Combining cultural and gender history with criminal justice history, this book charts a remarkable change: the adoption of increasingly severe judicial attitudes toward male violence, particularly violence against women, in the nineteenth century. This “war on male violence” (35) resulted in the end of the duel and a decline in fistfighting, a growing number of prosecutions and successful convictions for rape as the proof required for conviction became less demanding, the stigmatization of wife beating as a social evil, and increasingly harsh treatment of wife murderers. Overall, levels of violence declined over the century, but the type of violence that seemed most resistant to change (and which therefore attracted disproportionate attention) was wife killing. At the same time, the decreasing number of women accused of murder and infanticide were treated far more sympathetically. While most of these changes have a longer history, they culminated in the Victorian period. Martin Wiener attributes them to “the cultural reconstruction of manhood and womanhood that took place in the nineteenth century” (134), as women came to be seen as morally and spiritually strong but as physically vulnerable and in need of protection, while men were viewed as ideally more rational, but, particularly in the lower class, as desperately in need of learning self-restraint.

Owing to fundamental changes in law and judicial practice—the huge reduction in the number of offenses punishable by death (which removed an impediment to prosecute), greater use of transportation and imprisonment, new statutes criminalizing offenses against the person, and the introduction of professional police forces—the judicial system was able to take “a leading role” (14) in implementing these new cultural ideals. In an era when the political process was giving more men the right to vote, the judicial process became more open to outside pressure. Following a change in the law in 1836, which meant that executions no longer had to be carried out within forty-eight hours of the sentence being pronounced, for example, public attitudes played a greater role in the pardoning process. Petitions of up to 69,000 signatures were submitted to the Home Office demanding mercy for those condemned to die. Through careful analysis of a large sample of cases of homicide and rape recorded in The Times and other newspapers, the Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court, and correspondence and petitions to the Home Office, Wiener documents the often complex histories of changing judicial and public attitudes toward the various justifications male defendants offered in mitigation of their violence. As proofs of “provocation,” various types of misbehavior by wives, including insulting words, blows, drunkenness, and even adultery, became less acceptable, with insanity being the only mitigating plea that became more effective.

This book establishes beyond doubt the importance of decisions made in the courts to our knowledge of changing understandings of gender. It equally convincingly demonstrates the significant role wider cultural developments had on decision-making processes within the criminal justice system. But this creates a potential problem for the historian of criminal justice, for once it becomes necessary to study broader cultural developments in order to understand judicial decision making, the story becomes far more complicated, since public attitudes toward violence and gender were divided and often contradictory and are difficult to compress into coherent narratives of change. Time and again, the views of judges and the Home Office toward male violence were at odds with attitudes (informed by humanitarianism, sentimentalism, and patriarchy) found in the press and among offenders’ local communities, with jurors often caught in between. Wiener is fully aware of these complexities, but he does not have the space to analyze attitudes outside the courtroom in detail. If he had, his explanation for the decline of male violence in Victorian society would perforce become less top-down, less a story of official discipline being imposed on lower-class men. In this context, developments such as the fact that the popular ritual of “rough music” was increasingly targeted at husbands who beat their wives (rather than the reverse) would become relevant. While this book convincingly documents a significant “reconstruction of gender” within the criminal justice system, it does not, and indeed could not in a book of this length and focus, fully investigate the changing understandings of manliness that lie behind these judicial practices.