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PRIVATE VIOLENCE IN THE PUBLIC EYE
The Early Writings of Charles Dickens
Figures 1.1, 1.2, 1.3. Details from “Handy Phrenology,” Punch 15 (1848): 104.
On 9 september 1848, Punch published a spoof on the trend of “Hand Phrenology,” or the analysis of human character by the shape of the hand (104). The accompanying cartoons featured a cast of a boxing glove (fig. 1.1) and the blunt-fingered, powerful hand inside it (fig. 1.2). A third detail showed the blunt hand from the back (fig. 1.3), with a label around the wrist denoting its owner’s identity: “Sykes”—Bill Sikes, the criminal who brutally murders the prostitute Nancy in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.1 The Punch cartoon of 1848, published in a period of protest concerning inadequate penalties for wife assault, suggests the extent to which the figures of Sikes and Nancy became a kind of shorthand for wife beater and victim in the Victorian period. Published in January 1839, the scene of Nancy’s murder horrified and fascinated Victorians throughout the time span of this study. Featured in music hall songs, feminist discourse, Punch, and in Dickens’s famous readings from 1868 to 1869, the figures of Bill and “poor wretched Mrs. Bill Sikes” became cultural icons of the spousal abuse problem with which Victorians struggled from the 1820s to the end of the century.2 This first chapter examines the cultural context that made the murder scene in Oliver Twist so powerful to its original readers of the late 1830s. I will suggest that the figure of Nancy, as well as the other portraits of battered women in Dickens’s sketches and early fiction, responded to a dramatic cultural shift in the late 1820s and early 1830s whereby wife beating entered the public eye through the daily newspapers.
In her study of marital violence and sensation fiction, Marlene Tromp argues that Oliver Twist looks back to tales of family violence in The Newgate Calendar.3 I want to suggest a more immediate context for Dickens’s depictions of marital violence—that is, the newspaper coverage of marital assault trials following the 1828 Offenses Against the Person Act, the first piece of nineteenth-century legislation to address wife beating. It is well known that the young Charles Dickens became a journalist during the “upheavals of the early thirties,” when the Reform Bill, cholera, economic depression, and incendiarism combined to create considerable social tension.4 He joined the Mirror of Parliament in 1831, just in time to record some of the Reform Bill debates, and the Morning Chronicle in 1834, in the heat of the post–Reform Bill era, as the newspaper championed Whig reform measures in the face of political opposition from the Tories and journalistic opposition from the Times.5 What is important to my study is that Dickens became a journalist for a reformist newspaper in the wake of the 1828 Offenses Against the Person Act, which extended the jurisdiction of magistrates’ courts to cover common assault and battery, thus opening up these accessible courts to battered women.
We do not know whether Dickens actually worked as a reporter in the magistrates’ courts that heard these wife-assault charges. (We do know that he was familiar with at least some magistrates’ names, characters, and decisions.)6 But it is reasonable to assume that he knew the content of the six to eight pages of the daily paper for which he worked as a reporter. And if he read the Morning Chronicle, Dickens would inescapably have been familiar with the litany of domestic assaults and wife murders that filled its police and court news section in the wake of the 1828 act. “Extraordinary Charge of Murder” (4 August 1834); “Cutting and Maiming” (14 August 1834); “The Way to Get Rid of a Wife” (16 August 1834); “Desperate Assault and Attempted Suicide” (20 August 1834); “Matrimonial Miseries” (27 August 1834); “Murder in Hulme, Manchester” (28 August 1834); “Matrimonial Miseries” (3 September 1834); “Serious Assault” (24 September 1834); “Matrimonial Jars” (26 September 1834)—such headlines from the Morning Chronicle during just the first two months of Dickens’s employment as a staff journalist indicate how prevalent and disturbing were reports of wife assault at this time. And just as Dickens’s early sketches and fiction pick up the hot topics of the day—such as dangerous omnibus drivers (described in “Omnibuses”), the Norton-Melbourne trial (parodied in the Bardell-Pickwick trial), and electoral corruption (parodied in the Eatanswill election in The Pickwick Papers), so too the references to marital violence in Dickens’s journalism and fiction indicate his awareness of this contemporary issue. Battered women appear in “Gin Shops” (7 February 1835), “The Pawnbroker’s Shop” (30 June 1835), “Seven Dials” (27 September 1835), “The Hospital Patient” (6 August 1836), “Meditations in Monmouth Street” (24 September 1836), The Pickwick Papers (April 1836–November 1837), Oliver Twist (February 1837–April 1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), and The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). Moreover, these abused women take on more and more important roles: they are incidental in Dickens’s early sketches of London, central to “The Hospital Patient,” feature in interpolated narratives in The Pickwick Papers, form a thematic focus in The Old Curiosity Shop, and play a central and redemptive role in Oliver Twist. In both his journalistic “Sketches of London” and his early fiction, Dickens thus both responded to and participated in the new prominence of marital assault in the public press.
What these early writings about battered woman share is an enormous anxiety concerning the new visibility of wife assault. Dickens’s newspaper sketches and early fiction return repeatedly to scenes of public intervention in marital violence, to the moment when magistrate, private citizen, or journalist witnesses, testifies to, or interferes in spousal assault. From his early sketches and tales—Sketches by Boz (1836) through The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), to Oliver Twist (1837–39) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41)—he dwells almost obsessively on this moment when the “private” violence of the home enters the public eye. Thus, even as Dickens’s texts participate in the newfound visibility of marital violence, they reveal a deep ambivalence concerning public intrusion into domestic privacy. And so these texts come, paradoxically, to uphold those characters who resist that intrusion—women who maintain the privacy of the home by remaining loyal to their abusers, refusing the proffered intervention of the police, the courts, the journalist, or the doctor. Dickens’s reverence for the passive victim is striking because it flies in the face of the known fact that working-class women did seek relief in the courts (Doggett, 30); it also contradicts what we know about working-class women’s traditional resistance to violence—their willingness to fight to protect themselves or other women from abuse (see Hammerton, Cruelty, 21). In place of these two historically documented forms of resistance, Dickens created working-class female characters who are passive in the face of abuse, and who refuse or resist intervention when it is offered—characters who, in other words, work to produce and reinforce the emergent middle-class values of domestic privacy and the companionate marriage. Dickens’s subjects may be working-class battered women, but his texts are thus laced with the growing middle-class concerns over the impact of public intrusion on the private home.
Wife Assault in the Early Victorian Public Press
After the 1828 act, magistrates’ courts were “flooded” with battered working-class wives (Doggett, 30). In turn, stories about battered women appeared frequently in the court reports of daily newspapers, precipitating a significant cultural shift in how images of marital violence were produced and circulated in early nineteenth-century Britain. This is not to say that newspapers had been free of spousal violence before 1828, but after the 1828 act, with magistrates able to handle such cases, less serious assaults came to trial more frequently. The key issue, as I note in my introduction, was thus the level of violence in question. There was no doubt in the public mind that murderers such as William Corder should be punished. But marital assault trials heard by magistrates after the 1828 act concerned a level of violence that had not previously been brought under serious public scrutiny, and contemporary press accounts evinced considerable anxiety and doubt as to whether this kind of violence belonged in the courts at all. It was at this charged moment that Charles Dickens wrote his sentimental and influential portrayals of lower-class battered women.
In order to establish the context in which to understand Dickens’s concern with battered women, I have examined wife-assault trials from the mid-1830s in the Times and the Morning Chronicle, thus choosing the leading Tory and Whig newspapers of the period, including the paper for which Dickens worked as a staff reporter in the 1830s. M. J. D. Roberts notes that the combined circulation of the Times and the Morning Chronicle (eleven thousand per day) accounted for one-third of daily newspaper sales in London; the two papers thus “constituted a formidable engine for the manufacture of public opinion” and, by extension, key forums in which class identity and gender roles were circulated and reinforced.7 We should note that the very great majority of marital assault cases that reached the magistrates’ courts were from the lower classes—people of the middle class considered the police courts to be below their purview. Moreover, the magistrates, journalists, and readers of the daily newspapers identified with the emergent middle class. The 1828 act thus functioned very largely as a means by which lower-class private conduct was regulated, and can be seen as one of a number of pieces of legislation (including the new Vagrant Act of 1822 and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834) that defined and regulated the emergent working class, still in the process of both external definition and self-definition in the early decades of the nineteenth century. So what was at stake post-1828 was not so much the regulation of marital assault in general as the regulation of such assaults in the lower classes by middle-class institutions such as the court and the newspaper.
What is crucial to the present study is that in the early 1830s, when the effects of the 1828 act began to be felt in the public press, there was as yet no consensus on how and when the state should intervene in marital assault cases. As social historians have established, in the turbulent decades of the early nineteenth century, two models of working-class marriage competed in the public mind, the courts, and the press. The first represented a strong tradition of combative marriage, according to which “women were neither ladylike nor deferential, where men struggled to hold on to their authority over them, where ‘sexual antagonism’ was openly acknowledged” (Ross, 576; see also Hammerton, Cruelty, 31). At the same time, however, a new model was gaining ground, one that was “far more critical of the working-class tolerance of violence between husband and wife” (Tomes, 339). Nancy Tomes’s research shows that between 1840 and 1875, magistrates were increasingly guided by a middle-class ideal of marital harmony based on male protection and female submission. They started to view “the physical abuse of women as ‘barbaric’; wife-beaters in particular were called ‘brutes,’ ‘ruffians,’ and ‘tyrants’” (Tomes, 339). But in the early 1830s, when Dickens’s career was beginning, the class structure that emerged from the industrial revolution (and its attendant assumptions about social control of marital violence in the lower classes) was only just forming. In the 1830s’ newspaper accounts of wife-assault trials, we see, then, a lack of consensus as to how (and indeed whether) marital assault should be controlled. In some cases, couples, magistrates, and reporters seem to take mutual combativeness for granted and to resist interference in a seemingly self-regulating (albeit violent) system. This attitude competes in contemporary newspapers with a deep seriousness more typical of later Victorian writings on marital assault, in which mutual combativeness is felt to violate matrimonial harmony and to signify a worrying degree of general violence in the working class.
In the following pages, I provide examples of cases that exemplify these contradictory impulses in the early Victorian public press. In using newspaper accounts, I am cognizant of Shani D’Cruze’s warning: as she notes, the impression that such reports render “real voices” must be tempered by the knowledge that these reports were shaped by the institutional requirements of the courts and the newspaper, were limited by the types of questions and answers permitted in court, and thus are are often formulaic in structure (D’Cruze, 13). D’Cruze nevertheless affirms that newspaper articles can reveal the “points of view of both wives and husbands … as well as the judgments of the bench and the editorial voice of the reporter” (D’Cruze, 80). I am especially interested in how such cases reveal contestation or consensus surrounding what kinds of marital assault should be regulated. For the purpose of this inquiry, then, the editorializing of the reporter and the comments of the judge and others—that is to say, the visible institutional context(s) in which the assault is framed—form a critical part of the historical record.
I will start with three cases in which intervention is deemed inappropriate and then contrast these with three cases in which it is seen to be appropriate. Typically, a reporter signals that court interference is inappropriate if the case is characterized by open acrimony or sparring in court, as well as by the abused woman’s active resistance. Such cases also often involve age or size disparity or couples of Irish extraction. The reporter may signal lack of seriousness by tone, comedic devices, or simply by recording the magistrate’s dismissal of the case. A case reported in both the Times and the Morning Chronicle on 11 October 1834 represents a situation in which legal intervention was deemed unsuitable. Mr. Johnson had been charged with “having disturbed the neighbourhood with the very sound of the blows which he inflicted on his wife Louisa” (Morning Chronicle, 11 October 1834, 4c). The dialogue between Louisa Johnson and the magistrate captures a collision between class-based assumptions about marriage:
The LORD MAYOR (to the wife).—Well, I suppose you are come to complain of your husband?
Mrs. Johnson.—No, I an’t.
The LORD MAYOR.—Didn’t he give you that black eye?
Mrs. Johnson.—Not he, indeed. I’ve got a violent cold in my eye. To be sure, he sometimes gives me a dab in the face, but then that’s only between he and I. It’s nothing to nobody else.…
The LORD MAYOR.—Then, you have no complaint to make against him?
Mrs. Johnson.—Complaint! What would I complain against him for? I have a right to complain of those that wouldn’t let him alone.
The LORD MAYOR.—You deserve to be treated well, my poor woman. He must be a great brute who would strike you, and I must protect you against the violence of this man.
Mrs. Johnson.—Why, then, God bless your Lordship, leave us to settle the business ourselves. (Laughter).
Mr. Hobler.—She’ll manage him better than we can, my Lord. (Times, 11 October 1834, 4b; see Morning Chronicle, 11 October 1834, 4c)
The reporting of this dialogue implies strongly that middle-class assumptions about protecting abused women do not apply to this case. Despite the neighbors’ apprehension that her husband might murder her, Louisa Johnson suggests that her primary conflict is with the courts, not with him. Her strong defense of the combative marriage makes the Lord Mayor’s early Victorian concerns about wife abuse sound like so many pious clichés; moreover, the voice of Mr. Hobler supports her view that the “management” of this marriage is better left to the couple, not the magistrate. Such reports exemplify magistrates’ and reporters’ assumptions that working-class couples who engaged in such combative relationships, in which wives had the “right to fight” (Tomes, 342), were not within the purview of the court.
The Times of 19 November 1834 features another case exemplifying a noninterventionist ethos. This case, however, reverses the roles in the Johnson case: here the woman asks for intervention, and the magistrate refuses it:
A respectable-looking young woman entered the office, and addressing the bench said that she wanted a warrant against her husband.
Mr. WHITE.—What has he done to you?
Applicant.—He beat me last night when he came home, and I want a warrant against him for the assault.
Mr. WHITE.—What did you do to provoke him to assault you? …
Applicant.—Why, he came home to tea, which I had got ready for him, and while he was drinking it he fell asleep, and I only just woke him, when he threw the tea all over me.
Mr. WHITE.—You should not have woke him, particularly as he was such an irritable man. You should have let him sleep on as he liked, and then you would have been sure to have peace.
Applicant.—But then he turned me out of doors.
Mr. WHITE.—You were wrong to wake your husband when he was asleep; you were the first aggressor. Never wake your husband again when he is having a comfortable sleep. I cannot grant you a warrant.
The applicant then left the office apparently very much disappointed. (Times, 19 November 1834, 4a)
This exchange clearly exemplifies two competing and incompatible views of marriage: the applicant expects court intervention, and the magistrate merely recommends submission. The magistrate does not exactly endorse the husband’s violence, but condemns the wife as having been too provocative in her behavior and, by implication, too aggressive in seeking the warrant.8
A comedic report from the Morning Chronicle (7 September 1835) provides a final example of the noninterventionist view. Under the ironic headline “An Agreeable Honeymoon,” the newspaper reported that “an elderly man” named Patrick Mack was charged with having beaten his wife three weeks after their marriage. The early part of the report balances the couple’s sparring against the magistrate’s seriousness:
Elizabeth Mack stated … Mr Mack suddenly became jealous of one of her lodgers, and because she laughed at such folly and discouraged it, he struck her a blow under her left eye that struck the fire out of it, and she had never been fit to be seen since; besides which, he had sharpened a knife to cut her open, as he said, more easily. [a laugh]
The LORD MAYOR: How could you, defendant, so brutally violate your honeymoon? (Morning Chronicle, 7 September 1835, 4c)
The tone is changed, however, by the husband’s counteraccusations that his wife went drinking with another man and returned home to pull the covers off the bed. The reporter signals a shift in tone through the use of brogue, having used standard English for Mrs. Mack’s earlier statement:
Mack said that when his wife returned from her entertainment nothing would satisfy her but she must pull all the clothes off his bed, and wrap herself up in them on the floor. He was asleep at the time, and she stripped him so softly that he knew nothing about it till he awoke from dreaming that he fell into a ditch. He felt about, but d——l a wife or anything else could he find in the bed. At last he heard a sound snore from the middle of the floor, and though he was married only a few days, he knew whose it was: so up he got, and felt his way over to the spot, and when he stooped down his wife gave a sleepy groan, and muttered, “Jack, jewel, hisht! Paddy’ll hear you!” [great laughter]. (Morning Chronicle, 7 September 1835, 4c)
This report becomes a miniature masterpiece of comic writing in which the accusation of brutality (the wife’s eye was permanently injured) and the magistrate’s seriousness gradually become almost irrelevant. The charges are dropped; the court recommends that the couple separate; they leave, trading colorful insults. By the end of the report, the couple is represented as mutually combative both verbally and physically. In this type of relationship, the report implies, the discipline of the courts has no place.
The newspaper articles above exemplify Ellen Ross’s description of Victorian working-class marriage, in which conflict was open, women were not deferential, and husbands struggled to maintain authority over wives (Ross, 576). Contrasting with this lighthearted treatment is the serious tone reserved for cases of life-threatening abuse, manslaughter, or murder. But there are other cases that are treated with deep seriousness even when the injuries do not seem much greater than those described above. This interventionist approach is exemplified in “Two Weeks After Marriage” (Morning Chronicle, 12 November 1835), which relates that John Sellis was brought before the magistrate by a policeman who saw him knocking down and kicking his wife. As the wife did not appear to lay charges, the magistrate let Sellis go, but the dialogue between them captures competing expectations of marital—especially masculine—behavior:
MR. ROGERS (to the prisoner): What have you to say for yourself?—Defendant: The woman is my wife, and I don’t see that the officer had any business to interfere with us.
MR. ROGERS: Your wife, you wretch! Is that any reason you should be allowed to murder her?—Defendant: She came to me at nine o’clock, when I was taking my pint and pipe in a public-house, and wanted me to go home.
MR. ROGERS: Well, was there any harm in that?—Defendant: I consider so; I was not to be taken out of a public-house when she thought proper; it was not my time to leave it; and because I would not go home with her she pushed me and ran out of the house, and I followed her and knocked her down.
MR. ROGERS: Well, I never met with such a remorseless ruffian. How long have you been married, you brute?—Defendant: Only two weeks.…
MR. ROGERS: What a happy prospect you and your wife must have! Perhaps you may live together fifty or sixty years, and what a wretched life you will lead, if we are to judge from your unmanly conduct in this instance.…
Prisoner: “I wasn’t going to let her order me as she liked.”
MR. ROGERS: Hold your tongue; you swore to your Maker to protect her, and if you so soon violate your marriage vows, what is to become of her? (Morning Chronicle, 12 November 1835, 4d)
What is interesting about this case is that John Sellis’s protest strongly resembles Louisa Johnson’s challenge to the court. But whereas Louisa Johnson, as a combative wife, won the support of the court for her point of view, here the accused is labeled a “remorseless ruffian” and a “brute” who indulges in “unmanly conduct.” A key factor seems to be Sellis’s wife, whose absence conveys a kind of voiceless passivity; she thus is seen as needing protection from her husband, and—failing that—from the courts.
A further article from the Morning Chronicle (12 January 1836) exemplifies the new interventionist ethos of the courts and the public, as well as an emergent admiration for a new kind of heroine: the passive victim who refuses to defend herself or to testify against her abusive spouse. In this case, Timothy Reardon was charged with assaulting a watchman who had interfered in a dispute between him and his wife. The watchman said “he would not have taken notice of the squabble if he had not seen an extraordinary degree of cruelty upon the part of the man, and of patience upon the part of the woman” (Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1836, 4d). The watchman’s testimony is interesting because it indicates the two factors—male brutality and female passivity—that made him intervene. Another witness, a gentleman, also remarked on the woman’s passivity, saying that “the woman’s patient and forgiving disposition exceeded anything he had ever heard of” (Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1836, 4d). Finally, the wife herself denied (against the evidence of all the other witnesses) that her husband had assaulted her:
Mrs. Reardon denied, in the most positive manner, that her husband had struck or kicked her. She admitted that he had pushed her, because she deserved it, for knocking a mutton pie out of his hand, but nobody had the right to interfere.
Other persons, who saw the whole transaction, declared that the defendant beat the watchman as desperately as he beat his wife; and that the watchman would have been choked if the police had not assisted him.
The Woman persisted in saying that her husband was all in the right, and appealed strongly to Sir Peter Laurie, who, however, though anxious to do her every kindness, would not let her husband go until he had fined him in the penalty of twenty shillings. (Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1836, 4d)
In this case and others, the woman’s refusal to defend herself or to testify in court against her husband receives grudging admiration from magistrate and reporter, as if the womanly qualities they admire—passivity and loyalty—are incompatible with a wife laying charges against her husband. Yet her very passivity seems to guarantee the intervention against which she protests: the court simply takes over the protective male role that her husband has abdicated.
Indeed, in the Times of 30 October 1834, the conflict between personal loyalty and public intervention becomes the main affective focus of a report. The case involved a man called John Goldsmith, who had stabbed himself and was suspected of plotting to murder his sweetheart, Elizabeth Evans. Elizabeth Evans did not initially appear in court to make a complaint, and so it was assumed that she “did not intend to press the charge” (Times, 30 October 1834, 3a). Goldsmith was questioned, and on his assurances that he did not intend to harm himself or Evans, dismissed. Then, in almost novelistic discourse, the reporter describes Elizabeth Evans’s dramatic entrance into court:
As soon, however, as [Goldsmith] reached the outer office, a dreadful outcry and scuffle were heard. He met the father leading Elizabeth in, sobbing and half fainting, and he rushed towards her, perhaps to clasp her in his arms, but it was feared for some dreadful purpose. Elizabeth shrieked, and the bystanders shouted “Oh! keep him off!” and after a short struggle he was repulsed and placed at the bar. He turned pale and quivered, and when asked why he was so violent, he said “How can I help it, when I see her cry so?”
Elizabeth, who seemed to be about 20 years of age, without any unusual attractions, cried anew on being led up to give evidence.
“You know, Betsey, I never said I would kill you,” observed the prisoner in an imploring manner.
“I am not come here to say anything against you, John,” said she, in a very kind tone.
In reply to questions from the magistrate, she said, however, that he had repeatedly threatened her life, and that he would sooner kill her than see her become another’s. (Times, 30 October 1834, 3a)
This passage depicts Evans as divided between conflicting loyalties (loyalty to Goldsmith vs. fear of Goldsmith and duty to the court). Her discourse alternates between private and public spheres: she addresses Goldsmith in the language of domestic loyalty (“I am not come here to say anything against you, John”) but responds to the interventionist ethos of the magistrate (“she said, however, that he had repeatedly threatened her life”). The report highlights the great emotional appeal of the reluctant female witness at this moment when intervention in private relationships was so freighted with tension and anxiety.
The newspaper reports of the early 1830s thus exemplify not only a period when spousal assault assumed an unprecedented visibility in the public press, but also a moment at which a new interventionist ethos competed with an earlier laissez-faire attitude to marital violence. This moment of ideological tension formed the context for Dickens’s early sketches and fiction. His writings, as I will show, reveal deep ambivalence concerning public intervention in the private sphere. Even as they participated in the new interventionist ethos, these texts returned obsessively and anxiously to the moment of intrusion, the moment at which the domestic home or private relationship is opened up for scrutiny by the medical system, the courts, or—most saliently—the journalist.
Striking Scenes: “The Pawnbroker’s Shop”
In his article “The Pawnbroker’s Shop” (Evening Chronicle, 30 June 1835), Dickens first explicitly confronted the question of public intervention in “private” working-class violence. In this early sketch, the middle-class journalist invites the reader to explore the pawnshop through his eyes, establishing the newspaper as the surrogate eye of the middle-class reader. The scene that Dickens paints captures various levels and manifestations of misery, from genteel poverty to drunken rage and prostitution. The focus on marital violence begins with an altercation between a drunken man and a female neighbor who accuses him of beating his wife. The argument arises when the man “vent[s] his ill humour” by striking an “unfortunate little wretch” of a street urchin:
“What do you strike the boy for, you brute?” exclaims a slipshod woman, with two flat irons in a little basket. “Do you think he’s your wife, you willin [villain]?” “Go and hang yourself!” replies the gentleman addressed, with a drunken look of savage stupidity, aiming at the same time a blow at the woman which fortunately misses its object. “Go and hang yourself; and wait till I come and cut you down.”—“Cut you down,” rejoins the woman, “I wish I had the cutting of you up, you wagabond! (loud). Oh! you precious wagabond! (rather louder). Where’s your wife, you willin? (louder still; women of this class are always sympathetic, and work themselves into a tremendous passion on the shortest notice). Your poor dear wife as you uses worser nor a dog—strike a woman—you a man!” (very shrill). (SB, 190)
The sketch thus implicitly poses the questions of who should intervene in abusive situations and how that intervention should occur. The sketch pits the lower-class neighbor (who vehemently defends the urchin and the battered wife) against the middle-class journalist, testing them for their suitability to take on this public task. (We should note here that Dickens never endorsed a noninterventionist view.) Crucially, this sketch represents the lower-class woman’s intervention as part of the problem, not the solution. Dickens’s insertions (“loud,” “rather louder,” “louder still,” “very shrill”) depict her as unrestrained. The working-class woman’s willingness to defy brutal men is represented here as lamentably aggressive. The squabble between the man and his neighbor thus resembles the domestic disputes in magistrates’ courts, which (as noted above) seemed to negate any sympathy for the participants on the part of magistrates or reporters. Indeed, her intervention is seen to make things more, not less, violent: “This eloquent address,” Dickens writes, “produces anything but the effect desired” (SB, 191). The man hits about him, and a brawl ensues.
At this point the wife appears, exhibiting the passivity so markedly lacking in the other woman. This is a study in contrasts: whereas the intervening neighbor was “slipshod” and “shrill,” the wife is “wretched,” “worn-out,” and “in the last stage of consumption.” Her face bears “evident marks of recent ill-usage,” and in her arms she bears a “thin, sickly child,” the mark of maternal care. As she enters, the journalist tells the reader, the man “turns his cowardly rage” away from the aggressive neighbor and toward his wife (SB, 190–91). We should note that with the adjective “cowardly,” the journalist takes over the condemnation of the abuser, and in terms similar to those voiced by the “shrill” woman: he too indicates that for a man to strike a woman is unmanly. But the combative neighbor has gained little sympathy for this position. Not so the wife, who invokes such pity immediately. Her “imploring tone” and “bursting into tears” (SB, 191) render her the antitype of the aggressive neighbor: a passive—and hence sympathetic—victim. The husband then hits her, sending her flying out of the shop. As the journalist describes it, “Her ‘natural protector’ follows her up the court, alternately venting his rage in accelerating her progress, and in knocking the scanty bonnet of the unfortunate child over its still more scanty and faded-looking face” (SB, 191). “Natural protector”—the irony relies absolutely on the reader accepting a gender relationship in which men are seen as the protectors of the “weaker sex.” Dickens thus creates sympathy for the battered woman, but simultaneously implies that women who defend themselves or others are unworthy of sympathy. The article pits the companionate model against the combative model of marriage, and suggests that battery is a violation of the former. Working-class women’s traditional willingness to fight and to physically defend one another is here negated. Instead, the middle-class journalist—and, by extension, the middle-class reader—assumes the position of regulator and “natural protector” of the passive and beaten wife.
Notably, Dickens reiterates this condemnation of intervening women in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). In this novel, the wife beater is represented by the demonic and lawless figure of Quilp; his victims are his wife, whose arms are “seldom free from impressions of his fingers in blue and black colours” (OCS, 156), and, symbolically if not literally, Little Nell, the novel’s child heroine, whom Quilp fantasizes about raping. From an ideological point of view, the novel’s most interesting figure is Mrs. Jiniwin, Quilp’s mother-in-law and antagonist. When Mrs. Jiniwin and her friends gather at Quilp’s house to discuss their objections to violent husbands, they embody the resistance offered by a neighbor in “The Pawnbroker’s Shop,” a resistance that social historians recognize as a salient fact of working-class life. But, as in “The Pawnbroker’s Shop,” in The Old Curiosity Shop this resistance is not admired; on the contrary, it is seen to be nearly as monstrous as Quilp himself. When Mrs. Jiniwin tears the head off a shrimp to indicate what she would have done had her husband been abusive (OCS, 75), Dickens endows the action with an aggression that compares to Quilp’s bestial appetite a few pages later, as he eats “hard eggs, shells and all, and devour[s] gigantic prawns with their heads and tails on” (OCS, 86). Unlike Quilp, Mrs. Jiniwin is primarily a comedic figure. But she forms part of a significant pattern in the novel, whereby female combativeness (represented also by the persistent presence of the Punch and Judy show in the text) is contrasted negatively with Little Nell’s passivity, a passivity that the narrative constructs as sympathetic, admirable, and quintessentially feminine.
What is significant about these early narratives is that they contemplate—only to dismiss—the figure of the working-class woman as intervener. Toward this figure, Dickens shows the same lack of sympathy that the Times and the Morning Chronicle evinced for the squabbling Irish or for Louisa Johnson. Dickens’s relationship to the public press of the 1830s is thus complex. In contrast to the ambivalent press reports of the period, Dickens consistently endorses public intervention. But he does so almost exclusively on behalf of a passive victim, who embodies the values of domesticity and female passivity that were increasingly cherished by the middle class. It is clear that The Old Curiosity Shop achieved its extraordinary sales because of—not despite—its excessively passive heroine, Little Nell. If Mrs. Jiniwin represents the old style of relationship, in which working-class women gave as good as they got at the hands of abusive men, then Nell embodies the new middle-class ideal of passive womanhood. The sales figures for Dickens’s texts—The Old Curiosity Shop sold a hundred thousand copies, the largest circulation yet achieved by any novelist—suggest the immense popular appeal of this move, and in turn point to the ideological work of Dickens’s fiction in promulgating this ideal of the passive woman.9
Marital Violence in the Public Eye: “The Hospital Patient”
While Dickens vilifies Mrs. Jiniwin, his sketches and early fiction show an almost reverential sympathy for women who passively submit to abuse. Hence the cultural importance of Nancy in Oliver Twist, who symbolized for Victorians Mrs. Jiniwin’s antitype. The figure of “poor wretched Mrs. Bill Sikes” (Echo, 19 January 1869, 1) represents the working-class woman who does not fight, but defines herself by her passivity. What is important is that Nancy is not unique in Dickens’s writings, but rather represents one of a number of his female characters who are admired for their submission to abuse. For example, in The Pickwick Papers the interpolated narrative of “The Convict’s Return” idealizes a passive response to marital violence: “I do firmly and in my soul believe, that the man systematically tried for many years to break her heart; but she bore it all for her child’s sake, and, however strange it may seem to many, for his father’s too; for, brute as he was and cruelly as he had treated her, she had loved him once; and the recollection of what he had been to her, awakened feelings of forbearance and meekness under suffering in her bosom, to which all God’s creatures, but women, are strangers” (OT, 147). Similarly, Martin Chuzzlewit celebrates Mercy’s clinging loyalty to her violent husband:
He answered her with an imprecation, and—
Not with a blow? Yes. Stern truth against the base-souled villain: with a blow.
No angry cries; no loud reproaches. Even her weeping and her sobs were stifled by her clinging round him. She only said, repeating it in agony of heart, How could he, could he, could he! And lost utterance in tears. (MC, 528–29)
The most significant parallel to Nancy, however, is in Dickens’s “The Hospital Patient” (Carlton Chronicle, 6 August 1836), published six months before the first numbers of Oliver Twist. In this sketch, Dickens describes a woman who is dying from injuries inflicted by her lover, but who will not testify against him to the magistrates, doctors, and journalists assembled at her bedside. Instead, she persists in denying that her lover injured her and says that her injuries were caused by an accident. I turn to this sketch because it not only anticipates Dickens’s more famous character of Nancy but does so in a way that makes explicit Dickens’s preoccupation with the court handling and journalistic reporting of assault trials.
What makes “The Hospital Patient” important to my study is that the injured woman’s death occurs in public, and that it happens just after an interview that mimics a courtroom situation. The characters (the journalist, the police officers, the magistrates, the doctor) are clearly representative figures who dramatize society’s response to victims of marital abuse, and the sketch thus focuses on public institutions and their relationship to abused women. The sketch’s theme of spousal assault is introduced when the scene jumps from the hospital to the police office, where the journalist sees a “powerful, ill-looking young fellow at the bar, who was undergoing an examination, on the very common charge of having, on the previous night, ill treated a woman, with whom he lived in some court hard by” (SB, 238). A surgeon’s report says that the woman’s recovery is “extremely doubtful” (SB, 238), so the arresting police officer, joined by the journalist, sets off that night with the prisoner, Jack, to hear her testimony. They are joined at the hospital by two magistrates, the house surgeon, and two dressers (surgeon’s assistants). The sketch thus sets up a situation in which the battered woman’s private life is relentlessly exposed to public scrutiny. As she lies dying in a public institution, the woman’s final moments are invaded by the still more public eyes of the press and the magistrates. An ambivalence surrounding public institutions and their relation to the home frames the more intense focus on the official investigation of “private” spousal abuse.
I have problematized the term “private” here because Dickens’s texts, which penetrate from external street scenes to interior scenes of marital violence, suggest implicitly that the poor who engage in marital violence have no “inside” space, no privacy from the scrutiny of the middle-class reformer. And yet this scrutiny was performed by Dickens even as his novels promulgated a companionate model of marriage that enshrined the home as a sacred inalienable space. For middle-class Victorians, policing domestic relationships was highly problematic; as D. A. Miller notes, it moved surveillance out of the public arena of the streets and into the domestic space through which bourgeois liberal identity was constructed.10 Set in the public space of the hospital, with magistrates present who transform the ward into a court, “The Hospital Patient” pits the privacy of relationships against the reformer’s impulse to investigate. At the crux of this conflict is the battered woman’s choice of whether to make a “private” relationship public by testifying to her abuse.
The drama of Dickens’s sketch peaks as the party enters the ward. The woman’s body provides a ghastly spectacle: “She was a fine young woman of about two or three and twenty. Her long black hair, which had been hastily cut from near the wounds on her head, streamed over the pillow in jagged and matted locks. Her face bore deep marks of the ill usage she had received; her hand was pressed upon her side, as if her chief pain were there; her breathing was short and heavy; and it was plain to see that she was dying fast” (SB, 239). D’Cruze notes that court investigations put women’s bodies on display as often grotesque testimonials to male violence (139–40). Here the newspaper sketch offers the reader a voyeuristic glimpse of a degree of injury that could not be displayed in the courtroom. At the same time, the reader is invited to scrutinize the private relationship between this victim and her attacker:
The magistrate nodded to the officer, to bring the man forward. He did so, and stationed him at the bedside.…
“Take off his hat,” said the magistrate. The officer did as he was desired, and the man’s features were disclosed.
The girl started up, with an energy quite preternatural; the fire gleamed in her heavy eyes, and the blood rushed to her pale and sunken cheeks. It was a convulsive effort. She fell back on her pillow, and covering her scarred and bruised face with her hands, burst into tears.… After a brief pause the nature of the errand [i.e., collecting her evidence] was explained, and the oath tendered. (SB, 239)
The suspense of the scene rests on the woman’s conflict. Like Elizabeth Evans, she must choose between personal loyalty and public intervention. The scene is particularly interesting because its conflict is dramatic rather than legal: the woman’s testimony is not necessary for a conviction, as witnesses have testified already to the assault. In legal terms, the fate of such a prisoner would depend solely on the woman’s recovery. If she lived, he would probably receive a relatively short prison term. If she died, a manslaughter conviction could lead to transportation and a murder conviction to hanging. The body of the woman thus bears enormous meaning, one that was commonly registered in newspaper reports of the period, in which surgeons might report that a woman was “in a very precarious condition” (Times, 21 July 1835, 6d) or “appeared to be in a dying state” (Morning Chronicle, 29 September 1835, 4e). In terms of the legal outcome, then, it does not matter what the patient in Dickens’s sketch says; it matters simply whether she lives or dies. But her accusation matters intensely in this drama in which private relationships have become the subject of public scrutiny. Thus instead of creating legal suspense, the narrative focuses on personal drama: Will she accuse her lover? Will she preserve the privacy of the familial relationship?
The hospital patient remains loyal to her abuser, insisting that he is not guilty. In the face of a public investigation that promises to take her side, she insists on the inviolability of the private relationship. The scene is highly melodramatic:11
“Oh, no, gentlemen,” said the girl, raising herself once more, and folding her hands together; “no, gentlemen, for God’s sake! I did it myself—it was nobody’s fault—it was an accident. He didn’t hurt me; he wouldn’t for all the world. Jack, dear Jack, you know you wouldn’t!”
Her sight was fast failing her, and her hand groped over the bedclothes in search of his …
“Jack,” murmured the girl, laying her hand upon his arm, “they shall not persuade me to swear your life away.” (SB, 239)
Her denial is utterly unconvincing except as evidence of her resistance to the investigation. But its pathos creates the climax of the narrative: “We respect the feelings which prompt you to this,” says one magistrate (SB, 240). In this text that pits public investigation against private loyalty, even the foiled investigators revere the woman’s attempt to preserve marital privacy. That the nameless hospital patient has probably been a prostitute12 adds irony to this drama of the public and private: the hospital patient is a “public” woman, yet she becomes an eloquent defender of the private sphere.
That Dickens believed in the scrutiny of the police and the courts and participated in the scrutiny of the press does not mean that he was unambivalent about them. He revered women’s attempts to keep their private battles out of the public eye, and saw such attempts as examples of supreme loyalty. In Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, he transposes the police court into a divine one, imagining women reluctantly giving evidence before God: “Oh woman, God beloved in old Jerusalem! The best among us need deal lightly with thy faults, if only for the punishment thy nature will endure, in bearing heavy evidence against us on the Day of Judgement!” (MC, 529). His depictions of women’s loyalty efface many practical reasons why Victorian women might have refused to testify against their husbands in court. One such reason was that a husband’s jail term might send a wife and children to the workhouse. Another reason for not testifying was that when the husband got out of jail he might seek revenge. As Tomes points out, going to the police or testifying against an abusive husband could be extremely dangerous: she cites several cases in which women were killed or had acid thrown at them because they sought legal redress (Tomes, 333). As John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor observe, the abuser’s few months of imprisonment were followed “by a resumption of all his former power, and [the wife’s] imagination can well suggest with what consequences to her” (CW, 24:919). Yet despite such obvious reasons why women might not have testified against their husbands, Dickens consistently idealizes this decision. “The Hospital Patient” sketch is interesting because the woman’s dying state removes her from any such practical considerations. Her decision about whether to testify or not can be taken without any fear of consequences whatsoever. It is also without legal significance. What matters culturally and ideologically is that in her final moments, in a highly public institution, the hospital patient insists on the inviolability of the private sphere.
Dickens’s sketch ends with the patient’s death, which transforms the assault charge into manslaughter or murder, and is thus far more powerful legally than any testimony. But by refusing to indict her lover, by maintaining the privacy of their relationship, the hospital patient gains the reader’s sympathy. She epitomizes the loyal battered woman who at once deserves the protection of the journalist and the courts, and at the same time refuses this protection in the name of the companionate marriage. The tension between these two impulses is resolved by her death; the involuntary testimony of her dead body gives the courts full power to regulate her abuser.
Over Her Dead Body: Nancy as Passive Victim
As Michael Slater notes in his headnote to “The Hospital Patient,” this sketch looks forward in “a number of ways … to the character of Nancy in Oliver Twist” (SB, 236). Like both “The Pawnbroker’s Shop” and “The Hospital Patient,” Oliver Twist pits the intrusive eyes of journalist, novelist, and the courts against the values of marital privacy and loyalty. Ironically, then, in a novel that “features a massive thematization of social discipline” (Miller, Novel, ix), Nancy is positioned both as a subject of regulation (as prostitute and battered woman) and as epitomizing those values of domesticity and family that Dickens almost obsessively excluded from such regulation.
Initially, the novel associates Nancy with the streets, thus opposing her with Rose Maylie. Virginal and domestic, the middle-class Rose represents “the lovely bloom and spring-time of womanhood,” and seems “made for Home, and fireside peace and happiness” (OT, 264). In contrast, Nancy belongs to the lower classes, the streets, and—as she herself predicts—to a violent and premature death. But the relationship is not finally one of contrast. For the fascinating thing that Dickens does with the character of Nancy is to make the prostitute the epitome of womanly virtues (maternal nurturance, marital loyalty, and domestic privacy) as conceived by the Victorian middle class. Tromp, as well as Lawson and Shakinovsky, argues that Oliver Twist and other novels by Dickens work to fix domestic abuse in the lower classes (Tromp, 24–25; Lawson and Shakinovsky, 10); I would argue that while Oliver Twist does so, it also, and very significantly, works to apply to those classes the ideological values of the emergent middle class.
But Nancy applies these middle-class values in a lower-class setting in which they are impractical, unrecognized, and ultimately fatal. Like the police court reports in the Times and the Morning Chronicle, Oliver Twist thus depicts a collision between two different ideals of femininity. An example of this collision between passive and combative femininity occurs when Nancy imagines what she would do if Bill were condemned to death. She envisages a performance of masochistic loyalty: “I’d walk round and round the [prison] till I dropped, if the snow was on the ground, and I hadn’t a shawl to cover me” (OT, 160). Bill’s response is scathing: “And what good would that do? … Unless you could pitch over a file and twenty yards of good stout rope” (OT, 160). The supreme example of Nancy’s passivity occurs when she refuses to leave Sikes. When Rose offers to get Nancy to a “place of safety,” (OT, 364), Nancy refuses: “I must go back.… I am drawn back to him through every suffering and ill-usage; and I should be, I believe, if I knew that I was to die by his hand at last” (OT, 365). Very significantly, Nancy points out that this fidelity identifies her with “ladies” of the middle class:
“When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are,” replied [Nancy] steadily [to Rose], “give away your hearts, love will carry you all lengths—even such as you, who have home, friends, other admirers, everything, to fill them. When such as I, who have no certain roof but the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us? Pity us, lady—pity us for having only one feeling of the woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgement, from a comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering.” (OT, 366)
Nancy thus exemplifies a middle-class ethos in a working-class relationship. It is one of the novel’s central ironies that the impulses making Nancy refuse middle-class assistance to leave Bill are precisely those “feeling[s] of the woman” that she shares with the middle class. Nancy’s loyalty to Bill thus promotes the emergent middle-class ideal of selfless femininity. In contrast, the fights between Sikes and his dog parody the combative marriage commonly associated with the “brutal” classes to which Nancy belongs. It has frequently been noted that Nancy is paralleled with Sikes’s dog, Bull’s-eye: Fagin says explicitly that Sikes treats Nancy “like a dog” (OT, 401), and Tromp rightly points out that “Bull’s-eye, like the target after which he is named, takes Bill’s hits just as Nancy does” (Tromp, 36). Significantly, the fight between Sikes and Bull’s-eye features a poker, a stereotypical instrument of working-class domestic abuse (see fig. 1.4, “The Gin Drop,” Punch, 25 November 1843, 221). Moreover, Tromp notes that when Fagin interrupts a fight between Bill and the dog, Bill turns on Fagin, asking, “What the devil do you come between me and my dog for?” (OT, 153), echoing the common phrasing “me and my wife” (Tromp, 36). But whereas Tromp argues that “this parallel points up Nancy’s animalistic qualities” (Tromp, 35–6), I would argue the reverse. In my view the text distinguishes between Nancy and the dog in their response to this shared violence. Crucially, Nancy remains passive toward her abuser, whereas Bull’s-eye aggressively resists Sikes’s beatings, responding to violence with violence:
[A] kick and a curse, [were] bestowed upon the dog simultaneously.
Dogs are not generally apt to revenge injuries inflicted upon them by their masters; but Mr Sikes’s dog, having faults of temper in common with his owner, and labouring, perhaps, at this moment, under a powerful sense of injury, made no more ado but at once fixed his teeth in one of the half-boots.…
Figure 1.4. “The Gin Drop,” Punch 5 (1843): 221.
“You would, would you?” said Sikes, seizing the poker in one hand, and deliberately opening with the other a large clasp knife, which he drew from his pocket. “Come here, you born devil! Come here! D’ye hear?”
The dog no doubt heard; … but, appearing to entertain some unaccountable objection to having his throat cut, he remained where he was, and growled more fiercely than before: at the same time grasping the end of the poker between his teeth, and biting at it like a wild beast. (OT, 153)
The symbol of the dog thus identifies the combative relationship as brutal and animalistic, while the narrator consistently guides the reader to revere Nancy’s passive loyalty. Moreover, the text also includes another negative example of the combative relationship, ironically embodied in the union of parish beadle and workhouse matron: these representatives of the law show themselves to be lawless in their domestic conduct, as Mrs. Bumble inflicts “a shower of blows” on her husband’s head (OT, 325). I see a significant contrast between Mrs. Bumble (who exemplifies a combative and aggressive working-class woman) and Nancy, whose passive demeanor represents what the middle classes increasingly tried to impose on the working classes. Thus Nancy represents a textual exemplar of supreme devotion under the companionate model. As Dickens writes in his preface to the 1841 edition of Oliver Twist, “From the first introduction of that poor wretch, to her laying her blood-stained head upon the robber’s breast, there is not a word exaggerated or over-wrought. It is emphatically God’s truth, for it is the truth He leaves in such depraved and miserable breasts; the hope yet lingering there; the last fair drop of water at the bottom of the weed-choked well” (OT, 37). As Tromp notes, Dickens wrote this preface because critics had found Nancy’s devotion unconvincing and unnatural (Tromp, 25); I share her conclusion that “Dickens was generating a new moral code, one over which there was enough tension to arouse resistance and to require such effusions” (Tromp, 25). However, I see this new code as articulated in response to the newspapers, rather than The Newgate Calendar, and I see Nancy as a character through whom Dickens promulgates middle-class values, rather than, as Tromp argues, one who represents the pure physicality of the working-class woman (Tromp, 23).
As in the sketch “The Hospital Patient,” the major issue in the relationship of Sikes and Nancy is middle-class intervention in domestic assault cases. Both texts create a space between the assault and the death of the battered woman. In this gap, intervention by the middle class is offered and refused: the hospital patient refuses to testify and, similarly, Nancy refuses to take help from Rose Maylie. Both texts culminate in the death of the battered woman, which brings this intervention down in full force. Finally, in both texts, middle-class intervention—the impulse to take on the role of woman’s “natural protector,” which the abuser has violated—is refused in terms that appeal to the companionate ideal on which the impulse to intervene is based. Ironically, therefore, while Nancy’s loyalty traps her in delinquency and removes her from the protection of middle-class reformers such as Mr. Brownlow, Rose Maylie, and Mr. Losberne, at the same time it appeals powerfully to the values they cherish most. Like the magistrate in “The Hospital Patient,” they are forced to admire Nancy’s resistance to their own intervention. Nancy’s perfect loyalty is exemplified in her death, when she shows no resistance to Bill’s assault. This contrasts with her defense of Oliver, when she struggles “violently” (OT, 164) to save the child from “being ill-used” by Sikes (OT, 198). We realize that Nancy is capable of resistance, but will not exercise it in her own defense. She responds to Bill’s murderous assault with an embrace. As he beats her to death, she clings to him. Her perfect passivity to Sikes exemplifies the female loyalty that Dickens so revered:
“Bill, dear Bill, you cannot have the heart to kill me. Oh! think of all I have given up, only this one night, for you. You shall have time to think, and save yourself this crime; I will not loose my hold, you cannot throw me off. Bill, Bill, for dear God’s sake, for your own, for mine, stop before you spill my blood! …”
The man struggled violently to release his arms; but those of the girl were clasped round his, and tear as he would, he could not tear them away. (OT 422)
As Tromp notes, this scene generates a huge amount of sympathy for the abused woman (Tromp, 41–2); however, this sympathy is ideologically loaded. Tromp interprets Nancy’s death as insulating the middle class from spousal abuse, locating that violence in the pure physicality of the working-class woman (Tromp, 29). I agree that Nancy might temporarily play such an insulating role—but such insulation was short-lived at best, since by the 1840s, Dickens himself would portray domestic assault in the middle-class Dombey home. What is more important, in my view, is that Nancy represents a projection of emergent middle-class domestic ideology onto a working-class character.
Nancy’s death is crucial because it unleashes the public intervention that she has so signally resisted. Like the death of the hospital patient, her murder produces an almost excessive degree of public scrutiny. In “The Hospital Patient,” this is implicit; Dickens would have expected his readers to know that Jack now faces charges of manslaughter or murder rather than assault. In Nancy’s case, the intervention is immediate and explicit. Morning brings the symbolic gaze of the sun, which “light[s] up the room where the murdered woman lay” (OT, 423). The sun suggests the impossibility of concealment: “[Sikes] tried to shut it out, but it would stream in” (OT, 423). Moreover, as the sun rises, Bill starts to undertake the first acts of subterfuge, which the text suggests are futile. He burns the club and tries to rub blood off his trousers. Finding this impossible, he cuts the stained pieces out of his trousers, and burns them. Finally, he washes Bull’s-eye’s feet, finding that “The very feet of the dog were bloody” (OT, 424). The bloody feet of the dog as well as the permanent stains on Sikes’s clothing are highly significant. They both point to the fact that Nancy’s death is not a private event. Her blood moves the evidence of Sikes’s crime outside the walls of the private home. The traces of his violence ineluctably move his crime into the public eye.
The death of the prostitute in Oliver Twist spurs an excess of public scrutiny and intervention—pursuit by the mob, by police, by concerned middle-class citizens, and by the justice system. This wave of retributive justice seems to resolve the dilemma that Nancy’s own refusal of intervention posed. While Nancy is alive, the privacy of her relationship is respected. Once she is dead, that privacy is waived absolutely. Even the dead woman seems to partake in the ensuing scrutiny, as her “eyes” (OT, 428) represent the most powerful symbol of the forces that pursue Sikes to his death. As Armstrong observes, “As she comes back to haunt the criminal, … the figure of the prostitute works on the side of legitimate authority” (Armstrong, 184).
Indeed, the dead woman is omnipresent to Sikes as he tries to elude pursuit. Her presence is most tangibly represented by Bull’s-eye, for in the final scenes of the novel, the dog becomes unexpectedly like Nancy, displaying her illogical and pathetic devotion to an abusive owner/master. Although Bull’s-eye does resist Sikes’s attempt to drown him, he appears in Cruikshank’s illustration (fig. 1.5) as cowed, tail between his legs and back curved in a posture of submission—indeed, one is hard pressed to recognize the aggressive creature from the earlier illustrations. After he runs away from Sikes, his aggression seems to diminish further: he is portrayed as injured (bruised and lame); moreover, like the faithful Nancy, he seems unable to leave Sikes, as even his running away reunites them. Whereas in the early part of the text the identification of Nancy with the dog is attained metonymically through their common position as Sikes’s victims, in the final scenes Dickens makes this identification grotesquely concrete: Sikes sees Nancy’s eyes looking out of the dog’s body. This has the uncanny and morally satisfying effect of enabling Nancy to avenge her own murder, as Sikes slips into his own noose at the sight of “the eyes” (OT, 453). However, this effect—which might seem to mitigate Dickens’s earlier glorification of Nancy’s passivity—is almost immediately obliterated by the subsequent behavior of the dog, who lets out “a dismal howl” (OT, 453) and plunges after his (her?) master. Like Nancy’s, his skull is crushed, perfecting the identification between them (Tromp, 36). The victim’s passivity—even suicidal self-immolation—was thus necessary to Dickens’s conclusion after all.
Figure 1.5. George Cruikshank, “Sikes attempting to destroy his dog,” illustration for Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837–39).
The deaths of Nancy and Sikes, which represent, respectively, the glorification of the loyal passive woman and the drive toward public intervention in marital violence, thus embody the contradictory impulses of the 1830s regarding wife assault. At this key moment in early nineteenth-century culture, the emergent ideal of marital privacy was pitted against the impulse to intervene in wife-beating cases. Nancy, then, stands on the fault line of early Victorian views on the regulation of marital violence. In her loyalty to Bill, she exemplifies the middle-class value of marital privacy; in her death, she brings down the full force of public intervention. This powerful literary figure thus emerged from the newfound visibility of wife assault in the print culture of the 1830s and, through her enormous popularity throughout the century, worked to consolidate the feminine ideal of passive loyalty that she so signally embodied.
