“The wrongdoing of the poor man is as open as day”

Domestic disputes and neighborly disagreements were, of course, not unique to the working class. However, the spatial arrangement of their neighborhoods provided motivations for disputes and meant that violence, when it occurred, was common knowledge. An 1856 article on spousal violence graphically pointed out the particular spatial contexts of violence among the working class and poor: The wrongdoing of the poor man is as open as day. Violence is influenced by the ways that knowledge about it is gained. Knowledge of violence is shaped by space and forms, in a sense, a mental space of its own. Violent acts take particular forms, and participants and observers shape the meanings of those acts in relation to what they know about previous violence. Furthermore, divergent spatial environments and cultural forms contributed to different experiences of violence. For the middle class, that experience was limited in the nineteenth century, as spatial demarcation and cultural alienation increased.