High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  It was Stephen’s defence of the inferiority of women in marriage that caused most outrage. He said it was important that marriages should be incapable of being dissolved, because otherwise women would be the slaves of their husbands, rather than merely subordinate to them. ‘A woman loses the qualities which make her attractive to men much earlier than men lose those which make them attractive to women,’ he wrote.164 Fitz at this stage was forty-four, with the build and aspect of an all-in wrestler, it should be noted; but was also exceptionally happily married. ‘The tie between a woman and young children is generally far closer than the tie between them and their father. A woman who is no longer young, and who is the mother of children, would thus be absolutely in her husband’s power, in nine cases out of ten, if he might put an end to the marriage when he pleased. He then sets out his view of the marriage contract which he says is ‘as clear as that of a proposition in Euclid’:

  Marriage is a contract, one of the principal objects of which is the government of a family.

  This government must be vested either by law or by contract in the hands of one of the two married persons.

  If the arrangement is made by contract, the remedy for breach of it must either be by law or by a dissolution of the partnership at the will of the contracting parties.

  Law could give no remedy in such a case. Therefore the only remedy for breach of the contract would be a dissolution of the marriage.

  Therefore, if the marriage is to be permanent, the government of the family must be put by law and by morals in the hands of the husband, for no-one proposes to give it to the wife.165

  Stephen proclaims that ‘Mr Mill is totally unable to meet this argument,’ which given how far it rests on assertion and a series of begged questions is hardly to be wondered at. However, it would not be Mill, who died on 8 May 1873, but Mrs Fawcett, who would seek to answer him.

  Stephen was not impressed by her attempt. In the second edition of his book, published in 1874, he allowed her a footnote in response to a point she had made about a man who exercised his legal right to the extreme showing himself as acting in ‘a very brutal manner’. Stephen observed, with what his editor terms ‘brusque impatience’, that ‘this is as true as it is irrelevant. It is the only remark of Mrs Fawcett’s which I think it necessary to notice, and I notice it only as an illustration of what she understands by argument.’ We can deduce that what Fitz understood by argument, when he was unequal to someone else’s, was to be offensive in return.

  Mrs Fawcett derided the book as ‘the latest revelation of the Gospel according to St Stephen’, and suggested that the motto ‘this is the way, walk ye in it’ should be printed ‘in letters an inch high on the top of every page.’166 She added that ‘the reader feels as he studies these passages that the author is shouting in his ear.’ She questioned Stephen’s belief in the submission of women, as the weaker sex, to their husbands as a precept of the common law, asking ‘is the wife to obey the husband when, in obeying him, she does something she believes to be wrong? If the answer is “yes”, the possession of a husband may become the screen of all kinds of iniquity, from murder and robbery downwards. If the answer is “no”, everything is conceded that the advocates of equality in marriage demand, for many wives may and do think it wrong to encourage a spirit of despotism in their husbands by invariably allowing the husband’s authority to be supreme.’167

  Mrs Fawcett rejected Stephen’s metaphor of the family as a ship, with the husband as captain. She likened it to a government, with husband and wife as two chambers of Parliament, and the children being admitted to the conclave once they were old enough. Decisions would be debated and agreed rather than handed down. ‘The law sanctions the ship-captain theory, but the moral sentiment of many persons is superior to the law, and therefore there are many happy marriages.’168 In unhappy marriages there was no easy escape from abuse of authority. ‘The indissolubility of marriage renders all these so-called parallels entirely fallacious,’ she wrote, ‘and makes it necessary for the protection of the wife that she should not be either actually or legally subjugated to her husband.’169 She ridiculed Stephen’s premise that in return for submission women received protection. ‘That is to say, in return for submission married women get the protection of losing all control over their own property; they also have the inestimable advantage of possessing no legal right to the guardianship of their own children even after the death of their husbands.’ Twisting the knife, she pointed out that ‘in return for the submissiveness of women, little girls of twelve years old are, for the purposes of seduction, legally regarded as women – a most noteworthy instance, this, of the kind of protection the present state of the law affords.’

  She noted also that irrespective of what ‘protection’ men afforded their wives, the legal system seemed to treat with excessive leniency assaults by men upon their wives. She quoted an article in The Times from April 1872 – ‘every day the reports of our police courts and of our criminal tribunals still repeat the tale of savage and cowardly outrages upon women: and every day we have reason to marvel, not without a mixture of indignation, at the leniency with which some of our judges treat offences of this kind.’170 The article had concluded, with deep disapproval, that an Englishman, ‘within certain limits, may beat his wife as much as he pleases.’ Fawcett quoted the same newspaper, four months later, observing that ‘recent trials have revealed a prevalent indifference to the maltreatment of women, which is a heinous disgrace to English nature.’171

  Fawcett noted that in the better classes women had small favours shown them – ‘being “seen home” from evening parties, being helped first at dinner, having chairs offered, doors opened, umbrellas carried and the like’ – but that they more than returned the compliment ‘by sewing on buttons, working slippers, and making puddings for the mankind of their domestic circles.’ However, she noted that ‘it is a small consolation for Nancy Jones, in Whitechapel, who is kicked and beaten at discretion by her husband, to know that Lady Jones, in Belgravia, is always assisted in and out of her carriage as if she were a cripple. It is a small consolation to a widow whose children are taken from her and handed over to the guardianship of a stranger, to know that a gentleman will never pass out of the room before her, and that she may always take the inner side of the pavement.’172

  She concluded that:

  if women are to understand that the courtesies they now enjoy are simply yielded to them on condition of their legal and actual subjection to men, there are few women who would not at once declare that they were being grossly overcharged for the article, and also that these small privileges become utterly valueless unless they are completely voluntary in their character . . . it is quite an appalling thought to a woman in whom the English virtue of resistance to arbitrary authority is strongly developed, that, although she is ignorant of the fact, she is daily receiving concessions and having a thousand things done for her on condition of a submission which she never intends to give. When the settling day comes, she will have nothing to meet the demands of her creditors.173

  She conceded, though, that Stephen’s case against equality for women was ‘one among the many proofs of the growing importance of the movement for the emancipation of women’ because he was such ‘heavy artillery’. She contrasted his with the weak arguments deployed in debates on female suffrage in the Commons by the Home Secretary, which were so pitiful as to merit no reply.

  It was clear by the 1870s that for most educated men – with the exception of the odd hardcore feminist such as Mill or Sidgwick – the duty of their class to stabilise society through measures of reform had been fulfilled by giving all men the vote. Given the extent to which this had alarmed the likes of Carlyle, Stephen and Ruskin, and given the reservations about it felt by Arnold, the final stage of reform – inviting women into the political process, and ending their role as the chattels of men – would take much more effort yet, as Fawcett seems to have understood. Fortunately for them, there were other cru
cial areas of life – such as philanthropy, which we shall explore in Chapter 16 – where they could, despite the disabilities inflicted upon them by men, make their mark.

  VII

  For all the aggressive modernity of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, aspects of medieval life still lingered. Yet this was a period of rapid change and – as would be seen with reform of the franchise, and with women’s rights – ancient prejudices and practices could be discarded without so much as a backward glance. Until the 1860s, however, the way in which society dealt with crime and meted out punishments remained atavistic, even though a debate about abolishing public executions had been going on for over twenty years. Richard Monckton Milnes had said in the Commons in 1845 that ‘executions in this country formerly were conducted as spectacles for the people. It was supposed that they would work on the public mind, to the prevention of crime.’ He doubted this was still so, and claimed that ‘the progress of civilization’, which had stopped corporal punishments from being conducted in public, demanded the same be done to capital sentences.

  He argued that ‘the Judge who passed sentence on the prisoner should also be authorised to name the place (within the walls of the prison) of his execution. He proposed that the execution should take place in the presence of the authorities, and also that the reporters of the public press should be admitted.’ He added: ‘Public executions were defended on the ground that they improved the morals of the people. This could hardly be the case, when they reflected that those who attended executions were the dissolute and the desperate, and they were looked at as a sort of gladiatorial exhibition, and were visited as a kind of barbarous diversion.’174

  Dickens was prominently associated with the cause of abolishing public executions. On 13 November 1849 he attended the hanging of Frederick and Maria Manning outside Horsemonger Lane gaol in Southwark. The Mannings – he a career criminal, she a Swiss–French domestic servant – had been convicted of the murder of a wealthy friend, Patrick O’Connor, whom they killed after inviting him to dinner, and buried under their kitchen floor. Apprehended with his money, they were soon convicted, and became the first married couple to be hanged for 150 years. Dickens was so appalled by what he saw that he wrote twice to The Times about it: ‘I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution could be imagined by no man.’175 It ‘made my blood run cold,’ he wrote, not of the hangings themselves, but of the sounds of the crowd of ‘thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind’. The bloodless reaction to the fate of the Mannings was for Dickens as ‘if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world.’ He called public execution a ‘moral evil’ to be ‘rooted out’. It is not recorded what he thought of what happened to their corpses after they were cut down: a cast was made of their skulls for the purpose of phrenology (the phrenologist found them consistent with the skull shape of other murderers), and a sample taken of their brains.

  The Times paid tribute to Dickens as ‘a great novelist, whose knowledge of the human heart and its workings under the infinite varieties and accidents of modern life needs not our praise’. However, it warned against his radical prescription: ‘It appears to us a matter of necessity that so tremendous an act as a national homicide should be publicly as well as solemnly done. Popular jealousy demands it. Were it otherwise, the mass of the people would never be sure that great offenders were really executed . . . the mystery of the prison walls would be intolerable.’ Dickens wrote again five days later to enlarge upon the depravity of the spectacle: Calcraft, the hangman, he said ‘should be restrained in his unseemly briskness, in his jokes, his oaths, and his brandy.’176 He called for a ‘witness jury’ of twenty-four members of the public, drawn from all classes, to be summoned to executions if held in private, and for prison officials to attend too; and for all the bells of churches in the town to be tolled during the hour while the body hung at the end of the rope, and all the shops to be closed ‘that all might be reminded of what was being done’. The arguments made no impact for some years. However, by the 1860s the spectacle seemed at odds with the society the Victorians thought they were creating. The Commons discussed the matter on 23 February 1864 on a motion of John Hibbert, the Liberal MP for Oldham, the day after five foreign brigands had been hanged at Newgate for piracy and murder when attacking a British ship. Hibbert saw them as a ‘disgusting display’ that lagged behind the other reforms in the penal system over the preceding half-century.177

  Dickens had been present too, describing the occasion as ‘a diabolical fair’.178 Public hangings were, Hibbert argued, the relic of a time in which women were burnt for witchcraft and prisoners tortured for refusing to talk. He disputed that the spectacles were a deterrent. ‘As to the criminal classes,’ he added, ‘it was found that they were always largely represented on such occasions, and that the spectacle had very far from a wholesome influence upon them. In the victims themselves, the publicity of the execution tended to produce bravado and hardness of heart.’179 Most MPs were familiar with the scenes that attended hangings at Newgate. Hibbert recounted the hanging of two murderers at Kirkdale, near Liverpool in 1862, the crowd for which was delivered by special trains, and to which people walked miles from rural Lancashire and Cheshire ‘to gratify their depraved appetite’. The railway companies, ever open to a further profit, were always alert to hangings, which further reduced the respect in which they were held by the political class. Hibbert observed that women and children were present, and ‘the hours previous to the execution were passed in dissipation and debauchery’. His seconder, George Hadfield, the Liberal MP for Sheffield, radically suggested that as there had been no rise in forgery since it ceased to be a capital crime, the government might look at the point of having a death penalty.

  Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, felt the public hanging of the pirates had been a useful exercise, and disputed that such spectacles were demoralising. The crowds were, he argued, only so large because hangings had become markedly less frequent than they used to be; and crowds of lower class people behaved disgustingly wherever they were to be found, at a hanging or any other spectacle. ‘Does that show that the effect of an execution is altogether lost?’ he asked.180 It was perhaps as well that so many criminals were at such events, for ‘who can tell in how many instances a deep and lasting impression may be made upon the minds even of some of the most criminal class, which may check them in a career of crime, and, inducing them to abstain from the course to which they are prompted by passion, vicious habits and early association, tend to rescue them from the same ignominious end?’

  Lord Henry Lennox had gone to Newgate the previous morning to see whether the accounts of executions that he had read were accurate. He found they were, and was disgusted. ‘Anything more utterly unsuccessful, as an attempt to convey a moral to the people, he had never seen’.181 He read at length from that morning’s Daily News about ‘the obscene and blasphemous cries of the crew engaged in mocking the preachers, the fierce cheers with which the constant fights were encouraged, the screams and whistling, the hideous groans and indecent songs, which, as an open expression of abandoned depravity and rampant sin, has probably not been exceeded since the world began.’ Because hangings were usually held on a Monday, Lennox was angry that the Sabbath was routinely violated by people arriving during Sunday to get a decent view, and engaging in depravity of one sort or another. He asked Grey to move the day of executions, if he insisted on retaining them as a public spectacle.

  Some wished to discuss abolishing the death penalty entirely. The range of crimes for which someone could be hanged had been steadily reduced, not least because so few were executed for forgery, burglary, sheep-stealing or other former capital crimes that it acted as an encouragement to commit the offences. William Ewart, the MP for Dumfries, argued that so many now were acquitted of murder because juries did not think they should hang that the capital sentence had been brought into disrepute. Acquitta
l rates for capital crimes had become so high that someone tried for one was four-and-a-half times more likely to get off than someone being tried for a non-capital one. He quoted a newspaper that said ‘punishment for murder has become a lottery’.182 He alleged that 800 infanticides were committed each year, but there were no prosecutions as the crime carried the death penalty. Grey was against abolition, and believed the country was too: in that he was almost certainly right, at a time when even liberals such as Mill and Dickens felt there were cases when the penalty of death was the only suitable punishment.

  The preparations for the execution in front of Newgate, on 14 November 1864, of a German murderer, Franz Müller, reveal the inconvenience of the public execution, never mind its pornographic effect. ‘The excitement caused by the near approach of the execution is almost unprecedented,’ The Times reported on that same morning:183

  From 3 o’clock until 5 yesterday afternoon, although the day was wet, a crowd of people had assembled in front of the prison. Most of the crowd were then dispersed by a heavy shower of rain, but only to collect again on its cessation, and at 8 o’clock last evening the Old Bailey was all but impassable. In the open space opposite the gaol, and, indeed, throughout the whole length of Old Bailey from Ludgate Hill to Newgate Street, formidable barriers have been erected, about 20 feet apart, to lessen the pressure of the crowd, and especially to prevent the fearful surging which takes place on extraordinary occasions of this kind, and to which the weak are liable to succumb.