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
