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
