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³ Cited in Anon., The matrimonial preceptor, p. 125.Google Scholar

⁴ See for example Catherine, Hall, White, male and middle-class: explorations in feminism and history (New York, 1992), esp. pp. 97, 119–20, 177, 195Google Scholar, and more broadly Leonore, Davidoff and Catherine, Hall, Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class 1780–1850 (Chicago, 1987)Google Scholar. ‘Even in those cases where women had a direct financial stake in the family enterprise, their legal status prevented them from active partnership’, Hall and Davidoff argue. ‘It is not surprising that women were regarded as poor credit risks given their legal disabilities’, they conclude. ‘This general lack of commercial credibility was an important factor in the limited scale of women's business operations’ (pp. 277–8)Google Scholar. For the growing historiographical debate on the purchase of separate spheres ideology, see Amanda, Vickery, ‘Golden age to separate spheres?: a review of the categories and chronology of English women's history’, Historical Journal, XXXVI, 2 (1993), 383–414.Google Scholar

⁵ William, Blackstone, Commentaries on the laws of England (4 vols., Oxford, 1765–1769), I, 442Google Scholar. Blackstone was hardly the first legal writer to underline the legal disabilities of married women. The anonymous author of a much-cited treatise was equally emphatic at the beginning of the century. ‘A Feme Covert in our Books is often compared to an Infant, both being persons disabled in the Law, but they differ much; an Infant is capable of doing any Act for his own Advantage; so is not a Feme Covert’, he opined. Anon., Baron and feme: a treatise of law and equity concerning husbands and wives (London, 1738 edn), p. 8.Google Scholar

⁶ Kent, Susan Kingsley, Sex and suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (Princeton, 1987), p. 27Google Scholar; Shanley, Mary Lyndon, Feminism, marriage, and the law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (Princeton, 1989), p. 8.Google Scholar

⁷ Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, What I remember (New York, 1925), p. 62Google Scholar. Much the same tone is conveyed in, for example, Frances Power Cobbe's tract on married's women's rights, Criminals, idiots, women, and minors: is the classification sound? (London, 1869).Google Scholar

⁸ See esp. Lloyd, Bonfield, Marriage settlements, 1601–1740: the adoption of the strict settlement (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar, and Susan, Staves, Married women's separate property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).Google Scholar

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¹⁵ A list of debtors who have been received into the gaol of the county of Lincoln 1 Jan. 1810–April 1823, London, Public Record Office (P.R.O.), PCOM 2/309; Lancaster gaol debtors register 1792–97, London, P.R.O., PCOM 2/440; Lancaster Castle census, 1851, microfilm copy in Lancaster Reference Library. The figures for Lincoln were 7 women among 150 debtors; those for Lancaster were 5 women among 234 debtors in 1793 and 3 women among 109 debtors in 1851.

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²⁴ Anon., Baron and feme, p. 285Google Scholar. This case directly precedes that of the deserted wife of the ‘ordinary working Man’, serving to underline the socioeconomic distinctions to be observed in applications of the law of necessaries.

²⁵ See the recent argument along these lines in Kent, D. A., ‘Gone for a soldier: family breakdown and the demography of desertion in a London parish, 1750–91’, Local Population Studies, XLV (1990), 27–42Google Scholar, and Pamela, Sharpe, ‘Bigamy among the labouring poor in Essex, 1754–1857’, The Local Historian, XXIV, 3 (1994), 139–44.Google Scholar

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²⁸ Poovey, , Uneven developments, pp. 62–70Google Scholar provides a lucid summary of the separation; she notes Norton's early entanglement in debt litigation on p. 67. A trade protection society alerted its members to Norton's refusal to accept liability for her debts ‘as she is a femme covert’ in 1848. City of London Trade Protection Circular, 6 Oct. 1848.

²⁹ Caroline, Norton, English laws for women (London, 1856)Google Scholar, in Hoge, James O. and Jane, Marcus (eds.), Selected writings of Caroline Norton (Delmar, NY, 1978), pp. 55–90.Google Scholar

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³¹ Musselwaite v. Peel, 11 Aug. 1837, London, P.R.O., PALA 9/1/17. Significantly, this decision was rendered decades before legislation was passed giving magistrates' courts substantial powers to intervene in marital disputes. For this subsequent development, see George, Behlmer, ‘Summary justice and working-class marriage in England, 1870–1940’, Law and History Review, XII 2 (1994), 229–75.Google Scholar

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³³ The Rev. Hales v. Clarke, 31 Aug. 1838, P.R.O. PALA 9/1/19.

³⁴ The County Courts Chronicle, 1 Apr. 1858, p. 83.

³⁵ Ibid. 1 Apr. 1858, p. 83.

³⁶ This disability flowed directly from the suspension of the married woman's legal identity under coverture. As Thomas Peake explained, ‘no one can be a witness for himself; and it follows of course, that husband and wife, whose interests the law has united, are incompetent to give evidence on behalf of each other…and the law, considering the policy of marriage, also prevents them from giving evidence against each other; for it would be hard that the wife, who could not be a witness for her husband, should be a witness against him: such a rule would occasion implacable divisions and quarrels between them.’ Thomas, Peake, A compendium of the law of evidence (London, 1822 edn), pp. 169–70.Google Scholar

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³⁸ William, Hutton, Courts of requests: their nature, utility, and powers described, with a variety of cases, determined in that of Birmingham (Birmingham, 1787), pp. 256, 294.Google Scholar

³⁹ Beale v. Ellis, 26 July 1843, Hertford, Hertfordshire County Record Office, Hertford sheriff's court records, SH3/2/2.

⁴⁰ The County Courts Chronicle, 1 Sept. 1847, p. 63.Google Scholar

⁴¹ John, Cowburn, The suitor's guide to the new county courts: being a plain and familiar exposition of the act and rules of practice (London, 1847), pp. 10–11.Google Scholar

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⁴³ The broader, extra-legal context of working-class wives' negotiations of family debts in a slightly later period is detailed by Ellen, Ross, Love and toil: motherhood in outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York, 1993), esp. pp. 40–55Google Scholar. Her one reference to wives' interaction with the county courts concerns a married woman's defiance of a debt collector's efforts to enforce a county court judgement against her husband. Repeatedly sent threatening letters by the agency, she tore them into strips and distributed them to her spouse as pipe lights (p. 81).

⁴⁴ The County Courts Chronicle, 1 June 1847, p. 4.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Boston County Court Book, 1849–51, Lincoln, Lincolnshire Record Office (L.R.O.), AK16/4. The sampled months were March, June, September and December 1849. There were 67 labourers among the 165 male defendants, of whom 13 represented themselves and 16 were represented by their wives. (The remaining labourers failed to enter an appearance at all, thus rendering a judgement in favour of the plaintiff all but inevitable.)

⁴⁶ Bow county court plaint and minute book, 1849–51, London, Greater London Record Office, CCT/AK 15/4. A total of 69 cases (22 per cent) were defended either by wives or by other female relatives.

⁴⁷ The County Courts Chronicle, 1 Nov. 1847, p. 119.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Boston County Court Minute Book, 1849–51, L.R.O., AK16/4. The sampled months were Jan., April, July and Oct. 1850.

⁴⁹ Ibid. Of the 26 shopkeepers' cases heard by the judge in Mar., June, Sept. and Dec. 1849, 22 were litigated by male shopkeepers, and 4 by a shopkeeper's wife.

⁵⁰ Clitheroe county court: list of causes, 20 July 1847, Preston, Lancashire Record Office, CYC/1/29.

⁵¹ The County Courts Chronicle, 1 July 1847, p. 24.Google Scholar

⁵² In his analysis of crimes against property, Beattie finds that women were not only less likely to be convicted than men, but also that convicted women were more likely than men both to have their charge reduced and to be reprieved. Beattie, J. M., Crime and the courts in England 1660–1800 (Princeton, 1986), p. 438.Google Scholar

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⁵⁴ The County Courts Chronicle, 1 September 1853, pp. 113–14Google Scholar. Norton's account with her coachmaker had extended from 1843 to 1850, a circumstance that suggests her considerable ability to command credit despite her marital difficulties (ibid. p. 113).

⁵⁵ The case load of courts of requests was two to three times greater than that of London's superior courts in the early nineteenth century. See Brooks, C. W., ‘Interpersonal conflict and social tension: civil litigation in England, 1640–1830’, in Beier, A. L., Cannadine, David, AND Rosenheim, James M. (eds.), The first modern society: essays in English history in honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), p. 374Google Scholar. For the county court statistics, see The County Courts Chronicle, 1 Apr. 1858, p. 73.Google Scholar

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⁵⁷ Paul, Johnson, ‘Class law in Victorian England’, Past and Present, no. 141 (11. 1993), pp. 157–8Google Scholar. While county court debtors were legally obliged to pay their debts in full, debtors owing more substantial sums could file for bankruptcy, and thus avoid both the seizure of their goods or persons and the full repayment of their debts. See ibid. pp. 159–60.

⁵⁸ Hammerton, A. James, Cruelty and companionship: conflict in nineteenth-century married life (London, 1992), p. 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar