Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

1. Private Violence in the Public Eye: The Early Writings of Charles Dickens

|1| P R I V A T E V I O L E N C E I N T H E P U B L I C E Y E The Early Writings of Charles Dickens O  S , Punch published a spoof on the trend of “Hand Phrenology,” or the analysis of human character by the shape of the hand (). The accompanying cartoons featured a cast of a boxing glove (fig. .) and the blunt-fingered, powerful hand inside it (fig. .). A third detail showed the blunt hand from the back (fig. .), 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 , 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  Figures ., ., .. Details from “Handy Phrenology,” Punch  (): . You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. in the Victorian period. Published in January , 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  to , the figures of Bill and “poor wretched Mrs. Bill Sikes” became cultural icons of the spousal abuse problem with which Victorians struggled from the s 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 s. 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 s and early s 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  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 , just in time to record some of the Reform Bill debates, and the Morning Chronicle in , 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  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 fa-  | Private Violence in the Public Eye You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. miliar with the litany of domestic assaults and wife murders that filled its police and court news section in the wake of the  act. “Extraordinary Charge of Murder” ( August ); “Cutting and Maiming” ( August ); “The Way to Get Rid of a Wife” ( August ); “Desperate Assault and Attempted Suicide” ( August ); “Matrimonial Miseries” ( August ); “Murder in Hulme, Manchester” ( August ); “Matrimonial Miseries” ( September ); “Serious Assault” ( September ); “Matrimonial Jars” ( September )—such headlines from the Morning...