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.
