by E. H. Young
In 1935, Herbert raised a Member’s Bill for what would become the Matrimonial Causes Act, 1937 (which didn’t come into effect until January 1938), and wrote a thorough reflection on its progress through Parliament in 1937’s The Ayes Have It. The law, thus, changed at around the time at which Chatterton Square is set. Cruelty, rape, incest, drunkenness, insanity and desertion were now legally viable reasons for a wife to petition for divorce, with or without adultery. These had previously been grounds only for ‘judicial separation’, described in Divorce and its Problems as ‘giv[ing] the spouses the existence of single persons with the status of married persons’.
Mr Blackett’s faults are many, but they do not include rape, incest, drunkenness, insanity, desertion or adultery (though he constantly believes that other women might be tempted into this act with him). Nor is he cruel as it would be defined by a court of law.
We might expect the law of the 1930s to view cruelty only as a physical act, but the legal definition did include mental cruelty. Herbert’s bill attempted to nuance a definition of cruelty in the context of marriage but this was removed before the act was passed. Herbert wrote:
The expression ‘cruelty’ means such conduct by one married person to another as makes it unsafe, having regard to the risk to life, limb, or health, bodily or mental, for the latter to continue to live with the former, or as is calculated to cause and has caused the latter prolonged and unnecessary mental distress
Again, though one could argue that Mrs Blackett has lived with ‘prolonged and unnecessary mental distress’, any case based even on this definition would fall down at the word ‘calculated’. Thoughtless cruelty of intense selfishness does not feature.
The inclusion of ‘desertion’ is presumably the criterion that Mrs Fraser has in mind when her husband gets back in touch and suggests a divorce. The Matrimonial Causes Act is never mentioned in Chatterton Square, but it raises possibilities vital for the plot that would overwise not have existed. The act stipulated that desertion would have to be for at least two years – a target easily passed by Mr Fraser.
Though now legal, divorce had not lost its moral and social stigma in the eyes of some – in the eyes, for instance, of Miss Spanner.
“You don’t mean you’re going to divorce him?” Miss Spanner said with horror.
“That’s what he wants me to do.”
“Don’t do it,” Miss Spanner begged earnestly. “Don’t do it.”
The vulnerability of Miss Spanner’s position in the house is highlighted by her response, and the morality she has inherited from an unhappy childhood, means she believes she cannot live under the same roof as a divorced woman.
“And you said I was here for life!”
“And aren’t you?” Rosamund asked sadly.
“Well, is it likely?” Miss Spanner asked in the loud voice of her distress and went away without another word.
Young’s own domestic situation was rather less conventional than those of her characters. She was widowed in the First World War, then moved to London to live with her lover Ralph Henderson, who had been a close friend of her husband. He was also married, but his wife seems to have got on board with the arrangement. Young lived with them both, and lived (unmarried) with Henderson after his wife died. Chatterton Square doesn’t hint at any marital option resembling Young’s reality.
It’s unclear at the end of the novel how Mrs Fraser’s and Mrs Blackett’s respective marriages will fare. One husband has returned; one has been told the full truth. And the reader, of course, knows that the war, that Mr Blackett was certain wouldn’t happen, was on the horizon. We end this brilliant novel leaving all the characters to their uncertainties.
Simon Thomas
Series consultant Simon Thomas created the middlebrow blog Stuck in a Book in 2007. He is also the co-host of the popular podcast Tea or Books? Simon has a PhD from Oxford University in Interwar Literature.
