Bleak Houses. Lisa Surridge
30 June 1835), Dickens first explicitly confronted the question of public intervention in “private” working-class violence. In this early sketch, the middle-class journalist invites the reader to explore the pawnshop through his eyes, establishing the newspaper as the surrogate eye of the middle-class reader. The scene that Dickens paints captures various levels and manifestations of misery, from genteel poverty to drunken rage and prostitution. The focus on marital violence begins with an altercation between a drunken man and a female neighbor who accuses him of beating his wife. The argument arises when the man “vent[s] his ill humour” by striking an “unfortunate little wretch” of a street urchin:
“What do you strike the boy for, you brute?” exclaims a slipshod woman, with two flat irons in a little basket. “Do you think he’s your wife, you willin [villain]?” “Go and hang yourself!” replies the gentleman addressed, with a drunken look of savage stupidity, aiming at the same time a blow at the woman which fortunately misses its object. “Go and hang yourself; and wait till I come and cut you down.”—“Cut you down,” rejoins the woman, “I wish I had the cutting of you up, you wagabond! (loud). Oh! you precious wagabond! (rather louder). Where’s your wife, you willin? (louder still; women of this class are always sympathetic, and work themselves into a tremendous passion on the shortest notice). Your poor dear wife as you uses worser nor a dog—strike a woman—you a man!” (very shrill). (SB, 190)
The sketch thus implicitly poses the questions of who should intervene in abusive situations and how that intervention should occur. The sketch pits the lower-class neighbor (who vehemently defends the urchin and the battered wife) against the middle-class journalist, testing them for their suitability to take on this public task. (We should note here that Dickens never endorsed a noninterventionist view.) Crucially, this sketch represents the lower-class woman’s intervention as part of the problem, not the solution. Dickens’s insertions (“loud,” “rather louder,” “louder still,” “very shrill”) depict her as unrestrained. The working-class woman’s willingness to defy brutal men is represented here as lamentably aggressive. The squabble between the man and his neighbor thus resembles the domestic disputes in magistrates’ courts, which (as noted above) seemed to negate any sympathy for the participants on the part of magistrates or reporters. Indeed, her intervention is seen to make things more, not less, violent: “This eloquent address,” Dickens writes, “produces anything but the effect desired” (SB, 191). The man hits about him, and a brawl ensues.
At this point the wife appears, exhibiting the passivity so markedly lacking in the other woman. This is a study in contrasts: whereas the intervening neighbor was “slipshod” and “shrill,” the wife is “wretched,” “worn-out,” and “in the last stage of consumption.” Her face bears “evident marks of recent ill-usage,” and in her arms she bears a “thin, sickly child,” the mark of maternal care. As she enters, the journalist tells the reader, the man “turns his cowardly rage” away from the aggressive neighbor and toward his wife (SB, 190–91). We should note that with the adjective “cowardly,” the journalist takes over the condemnation of the abuser, and in terms similar to those voiced by the “shrill” woman: he too indicates that for a man to strike a woman is unmanly. But the combative neighbor has gained little sympathy for this position. Not so the wife, who invokes such pity immediately. Her “imploring tone” and “bursting into tears” (SB, 191) render her the antitype of the aggressive neighbor: a passive—and hence sympathetic—victim. The husband then hits her, sending her flying out of the shop. As the journalist describes it, “Her ‘natural protector’ follows her up the court, alternately venting his rage in accelerating her progress, and in knocking the scanty bonnet of the unfortunate child over its still more scanty and faded-looking face” (SB, 191). “Natural protector”—the irony relies absolutely on the reader accepting a gender relationship in which men are seen as the protectors of the “weaker sex.” Dickens thus creates sympathy for the battered woman, but simultaneously implies that women who defend themselves or others are unworthy of sympathy. The article pits the companionate model against the combative model of marriage, and suggests that battery is a violation of the former. Working-class women’s traditional willingness to fight and to physically defend one another is here negated. Instead, the middle-class journalist—and, by extension, the middle-class reader—assumes the position of regulator and “natural protector” of the passive and beaten wife.
Notably, Dickens reiterates this condemnation of intervening women in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). In this novel, the wife beater is represented by the demonic and lawless figure of Quilp; his victims are his wife, whose arms are “seldom free from impressions of his fingers in blue and black colours” (OCS, 156), and, symbolically if not literally, Little Nell, the novel’s child heroine, whom Quilp fantasizes about raping. From an ideological point of view, the novel’s most interesting figure is Mrs. Jiniwin, Quilp’s mother-in-law and antagonist. When Mrs. Jiniwin and her friends gather at Quilp’s house to discuss their objections to violent 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