ABSTRACT
In Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury, Edwin, defendant in the breach of promise case providing the central plot, argues that, being ‘always in liquor’, if he married Angelina, the plaintiff, he would beat her. This provides the excuse for the judge to suggest that, since Edwin claims when drunk, £he would thrash and kick her’, 'let’s make him tipsy, gentlemen, and try’. Angelina objects: Edwin enthusiastically does not!1 The Victorian comic opera takes this no further, but the libretto’s humorous linkage of drink and violence provides a provocative clue to the elaborate, often contradictory, codes that encircled the stereotyping of Victorian violence. Such expressions of popular facetiousness have considerable implications for comprehension of the scale of everyday violence and its practical dimensions. For example, they indicate the extent to which external factors, including alcohol, were held to contribute to the practice of violence and the ways in which, in some circumstances, types of physical force were unlikely to be severely condemned. This raises the question of the contributions made to the codes surrounding expressions of violence by factors of class, age, race and, above all, gender (though race, as a factor, cannot be fairly dealt with here for reasons of space, and consequently the focus is entirely on the ‘British’, not including the Irish). In relation to these, specified levels of violence were ‘acceptable’: other levels or types, especially when perpetrators were identified by gender, were not. And there were certain victims (notably animals, though this aspect of Victorian violence also will not be considered here) where respectable society increasingly positioned itself against any expressions of violence outside the increasingly formalised and organised rituals of sport, with their links to British masculinities. In terms of violence against human targets, only incidents involving excessive levels or ‘unacceptable’ types of violence were likely to involve the courts, and
these cases never represented more than a proportion of the everyday violence present in communities.
