Gender and Class, ed. Shani D’Cruze (Longman, 2000), 164-65. Also see Tomes, “Torrent of Abuse,” 332-33.

[7] The action of locking away knives in the presence of a drunk and abusive husband was a common strategy employed by working-class wives at this time. Tomes, “Torrent of Abuse,” 333.

[8] Such abuse centring on the marital bed is also evident in other periods. For example, in early modern England, Laura Gowing found cases of wives being ‘dragged’ out of their beds and their bedsheets cut up by their husbands. Laura Gowing, “The Twinkling of a Bedstaff: Recovering the Social Life of English Beds 1500–1700,” Home Cultures, 11, no. 3 (2014): 283-84, doi: 10.2752/175174214X14035295691355. Meanwhile, Begiato describes a 1799 case where one husband was sewn up in the bed-clothes while he slept, in order that his wife could beat him. Bailey, Unquiet Lives, 132.

[9] Elizabeth Foyster, Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660-1857 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 137.

[10] Foyster, Marital Violence, 190; Tomes, “Torrent of Abuse,” 336.

[11] Framlingham Weekly News, Oct 18, 1873, 4; Ipswich Journal, Oct 14, 1873, 2.

[12] Martin Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal justice in Victorian England (Cambridge University Press, 2004),, 34, 171-91; Annmarie Hughes, “The ‘Non-Criminal’ Class: Wife-beating in Scotland (c.1800-1949),” Crime, History & Societies 14, no. 2 (2010): 31-54. Also see Tomes, “Torrent of Abuse,” 338-39; and, Bailey, Unquiet Lives, 117-20.

[13] Clarke, Struggle for the Breeches, 262.

[14] Suffolk Chronicle, Dec 21, 1861, 6; Suffolk Chronicle, Feb 27, 1864, 8-9.

[15] Ipswich Journal, Oct 3, 1868, 10.

It has been while since I last wrote a blog post. Indeed, since my last post I have had a baby who is now a toddler. After exploring the life cycle of working-class marriage in the Victorian era through the beds they inhabited in my Palgrave Pivot In Bed with the Victorians, I am now turning my attention to the bed itself. I have, in my continued use of the coroners’ inquests, uncovered a wide range of wooden bedsteads in the Victorian working-class home – four post, tent, french, and stump – in varying conditions. However, one surprise has been the discovery of metal bedsteads from as early as 1878 being present in some of the dwellings inhabited by the poorest of the working-class.

Metal bedsteads, as Lesley Hoskins has explored in her work on nineteenth-century inventories, only began to increase in popularity in middling homes from the 1860 as a result of mass manufacture and falling prices. The main selling point of a metal bedstead was its ‘hygienic qualities’ – since they did not harbour bedbugs.[1] Thus, they were seen as ideal for those spaces where such infestations might thrive, including the homes of the working-class. Yet, as the coroners’ inquests reveal the presence of a metal bedstead (in the cases I have found so far all comprising of iron) in the working-class home did not necessarily entail a healthy night’s sleep.

In late 1892, Elizabeth Butcher of Lowestoft (Suffolk) found herself before the authorities on two occasions. The first was a charge of neglect brought before the Police Court, and the second was a coroner’s inquest held regarding the death of her seven-year-old son—Charles Henry Butcher. The subsequent newspaper reports reveal much on the material aspects of the family’s home—88 Seago Street—and their sleeping arrangements. Struggling to make ends meet on her husband’s meagre earnings as a smacksman, Elizabeth Butcher had several lodgers occupying the front rooms while the family resided in the backrooms. Several witness at both the neglect proceedings and coroner’s inquest described the house as being in a ‘dirty’ state. The back bedroom – where the children slept —contained two ‘old iron bedstead[s]’, on which there were two straw mattresses ‘rotten with filth’. Furthermore, ‘There was not an atom of bedclothing in the house [instead] old coats and a jacket were used as a covering’. Other signs of ‘the direst poverty’ were also evident around the family’s home, as stated in Police Sergeant Roxby’s testimony in the inquest. Having gained access to the Butcher’s home after the death of Charles – a death granted unprecedented access to such homes – ‘The only food he found was a loaf of bread, a little butter, and a small quantity of port wine’. It was unsurprising then, to find that Charles, who was noted as having ‘been very weak since birth’, had struggled to thrive under such conditions. Becoming unwell and deteriorating quickly, he died suddenly from what the medical witness concluded was ‘syncope…probably accelerated by the want of sufficient nourishment’.[2]

At a similar case in Chelmsford, in 1903, regarding the death of a brassmoulder’s child, it was recorded in the newspaper report of the coroner’s inquest that: ‘The bed in which the father and mother slept was filthy. There was a lot of old coats, but no recognised bed clothing at all. There was a mattress, which was filthy dirty. Everything was filthy dirty…In the children’s room there were two iron bedsteads, with the same sort of bedclothing—old pieces and coats’.[3]

These and other coroners’ inquests which reveal iron bedsteads in working-class homes on the brink of poverty raise several questions that I have yet to answer. How did such families acquire these metal bedsteads? Perhaps, in the case of the Chelmsford brass moulder, this was somehow obtained cheaply through their employment. Certainly, one of the other owners of an iron bedstead (which was the only thing left in a bedroom consumed by a fire) was a whitesmith. As it has been suggested by Angela McShane and Joanne Begiato, the bed frames were potentially already in the property, having been left by previous inhabitants. Had they perhaps, even, been provided by landlords/landlady? Were the cheapest forms of these metal bedsteads—the metal stump bedstead—widely available on the second-hand market and thus in better times the working-class householder had been able to afford them? And, finally, one question aside from the purchase and ownership of these, why is it the household’s children generally sleeping upon the household’s metal bedstead?

[1] Phyllis Bennett Oates, The Story of Western Furniture (Landham, MD: New Amsterdam Books, 1998), p. 169.

[2] Eastern Daily Press, Oct 11, 1892; East Anglia Daily Times, Nov 21, 1892.

[3] Chelmsford Chronicle, January 13, 1903