What reader of Dickens could forget Thomas Benjamin (David Copperfield [1850]), Miss Wisk (Bleak House [1853]), or Mrs. Leeford (Oliver Twist [1838])? Actually, as Kelly Hager’s persuasive and well-written study demonstrates, Dickens buries these characters—a suitor for a divorce-like annulment in the Court of Chancery, an obstreperous women’s rights activist, and the woman whose miserable marriage prevents Oliver’s legitimacy—within his seemingly conservative plots as dark critiques of marriage as a happy ending, or as an ending of any sort. Hager’s study compellingly shifts our attention from the conventional conclusion of so many Victorian novels to those novels’ beginnings, margins, and nooks and crannies, where a surprising cast of unhappily married characters lurk.

The plots she helps us to see are structured not by courtship leading inexorably to marriage but by the engine of marriage itself. These plots, falling under Hager’s umbrella term “failed-marriage,” include a startling number of abusive, ill-assorted, adulterous, and unraveling marriages. Hager’s aim is to insert recent historical accounts of the legal upheavals and demographic complexities of Victorian marriage into literary criticism. She argues that since Ian Watt claimed that “the great majority of novels written since Pamela have continued its basic pattern, and concentrated their main interest upon a courtship leading to marriage,” critics have overemphasized the courtship and marriage plot (quoted on 21). That plot, after all, is merely “a formalization critics abstract from the messy and uncontainable history of the novel” (12–13). Dickens and the Rise of Divorce begins with a chapter surveying this misplaced critical emphasis, noting the frequency with which even progressive critics suggest that a happy marriage is the inevitable focus and closure-producing outcome of Victorian novels. Hager turns to legal history to refute this tendency, providing a useful summary of the changes to divorce law over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She argues that these legal possibilities provided the novel with an array of narrative alternatives to the courtship-to-marriage trajectory.

The remaining chapters draw their primary examples from the early and mid-career fiction of Charles Dickens. Dickens’s novels are often made to exemplify a conservative tendency to suppress independent characters through concluding marriages, but Hager shows us that each of his novels contains “at least one failed marriage and at least one plot which revolves around breaking wedlock” (7). Chapter 2, “Monstrous Marriage in Early Dickens,” focuses on marriages at the extreme margins of Dickens’s early novels—Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby (1839), and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)—the unhappy marriages that catalyze the plots of these novels, yet are only relayed to the reader briefly, and jus when her attention is distracted by other plot developments. These marriages are stories told “as if they were a shameful secret” (55). Chapter 3 turns to Dombey and Son (1848), with its very different approach to a miserable marriage, which Hager convincingly identifies as melodramatic. Edith and Paul Dombey’s marriage fails catastrophically, in flamboyantly outsized postures that demonstrate the efficacy of melodrama at exposing (though not remedying) institutional failures. Hager demonstrates that the novel employs melodrama as “the perfect vehicle for illustrating [the] limited options” that lock women into, and then out of, marriage (103). Chapter 4 shows us a new David Copperfield, observing that the novel is crammed with “women who want to leave their husbands—Dora Copperfield, Emma Micawber, and Betsey Trotwood—and their repressed plots of marital unhappiness” (135). If these women, in their different ways, long to desert their frustrating spouses, they nonetheless uniformly remain faithful to them. The faux-infidelity plot of Annie Strong, in this reading, is a Dickensian sleight of hand, a misdirection from the plots of real failed marriages that surround it.

In these chapters, Hager is often deliberately counterintuitive, but if she occasionally stretches a point, it is almost always worth it. It is hard to see Edith Dombey’s exile in Italy with her doddering Cousin Feenix as “a virtue-rewarded ending,” but this claim does highlight Edith as a rare character who escapes her parents, her husband, and Australia (97). Similarly, the presence of unhappy wives and the pseudo-divorce suit of Thomas Benjamin do not make David Copperfield “a novel of divorce,” but Hager’s searching attention to the unspoken (and unheard) plots of the novel is importantly transformative (132).

There is no need for provocative overstatement in chapter 5, “Hard Times and the Indictment of Marriage,” since this 1854 novel features the difficulty of divorce, was published just as the divorce bill was first introduced into parliament, and cannot boast even one happy marriage. Hager teases apart the novel’s two main plots, too often conflated, of Stephen Blackpool’s tragic inability to afford a divorce and Lousia Bounderby’s flight from her husband back to her father. Hager shows us that Dickens’s refusal to provide a satisfying conclusion for either plot underlines his crusading depiction of “the structural inflexibility of Victorian law and culture” (173).

One voice that is missing (in this already rich choir) is that of Victorian reviewers and critics. To what extent did they abstract the courtship plot from the many other plots they encountered? It seems to me that tracing this problem back to Ian Watt doesn’t go quite far enough. Margaret Oliphant worried in 1867 that sensation novelists, in their pursuit of sensationally failed marriages, were abandoning the two endings of which she could approve: “the romance that [ends] pleasantly in a wholesome wedding, or pathetically in a violet-covered grave” (“Novels,”Blackwoods Magazine 102 [1867]: 259).

Hager deftly shows Dickens’s diverse strategies for representing failed marriages, from plot burial, repression, and elision, to the overemphasis of Edith Dombey’s melodrama and the repetition of Emma Micawber’s “I will never desert Mr. Micawber!” It would have been helpful, however, to see the connection between these approaches to the failed-marriage plot theorized more fully. In spite of these minor reservations, scholars of both Victorian fiction and the history of marriage will profit from consulting Dickens and the Rise of Divorce. Even seasoned Dickens experts will be surprised and delighted by the details Hager’s excellent study brings to light and compelled by her reassessment to encounter Dickens—from his minor characters to his major plots—afresh.