The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 marked the first step towards making divorce much easier, and also protecting the property of women who were divorced, separated or deserted by their husbands.
This post tells two stories of the act being invoked, as first encountered in local newspapers. The first was an attempt to get a divorce, and the second asked for protection of property after desertion by the husband.
For the purposes of this post, the act shifted divorce from being a church court matter, and sometimes requiring an act of Parliament, to a civil court matter. There is a very interesting article online by Jennifer Aston, ‘An exceedingly painful case’: the aftermath of divorce in mid-nineteenth century England and Wales, Family & community history, vol. 26, issue 1, 2023.
Divorce remained expensive – I am unclear how expensive – and was mostly used by the well off. The priced Ancestry website has 90,710 divorce proceedings for England and Wales for the period 1858-1918, a smallish number. Newspapers frequently reported on the proceedings, but only, it seems to me, for the well-off.
However, to obtain a divorce, a man had to prove that his wife had committed adultery. If a woman wanted a divorce, she had to prove adultery but also another offence such as desertion or physical cruelty. This difference was apparently because a woman’s adultery was considered more serious, as it meant doubt as to the paternity of any children. It does not seem to have occurred to those drafting the bill that, for example, a woman who had been beaten and then deserted might be entitled to a divorce.
Additionally, the act protected the property of women. Unless specially specified, money given or bequeathed to women belonged to the husband. Now a court order could be requested by deserted women. The act is widely considered the first, feeble beginning towards giving women rights.
So, the first case. Warning, it may shock some of my readers.
The Hastings & St Leonards Gazette, 18 April 1857, has the following brief (and cynical) notice:
John Peters, of St Leonards, was, on Monday last, bound over in his own recognizance of £20 and a surety of £10 to keep the peace towards his wife, for six months. On the same day last year, the said John Peters was bound in the chains of Hymen. Such is Life.
John Albert Peters, age 24, had married on the 14 April 1856, at Hollington church, Eliza Rose Waters, age 22. He was a carpenter, she was a gunmaker’s daughter.
What happened next is explained by the husband in the divorce papers he filed on the 9 May 1861, Peters v Peters and Willett. A petition by a mere carpenter was very unusual.
It consists of an affidavit dated the 25 March 1861 from 18 London Road, which gives a good deal of valuable information. It is written in very contorted language. Here are quotes from it. Note that he set sail about a month after the difficulties set out in the newspaper account – perhaps she had her own reasons to agree to his departure.
That after the said Marriage your Petitioner and his said Wife lived and cohabited together at No. 27 London Road St Leonards in the County of Sussex and that your Petitioner and his said Wife have had no issue of their said Marriage.
That at the expiration of about twelve months from their said Marriage your Petitioner being unsuccessful in his business as a Carpenter it was arranged between him and his said Wife that he should proceed to America with the view of improving his condition and that his said Wife should remain his this Country and follow her occupation of a Milliner and Dressmaker until he could provide her with funds sufficient to enable her to join him in America.
That accordingly on the twentieth day of May one thousand eight hundred and fifty seven your Petitioner with the entire concurrence of his said Wife sailed from this Country for America and after his arrival there he corresponded with his said Wife until about the month of November one thousand eight hundred and fifty seven, when she ceased to answer his letters and that from that time he never heard from or received any tidings of his said Wife until his return to England in the month of October one thousand eight hundred and sixty when he discovered that she was walking the Streets as a Common Prostitute.
He went on to cite four men with whom, he claimed, she had committed adultery, from October 1858 onwards, the first being a certain Robert Jones:
That on the third day of August one thousand eight hundred and fifty nine the said Eliza Rose Peters gave birth to an illegitimate child the result of her adulterous connection with the said Robert Jones.
I have been unable to identify this child and it is probable that he or she either died young or was looked after by relatives. The offences with the other three men all occurred in the St Marylebone area, which she later lived in. There were other men, apparently, for whom he did not have names.
The divorce papers state that on the 28 January 1862 the court ruled that the case be dismissed. I do not know why.
American shipping records have Peters arriving at New York on the 3 June 1857 on the ‘City of Washington’, which had sailed from Liverpool. I cannot find him in the American 1860 census.
In the 7 April 1861 census, at 18 Norman Road West, he was single – which of course he wasn’t — born Ore, living with his widowed mother. His wife in the census was a visitor to a laundress in Ore, married, a dressmaker, so we do not know where she was living.
Probate records state that he, formerly of St Leonards on Sea, died 23 March 1865 at King’s Cross – close to, or in, St Marylebone — with an estate of £300. He was buried on the 29 March at Kensal Green, where it stated he was of 46 Liverpool Street. I looked back in the records and found that he was baptised at St Mary in the Castle in 1832, his father a publican, and was a servant in the 1851 census at 22 White Rock for a builder.
As for Eliza, in the 1851 census she was living with her Waters grandparents at Rye. In the 1871 census she was in St Marylebone, aged 34, dressmaker, with son John H. Peters, age three months. The birth certificate might give the name of the father but my understanding is that unless he accompanied her to register the birth his details would not be given. In the 1881 census she had another child as well, Eliza, born Kilburn, aged 9, her brother being 10. I wonder if the fact that the husband died in her favoured neighbourhood meant that there was a reconciliation and that they lived together. I have traced her as far as the 1901 census, still in St Marylebone, a 67-year-old widow, still with the name of Peters, a dressmaker on her own account.
Here is the second case of the Act being invoked.
The Hastings and St Leonards News, 23 September 1859:
Hastings Borough Bench. Matrimonial Causes Act. Mrs Jane Muthern, of 2, St Margaret’s Terrace, applied under this Act of Parliament for an order for the protection of her property against her husband. Applicant stated that her husband deserted her in May, 1855, after they had been married 10 months. She had not heard from him for two years and a half, and did not know where he was, but she had been told that he was in Brighton.
The application was supported by Mr W.P. Beecham, and an order was granted.
The newspaper reporter misheard what was being said in court, and the actual surname was Mulhearn. On the 31 July 1854, St Mary Magdalen, John Thomas Mulhearn, coachmaker, had married Jane Carpenter, both of the parish.
In the 7 April 1861 census she occupied 2 St Margaret’s Terrace, as a wife, age 28, lodging house keeper, with Mary Watson, a ‘servant of all work.’ There were four lodgers. I could not find her husband in that census.
The newspaper called Osborne’s Directory, 29 June 1861, stated that she had moved from 2 St Margaret’s Terrace to 28 Warrior Square.
There was a reconciliation, as in the 1871 census they were together at 28 Warrior Square, he a coach maker, born Oxford, she a lodging house keeper, born Somerset, with a seven-year daughter born in St Leonards and a Carpenter niece. Her husband died at that address on the 25 September 1873, aged 47. She was still there as a lodging house keeper in the 1881 census, but stopped being listed in 1885. A few years later she was listed as a shareholder in the local gas company, and died in the Thanet area, Kent, in 1888.
As for the daughter, the Hastings and St Leonards News, 11 January 1884, reported on the marriage near Taunton of Sarah Mulhearn to Mercer Wildish of London Road. He was 24, a butcher, she 20, of Staplegrove, daughter of John Thomas Mulhearn, lodging house keeper (which he wasn’t, of course). Why Somerset ? Her mother was from that area. In the 1911 census the couple were still living locally, at 22 Church Road.
I didn’t realize how class-based divorce was in the 19th century! The wealthier you were, the more access you had to legal protections like divorce, which feels so unjust, especially in an age where we think of legal reforms as helping everyone equally.