Kha on the Spectacle of Divorce Law in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust and A. P. Herbert's Holy Deadlock @tandfonline

Henry Kha has published The Spectacle of Divorce Law in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust and A. P. Herbert's Holy Deadlock in Law and Literature. Here is the abstract.

The article examines the way Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934) and A. P. Herbert's Holy Deadlock (1934) express popular dissent against the divorce laws of England in the 1930s. These novels satirized the legal process of obtaining a divorce as farcical and tainted by parties colluding to stage “hotel divorces” in order to satisfy the single-fault ground of adultery. This article argues that these novels helped to articulate widespread opposition towards the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, which only allowed divorce to be granted for adultery alone. The writings also spurred parliamentary debate and ultimately paved the way forward for the introduction of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937. Herbert played a unique part in the campaign for divorce law reform. Both as a novelist and as a parliamentarian, Herbert composed legal satires and successfully introduced the Divorce Bill into the British Parliament respectively.

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