Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England.

Smith, Greg T.

Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England, by Martin J. Wiener. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. xvi, 296 pp. $70.00 US (cloth).

In this provocative and lively book, Martin Wiener traces the attitudes and responses to male violence against females in Victorian England and relates the story of how those attitudes became entrenched in statutes designed to punish violent men. Wiener has analysed nearly every recorded case of male-on-female violence in the nineteenth century, drawing his data from court records, government records in the home office papers, law reports, newspapers, and printed ephemera. His story is thus richly (if depressingly) illustrated.

Wiener accepts the separate spheres division of Victorian society, but argues that as this concept deepened, it was the violence done by men that was singled out for sharpening criticism and censure. Over the course of the nineteenth century, he argues, when it came to the prosecution and punishment of domestic violence, it was the husbands and male partners who needed to be tamed or civilized. Inevitably, then, as the courts grew more strident in their condemnation of male violence they inadvertently deepened the notion of the frail, defenceless woman, in need of protection from men who epitomized newly formed male gender norms: that is to say, those men whose strength was revealed in their moral character exemplified by restraint; who demonstrated their ability to provide a safe and stable home; and who eschewed the swaggering bravado and quick leap to violence ascribed to the lower classes, and foreigners. To this extent, the book makes a significant contribution to current debates on the history of masculinity and to the central role of the law in the social construction of gender norms in Victorian England.

Wiener also suggests that the growing intolerance for male-on-female violence is a key aspect of the long-term decline in interpersonal violence generally over the course of the nineteenth century, a story that has been traced through an analysis of available statistical evidence. Social historians of crime have, at various times, employed various theories to explain that decline. Variations of Norbert Elias' "civilizing process" argument have dominated that trend and Wiener contributes to that work by incorporating the fundamental (and largely overlooked) variable of gender. Specifically, Wiener asks how Victorian notions of manliness served to shape both nineteenth-century opinions and legislation concerning violence committed by men on women. Though there were evident stirrings of such change in the eighteenth century, Wiener argues that it was the following century that experienced the most dramatic modifications of social attitudes and of the law. Male violence was criminalized, and the violence that men employed in the control and domination of their female partners "was viewed with ever-greater disapproval and treated with ever-greater severity" (p. xii). The nineteenth century witnessed the arrival of the most significant pieces of legislation against interpersonal violence, for example, giving formal expression to ideas that had been merely percolating in the previous century. Wiener wants to suggest that one of the prime motivations for this concrete, legal framing of criminal violence, especially from the 1820s on, was the desire to further inculcate Victorian notions of manhood on Victorian men.

The criminalization of male violence in particular, in the Victorian age, Wiener argues, is suggestive of a broader trend in the nineteenth century towards public and official ways of encouraging self-discipline and repressing violent behaviour. These trends, he suggests, are features of a long-term process in the "reconstruction of gender" (p. 3) that began in the mid- eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, normative female gender roles were being defined more consistently within the separate spheres model where women, the "weaker vessel," were most in need of protection from men. Support for this claim was heightened when incidents of male-on-female violence were discovered and exposed, and was further solidified when the power of the courts, with the backing of parliament through new legislation, was brought to bear, ostensibly to protect women better. The legislation that appeared in the latter half of the nineteenth century to control wife beating, for example, was able to protect women and children to some greater extent (though how much is hard to determine as domestic violence was always a hidden horror) and to punish offenders with increased severity, but the aim of that legislation was, Wiener argues, the control and suppression of male violence and male aggression.

How did this "reconstruction of gender" manifest itself? Wiener shows how hardening attitudes towards drunkenness and other immoral activities helped to diminish the range of acceptable excuses for male violence, especially domestic violence. But outside of the violent/passive dichotomy that Wiener sets up in exploring the changing notions of acceptable masculine behaviour within domestic relationships, there is little to link those ideas with broader notions of what manliness might have meant in other Victorian contexts. Here Wiener is cautious in his reach, no doubt realizing that a full discussion of this complex issue was beyond the ambit of this one book. Yet in other places, Wiener reveals his interest in the discursive and contextual representations of violence, as in his discussion of the medicalization of insanity defences for charges of murder. If such new, Victorian ideas could find their way into court cases and legal decisions, where else did the judges and juries turn to draw their conceptions of proper, civilized, respectable men?

This book will provoke fresh debate on the nature and experience of legal and social reform in the Victorian period, finding wide appeal among historians of crime, gender, the law, and the Victorian age. It will, no doubt, wrinkle some feminist noses as some readers will see in Wiener's attention to the reconstruction of masculinity in this context an essentially triumphant endorsement of Victorian values and policies, which most scholars would concede meant elite male values and policies.

Greg T. Smith

University of Manitoba