He could still have kept her safely locked up in the tower. Wouldn’t insanity have been legitimate grounds for divorce even in the 1850s?
Divorce required a Private Bill to be passed through the legislature to legalise it in the specific case. Such Bills were expensive and required social and political connections, and were beyond the means of only-moderately wealthy men like Mr Rochester.
Wasn’t there also a law that if the spouse was mentally ill, you weren’t allowed to divorce them? I seem to remember that being a plot point in one of Agatha Christie’s novels (which means it may be subject to a large grain of salt).
Wow- interesting… Dang.
Even if he could have afforded it, it would have been a massive insult to his wife’s family, and social suicide for Rochester.
Rochester not only remaining married to her, but keeping her in his own house and cared-for was meant to be a sharp indication of his good character - the contrasting “common” response to a mad wife by the upper classes would be to pack her off to a country estate, drug her up on opium until she died of overdose, or ship her off to Bedlam if it could be done quietly, and then to simply take a mistress.
It would have been dishonourable. Then again, so was trying to bigamize Jane, but we are meant to see a man imprisoned by honour, freed by Love, re-imprisoned by propriety, and finally freed by fate, for no more price than his eyesight.
Jane Eyre, like much of the Bronte sisters’ work, was set possibly in the late 18th century or at any rate under George III. Charlotte was dead by 1855. [ That awful little creep, Heathcliff was born in 1764. ]
Until the Divorce Act of 1857 there were very few divorces — divided into a mensa et thoro : separation with support to the wife and a vincula matrimonii which invalidated the actual marriage — but a lot of informal separations and scarperings a landed gentleman could not follow.
There’s a good overview here from Family Search.
Also:
Prior to 1754 some people in England and Wales thought of marriage as a publicly witnessed contract rather than as a ceremony in a church. It was thus not such an outrageous idea that a wife might be dispensed with by another publicly witnessed contract, by sale in the market place or local public house. A miniscule number of wives were sold in this way for nominal sums, mostly it would seem by prearrangement and to the persons to whom they had transferred their affections. *
This too would have been unavailable to Mr. Rochester.
Actually, as far as true or false lockings up for lunacy were concerned, men were at greater risk from their families than women in the Victorian period. One can sympathise with a family whose father is alcoholic, but ( male ) doctors — in a time when one need only two signatures — seem to have sympathised a little too much, since being sent to an asylum when one is not insane is not optimal.
Then more than ever. At any rate I read some fiction about Dr. Neill Cream, dec’d 1892. ( possibly by the excellent Professor*Donald Thomas** ) which indicated even American asylums and prisons weren’t charming even later ).
Very informative! Thanks ever so.
Three Act Tragedy. In that one, Sir Charles wanted to remarry, so he murdered his best friend (the only one who knew about the wife), plus two others as well. I’ve always thought it would have been easier for him to just kill the wife!
WHY can’t you divorce someone who’s insane?
Probably because women at that time didn’t generally have a personal means of support other than father or husband. To divorce a woman whose father was dead (likely at the time) and who could not find a new husband due to the insanity was to leave her destitute.
Let it be noted that this is a WAG, not some sort of expert opinion.
I tend to agree with your WAG. 
That is the rationale I’ve always heard as to why divorce in general was so rare. Presumably, though, if the legal system were to permit divorce more broadly, it could simultaneously adopt a system of spousal support.
For better and for worse, in sickness and in health.
The ban on mental illness as grounds for divorce was in America too and lasted much later.
Trivia: Henry Flagler, a partner of John D. Rockefeller and considered the father of Florida tourism (if you ever go to St. Augustine every other street and museum is named for him), changed his legal residence to Florida when the Florida state legislature passed a bill making incurable insanity grounds for divorce. He was 71 at the time, his second wife had been in an institution on and for decades, and, like Rockefeller, he was having some late-life morality crises and wanted to make an honest woman of his longtime mistress. The bill was passed strictly as a thank you to Flagler for the gazillions he had pumped into Florida and it would be years before it was used by anybody else but him.
Fiurther off track: When he died it made his much younger third wife the richest widow in the U.S… She remarried after his death and died under odd circumstances within a year, leaving millions to her second husband whose family (by his first wife) became one of the richest families in Kentucky as a result.
324 to be precise, an average of less than two a year!
Basically, before the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, divorce was technically illegal. The only way to get around it was to apply for an Act of Parliament granting an individual “exception” to the law, and only on the grounds of adultery. This cost about £1,000, which according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator (calculating from 1857 to 2013), would be about £98,000 ($152,000 USD) today.
Also, the husband had to swear to an ecclesiastical court that he would never re-marry, so Jane Eyre would still have been out of luck.
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Sir Charles has no known motive for killing those other people. I mean, maybe you believe the butler’s Hey-I-Just-Saw-You-Poison-That-Guy blackmail note; maybe you disregard that and figure The Butler Did It; but you don’t check whether Sir Charles has a good alibi for that evening, because why the heck would you? He’s just one more guy who stood to inherit nothing, and whom no eyewitness places at the scene of the crime; the planet is full of 'em.
But if a wife turns up murdered, isn’t the first question Did The Husband Do It?
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The law was even stricter than “no divorce.” A marriage proposal was considered a binding contract on the man (who did the asking; women never did). If a man asked a woman to marry her, and then denied doing so, or did something like proposing to someone else, the woman could sue him for breach of contract. He could settle by marrying her, or he could take his chances in court. If he lost, he’d probably end up paying her a lot of money. It might even be a stipend that was a lot like alimony, and continued until she married someone else.
A woman could always choose to release a man from his promise, however. If you have read PG Wodehouse, and wondered about all the backstage machinations Bertie Wooster went through trying to get a woman to break of an engagement he’d gotten into accidentally, instead of just telling her “Sorry, mistake,” it was because he didn’t want to be sued for breach of contract.
This has also come up on Downton Abbey.
In the play The Insanity of Mary Girard, a wealthy 1780s Philadelphia man has his wife, who had cheated on him, committed to an asylum after paying off a doctor to declare her insane.
Let’s just say it’s not a zany comedy.
One woman asked. Queen Victoria proposed to Albert, because he could not properly propose to a monarch. (Had he been a monarch himself, things might have been different.)