On an unseasonably warm Wednesday in May 1825, Miss Margaret Shands travelled to St Saviour’s Church, Southwark, to marry mariner, Alexander Christie. They set up home together on Watling Street in the City of London and were joined by a daughter, Rebecca in 1827, and a son, William, in 1830. The Christie’s marriage (perhaps unsurprisingly, […]
Of all the forms of litigation that unhappily married spouses could pursue in the Divorce Court between 1858 and 1923, divorce is probably the most recognisable today. For clarity, divorce is a form of permanent legal separation that allows both spouses to remarry. It was one of only two options available to unhappily married husbands
D.I.V.O.R.C.E. Legally Severing the Bonds of Marriage Read More »
Come along to the book launch as part of the Women’s History Seminar Series at the Institute of Historical Research (or join online-via Zoom) for Dr Jennifer Aston and Professor Oliver Anderson’s new book: Deserted Wives and Economic Divorce in 19th-Century England and Wales: For Wives Alone. In this seminar we will be celebrating
In our last blog we outlined how to find Divorce Court records, so that you can use them in your own research, whether that’s for academic study or to explore your own family history. Once you start to delve inside the case files, you’ll find some fascinating information that can tell you a great deal
What’s in a divorce case file? Read More »
Over the next 18 months, we’ll be working in close partnership with The National Archives (TNA) to carry out the project ‘A New Methodological Approach to the History of Divorce’. TNA houses the records of the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes from 1858-1875 and its later iteration as the Supreme Court of Judicature, Probate,
How to find Divorce Court records (estimated read time 3 minutes) Read More »
Content Note: Please be aware that this blog post contains descriptions of domestic abuse. It also includes historic language about deafness, directly quoted from a historic source. While we would not use this language ourselves, we have retained it here to accurately reflect the 19th century source material. On 25 July 1876, a solicitor by
Deafness in the Divorce Court Read More »
The Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes (Divorce Court) was established as part of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 which became law in January 1858, removing jurisdiction over marriage breakdowns from ecclesiastical to civil courts in England and Wales. The creation of the new court improved access to divorce for many unhappily married spouses who
Introduction to the Divorce Court Read More »
Welcome to the Blog Series of the ‘New Histories of Divorce’ project. My name is Dr Jennifer Aston, and I am the Principal Investigator on the project and an Associate Professor in Law at Northumbria University. This project came about after I (like so many scholars before me) fell down an archival rabbit hole at
Welcome to ‘New Histories of Divorce’ Read More »
Dr Jennifer Aston, the Principal Investigator on this project, will be presenting at the 2024 British Legal History Conference, with a paper called Domestic Abuse and Pregnancy in Marriage in England and Wales, 1858-1918: Evidence from the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes. This year’s British Legal History Conference: Insiders and Outsiders in the
