"Divorce Court"

In issue 1875 of the Illustrated Police News, the paper printed an article simply titled “Divorce Court,” with the subtitle, “A Hong Kong Romance” next to the article “Theatrical Case.” In the first article, which was published in January 1900, they describe a hearing at divorce court where Mrs. Lilias Maxwell Cooper-King is applying for “restitution of conjugal rights,” an act that could be brought to the court in the event of a husband or wife living away from their spouse for no legitimate reason. In this case, the wife of Mr. Reginald Cooper-King, who was in the army, appealed to the court for this purpose. The article goes into the background on their marriage, stating how they married in 1897 at the registrar’s office in Hong-Kong, where the wife was living with her parents and the husband was the aide-de-camp to the General. They already were acquaintances when they boarded the same ship to Japan, and they took the same ship back and secretly married upon their return. Yet they returned to their living situations, and Mrs. Cooper-King’s husband eventually traveled to Singapore and then England, and never lived with his wife; they had only seen each other three times since their marriage. On his last visit, he suggested that he did not recognize her as his wife and did not want to live with her, and after further questioning, she found out that he did not want anything to do with her and he wrote her a letter telling his wife that he changed his mind and to end the discussion there. Once the court confirmed that the marriage was legitimate, the judge granted Mrs. Lilias Maxwell Cooper-King’s request, meaning that her husband was to be required to live with his wife. The second article described Mrs. Georgina Emily Alexander’s petition for divorce on the grounds of cruelty and infidelity of her husband. The title comes from the couple’s profession, as they were in the theatrical field; Mr. Pridham Whippell and Mrs. Alexander were married 1887 and as they were touring, the husband had an affair and assaulted his wife. He burned through their money during this time as well. She summoned him, and they were meant to be seperated but Mr. Whippell violated the deed and they lived together then. He continued to abuse his wife, and she filed for an order of separation after another assault but he never complied with it. He assaulted her twice more and she took him back, until he continued to mistreat his wife and threatened to kill her. The article then mentions how Mr. Whippell’s mistress rented an apartment under the guise of being Mrs. Alexander, but that witnesses had to turn them away because they did not return until three o’clock in the morning. The article ends in stating that the judge granted Mrs. Georgina Emily Alexander’s request, and she was granted costs and custody of the children as well.

This article interested me because of the mention of divorce, which was a difficult act to obtain in England at the time, and because in the first article, there was no divorce at all. Instead, a woman petitioned the courts to refuse her husband’s desertion of her, and was her request was fulfilled and her husband was no longer allowed to deny her as wife and evade her. The second article detailed the misery of an abused wife, who files for divorce and is finally granted separation. These articles both discuss the women as initiators in their cases, as they both take their husbands to court for their “bad behaviors.” Though in the 19th century women were given little access to legal representation, the fact that these women were able to reclaim some semblance of agency through these suits demonstrates the ways in which women are progressing, even if only slightly, from being seen as property and are given a little more agency by the turn of the century. However, the fact that Mrs. Alexander’s abuse was carried on for much longer than it needed to be because the law failed to protect her demonstrates how women are only believed in extreme circumstances; they must prove their husband’s mistreatment multiple times to the courts in order to gain any sort of legal footing. Like the Tess and Sylvia, the women in these articles have a complicated relationship to men and marriage, and are able to gain some recourse through the divorce courts. Through these articles, women are shown in a different light in the courtroom, as they are fighting for their rights as wives to be respected by their husbands or to be seen as humans who are not worthy of mistreatment or abuse.