The Divorce Court and the Queen’s/King’s Proctor: Legal Patriarchy and the Sanctity of Marriage in England, 1861‑1937
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The office of H M Proctor, a curious aspect of English divorce procedure, investigated divorce cases based on collusion between the spouses and divorce cases brought by spouses whose own misconduct disqualified them from the right to divorce. On the basis of evidence provided by the proctor's intervention into divorce suits, the divorce court had the power to rescind divorce decrees improperly obtained. This essay describes the origins of this legal institution and delineates its impact on divorce during the Victorian period. The analysis considers the growing criticism of the proctor's powers during the first four decades of the twentieth century. English divorce law was originally intended to buttress both the power of the husband within the marital relationship and the power of the state over the family. The changing view of the proctor over seventy-five years reveals the tensions inherent in Victorian gender ideology and reflects changing attitudes towards the nature of marriage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".