ABSTRACT
The Divorce Bill received the royal assent on 28th August, 1857. In that same year the three Dickens brothers, including the writer Charles, left their wives, and Marian Evans, known to us as George Eliot, moved in with G. H. Lewes, a married man. The wife of the writer and poet George Meredith went holidaying that hot summer in Wales with her lover, the painter Henry Wallis, and conceived a son. Though diaries and correspondence reveal remarkably little about discussions involving divorce, Victorians did take stock of marriage and their marriages. Few, however, followed these inhabitants of the literary world whose pasts or hoped-for futures precluded divorce, even under the less expensive proceedings. Though challenged repeatedly, Respectability reigned supreme for the rest of Victoria's reign, and into that of her unRespectable son. However, developments, sometimes paralleling the history of divorce discussed in Chapter 5 and more than occasionally involving the divorce court, led to the charge of hypocrisy so often levelled against Victorians.
