Kelly Hager. Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6947-0. Price: US$99.95/£55.00

In her engaging and well-researched study, Dickens and the Rise of Divorce, Lisa Hager challenges traditional critical views that the English novel was inherently a novel of courtship. In contrast, Hager argues that "failed" marriages provide "a competing and complementary plot from the beginning of the novel's emergence in the eighteenth-century" (14). She takes issue with Ian Watt's formulation that English novels rely on courtship to provide closure and restore social harmony. Hager points out how Watt's reading of Pamela (1740) as the prototype of the domestic novel overlooks the ways that Richardson's novel continues beyond the wedding and represents the difficulties in negotiating the daily challenges of marriage. As social historian Stephanie Coontz has argued, the nineteenth century was a period that celebrated marital intimacy, and rejected pre-eighteenth-century notions of marriage for political and economic motives. Along with this relatively new celebration of the love-based marriage came a demand for the right to divorce in the case of loveless marriages. In addition to inspiring countless narratives of true love within marriage, the nineteenth-century novel contained numerous examples of the miserable consequences of ill-matched unions. Hager’s second chapter presents a compelling reading of the “monstrous marriages” in Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) which result from ill-fated, mercenary unions. Both Monks and Smike are the hideous abandoned progeny of loveless, (secret) mercenary marriages. They, as well as innocents, such as Oliver, Nicholas, and Nell, suffer when patriarchs make such loveless matches. Another reminder of the monstrousness of the loveless marriage is the figure of Jasper Packlemerton, a wax figure in The Old Curiosity Shop who is reported to have murdered all 14 of his wives by tickling them to death. This “figure of a figure of speech,” along with the Punch and Judy show, represents an intense hostility within marriage, a hostility that cannot be muted by conventional saccharine love plots of the heroes (79). Hager’s chapter on marriage as melodrama in Dombey and Son, points out the ways that both Edith Dombey and Caroline Norton used the conventions of melodrama to construct roles as persecuted victims of unfair nineteenth-century marriage laws. Using Elaine Hadley and Peter Brooks’ formulations of melodrama as a genre that, although conventionalized, allowed for the expression of intense, authentic feelings, Hager shows how in Dombey and Son “Dickens is staging marriage as an institution which threatens the innocent, works by means of an intimate betrayal, and exploits the inherent structure of a family” (95). Both Edith and Caroline Norton defy their abusive husbands, are accused of adultery, but are ultimately constructed as innocent victims of unfair marriage laws. Edith’s acute awareness of the cash nexus of the marriage contract deconstructs the false image of the angel in the house who was supposed to create within the home a shelter from immoral capitalist transactions. Edith’s assumption of equality within her marriage is a refusal of the doctrine of coverture which denied wives a separate legal identity and thus made it impossible for them to own their own property. During the same period of time, Dickens was acting in the melodrama, The Frozen Deep, and was formulating his own narrative of marital discontent, an unhappiness that ultimately caused him to force his wife out of their home. While melodrama necessitates conventional, formulaic roles, it allowed Dickens to create a subversive character in Edith, a woman who leaves her husband but is not banished to Australia or killed as a result. The last chapter of Dickens and the Rise of Divorce reveals Dickens’s sympathy for those who had not the …