Divorce laws in Hard Time

• In the midst of his satiric attack on the philosophy of the utilitarians, Dickens found space in Hard Times to take aim at another target: the highly restrictive divorce laws that operated in England at the time.
• The institution of marriage does not emerge from Hard Times with any credit. Three marriages are presented: the Gradgrinds, the Bounderbys, and Stephen Blackpool and his unnamed wife. Not one of these marriages is a good one (and that is not even to mention the allusions to the disastrous marriage of Mrs. Sparsit many years earlier). The worst marriage by far is between Stephen and his drunken wife.

•  The matter of the divorce laws was a highly topical one at the time Dickens was writing Hard Times. There was widespread agreement amongst the educated classes that the divorce laws were badly in need of reform.
•  In 1853, a Royal Commission had been appointed to investigate the matter, and the following year the commission recommended that divorce be made a matter for the civil courts rather than the ecclesiastical courts. A bill incorporating the recommended changes was introduced into the House of Lords in 1854, but it faced powerful opposition and was quickly withdrawn.

•  The Murdered Person"

appeared in October 1856. It was a comment on the trial, a few months earlier, of a working-class man who was convicted and hanged for murdering his wife. Dickens used the case to attack the divorce laws. He pointed out that there was no escape from a bad marriage except in certain very restricted circumstances and then "only on payment of an enormous sum of money."

•  A wealthy couple trapped in a bad marriage could arrange to inhabit separate quarters in a large house and live virtually independent lives (a point that Stephen makes to Bounderby in the novel).    But this was not possible for working-class couples who lived in cramped conditions, often a single room, as Stephen and his wife do.

•  These courts would grant an absolute divorce (as opposed to a judicial separation, without the right to remarry) only in cases in which the marriage was found to be invalid due to age, mental incompetence, sexual impotence, or fraud. The only other way a complete divorce might be obtained was through a private act of Parliament. During the nineteenth century, there were usually about ten such acts passed each year, but they were not for the likes of Stephen Blackpool, because the procedure was extremely expensive. Only the wealthy could afford it.

• Divorce Act

 A civil court with jurisdiction over divorce was established, and the number of reasons for which a divorce might be obtained was increased. There was little comfort for the working classes, however. Although one of the stated aims of the reformers was to remove the perception that there was one law for the rich and another for the poor, the new act made it no easier for people from the lower classes to divorce, since there was only one court, in London, authorized to deal with such matters.