Divorcees of History

If you check the Wikipedia article for the Victorian pre-Raphaelite painter Jane Benham Hay, you read this about her personal life: "Jane married artist William Hay in 1851 and they had a son the following year. However, their marriage did not last long as Jane left London for Florence in the mid-1850s. Around the same time, she met Francesco Saverio Altamura...They married and had a son together, Bernardo Hay (1864–1934)." If you ask art historian experts, such as Dr. Jan Marsh , you learn that "she left her husband William Hay, said to have been a rather middle- of-the-road artist, and their child, to run away to Italy where she lived with an artist called Francesco Altamura and had more children. But really much of this is guesswork." In other words, there simply hasn't been much information available about her personal life, so people made assumptions about a romantic scandal. But what happens if we look at the words of Jane Hay herself in her affidavit fo...

The case of Mary Ann Gray, from 1876, is mostly intriguing because of one specific aspect of her identity: Mrs. Gray identifies both herself and her husband as "deaf and dumb." She is careful to specify that both parties are literate, and that she herself was educated at the Doncaster School for the Deaf, an institution founded in 1829 that is still going strong today. Her daughter from her first marriage, Mary Peel, is not identified as either hearing or Deaf. The official court record, intriguingly, makes no mention of Mary Ann's lack of hearing; it's an entirely standard grant of divorce and protection of earnings based on her husband's cruelty and abandonment. We only learn about it from Mary Ann's own words in her sworn affidavit. Mary Ann's description of the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband also reflects their deafness: "He threatened to kill me and told me by signs that if I did not leave him he would kill me....

Sometimes my British Victorian ladies have more in common with my Roman women than they might imagine. Take Hannah Gidney. Hannah and her husband Henry, a timber dealer married in August of 1874. In June of 1875, they welcomed a baby daughter. Hannah's husband sent her and the baby for a few weeks to the countryside in July to recover from the birth and "get some fresh air." By late July, she had received news from her mother-in-law that her husband had left for Australia. In August, a few weeks later, she took up a position as wet nurse to the new baby of the Earl and Countess of Eldon.   Wet nursing was reasonably common if somewhat controversial among the Victorian upper classes of the time, and generally involved impoverished lower-class mothers caring for the babies of the elite, sometimes at the expense of the health and nurture of their own children.   Hannah was able to parlay this position into serving as a nurse and eventually the head nurse of the seven Eldon...

Today we've got two more dueling husband-wife accounts, but it's a little easier to piece together a coherent story, because each spouse simply omits discussion of certain aspects that might prejudice the judge against them. Julia and Thomas Fleming, a widow and widower, were married in 1885; she sought a divorce in 1887. They lived together before marriage, and, according to Thomas' affidavit, shortly after the marriage she told him that she regretted marrying him and wished they had just stayed "friends." According to Julia, soon after their marriage she discovered that Thomas was a "habitual drunkard" and prone to physical and verbal abuse. According to Thomas, soon after their marriage Julia began leaving the house and spending time with other people and other gentlemen, including eating all her meals, even on Christmas Day, at a house called the "Aubury," (possibly a brothel) and having mysterious carriages pick her up at midnight. Ev...

Very rarely, I find a case which contains affidavits from both wife and husband, rather than just the wife's testimony. However, this bit of good fortune gives us a more holistic view of the case, so we don't have to rely solely on assuming that the wife is testifying truthfully about the state of the marriage and her financial affairs. In the case of Annie and Christopher Bellew Richards (1881), the double affidavits only make matters more complicated, because they directly contradict each other on almost every point. Our only somewhat objective source here are the comments of the judge in this case, who found Christopher less believable than Annie under cross-examination. Regardless of the truth - what's amazing and useful about this case? We begin, in both accounts, with a somewhat whirlwind courtship and marriage in Brussels - whether due to Annie's insistence (C's version) or Christopher's (A's version). Soon after the marriage Annie found a love ...

Sometimes you start reading a Victorian divorce case and you can see the train wreck coming from a long, long while way, and you want to shout, "No, Martha Mary! Run away fast now!" Only all this happened 150 years ago and everyone involved is long since dead and so I just keep reading, wincing, and making notes for my database. In 1864, the widow Martha Mary Evans, mother of six children under 14, fell in love with a handsome young widower named Robert Raymes, a single father of four children. Now, while the late Mr. Evans had died suddenly and intestate, he left Martha and their kids a substantial amount of property, in particular the three oil and colour shops he had founded, which, despite their somewhat confusing name, were "victualling stores" or, essentially, your local neighborhood liquor and beverage mart. Martha had gone on to open up a fourth shop herself. Martha was a prudent woman, so before her marriage to Robert she arranged for, essentially, a pr...

"From the date of my husband leaving me to the present time (1871) he has sent me no money save and except that some months since he enclosed in a letter to me the smallest silver Coin of the United States of America of the value of about two pence in English money..." Larry Schwimmer helped me to discover that the coin in question was a U.S. trime , or three-cent coin.

I love the moments in historical research when you can really attach a clear numerical valuation to someone's feelings about a relationship: In 1866 the Hon. Wilfred Brougham obtained an order from the divorce court for restitution of his conjugal rights. His wife, Frances Isabella Brougham, paid him 600 pounds a year not to enforce it, or about $100K a year in modern terms. More details on the sordid marriage of the Broughams - when they married she (an Italian heiress, apparently), settled 1500 pounds a year upon him; he contributed nothing. They were separated for about 20 years before they tried actually divorcing, at which point the Queen's Proctor stepped in, investigated, and denied the divorce on the grounds of collusion and 20 years of mutually tolerated adultery. When Frances, still technically married, died in Paris in 1901, she left her entire estate, some 4580 pounds, to a "single woman, Diana Bexley, aged 25." I think but cannot confirm that Mi...

Many of us are fans of Victorian melodrama - Charles Dickens, the Brontes, etc... - and assume that a lot of the crazy shenanigans in there are just for dramatic effect. Gather around and listen to the entirely true tale of Eliza Durussel, based on her court affidavit for divorce and the protection of her property, and a news article abo ut her aunt.  WARNING: Discussions of domestic abuse and violence follow. In 1868, Eliza Hacker, the 30-year-old daughter of prosperous British parents Charles and Mary Ann, was sent by her family to Paris to study French. Eliza fell madly in love with the brother of her French tutor, a 26-year-old engraver named Mr. L. Edouard Durussel, and married him in a runaway elopement, without the consent of her parents or any financial support beyond her own one share in the Great Western Railway. Edouard sold that share for 120 pounds and used 110 pounds of it to pay off his debts, before moving with Eliza to Berne, Switzerland, where he set up as an en...

I'm Anise K. Strong, Associate Professor of History at Western Michigan University and author of  Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman World (Cambridge, 2016) . Currently, I'm working on a new research project, "Women's Divorce and Successful Societies," the first global comparative history of female-initiated divorces and their social consequences. I am doing four main case studies for this project: the Roman Empire from 100 BCE-300 CE, T’ang Dynasty China from 618-820 CE, the Ottoman Empire from 1500-1700 CE, and Great Britain from 1857-1930 CE. Each of these particular societies featured comparatively frequent wife-initiated legal divorces, as well as a high level of economic prosperity, political success, and social stability. While not unique, these four cultures are quite rare in their legalization of women’s marital rights, particularly since they all preceded or followed more restrictive and misogynist systems of marriage. By comparing the evidence on divo...