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
