1. Wiener, Martin, “The March of Penal Progress?” Journal of British Studies 26 (January 1987): 87–88.Google Scholar See also Wiener, , Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1990), 7–10Google Scholar; Gatrell, V. A. C., “Crime, Authority and the Policeman-State” in The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, ed. Thompson, F. M. L. (Cambridge, 1990), 3:243–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McGowen, Randall, “A Powerful Sympathy: Terror, the Prison, and Humanitarian Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of British Studies 25 (July 1986): 312–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The continuing influence of local values on a criminal justice system receives attention from Conley, Carolyn, The Unwritten Law. Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

2. Davis, Jennifer, “A Poor Man's System of Justice: The London Police Courts in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Historical Journal 27 (June 1984): 309, 313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. John Gillis is surely right to characterize marriage as a “social drama in which not just the couple but several parties play crucial roles.” Gillis has tried with considerable success to balance the standard conception of marriage “in legal, institutional terms” with a fresh focus on the dynamic (and inherently political) interactions among the couple and their family, friends, and neighbors. See Gillis, , For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York, 1985), 5–6, 8.Google Scholar Yet certain “legal” and “institutional” dimensions of English marriage are equally well suited to analysis as social drama.

4. Giles, F. T., The Magistrates' Courts (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1949), 8.Google Scholar

5. For the summary powers of early modern magistrates see Landau, Norma, The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760 (Berkeley, 1984)Google Scholar; for magistrates' roles in misdemeanor prosecutions see Shoemaker, Robert B., Prosecutions and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c. 1660–1725 (Cambridge, 1991).Google Scholar

6. By 1860, seventy-three percent of all larcenies (without violence) were being tried summarily; by 1900, this figure would rise to eighty-eight percent. See Gatrell, V. A. C., “The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England,” in Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe Since 1500, ed. Gatrell, V. A. C., Lenman, Bruce, and Parker, Geoffrey (London, 1980), 274, 301–2.Google Scholar

7. Giles, The Magistrates' Courts, 8; “Solicitor,” English Justice (London, 1932), 7. Over grave felonies such as murder, consummated rape, and arson, the police court never gained jurisdiction. The job of the magistrate in such cases was to determine whether enough evidence of guilt existed to send the accused on to Quarter Sessions or Assizes for trial by jury. As regards training, the 1949 Justices of the Peace Act established “schemes for instructing” magistrates but provided nothing like systematic legal education.

8. Tobias, J. J., Crime and Police in England 1700–1900 (Dublin, 1979), 137–38Google Scholar; Manchester, A. H., A Modern Legal History of England and Wales 1750–1950 (London, 1980), 77–78.Google Scholar Not all large towns chose to appoint stipendiaries, nor were stipendiaries appointed only in the largest urban centers. As late as 1935 Sheffield, Newcastle, Bristol, and Nottingham relied upon lay magistrates, for example, whereas Grimsby and Pon-typridd had stipendiaries. Mullins, Claud, “Justices of the Peace: Abolition or Reform?” Quarterly Review 265 (October 1935): 224–25Google Scholar; Ensor, R. C. K., Courts and Judges in France, Germany and England (London, 1933), 18.Google Scholar

9. Daily News, February 11, 1873.

10. Saturday Review 35 (February 15, 1873): 213–14; Punch 64 (March 15, 1873): 105. The chief metropolitan magistrate, traditionally attached to Bow Street Police Court, received a higher salary. Theoretically, the chief magistrate served as a conduit through whom information passed between the metropolitan bench and the Home Office. See “A Magistrate,” Metropolitan Police Court Jottings (London, 1882), 8.

11. Police court melodrama was among the most popular elements of Victorian sensationalism. On the latter subject see Boyle, Thomas, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Hughes, Winifred, The Maniac in the Cellar (Princeton, N.J., 1980)Google Scholar; and Walkowitz, Judith R., City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), 85–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Holmes, Thomas, Pictures and Problems from London Police Courts (London, n.d. [1911]), 32, 35.Google Scholar Similarly, see Potter, J. Hasloch, Inasmuch: The Story of the Police Court Mission, 1876–1926 (London, 1927), 24.Google Scholar

13. [Longman, F.] Fifteen Years Fight Against Compulsory Vaccination, 4th ed. (London, n.d. [1900]), 2–3Google Scholar; The Lancet, February 11, 1905, p. 378; Bygott, A. H., “The Minor Courts in Their Relation to Public Health,” Report of the Proceedings of the National Conference on the Prevention of Destitution, 2 vols. (London, 1912), 2:513–17Google Scholar; Sanitary Record, October 26, 1877, p. 270; Nevinson, Margaret W., Life's Fitful Fever (London, 1926), 93.Google Scholar

14. Report of the Committee on the Metropolitan Police Courts and Juvenile Courts (London, 1929), 4; Thompson, A. C., “Monday Morning in the Police Court,” Church of England Temperance Chronicle, October 18, 1884, p. 291.Google Scholar

15. Dark, Sidney, Inasmuch … Christianity in the Police Courts (London, 1939), 15–16.Google Scholar

16. South Western Star, March 8, 1907.

17. Ibid., May 5, 1911.

18. Plowden, Alfred C., Grain or Chaff? The Autobiography of a Police Court Magistrate (London, 1903), 175Google Scholar; Galsworthy, John, The Silver Box [first performed in 1906], Plays by John Galsworthy (London, 1927), act 3.Google Scholar

19. Fitzgerald, Percy, Chronicles of Bow Street Police-office, 2 vols. (London, 1888), 1:214–15.Google Scholar

20. Morning Advertiser, February 12, 1873; Biron, Chartres, Without Prejudice: Impressions of Life and Law (London, 1936), 265–66.Google Scholar Unlike the general public, members of the press could be present during the “applications” phase of police court business. Magistrates were, therefore, under constant scrutiny.

21. Williams, Montague, Later Leaves (London, 1891), 395–97Google Scholar; Law Times 164 (October 1, 1927): 225; Caims, J. A. R., The Loom of the Law (London, 1922), 272–74.Google Scholar

22. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York, 1979), 296–98.Google Scholar Cf. Walkowitz, Judith, “Patrolling the Borders: Feminist Historiography and the New Historicism,” Radical History Review 43 (Winter 1984): 28–29.Google Scholar

23. Davis, Jennifer, “Prosecutions and Their Context: The Use of the Criminal Law in Later Nineteenth-Century London,” in Policing and Prosecution in Britain 1750–1850, ed. Hay, Douglas and Snyder, Francis (Oxford, 1989), 413–14Google Scholar; Davis, “A Poor Man's System of Justice,” 330–31; Ignatieff, Michael, “State, Civil Society and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment,” in Social Control and the State, ed. Cohen, Stanley and Scull, Andrew (New York, 1983), 90–91.Google Scholar

24. Although the derivation of this slang term for a magistrate remains uncertain, “beak” was in common use by the middle of the nineteenth century. Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (London, 1989), 2:14.

25. The Times, November 17, 1860; Pinero, Arthur, The Magistrate [first performed in 1885] (London, 1909), act 1.Google Scholar

26. Waddy, Henry Turner, The Police Court and Its Work (London, 1925), 162–63Google Scholar; Williams, Later Leaves, 242–43.

27. Chapman, Cecil, From the Bench (London, 1932), 30–31.Google Scholar

28. Public Records Office, MEPO 2/1426, Cooper to Fordham, December 20, 1910; Davis, “A Poor Man's System of Justice,” 328–29.

29. Plowden, Grain or Chaff? 217; Waddy, The Police Court and Its Work, 56–58.

30. Storch, Robert D., “Police Control of Street Prostitution in Victorian London: A Study in the Contexts of Police Action,” in Police and Society, ed. Bayley, David H. (Beverly Hills, Calif, 1977), 53–56Google Scholar; South Western Star, April 18, 1891.

31. Manchester Guardian, October 24, 1891.

32. Timewell, James, The Police and the Public: The Southwark Police Case and Its Moral, 2d ed. (London, 1898), 4–8.Google Scholar

33. Gamon, Hugh R. P., The London Police Court To-Day and To-Morrow (London, 1907), vii–viii.Google Scholar

34. Davis, “A Poor Man's System of Justice,” 333–34.

35. Gamon, The London Police Court, viii.

36. Criminal Statistics, England and Wales, 1934, Parliamentary Papers 25 (1935–36) (Cmd. 5185): xv. Even contemporaries who should have known better sometimes misunderstood both the variety and the volume of police court business. In 1931, a High Court judge was startled to learn that a serious larceny case had been tried summarily in “a place where small motoring offences and such things were dealt with.” The Times, October 22, 1931.

37. Mullins, “Justices of the Peace,” 223–24.

38. Rowntree, Griselda and Carrier, Norman, “The Resort to Divorce in England and Wales, 1858–1957,” Population Studies 11 (March 1958): 189–90.Google Scholar

39. The total number of judicial separations sought each year is best approximated by combining the applications for maintenance orders and the applications for separation orders without maintenance. Working-class wives, who typically accounted for ninety-four to ninety-seven percent of the applicants, rarely asked for maintenance orders that did not include some provision for non-cohabitation. In several years the official statistics do not differentiate between separation orders and maintenance orders.

40. 20 & 21 Viet., c. 85.

41. These equivalencies are rough. Charles Tibbits reckoned that the average undefended divorce case in 1907 cost £50, and the average defended case about £121. Tibbits, , Marriage Making and Marriage Breaking (London, 1911), 58.Google Scholar A. L. Bowley gave twenty-six shillings as the average weekly wage for a fully employed British male in 1911. Bowley, , Wages and Income in the United Kingdom Since 1860 (Cambridge, 1937), 74.Google Scholar Had Bowley excluded Scottish and Irish males from his figures, the resulting average weekly wage would have been somewhat higher. Similar caveats must surround his estimate that the average weekly wage for British women in 1911 (including domestic servants and shop assistants) was just under fourteen shillings.

42. Rowntree and Carrier, “The Resort to Divorce,” 222. See also Savage, Gail, “The Operations of the 1857 Divorce Act, 1860–1910. A Research Note,” Journal of Social History 16 (Summer 1983): 106–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Savage, “Marital Conflict Among the Respectable: Middle-Class Divorce in Victorian England,” unpub. paper presented to the American Historical Association (December 1989), 5–6; and Hammerton, A. James, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1992), 104–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar “Poor Man's Lawyers,” barristers and solicitors at first associated with certain East London settlement houses, began their volunteer legal advice work in the mid-1890s. See Law Journal 28 (December 30, 1893): 898; Annual Report of Mansfield House (London, 1896), 38–39; and Meacham, Standish, Toynbee Hall and Social Reform 1880–1914 (New Haven, Conn., 1987), 79–80.Google Scholar

43. [Gladstone, W. E.] “The Bill for Divorce,” Quarterly Review 102 (July 1857): 286Google Scholar; Stone, Lawrence, Road to Divorce (Oxford, 1990), 385–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. Gillis, For Better, For Worse, 237–42.

45. See Behlmer, George, “Deadly Motherhood: Infanticide and Medical Opinion in Mid-Victorian England,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 34 (October 1979): 403–27CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Higgenbotham, Ann R., “‘Sin of the Age’: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London,” Victorian Studies 32 (Spring 1989): 319–37.Google Scholar

46. Shanley, Mary L., Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (Princeton, N.J., 1989), 161.Google Scholar For a discussion of how newspapers helped propagate a “middle-class myth of rape,” see Clark, Anna, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770–1845 (London, 1987), 16–18.Google Scholar On domestic violence generally during the Victorian period, see Tomes, Nancy, “A ‘Torrent of Abuse’: Crimes of Violence Between Working-Class Men and Women in London, 1840–1875,” Journal of Social History 11 (Spring 1978): 328–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47. Justice Archibald to the Home Secretary, Reports … on the State of the Law Relating to Brutal Assaults, Parliamentary Papers, 1875, 61 (Cmd. 1138): 9.

48. Cox, E. W., The Principles of Punishment, as Applied in the Administration of the Criminal Law (London, 1877), 87–88Google Scholar; Pulling, Serjeant, “What Legislation Is Necessary for the Repression of Crimes of Violence?” Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (London, 1876), 345–46Google Scholar; Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship, 34–35.

49. Cobbe, F. P., Life of Frances Power Cobbe, 2 vols. (Boston, 1894), 2:534–37Google Scholar; Cobbe, , “Wife-Torture in England,” Contemporary Review 32 (April 1878): 80, 82.Google Scholar Miss Cobbe was not the first to propose judicial separation as a shield for abused wives. Forty years earlier Richard Mence had argued for allowing magistrates to grant “provisional separations” in such cases. Mence, , The Mutual Rights of Husband and Wife (London, 1838): 59–61.Google Scholar

50. 41 Viet., c. 19. See Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., 239 (March 29, 1878), cols. 191–92; Manchester, A Modern Legal History, 123.

51. Crawford, Mabel Sharman, “Maltreatment of Wives,” Westminster Review 139 (March 1893): 298–99.Google Scholar On the nineteenth-century feminist analysis of wife-beating, see Doggett, Maeve E., Marriage, Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England (London, 1992), 126–33.Google Scholar

52. Women's Suffrage Journal 11 (July 1880): 123.

53. Manchester Guardian, October 5, 1881. For a strikingly similar judicial response to a wife-beating “charivari” in late Victorian Yorkshire, see Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship, 15.

54. Bauer, Carol and Ritt, Lawrence, “Wife-Abuse, Late-Victorian English Feminists, and the Legacy of Frances Power Cobbe,” International Journal of Women's Studies 6 (May/June 1983): 199.Google Scholar More broadly, Iris Minor has argued that the ad hoc nature of matrimonial law reform in the late Victorian and Edwardian years probably increased the vulnerability of working-class wives. See Minor, , “Working-Class Women and Matrimonial Law Reform, 1890–1914,” in Ideology and the Labor Movement, ed. David Martin and David Rubinstein (London, 1979), 103–24.Google Scholar

55. 49 & 50 Viet., c. 52.

56. 58 & 59 Viet, c. 39.

57. Parliamentary Debates, 4th sen., 34 (May 22, 1895), col. 62.

58. Tibbits, Marriage Making, 66; Mcllquham, Harriet, “Marriage: A Just and Honourable Partnership,” Westminster Review 157 (April 1902): 440.Google Scholar

59. 2 Ed. 7, c. 28.

60. Lushington, Sydney G. and Lushington, Guy, The Summary Jurisdiction (Married Women) Act, 1895, 2d ed. (London, 1904), vi–vii.Google Scholar At least one veteran police court “missionary” warned that the 1902 Licensing Act would promote family disintegration by weighting the scales of summary justice against drunken wives. See Holmes, Thomas, “The New Licensing Bill,” Contemporary Review 81 (April 1902): 509–15.Google Scholar

61. Elmy, Elizabeth Wolstenholme, Woman and the Law ([Congleton, Cheshire], n.d. [1896]), 15.Google Scholar See also Elmy to Mcllquham, August 15, 1897, Elmy Papers, British Museum, Add. MS. 47451. I owe this reference to Gail Savage.

62. Although Jacques Donzelot's provocative essay cites mainly French evidence, its frame of reference is far wider, suggesting indeed that all “advanced liberal” societies have suffered from the invasive regulation of domestic life. See Donzelot, , The Policing of Families, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York, 1979), 228.Google Scholar As the evidence analyzed here will show, however, the “policing” of working-class marriage in the world's most “advanced liberal” society was far from uniform and often inefficient.

63. The Post Office London Directory for 1889, 2 vols. (London, 1899), 2:2519.

64. Besant, Walter, South London (London, 1899), 319–20.Google Scholar

65. P.R.O., H045/10566/173881, Troop's minute of October 22, 1909; Besant, Walter, London South of the Thames (London, 1912), 163–65, 246.Google Scholar

66. Myers, Sam Price, London South of the River (London, 1949), 112.Google Scholar

67. The New Survey of London Life and Labour, 9 vols. (London, 1930–35), 6:439–42, 447–50; ibid. 1:357; Kent, William, An Encyclopedia of London (New York, 1937), 36, 696.Google Scholar

68. Although the South Western Star began publication in 1877, the British Library holds no issue before 1889.

69. Since surviving police court records are rare, and when extant amount to terse entries on printed ledgers, the historian is left with local newspaper reports. Although the Star's police court reportage clearly did emphasize the sensational or humorous elements in domestic disputes, there is no evidence that these accounts consistently suppressed relevant information.

70. T. Holmes, Pictures and Problems, 53–54.

72. South Western Star, June 28, 1901. For a similar case of husband-beating see ibid., January 5, 1889. Mary Loane, the district nurse and chronicler of working-class family life, observed that assaults on husbands most often took place when men returned home “minus an undue proportion of their week's wages.” Loane, , “Husband and Wife among the Poor,” Contemporary Review 87 (February 1905): 222.Google Scholar

72. South Western Star, September 11, 1908.

73. Ibid., March 25, 1904.

74. See Fishman, W. J., East End 1888 (Philadelphia, 1988), 203.Google Scholar Cf. Roberts, Robert, The Classic Slum (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1987), 29.Google Scholar

75. Justice of the Peace and Local Government Review Annual, 1928 (London, 1928), 12.

76. South Western Star, March 25, 1904; ibid., May 6, 1893; ibid., July 25, 1913; Waddy, The Police Court, 136–37.

77. 20 & 21 Viet., c. 85, s. 21. This provision fell into disuse after the 1870 Married Women's Property Act became law. Mullins, Claud, Wife v. Husband in the Courts (London, 1935), 23.Google Scholar See also Holcombe, Lee, “Victorian Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women's Property Law, 1857–1882,” in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Vicinus, Martha (Bloomington, Ind., 1977), 3–28.Google Scholar

78. Giles, The Magistrates' Courts, 192.

79. South Western Star, July 31, 1903.

80. Ibid., May 22, 1903.

81. Ibid., April 1, 1898.

82. Cecil Chapman, another metropolitan magistrate, devised a way to outwit husbands who nominally “maintained” their wives while bringing other women home to bed. Chapman advised victims of this cynical strategy to leave their homes and summons their husbands for “persistent cruelty.” At the subsequent trial Chapman would rule that such gross humiliation of a wife did in fact represent “persistent cruelty,” even though prevailing legal standards were much less elastic. Chapman, , The Poor Man's Court of Justice (London, 1925), 62–63Google Scholar; MacQueen, John Fraser, The Rights and Liabilities of Husband and Wife, 4th ed. (London, 1905), 224–25.Google Scholar For an excellent analysis of “cruelty” in Divorce Court decisions, see Hammerton, A. James, “Victorian Marriage and the Law of Matrimonial Cruelty,” Victorian Studies 33 (Winter 1990): 269–92.Google Scholar

83. The Times, July 19, 1909. Adultery did not become a ground for judicial separation in courts of summary jurisdiction until 1937.

84. Mrs. Jackson's predicament drew wide press coverage. See The Times, March 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, and 20, 1891; and Linton, Eliza Lynn, “The Judicial Shock to Marriage,” Nineteenth Century 29 (May 1891): 691–700.Google Scholar For a discussion of the legal significance of R. v. Jackson, see Doggett, Marriage, Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England, 1–4, 142–48.

85. South Western Star, September 8, 1891.

86. Greenwood, James, The Prisoner in the Dock: My Four Years' Daily Experiences in the London Police Courts (London, 1902), 16–17Google Scholar; Plowden, Grain or Chaff? 249–51; Holmes, Pictures and Problems, 75. Cf. “A Magistrate,” Metropolitan Police Court Jottings, 37.

87. Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, Parliamentary Papers 68 (H.L. 1912–13) (Cmd. 6479): QQ. 6953, 7573, 2182.

88. Martin, Anna, “The Mother and Social Reform,” Nineteenth Century and After 73 (May 1913): 1075.Google Scholar

89. Gillis, For Better, For Worse, 259; Lewis, Jane, Women in England, 1870–1950 (Bloomington, Ind., 1984), 10.Google Scholar

90. Ross, Ellen, “‘Fierce Questions and Taunts’: Married Life in Working-Class London, 1870–1914,” Feminist Studies 8 (Fall 1982): 593.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

91. South Western Star, March 9,1889. To point out that working-class wives expected a greater degree of violence from husbands than would be tolerated today is not to suggest that these women were strangers to deep emotional pain.

91. Ibid., May 15, 1914; ibid., June 18, 1915.

92. Ross, “‘Fierce Questions,’” 592; South Western Star, October 17, 1913.

94. Royal Commission on Divorce, Parliamentary Papers 69 (H.L. 1912–13): QQ. 18,999, 19,021. At the same time that he was taking this liberal line on divorce, Plowden was regretting that he could not punish women's suffrage activists more severely for staging a bell-ringing protest. Nevinson, Life's Fitful Fever, 198.

95. Chapman, Cecil, Marriage and Divorce (London, 1911), 75, 141–42.Google Scholar

96. The Chairman of the Durham County Police Court, for example, was irate when a miner's wife announced that she wanted to withdraw her charge of aggravated assault: “You make use of this court just to threaten your husband. That's the case with you women. You get into a tantrum with your husbands, and then you come here. Well, it's your own look out.” Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, March 22, 1890.

97. Royal Commission on Divorce, Parliamentary Papers 69 (H.L. 1912–13): Q. 12,950.

98. See, for example, South Western Star, October 31, 1913; ibid., June 6, 1913.

99. National statistics for the years 1907–9. Royal Commission on Divorce, Parliamentary Papers 69 (H.L. 1912–13): Q. 23,435.

100. South Western Star, April 6, 1900.

101. 4 & 5 Geo. V, c. 58, s. 4.

102. Report of the Departmental Committee on Imprisonment by Courts of Summary Jurisdiction in Default of Payment of Fines and Other Sums of Money, Parliamentary Papers 2 (1933–34) (Cmd. 4649): 12–13, 42–43, 47. On the “silting up” of local prisons with maintenance defaulters, see McGregor, O. R., Blom-Cooper, Louis, and Gibson, Colin, Separated Spouses (London, 1970), 22–23.Google Scholar In interwar Liverpool, the task of collecting maintenance money from husbands fell to a variety of non-judicial bodies, among them the Liverpool Women Police Patrol. See Ayers, Pat and Lambertz, Jan, “Marriage Relations, Money, and Domestic Violence in Working-Class Liverpool, 1919–1939,” in Labour and Love: Women's Experience of Home and Family, 1850–1940, ed. Lewis, Jane (Oxford, 1986), 210 and nn. 58, 218.Google Scholar

103. Haynes, E. S. P., “Divorce Law Reform,” English Review 3 (November 1909): 727.Google Scholar

104. Royal Commission on Divorce, Parliamentary Papers 67 (H.L. 1912–13): 3.

105. “Marriage, Divorce and the Divorce Commission,” Edinburgh Review 217 (January 1913): 18–19. The question of working-class demand for divorce was addressed most directly in the testimony of two very different women's organizations. Among the 25,897 members of the socialist Women's Co-operative Guild, most of whom were wives of “respectable artisans,” there existed an “overwhelming” desire for drastic reform of the divorce laws. In stark contrast, the conservative Mothers' Union submitted to the Commission an anti-divorce law reform petition from 21,389 working-class (and overwhelmingly Anglican) wives. Royal Commission on Divorce, Parliamentary Papers 67 (H.L. 1912–13): 47–48; and ibid. 70 (H.L. 1912–13): QQ. 36,964–65; 36,976–78. Cf. Reynolds, Stephen, “Divorce for the Poor,” Fortnightly Review n.s., 88 (September 1910): 488.Google Scholar

106. Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser., 2 (H.L. July 14, 1909): cols. 488–91.

107. Royal Commission on Divorce, Parliamentary Papers 69 (H.L. 1912–13): QQ. 17,972–74; ibid. 67:178–79.

108. McWilliams, William, “The Mission to the English Police Courts,” Howard Journal 22 (1983): 131–33, 140–42Google Scholar; LeMesurier, Lilian, A Handbook of Probation and Social Work of the Courts (London, 1935), 22–23.Google Scholar

109. Gamon, The London Police Court, 161.

110. South Western Star, March 5, 1897.

111. Ibid., May 1, 1914; ibid., October 8, 1909.

112. P.R.O., H045/22774/272425, Home Office notes for February 1, 1918.

113. Cancellor, H. L., The Life of a London Beak (London, 1930), 123Google Scholar; Answers: A Weekly Journal of Instruction, December 14, 1918, p. 52.

114. Office, Home, Second Report of the Work of the Children's Branch (London, 1924), 18.Google Scholar

115. Waddy, The Police Court, 79; Royal Commission on Divorce, Parliamentary Papers 67 (H.L. 1912–13): 178–79; Cancellor, Life, 95–99. Cf. Journal of the Divorce Law Reform Union (April 1924), 11.

116. See especially the cases of Mmes. Smith, Clark, and Maile: South Western Star, October 3, 1917; ibid., October 17, 1917; ibid., July 15, 1921; ibid., February 11, 1921.

117. Lambertz, Jan, “Feminists and the Politics of Wife-Beating,” in British Feminism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Smith, Harold L. (Aldershot, Hants., 1990), 31.Google Scholar

118. South Western Star, June 15, 1917.

119. Ibid., March 1, 1918.

120. Ibid., February 1, 1918; ibid., October 21, 1921.

121. Civil Judicial Statistics for 1913, Parliamentary Papers 19 (H.L. 1914–16): 23; Civil Judicial Statistics for 1919, Parliamentary Papers 41 (H.C. 1921): 19.

122. Gibson, Colin, “The Effect of Legal Aid on Divorce in England and Wales,” Family Law 1 (May/June, 1971): 92Google Scholar; Winter, J. M., The Great War and the British People (London, 1986), 263–64Google Scholar; Phillips, Roderick, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge, 1988), 519–22Google Scholar; Stone, Lawrence, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (New York, 1990), 394.CrossRefGoogle Scholar As Stone points out, although a larger proportion of English husbands may have committed wartime adultery overseas, these deeds were more easily concealed.

123. Stetson, Dorothy, A Woman's Issue: The Politics of Family Law Reform in England (Westport, Conn., 1982), 106–12.Google Scholar

124. MacKinnon, Frank Douglas, On Circuit 1924–1937 (Cambridge, 1940), 112–13Google Scholar; Holmes, Ann Sumner, “Hard Cases and Bad Laws: Divorce Reform in England, 1909–1937,” (unpublished Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1986), 223–29.Google Scholar

125. Thomas Bucknill, in The Times March 2, 1935.

126. Law Journal 65 (May 12, 1928): 391.

3. Much of the evidence for this assertion must be inferential. Occasionally, however, the strategy was explicit. As G. E. Franey, a probation officer attached to the Greenwich Police Court, told to a Home Office committee in 1934, “At the end of 1919 the late Mr. W. H. Disney sent for me to say, that in view of the largely increased applications for Separations, one of the after results of the Great War, it was his wish, before any application for process was made, I should interview the parties, talk over the difficulties, and try and effect a reconciliation.” Home Office Library, testimony before the Summary Courts (Social Services) Committee, 1934–35, I, written evidence, B2.

128. Justice of the Peace 88 (January 26, 1924): 68–69; Lieck, Albert and Morrison, A. C. L., Matrimonial and Family Jurisdiction of Justices, 2d ed. (London, 1932), 23–25, 29–33.Google Scholar

129. Reiss, Erna, Rights and Duties of Englishwomen (Manchester, 1934), 86–87Google Scholar; Parliamentary Debates, 5th sen, 61 (H.L. May 26, 1925): cols. 525–27; Claud Mullins, Wife v. Husband in the Courts 26–27.

130. Haynes, E. S. P., Lycurgus, or the Future of Law (London, 1925), 92, 47–50.Google Scholar Since on a per capita basis the U.S. was producing roughly twenty times as many divorces as England and Wales during the mid-1920s, the proposed “Americanization” of legal procedure in this area made many middle-class people in the old country understandably nervous.

131. Royal Commission on Divorce, Parliamentary Papers 67 (H.L. 1912–13): 68–69; McGregor, O. R., Social History and Law Reform (London, 1981), 50–51.Google Scholar

132. Leeson, Cecil, The Probation System (London, 1914), 36–37Google Scholar; Spadoni, Adriana, “In the Domestic Relations Court,” Collier's 47 (August 26, 1911): 15Google Scholar; Gremmill, William, “Chicago Court of Domestic Relations,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 52 (March 1914): 115–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pleck, Elizabeth, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York, 1987), 136–37.Google Scholar

133. P.R.O., H045/15719/520977, Miss Bolton [Administrator of the Given-Wilson Institute, Plaistow] to the Home Secretary, April 15, 1919.

134. Reconciled, being the First Annual Account of the Work of the Reconciliation Bureau of the Salvation Army (London, 1928), 5–6, 9.

135. Mowrer, Ernest and Mowrer, Harriet R., Domestic Discord: Its Analysis and Treatment (Chicago, 1928), 10Google Scholar; Haynes, Lycurgus, 61–68.

136. Evening News May 11, 1928; ibid., May 14, 1928; Law Journal 65 (May 12, 1928): 391.

137. Lasch, Christopher, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York, 1979), 42–43.Google Scholar

138. Preparation for Marriage: A Handbook Prepared by a Special Committee on Behalf of the British Social Hygiene Council (London, 1932), 87, 93–94; Advances in Understanding the Child (London, 1935), 8–9.

139. Minutes of the C.E.T.S. Police Court Missionaries' Guild, October 17, 1929, Lambeth Palace Library, MS. 2060; Probation (January 1935), 349–50; Ellison, Mary, Sparks Beneath the Ashes: Experiences of a London Probation Officer (London, 1934), 100–11.Google Scholar

140. Evening News April 21, 1934.

141. Parliamentary Debates 5th ser., 92 (H.L. May 15, 1934): col. 365; Evening News, April 21, 1934; “Police Courts and Husbands and Wives,” The Spectator 152 (April 13, 1934): 567.

142. See, for example, The Times May 15, 1934; and “Marriage in the Police Court,” New Statesman and Nation n.s., 7 (April 21, 1934): 587.

143. Parliamentary Debates 5th sen, 92 (H.L. May 15, 1934), cols. 366–72, 378, 380–85.

144. P.R.O., H045/15719/520977, memo by Maxwell, ca. May 2, 1934; Schuster to Dawson, April 19, 1934.

145. The Times July 26, 1934. Lord Merrivale's Matrimonial Causes (Amended Procedure) Bill, introduced on October 30, 1934, was designed primarily to remind the government that pressure for regularizing police court matrimonial work had not diminished. Parliamentary Debates 5th ser., 94 (H.L. October 30, 1934), cols. 1–2; ibid., 94 (November 7, 1934), cols. 173–76, 186.

146. Modern historical scholarship has completely overlooked Mullins as a legal reformer and judicial innovator. He has earned just one casual reference, this in Jane Lewis's Women in England 1870–1950, 47.

147. Mullins, Claud, One Man's Furrow (London, 1963), 13, 52–53, 100, 103Google Scholar; Mullins, , Fifteen Years' Hard Labour (London, 1948), 13–20.Google Scholar

148. Mullins, One Man's Furrow, 104–8; idem, Marriage, Children and God (London, 1933), 77–78; idem, The Magistrate (July-August 1933), 707–8; idem, “Christianity and the Family,” The Spectator 152 (February 2, 1934): 152–53. See also Barry, F. R., Mullins, Claud, and White, Douglas, Right Marriage (London, 1934).Google Scholar As if Mullins's open advocacy of birth control were not controversial enough, he also wrote at least one article on the psychic prowess of Fraulein Oesterreicher, a German “intuitive graphologist.” See Mullins, “The Graphologin: A Unique Experience,” Cornhill Magazine n.s., 72 (April 1932): 398–406.

149. Mullins, Marriage, Children and God, 196; idem, One Man's Furrow 110.

150. Mullins, One Man's Furrow, 110–12; P.R.O., H045/15719/520977, Powell to Robinson, May 1, 1934.

151. South Western Star, November 2, 1934; ibid., June 16, 1933; ibid., June 23, 1933. By early 1939 Mullins had persuaded the Home Office to assign his court two additional missionaries: ibid., March 10, 1939.

152. Ibid., November 9, 1934.

153. Home Office Library, testimony before the Summary Courts (Social Services) Committee, 1934–35, I, E.V. 9, 2.

154. Mullins, Wife v. Husband in the Courts, 50–53; idem, One Man's Furrow, 113; South Western Star, November 23, 1934.

155. Home Office Library, testimony before the Summary Courts (Social Services) Committee, 1934–35, I, E.V. 10, n.p.

156. Mullins, Wife v. Husband in the Courts, 16–17.

157. South Western Star, May 17, 1935. Mullins compiled his panel of medical psychologists with help from the British Social Hygiene Council. On the B.S.H.C.'s work with the “physiology of marriage” see Collier, Howard E., Happy Marriage in Modern Life (Birmingham, 1937), 9.Google Scholar

158. Mullins, Wife v. Husband in the Courts, 41–42, 116–19, 15–16.

159. South Western Star July 24, 1936.

160. Report of the Departmental Committee on the Social Services in Courts of Summary Jurisdiction, Parliamentary Papers 8 (1935–36) (Cmd. 5122): 11.

161. South Western Star, February 22, 1935; ibid., January 3, 1936.

162. Ibid., February 7, 1936; ibid., October 9, 1936; ibid., November 13, 1936; Mullins, Fifteen Years' Hard Labour, 148–49. See also Daily Mirror, July 7, 1937.

163. Report of the Departmental Committee on Sterilisation, Parliamentary Papers 15 (1933–34) (Cmd. 4485): 21; Mowrer, Ernest R., Family Disorganization (Chicago, 1927).Google Scholar Mullins himself was convinced that juvenile crime usually stemmed from what Cyril Burt called “defective family relationships.” In addition to Burt's The Young Offender (1925), two studies by American criminologists, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck's One Thousand Juvenile Delinquents (1934), and Albert Morris's Criminology (1935), did much to shape Mullins's views on the causal connection between divorce and delinquency. See Mullins, Wife v. Husband in the Courts, 23–24.

164. Maxwell, Alexander, Treatment of Crime (London, 1938), 11–12.Google Scholar

165. The Times July 19, 1939; P.R.O., H045/21034/590660, Maxwell to Mullins, August 4, 1939.

166. P.R.O., H045/21034/590660, memo of March 10, 1936; Mullins, One Man's Furrow, 126. Nor would Neville Chamberlain's Tory government listen to the Labour Member of Parliament who wished to brand Mullins a judicial misfit for declaring that two untrustworthy witnesses should be placed in a “concentration camp” and forced to study history for five years. Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser., 341 (November 17, 1938), cols. 1050–51; South Western Star, November 4, 1938.

167. South Western Star, July 16, 1937.

168. Liverpool Post, October 5, 1937; Yorkshire Observer, October 5, 1937.

169. South Western Star, August 9, 1935.

170. Report of the Departmental Committee on the Social Services in Courts of Summary Jurisdiction, Parliamentary Papers 8 (1935–1936): 12Google Scholar; Probation (October 1936): 83.

171. Geeson, Cecil, Just Justice? Husbands and Wives in the Police Courts (London, 1936), 44–46.Google Scholar

172. Home Office Library, testimony before the Summary Courts (Social Services) Committee, 1934–35, 1, E.V. 23(a), 12; ibid., E.V. 36, 2.

173. Latey, William and Rees, D. Perronet, Latey's Law and Practice in Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, 12th ed. (London, 1940), 416.Google Scholar

174. The Summary Procedures (Domestic Proceedings) Act, 1937, 1 Edw. 8 and 1 Geo. 6, c. 58. This Act took effect on October 1, 1937.

175. P.R.O., H045/17152/695967, Harris to Mullins, January 14, 1937; Mullins to Harris, January 17, 1937.

176. Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser., 319 (February 5, 1937), cols. 1977–78, 1948, 1953.

177. Phillips, Putting Asunder, 529–30; Stone, Road to Divorce, 401; Stetson, A Woman's Issue, 115–17; Acland, E. D., “The Marriage Bill,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 141 (February 1937): 226.Google Scholar

178. Cole, Margaret, Marriage Past and Present (London, 1938), 187.Google Scholar

179. The Times, April 23, 1934; ibid., July 8, 1937; ibid., September 9, 1937. Mullins and Herbert, one-time allies in the cause of divorce law reform, came to rhetorical blows over the former's public criticism of the “Marriage Bill.” See Herbert, A. P., The Ayes Have It (London, 1937), 57–63Google Scholar; and The Times, September 8, 1937.

108. [Claud Mullins] “Divorce via Magistrates' Courts,” Law Journal 84 (October 9, 1937): 230–31.

181. South Western Star, October 15, 1937.

182. By the late 1930s, the practice of lawyers giving free legai advice to working-class folk had spread far beyond the East End university settlements where it had begun. In London, a voluntary body called the Bentham Committee gave some organizational form to work that had long lacked any uniformity. Beyond offering counsel, a “Poor Man's Lawyer” would do no more than draft letters for his “clients.” To gain representation in court a laborer had to apply to one of the ninety “Poor Persons Committees” operating in England and Wales under the auspices of various professional legal societies. “Poor Persons” representation was limited to actions taken in the High Court of Justice, mostly undefended divorce cases. On the eve of World War II there existed no scheme for cheap legal representation in police courts. The Society, Law, Annual Report, 1937 (London, 1937), 132, 142, 152Google Scholar; Jackson, R. M., The Machinery of Justice in England (Cambridge, 1940), 252–53, 256–57.Google Scholar

183. Roberts, The Classic Slum, 41–44, 77–78; Meacham, Standish, A Life Apart: The English Working Class, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 62–66, 199Google Scholar; Jones, Gareth Stedman, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900,” in Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), 226–27, 234.Google Scholar The “language of fatalism,” as Ellen Ross has remarked about London slum mothers, may have been “the safest posture for the[se] women to adopt with middle-class professionals.” Ross, , Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York, 1993), 98, 167.Google Scholar

184. See, for example, the case of Ethel Flintham: South Western Stan January 14, 1938.

185. R. M. Jackson, The Machinery of Justice in England, 152.

186. Final Report of the Committee on Procedure in Matrimonial Causes, Parliamentary Papers 13 (1946–47) (Cmd. 7024): 5–6, 13–14; Dawtry, Frank, “Whither Probation?” British Journal of Delinquency 8 (January 1958): 184.Google Scholar

187. Mullins, . “Conciliation in Divorce Cases,” Quarterly Review 285 (July 1947): 376Google Scholar; Mullins, , “Divorce in the Post-War World,” Quarterly Review 279 (October 1942): 155–67.Google Scholar Cf. The Magistrate (July-August 1938), 81; and Justice of the Peace 105 (July 12, 1941): 386.

188. Report of the Departmental Committee on Grants for the Development of Marriage Guidance, Parliamentary Papers 17 (1948–49) (Cmd. 7566): 14–15; The Times November 21, 1938; Sanctuary, Gerald, Marriage Under Stress (London, 1968), 13–14.Google Scholar

189. Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, Parliamentary Papers 23 (1955–56) (Cmd. 9678): 97.

190. Smart, Carol, The Ties that Bind: Law, Marriage and the Reproduction of Patriarchal Relations (London, 1984), 71–72, 75–76Google Scholar; McGregor, Social History and Law Reform, 50–52. See also Bottomley, Anne, “What is happening to family law? A feminist critique of conciliation,” in Women-In-Law: Explorations in Law, Family and Sexuality, ed. Brophy, Julia and Smart, Carol (London, 1985), 162–87Google Scholar; and Eekelaar, John, Family Law and Social Policy (London, 1978), 199–201.Google Scholar

191. Szwed, Elizabeth, “The Family Court,” in The State, the Law, and the Family: Critical Perspectives, ed. Freeman, Michael D. A. (London, 1984), 276–77Google Scholar; Anne Bottomley, “Resolving Family Disputes: A Critical View,” in ibid., 296–97, 300.