ABSTRACT
Thomas Hardy’s interest in the law was multi-faceted and abiding. 1 Though recent biographies barely mention the fact, he served as a local magistrate, or Justice of the Peace, in Dorchester (1884–1916), hearing cases ranging from stealing from a public lavatory to sexual assault and fraud. When he was not sitting in his own court (his attendance was irregular), he served at Dorchester’s periodic assizes at which various London justices presided, and at which he heard more serious cases involving bigamy, criminal assault, murder and the like. 2 He regularly visited London law offices, the police and divorce courts, sometimes for the purpose of gathering what he called ‘novel padding’, 3 and on one occasion during a trip to Paris in 1888 he attended ‘one of the Correctional courts [and] heard two or three trivial cases’. 4 His writing about divorce in such novels as The Woodlanders, Tess and Jude was supported by his attendance at the Crawford-Dilke divorce trial in 1886, at which he took notes, and by his ongoing discussions of divorce and related legal matters with his long-time friend Sir Francis Jeune (1843–1905), President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court. 5 Hardy was especially interested in the ‘marriage laws … also of the difficulties of separation, of terminable marriages where there are children, and of the nervous strain of living with a man when you know he can throw you over at any moment’. 6 Hardy also knew that the opposite could happen: Jeune’s colleague, Justice Sir Lewis William Cave (1832–97), was charged with hearing the infamous ‘Clitheroe Abduction Case’ (1891: more properly known as R. v. Jackson), a case of wife-abduction that tested the husband’s right to imprison his misbehaving wife. 7 Hardy’s interest in this case doubtless stemmed from his long-time concern for the legal position of women, a concern that he documented in his 1880s notebook entitled ‘Facts From Newspapers, Histories, Biographies, & other chronicles – (mainly Local)’. 8 Here Hardy summarizes some fifty court cases and newspaper stories dealing with women and such legal events as divorce, rape and desertion, this last one being one of his chief interests. Both the Life and his letters show him discussing these and other legal issues with many of the leading judges of the late nineteenth century, among them Lord Chief Justice Sir John Duke Coleridge (1820–94) and Sir Henry Hawkins (1817–1907). Both justices heard cases brought to court under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, an act written to provide additional protection to women and girls in cases of sexual assault and seduction. Within two years of the passage of this Act Hardy began work on Tess.
