‘A perfect farce’: the practice of claiming damages for adultery in the late-Victorian divorce court

Abstract

ABSTRACT For nearly three hundred years it was a British husband’s right to claim damages for the trespass of his wife. By the mid-nineteenth century the practice was considered morally questionable, yet still it entered the statute books under the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 where it remained something of an embarrassment until 1969. Very few studies have considered what this meant in practice. This article offers a comprehensive examination of compensatory awards by analysing data from a sample of petitions filed with the divorce court between 1881 and 1900. It asks, who were the men who put a pecuniary value on their wife’s ‘ruin’ and considers why damages were more pertinent to middle-class petitioners than those above or beneath them. It explores the practical implications of how damages were calculated and applied and suggests reasons why juries frequently awarded lower sums than claimed. Finally, it considers the moral implications of a system that treated wives as chattel and continued to do so well into the twentieth century.