BBC radio 4's report on Victorian depiction of mad women included a remark that all Shakespeare's plays were about how to kill a king and that Victorian novels were about how to get rid of a wife.
I know of a luckier Victorian wife, born Jane Johnson in Reading, who avoided being locked up, and despite twenty or thirty years of poverty, ended by having an annuity from her bankrupt husband. How the tables turned!
Around 1834, William Sugden, went to Melbourne, leaving his wife Jane with their three small children. As an illiterate washer woman, she must have found life hard, despite living for several years with his parents in Yorkshire.
William moved to Tasmania where he ran a hostelry and had an affair that produced two sons. The business failed and he moved back to Melbourne where he ran another hostelry and as the first chief of police in the suburb of St Kilda, he became a well known public figure, strutting down the main street like the Queen's guard that he had been. . Then, in April 1843, he married a 19-year old woman, Louisa, daughter of an important business man and within six months she had a son, Arthur. Perhaps William had to marry her.
Somehow Jane knew where he'd gone and that he'd remarried. Jane and William had had a daughter, Caroline. Jane and her children had moved back to Reading where she had been born. Caroline there met and married the younger brother of the Mayor of St Kilda. Perhaps she, and her husband shared information with the mayor and thus discovered William's bigamous marriage, a scandal in Victorian times when divorce was impossible, and bigamy was illegal.
Jane and her other daughter, Esther, went out to Melbourne in the early 1850s. When they came back to England, the censuses reveal that she was living on an annuity.
Meanwhile, William was going bankrupt again. In the bankruptcy court, he had to explain the large sum of money paid out to a Mrs Sugden in London, but to admit who he'd paid it to would have revealed him as a bigamist. Thus he fell from grace. He died only a few years later, never regaining his wealth, and consequential right to vote.
He may have been a bigamist, but he didn't marry the girl in Tasmania, and he didn't put his wife away as mad. In fact, given that he loved at least three women in his life, he was probably quite a nice person, definitely attractive to the women! And his wife wasn't mad. She was astute.
