I Did Not Commit Adultery:  Marital Conflict and the Law in Ontario in the 1870s

Jim Phillips, I Did Not Commit Adultery:  Marital Conflict and the Law in Ontario in the 1870s, published by the University of Toronto Press. Jim Phillips is a Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to the Department of History and the Centre for Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Osgoode Society. This book chronicles the breakdown of the marriage of Robert and Eliza Campbell, of Whitby, in 1873, which precipitated a six-year battle in the Ontario courts and the Parliament of Canada. In the Court of Common Pleas Robert Campbell successfully sued the man he alleged had seduced his wife for criminal conversation, and Eliza Campbell successfully sued Robert’s brother James Campbell for defamation. Eliza Campbell failed, however, to get an order for alimony in the Court of Chancery. When all this litigation was concluded Robert Campbell petitioned Parliament for an Act of Divorce, the only way to get a divorce in Ontario before 1930.  In 1876 he failed to persuade the Senate divorce committee that Eliza had committed adultery, the only ground for a divorce at that time, but Eliza succeeded in having an Act of Separation passed in her favour. This book is a detailed study of how the law governed married women in the later nineteenth century, and along the way also looks at the operations of the civil courts, the forensic skills of leading members of the Ontario legal profession, constitutional law, and parliamentary divorce, the last a topic never before examined in detail by Canadian historians