Preface; Introduction; 1. Violence and law, gender and law; 2. When men killed men; 3. Sexual violence; 4. Homicidal women and homicidal men: a growing contrast; 5. Bad wives I: drunkenness and other provocations; 6. Bad wives II: adultery and the unwritten law; 7. Establishing intention: probing the mind of a wife killer.
An examination of the treatment of serious violence by men against women in nineteenth-century England.
Martin J. Wiener is the Mary Jones Professor of History at Rice University. His previous books include Between Two Worlds: The Political Thought of Graham Wallas (1971), English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1980), and Reconstructing the Criminal (1990).
'... an important and, usefully, an accessible and approachable text. It is well written and presented. ... It is a book that deserves to be widely read.' British Journal of Criminology 'Weiner's book is a striking instance of how a problematic of masculinity opens up the way to new and illuminating questions in well-trodden terrain.' History Workshop Journal 'Martin Wiener's impressive work, Men of Blood, is to be welcomed not only because it fills a huge gap in the field by demonstrating how changes in ideas about manliness affected decision-making at the highest levels of Victorian justice, but also because of the scope and depth of its scholarship, which sheds considerable light on the relationship between civil servants, judges, juries and the wider public. Most significantly, he argues very convincingly that we need to think of Victorian criminal justice as a contested but shifting terrain, in which concerns about liberal citizenship ultimately created a very different approach to gender and justice than that which had been adopted in the eighteenth century. ... undoubtedly an extreemly important work, which will stimulate considerable debate and attention. It is highly relevant to all scholars and students of gender, crime and the Victorian social order; any review cannot do justice to the richness and complexity of information that is contained within its 300 pages.' Crime, History & Societies
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