Bleak Houses. Lisa SurridgeЧитать онлайн книгу.
in which the accusation of brutality (the wife’s eye was permanently injured) and the magistrate’s seriousness gradually become almost irrelevant. The charges are dropped; the court recommends that the couple separate; they leave, trading colorful insults. By the end of the report, the couple is represented as mutually combative both verbally and physically. In this type of relationship, the report implies, the discipline of the courts has no place.
The newspaper articles above exemplify Ellen Ross’s description of Victorian working-class marriage, in which conflict was open, women were not deferential, and husbands struggled to maintain authority over wives (Ross, 576). Contrasting with this lighthearted treatment is the serious tone reserved for cases of life-threatening abuse, manslaughter, or murder. But there are other cases that are treated with deep seriousness even when the injuries do not seem much greater than those described above. This interventionist approach is exemplified in “Two Weeks After Marriage” (Morning Chronicle, 12 November 1835), which relates that John Sellis was brought before the magistrate by a policeman who saw him knocking down and kicking his wife. As the wife did not appear to lay charges, the magistrate let Sellis go, but the dialogue between them captures competing expectations of marital—especially masculine—behavior:
MR. ROGERS (to the prisoner): What have you to say for yourself?—Defendant: The woman is my wife, and I don’t see that the officer had any business to interfere with us.
MR. ROGERS: Your wife, you wretch! Is that any reason you should be allowed to murder her?—Defendant: She came to me at nine o’clock, when I was taking my pint and pipe in a public-house, and wanted me to go home.
MR. ROGERS: Well, was there any harm in that?—Defendant: I consider so; I was not to be taken out of a public-house when she thought proper; it was not my time to leave it; and because I would not go home with her she pushed me and ran out of the house, and I followed her and knocked her down.
MR. ROGERS: Well, I never met with such a remorseless ruffian. How long have you been married, you brute?—Defendant: Only two weeks.…
MR. ROGERS: What a happy prospect you and your wife must have! Perhaps you may live together fifty or sixty years, and what a wretched life you will lead, if we are to judge from your unmanly conduct in this instance.…
Prisoner: “I wasn’t going to let her order me as she liked.”
MR. ROGERS: Hold your tongue; you swore to your Maker to protect her, and if you so soon violate your marriage vows, what is to become of her? (Morning Chronicle, 12 November 1835, 4d)
What is interesting about this case is that John Sellis’s protest strongly resembles Louisa Johnson’s challenge to the court. But whereas Louisa Johnson, as a combative wife, won the support of the court for her point of view, here the accused is labeled a “remorseless ruffian” and a “brute” who indulges in “unmanly conduct.” A key factor seems to be Sellis’s wife, whose absence conveys a kind of voiceless passivity; she thus is seen as needing protection from her husband, and—failing that—from the courts.
A further article from the Morning Chronicle (12 January 1836) exemplifies the new interventionist ethos of the courts and the public, as well as an emergent admiration for a new kind of heroine: the passive victim who refuses to defend herself or to testify against her abusive spouse. In this case, Timothy Reardon was charged with assaulting a watchman who had interfered in a dispute between him and his wife. The watchman said “he would not have taken notice of the squabble if he had not seen an extraordinary degree of cruelty upon the part of the man, and of patience upon the part of the woman” (Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1836, 4d). The watchman’s testimony is interesting because it indicates the two factors—male brutality and female passivity—that made him intervene. Another witness, a gentleman, also remarked on the woman’s passivity, saying that “the woman’s patient and forgiving disposition exceeded anything he had ever heard of” (Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1836, 4d). Finally, the wife herself denied (against the evidence of all the other witnesses) that her husband had assaulted her:
Mrs. Reardon denied, in the most positive manner, that her husband had struck or kicked her. She admitted that he had pushed her, because she deserved it, for knocking a mutton pie out of his hand, but nobody had the right to interfere.
Other persons, who saw the whole transaction, declared that the defendant beat the watchman as desperately as he beat his wife; and that the watchman would have been choked if the police had not assisted him.
The Woman persisted in saying that her husband was all in the right, and appealed strongly to Sir Peter Laurie, who, however, though anxious to do her every kindness, would not let her husband go until he had fined him in the penalty of twenty shillings. (Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1836, 4d)
In this case and others, the woman’s refusal to defend herself or to testify in court against her husband receives grudging admiration from magistrate and reporter, as if the womanly qualities they admire—passivity and loyalty—are incompatible with a wife laying charges against her husband. Yet her very passivity seems to guarantee the intervention against which she protests: the court simply takes over the protective male role that her husband has abdicated.
Indeed, in the Times of 30 October 1834, the conflict between personal loyalty and public intervention becomes the main affective focus of a report. The case involved a man called John Goldsmith, who had stabbed himself and was suspected of plotting to murder his sweetheart, Elizabeth Evans. Elizabeth Evans did not initially appear in court to make a complaint, and so it was assumed that she “did not intend to press the charge” (Times, 30 October 1834, 3a). Goldsmith was questioned, and on his assurances that he did not intend to harm himself or Evans, dismissed. Then, in almost novelistic discourse, the reporter describes Elizabeth Evans’s dramatic entrance into court:
As soon, however, as [Goldsmith] reached the outer office, a dreadful outcry and scuffle were heard. He met the father leading Elizabeth in, sobbing and half fainting, and he rushed towards her, perhaps to clasp her in his arms, but it was feared for some dreadful purpose. Elizabeth shrieked, and the bystanders shouted “Oh! keep him off!” and after a short struggle he was repulsed and placed at the bar. He turned pale and quivered, and when asked why he was so violent, he said “How can I help it, when I see her cry so?”
Elizabeth, who seemed to be about 20 years of age, without any unusual attractions, cried anew on being led up to give evidence.
“You know, Betsey, I never said I would kill you,” observed the prisoner in an imploring manner.
“I am not come here to say anything against you, John,” said she, in a very kind tone.
In reply to questions from the magistrate, she said, however, that he had repeatedly threatened her life, and that he would sooner kill her than see her become another’s. (Times, 30 October 1834, 3a)
This passage depicts Evans as divided between conflicting loyalties (loyalty to Goldsmith vs. fear of Goldsmith and duty to the court). Her discourse alternates between private and public spheres: she addresses Goldsmith in the language of domestic loyalty (“I am not come here to say anything against you, John”) but responds to the interventionist ethos of the magistrate (“she said, however, that he had repeatedly threatened her life”). The report highlights the great emotional appeal of the reluctant female witness at this moment when intervention in private relationships was so freighted with tension and anxiety.
The newspaper reports of the early 1830s thus exemplify not only a period when spousal assault assumed an unprecedented visibility in the public press, but also a moment at which a new interventionist ethos competed with an earlier laissez-faire attitude to marital violence. This moment of ideological tension formed the context for Dickens’s early sketches and fiction. His writings, as I will show, reveal deep ambivalence concerning public intervention in the private sphere. Even as they participated in the new interventionist ethos, these texts returned obsessively and anxiously to the moment of intrusion, the moment at which the domestic home or private relationship is opened up for scrutiny by the medical system, the courts, or—most saliently—the