Bleak Houses. Lisa Surridge
to her violent husband:
He answered her with an imprecation, and—
Not with a blow? Yes. Stern truth against the base-souled villain: with a blow.
No angry cries; no loud reproaches. Even her weeping and her sobs were stifled by her clinging round him. She only said, repeating it in agony of heart, How could he, could he, could he! And lost utterance in tears. (MC, 528–29)
The most significant parallel to Nancy, however, is in Dickens’s “The Hospital Patient” (Carlton Chronicle, 6 August 1836), published six months before the first numbers of Oliver Twist. In this sketch, Dickens describes a woman who is dying from injuries inflicted by her lover, but who will not testify against him to the magistrates, doctors, and journalists assembled at her bedside. Instead, she persists in denying that her lover injured her and says that her injuries were caused by an accident. I turn to this sketch because it not only anticipates Dickens’s more famous character of Nancy but does so in a way that makes explicit Dickens’s preoccupation with the court handling and journalistic reporting of assault trials.
What makes “The Hospital Patient” important to my study is that the injured woman’s death occurs in public, and that it happens just after an interview that mimics a courtroom situation. The characters (the journalist, the police officers, the magistrates, the doctor) are clearly representative figures who dramatize society’s response to victims of marital abuse, and the sketch thus focuses on public institutions and their relationship to abused women. The sketch’s theme of spousal assault is introduced when the scene jumps from the hospital to the police office, where the journalist sees a “powerful, ill-looking young fellow at the bar, who was undergoing an examination, on the very common charge of having, on the previous night, ill treated a woman, with whom he lived in some court hard by” (SB, 238). A surgeon’s report says that the woman’s recovery is “extremely doubtful” (SB, 238), so the arresting police officer, joined by the journalist, sets off that night with the prisoner, Jack, to hear her testimony. They are joined at the hospital by two magistrates, the house surgeon, and two dressers (surgeon’s assistants). The sketch thus sets up a situation in which the battered woman’s private life is relentlessly exposed to public scrutiny. As she lies dying in a public institution, the woman’s final moments are invaded by the still more public eyes of the press and the magistrates. An ambivalence surrounding public institutions and their relation to the home frames the more intense focus on the official investigation of “private” spousal abuse.
I have problematized the term “private” here because Dickens’s texts, which penetrate from external street scenes to interior scenes of marital violence, suggest implicitly that the poor who engage in marital violence have no “inside” space, no privacy from the scrutiny of the middle-class reformer. And yet this scrutiny was performed by Dickens even as his novels promulgated a companionate model of marriage that enshrined the home as a sacred inalienable space. For middle-class Victorians, policing domestic relationships was highly problematic; as D. A. Miller notes, it moved surveillance out of the public arena of the streets and into the domestic space through which bourgeois liberal identity was constructed.10 Set in the public space of the hospital, with magistrates present who transform the ward into a court, “The Hospital Patient” pits the privacy of relationships against the reformer’s impulse to investigate. At the crux of this conflict is the battered woman’s choice of whether to make a “private” relationship public by testifying to her abuse.
The drama of Dickens’s sketch peaks as the party enters the ward. The woman’s body provides a ghastly spectacle: “She was a fine young woman of about two or three and twenty. Her long black hair, which had been hastily cut from near the wounds on her head, streamed over the pillow in jagged and matted locks. Her face bore deep marks of the ill usage she had received; her hand was pressed upon her side, as if her chief pain were there; her breathing was short and heavy; and it was plain to see that she was dying fast” (SB, 239). D’Cruze notes that court investigations put women’s bodies on display as often grotesque testimonials to male violence (139–40). Here the newspaper sketch offers the reader a voyeuristic glimpse of a degree of injury that could not be displayed in the courtroom. At the same time, the reader is invited to scrutinize the private relationship between this victim and her attacker:
The magistrate nodded to the officer, to bring the man forward. He did so, and stationed him at the bedside.…
“Take off his hat,” said the magistrate. The officer did as he was desired, and the man’s features were disclosed.
The girl started up, with an energy quite preternatural; the fire gleamed in her heavy eyes, and 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