Respectability, Bankruptcy and Bigamy in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Britain explores the vexed question of middle-class respectability in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It focuses upon the life of London solicitor Hamilton Pawley (1860?1936), who was barred from working by the Law Society, twice declared bankrupt, and in 1919 was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment with hard labour for bigamously marrying a woman practically forty years his junior. If Pawley did not suffer the revenge of respectable society, it is difficult to think who would.