Moreover, as the sun rises, Bill starts to undertake the first acts of subterfuge, which the text suggests are futile. He burns the club and tries to rub blood off his trousers. Finding this impossible, he cuts the stained pieces out of his trousers, and burns them. Finally, he washes Bull’s-eye’s feet, finding that “The very feet of the dog were bloody” (OT, 424). The bloody feet of the dog as well as the permanent stains on Sikes’s clothing are highly significant. They both point to the fact that Nancy’s death is not a private event. Her blood moves the evidence of Sikes’s crime outside the walls of the private home. The traces of his violence ineluctably move his crime into the public eye.
The death of the prostitute in Oliver Twist spurs an excess of public scrutiny and intervention—pursuit by the mob, by police, by concerned middle-class citizens, and by the justice system. This wave of retributive justice seems to resolve the dilemma that Nancy’s own refusal of intervention posed. While Nancy is alive, the privacy of her relationship is respected. Once she is dead, that privacy is waived absolutely. Even the dead woman seems to partake in the ensuing scrutiny, as her “eyes” (OT, 428) represent the most powerful symbol of the forces that pursue Sikes to his death. As Armstrong observes, “As she comes back to haunt the criminal, … the figure of the prostitute works on the side of legitimate authority” (Armstrong, 184).
Indeed, the dead woman is omnipresent to Sikes as he tries to elude pursuit. Her presence is most tangibly represented by Bull’s-eye, for in the final scenes of the novel, the dog becomes unexpectedly like Nancy, displaying her illogical and pathetic devotion to an abusive owner/master. Although Bull’s-eye does resist Sikes’s attempt to drown him, he appears in Cruikshank’s illustration (fig. 1.5) as cowed, tail between his legs and back curved in a posture of submission—indeed, one is hard pressed to recognize the aggressive creature from the earlier illustrations. After he runs away from Sikes, his aggression seems to diminish further: he is portrayed as injured (bruised and lame); moreover, like the faithful Nancy, he seems unable to leave Sikes, as even his running away reunites them. Whereas in the early part of the text the identification of Nancy with the dog is attained metonymically through their common position as Sikes’s victims, in the final scenes Dickens makes this identification grotesquely concrete: Sikes sees Nancy’s eyes looking out of the dog’s body. This has the uncanny and morally satisfying effect of enabling Nancy to avenge her own murder, as Sikes slips into his own noose at the sight of “the eyes” (OT, 453). However, this effect—which might seem to mitigate Dickens’s earlier glorification of Nancy’s passivity—is almost immediately obliterated by the subsequent behavior of the dog, who lets out “a dismal howl” (OT, 453) and plunges after his (her?) master. Like Nancy’s, his skull is crushed, perfecting the identification between them (Tromp, 36). The victim’s passivity—even suicidal self-immolation—was thus necessary to Dickens’s conclusion after all.
Figure 1.5. George Cruikshank, “Sikes attempting to destroy his dog,” illustration for Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837–39).
The deaths of Nancy and Sikes, which represent, respectively, the glorification of the loyal passive woman and the drive toward public intervention in marital violence, thus embody the contradictory impulses of the 1830s regarding wife assault. At this key moment in early nineteenth-century culture, the emergent ideal of marital privacy was pitted against the impulse to intervene in wife-beating cases. Nancy, then, stands on the fault line of early Victorian views on the regulation of marital violence. In her loyalty to Bill, she exemplifies the middle-class value of marital privacy; in her death, she brings down the full force of public intervention. This powerful literary figure thus emerged from the newfound visibility of wife assault in the print culture of the 1830s and, through her enormous popularity throughout the century, worked to consolidate the feminine ideal of passive loyalty that she so signally embodied.
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DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND MIDDLE-CLASS MANLINESS
Dombey and Son
In his sketch “Meditations in Monmouth Street” (Morning Chronicle, 11 October 1836), Charles Dickens turns his attention to the connection between manliness and domestic assault. Gazing at an array of secondhand men’s clothing in a shop—a boy’s suit, some corduroys and a round jacket stained with ink, a threadbare suit, a vulgar suit, a green coat with metal buttons, and a coarse common frock—he imagines the clothes as the possessions of one individual, the detritus of a life: “There was the man’s whole life written as legibly on those clothes, as if we had his autobiography engrossed on parchment before us” (SB, 78). From the schoolboy in the inky suit to the ruffian in the coarse frock, he reads the man’s moral deterioration in the clothing. Crucially, the man’s imagined moral descent is signaled by acts of domestic assault: Dickens pictures him hitting his mother with a “drunken blow” and striking his wife as she holds a “sickly infant, clamouring for bread” (SB, 79, 80). Finally, Dickens imagines the mother dying in poverty and the family destitute, while the man (now a criminal) is transported and dies a lingering death. “Meditations in Monmouth Street,” then, depicts manly virtue eroding into laziness, drunkenness, domestic violence, and crime. The sketch thus deploys family violence as a key sign of lost manliness. As a Times editorial stated on 12 March 1853, “a man [shows] that he has no claim to consideration as a man by acts of brutal violence against a woman or a child” (6d).
While the sketch “Meditations in Monmouth Street” focuses on violence against women as a sign of lost manliness, Dickens’s other early writings reveal a nascent interest in the conscience of the male abuser. In Jack’s sobbing in “The Hospital Patient,” and Sikes’s haunting by Nancy in Oliver Twist, Dickens probes the possibility of the abuser’s redemption even as he celebrates female passivity. In Dickens’s early work these are still gestures; the central point of narrative interest remains the abused woman. In 1846–48, however, Dickens published Dombey and Son, his full anatomy of failed manliness. Here, as in the Monmouth Street sketch, domestic assault marks the nadir of masculine failure, in this case in Mr. Dombey’s descent from Victorian businessman and paterfamilias to lonely bankrupt. When Dombey’s wife leaves him (as he thinks) for his business manager, Mr. Carker, he fantasizes about “beating all trace of beauty out of [his wife’s] triumphant face with his bare hand” (DS, 636). Instead, in his impotent rage, he strikes his daughter Florence in the central hall of their home, conflating the women in a symbolic assault on both of them. When he commits this assault on wife and child, his business, his home, and his very identity collapse. Through his inability to understand his obligations within the domestic sphere—in particular his duty to protect wife and child—the successful middle-class businessman falls into the role of the abuser, widely perceived by Victorians as that of the unmanly and unclassed. Paradoxically, then, even as Dombey and Son draws public attention to middle-class family violence, the text’s symbolic language—of slums, tenements, and class descent—still points to the identification of such violence with the working class.
“Much More a Man’s Question”
That Dickens should turn his attention in Dombey and Son to the connections between manliness and family violence points to a growing trend in the 1840s and 1850s for Victorians to see domestic assault as a man’s issue. Lewis Dillwyn, MP for Swansea, exemplified this trend when in 1856 he introduced to the House of Commons a bill proposing flogging as punishment for wife abusers. He described wife assault as “not altogether a woman’s question, but … much more a man’s question.” As he urged the all-male House of Commons, “It concerned the character of our own sex that we should repress these unmanly assaults” (142 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 169; my emphasis). In Dickens’s interest in masculinity and domestic assault—evident in his early sketches
