I'll have to go back and check this, but how commonly known was Elizabeth Shackleton's situation really? After all, what we know about her marriage comes from her private diary. I know she went to her brother for help, but I'm wondering whether she wouldn't have tried to shield her children from the worst of what was happening to her, especially if they were away from home most of the time, both to protect them and to avoid humiliation to herself. As for spreading the news to her general acqaintance, she would have known that as well as sympathy, the instant question would have been "What has she done to make her husband beat her?", so just perhaps, her sons wouldn't have known how bad things really were.