ABSTRACT
When the hearing of divorce suits was transferred to a civil court in 1857, a notable authority on the law observed: ‘There are two ways of withholding divorce from the poor. One is to say so in words; another is to erect an unapproachable tribunal’ (MacQueen 1858: 129). The working of the new divorce procedure had been forecast with remarkable accuracy, for only a small number of broken marriages could contemplate the high legal cost of presenting a divorce petition to the newly formed Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes in London. All divorce petitions had to be heard in London; though section 12 of the 1857 Act clearly stated that ‘The Court . . . shall hold its sittings at such place or places in London or Middlesex or elsewhere as Her Majesty in Council shall from time to time appoint’. But the clause was very soon a dead letter, for the judges decided to restrict the legislator’s intention that an issue of fact might be tried before an Assize judge in any county. This judicial fettering of the power given by Parliament remained unaltered until 1920. The rule that all divorce petitions had to be heard in London continued from the period of Parliamentary divorce to 1922 when the new legislation of 1920 was implemented.
