Abstract
A letter from Tennyson to Sophia (Rawnsley) Elmhirst on day following his wedding (14 June 1850) consists simply of two short sentences: We seem to get on very well together. I have not beaten her yet (Letters 1:328), making a grotesquely playful comment on a marriage that was to bring the peace of God . . . into my life (H. Tennyson 1:329). While it seems to concede ordinariness of wife beating among humanity at large (indeed range of court cases later in century indicates that upperclass men were as likely as those lower in social scale to employ extreme cruelty to their wives [Hammerton 276]), it may assume a difference between behavior of a respectable middle-class man, beginning marriage late after long choosing a wife, and ever more visible brutalities of lower orders1, who were often driven into marriage by early impulses and consequences of pregnancy that followed. In focusing on this class of people as a reporter and an aspiring realist, Richard Jefferies was to make distinctive contributions to social record of his time as he
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