Page:English laws for women in the nineteenth century.djvu/162

150 get the old one annulled; but must be content to live, paired together, in the only way that remains possible,—or run the risk of being tried at the bar of justice! Nor is this confined to the lower classes: persons in respectable and educated positions, from ignorance of the exact law, or in the hope of escaping its notice, run the same risk. We have only to turn to the newspapers, and take the first case at hazard, as an illustration. I find one tried before Mr Russell Gurney; so lately as December 3, 1853. I find, in that brief report, a story revealed, which resembles the romance of "Jane Eyre," (except that romance always appears to excite deeper interest than reality). The couple whose misfortunes thus flashed for a moment on public attention, were Mr E. Gray and Mary Adams: the evidence, shewed that Mr Gray had a wife; living and undivorced; and was therefore guilty of bigamy. Mary Adams deposed that he had courted her for six years; had no money with her; on the contrary, supplied her with money since his apprehension; had always been very kind; and that they had a child of his, residing with them. The undivorced wife was living with an omnibus man, and had been in a lunatic asylum! Mr Russell Gurney, in deciding the case, observed, with epigrammatic truth, that "this was one of those unfortunate cases, in which, in the present state of the law, if a man was not possessed of wealth, he had no power to remedy his situation." Now, if instead of plain Mr Gray and obscure Mary Adams, the parties had been Lord Grayton and Lady Mary, we should simply have had "Grayton's Divorce Bill" going quietly through the House of Lords, previous to receiving the royal assent; and Lady Mary, innocently looking forward to making that forsaken home happy, by replacing the mad bad wife, who could no longer be a "help-mate" to her husband. Not being persons of wealth and station, we have a trial for bigamy, and this illegal attempt at happiness rooted up by the stern hand of justice, which pronounces such unions to be tares among the permitted grain, of marriages