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]
