Dr Jennifer Aston will be presenting a paper called ‘Navigating Mental Illness in the Pre-1937 Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes’ at the 49th Annual Social History Society Conference at the Black Country Living Museum. This will be on Tuesday 7th July 2025 as part of Panel 4 from 2.15-3.45pm on ‘Constructing (In)sanity in 19th Century Britain: Law, Language and Lived Experience’ in the E & C Lounge.
Abstract
There is no doubt that both physical and mental illness can place enormous pressure on marital relationships, indeed traditional wedding vows anticipate this strain with the line ‘I do take thee…in sickness and in health, until death do us part’. Permanently ending a marriage became more straightforward after the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 came into force in January 1858, but the grounds for divorce remained heavily limited and restricted only to those husbands who could prove their wife had committed adultery and wives who could prove both adultery and a further matrimonial offence, such as bigamy, desertion or cruelty. The mental illness – however severe – of a spouse did not become legal grounds for divorce until 1937, some eighty years later. This is not to say, however, that the issue of mental illness and questions of ‘sanity’ or ‘insanity’ did not come before the Divorce Court during this period, perhaps most famously in the petitions of Sir Charles Mordaunt who sought a divorce on the grounds of his wife Lady Harriet Mordaunt’s reported adultery with several men, including the Prince of Wales. This paper will use the Mordaunt divorce and other cases heard by the Divorce Court between 1858 and 1923, to examine how mental illness and questions of sanity were treated before ‘incurable insanity’ became a recognised grounds to dissolve a marriage. It will argue that the intersection of gender, class, and the manifestation of mental illness played a crucial role in navigating the breakdown of a relationship.