PENAL DANCING FOR THE PROTECTION OF WOMEN.
In a quadrille—composed, we think, by the ingenious M. Jullien—a lively and diverting effect is produced by the cracking of a whip, which forms an accompaniment of the tune which the company are supposed to dance to.
William Curtis, a tailor, according to the Police Reports, was brought the other day before the Lord Mayor, at the Mansion House, for having cruelly beaten and attempted to murder his wife; who stated on evidence—which was corroborated by a policeman—that he ripped up her stays with a penknife, took the bone out of them, and beat her with the bone till it broke in three pieces; then beat her with her hair-brush, dragged her out of bed, tried to strangle her, and beat her again with a large square-cut stick—declaring that if she dared to call out for assistance he would dance upon her body.
The quadrille above-mentioned supplies a hint in regard to Mr. Curtis's notion of a dance. Mr. William Curtis is an uneducated man. He has not been taught how to behave himself to the gentler sex. He wants a little instruction in deportment, to which dancing should be added, as his ideas concerning that accomplishment are evidently barbarous. Mr. Curtis should have been sent to Mr. Calcraft's Dancing Academy, and there have been taught to dance with fettered heels to the smack of the lash resounding on his own bare back.
The Lord Mayor consigned Mr. Curtis to Holloway Prison and hard labour for six months, to give him, as his Lordship said, an opportunity for reflection and repentance. But the dancing lessons—two, or even three, perhaps, would not have been too many—were wanting to render the reflection profitable and the repentance sincere. They would have given him an opportunity for reflecting on the nature of stripes and blows, and for repenting of having inflicted such injuries on a woman.
Another tailor, James Wright, also brought before the Lord Mayor on the same day for the like offence, had hit his wife twice on the head with a sleeveboard, cutting open her skull in three places, had struck her with his fist in the face, and continued to knock her about for three or four minutes. At the Thames Police Office, likewise on the same day, James Cropley, a Lancashire collier, was charged with committing an assault upon his wife, which consisted in felling her to the earth by dealing her a blow in the face with a heavy stick that knocked her nose flat. Six months' imprisonment and hard labour only, were the sentences on these gentlemen also. No blame to the Mayor or the Magistrate. The law at present unfortunately does not empower them to enter such savages at the School of Correction for the extra of penal dancing.
Since these cases, others of similar atrocity have occurred, and continue to occur so frequently as to suggest the existence of a downright mania for wife-beating. In other forms of mania the whip has happily been disused; but it is the only cure for this. There is clearly no other help. Cure?—preventive we should rather say. Dastards—with the fear of the scourge before their eyes—have ceased to assail the Royal person, and would very soon begin to respect that of the mere female subject. Thus the possibility of being whipped would restrain them from rendering themselves liable to whipping; a consideration which quite conquers the repugnance one feels at the thought of lashing a human being—if such a phrase can be applied to a brute. Whipcord, therefore, would never, probably, have to whistle, or thong to crack, to the howl of any such ruffian after all: but, if occasion were given for such music, we must say our ears would not be too delicate to bear it.
The present Home Secretary is evidently determined to keep his department in order, and may doubtless be depended upon for making Home tolerable to a poor woman, in as far as he can, by warranting her such protection as a cat-o'-nine-tails can afford against the ferocity of a brutal husband.