WIFE-TORTURE IN ENGLAND. 



49 



" scratching a newt's tail " when they refer to 

 burning alive, or dissecting out the nerves of liv- 

 ing dogs, or torturing ninety cats in one series of 

 experiments. 



Wife-beating is the mere preliminary canter 

 before the race — the preface to the serious mat- 

 ter which is to follow. Sometimes, it is true, 

 there are men of comparatively mild dispositions 

 who are content to go on beating their wives year 

 after year, giving them occasional black- eyes and 

 bruises, or tearing out a few locks of their hair 

 and spitting in their faces, or bestowing an ugly 

 print of their iron fingers on the woman's soft 

 arm, but not proceeding beyond these minor in- 

 juries to anything perilous. Among the lower 

 classes, unhappily, this rude treatment is under- 

 stood to mean very little more than that the man 

 uses his weapon — the fists — as the woman uses 

 hers — the tongue — and neither is very much hurt 

 or offended by what is either done by one or 

 said by the other. The whole state of manners 

 is what is to be deplored, and our hope must be 

 to change the bear-garden into the semblance of 

 a civilized community, rather than by any direct 

 effort to correct the special offense. Foul words, 

 gross acts, drink, dirt, and vice, oaths, curses, and 

 blows, it is all, alas ! in keeping — nor can we hope 

 to cure one evil without the rest. But the un- 

 endurable mischief, the discovery of which has 

 driven me to try to call public attention to the 

 whole matter, is this : vrifa-beating in process of 

 time, and in numberless cases, advances to wife- 

 torture, and the wife-torture usually ends in wife- 

 maiming, wife -blinding, or wife-murder. A man 

 who has "thrashed" his wife with his fists half 

 a dozen times becomes satiated with such enjoy- 

 ment as that performance brings, and next time 

 he is angry he kicks her with his hobnailed shoes. 

 When he has kicked her a few times standing or 

 sitting, he kicks her down and stamps on her 

 stomach, her breast, or her face. If he does not 

 wear clogs or hobnailed shoes, he takes up some 

 other weapon, a knife, a poker, a hammer, a bottle 

 of vitriol, or a lighted lamp, and strikes her with 

 it, or sets her on fire — and then, and then only, 

 the hapless creature's sufferings are at an end. 



I desire specially to avoid making this paper 

 more painful than can be helped, but it is indis- 

 pensable that some specimens of the tortures to 

 which I refer should be brought before the read- 

 er's eye. I shall take them exclusively from 

 cases reported during the last three or four 

 months. Were I to go further back for a year 

 or two, it would be easy to find some more " sen- 



76 



sational," as, for example, of Michael Copeland, 

 who threw his wife on a blazing fire ; of George 

 Ellis, who murdered his wife by pitching her out 

 of a window ; of Ashton Keefe, who beat his 

 wife and thrust a box of lighted matches into his 

 little daughter's breast when she was too slow in 

 bringing his beer ; and of Charles Bradley, who, 

 according to the report in the Manchester Exam- 

 iner, " came home, and, after locking the door, 

 told his wife he would murder her. He imme- 

 diately set a large bull-dog at her, and the dog, 

 after flying at the upper part of her body, seized 

 hold of the woman's right arm, which she lifted 

 to protect herself, and tore pieces out. The 

 prisoner in the mean time kept striking her in the 

 face, and inciting the brute to worry her. The 

 dog dragged her up and down, biting pieces out 

 of her arms, and the prisoner then got on the 

 sofa and hit and kicked her on the breast." 



But the instances of the last three or four 

 months — from September to the end of January 

 — are more than enough to establish all I want 

 to prove ; and I beg here to return my thanks 

 for a collection of them, and for many very use- 

 ful observations and tabulations of them, to Miss 

 A. Shore, who has been good enough to place 

 them at my disposal. 



It is needful to bear in mind, in reading them, 

 that the reports of such cases which appear in 

 newspapers are by no means always reliable, or 

 calculated to convey the same impressions as the 

 sight of the actual trial. In some of the fol- 

 lowing instances, also, I have only been able 

 to obtain the first announcement of the offense, 

 without means of checking it by the subsequent 

 proceedings in court. Per contra, it should be 

 remembered that if a fevr of these cases may 

 possibly have been exaggerated or trumped up 

 (as I believe the story of the man pouring Chili 

 vinegar into his wife's eyes proved to have been), 

 there are, for every one of these published hor- 

 rors, at least three or four which never are report- 

 ed at all, and where the poor victim dies quietly 

 of her injuries like a wounded animal, without 

 seeking the mockery of redress offered her by 

 the law : 



" James Mills cut his wife's throat as she lay 

 in bed. He was quite sober at the time. On a 

 previous occasion he had nearly torn away her left 

 breast. 



" J. Coleman returned home early in the morn- 

 ing, and, finding his wife asleep, took up a heavy 

 piece of wood and struck her on the head and 

 arm, bruising her arm. On a previous occasion 

 he had fractured her ribs. 



