Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England Carolyn A. Conley (bio) Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England, by Martin J. Wiener; pp. xvi + 296. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, £45.00, $70.00. Martin Wiener is the leading American historian of crime in Victorian England; this book on the changing attitudes toward male violence during the nineteenth century will only strengthen that assessment. He uses diverse, often previously untapped sources and asks questions which historians have all too often either ignored or incorrectly assumed were settled. For decades historians have known that violent crime in England declined significantly during the nineteenth century, but here Wiener analyzes the decline in greater depth, incorporating the methods of social science as well as cultural and literary analysis. He also draws connections to imperialism, greater centralization of the state, and new ideas about individual responsibility. As Wiener himself notes, the project is an extremely ambitious one. By examining both thought and action, he is challenging current historiographical divides. His two major sources represent a breadth rarely seen. He uses his own database of all spousal murders reported in The Times—an archive of unprecedented size and richness as a source of both fact and discourse—as well as the Home Office collection of papers related to appeals for mercy in murder convictions. This latter, previously untapped source provides a fascinating view of the ways that political, cultural, and imperial concerns were literally of life and death significance for Englishmen convicted of killing their wives. Wiener argues that the Victorian tendency to draw ever-more-exacting distinctions between masculinity and femininity has all too often been seen simply as a net loss for women. In spite of the limitations these narrow definitions may have placed on women's behavior, such strictures were equally restrictive for men, and at least in terms of criminal violence, women may actually have gained more than they lost. During the Victorian period, traditional definitions of manliness which had emphasized strength and bravery were being superseded by definitions which stressed reason and self-control. Manliness included protecting the weak, and therefore violence toward women was becoming less acceptable. By the late Victorian period, sexual violence and spousal homicide were being prosecuted more often and more successfully, and being punished more harshly, than ever before in English history—and more surprisingly, than ever since. [End Page 102] Sentences for men convicted of such violence were declining by the end of the century as part of a general trend towards more humane treatment of prisoners. One aspect of the situation that remains to be explained, however, is the fact that convictions for men accused of wife-murder peaked in the 1880s and then fell again to mid-century levels in the 1890s, an issue that Wiener does not address. Nevertheless, it does seem clear that the most serious forms of male violence against women were being treated far more seriously in the second half of the century. Wiener connects this trend to a number of other significant changes in Victorian England. First, as conceptions of national identity evolved, violence towards women was increasingly portrayed as a sign of inferiority and as behavior that was distinctly un- English. This connection between brutality towards women and Otherness was crucial in one of the most significant changes in judicial practice. Discovering one's wife with another man was traditionally regarded as the sort of provocation that might reduce a charge of murder to mere manslaughter, but during the nineteenth century, violent responses to suspected infidelity were increasingly portrayed as typical of the French, and English judges and juries grew correspondingly less tolerant of (though perhaps no less sympathetic towards) husbands who used violence to avenge such betrayals. That Englishmen were kind to women was also one of the many rationales offered to justify imperial conquests: the queen's troops were not so much oppressing native men as they were protecting native women. Wiener also argues that the judicial treatment of men who committed crimes against women reflects the larger trend towards centralization of government. As Peter King has demonstrated, in earlier centuries...