%20-%20https://sketch.com%20--%3e%3ctitle%3e3ECBBF50-FD08-412A-943D-2CFC5E025A16%3c/title%3e%3cdesc%3eCreated%20with%20sketchtool.%3c/desc%3e%3cg%20id='Stylesheet'%20stroke='none'%20stroke-width='1'%20fill='none'%20fill-rule='evenodd'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(-926.000000,%20-668.000000)'%20id='BUTTONS'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(100.000000,%20597.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='BTN-/-RIGHTS'%20transform='translate(816.000000,%2065.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='ICON-/-Rights'%20transform='translate(10.000000,%206.000000)'%3e%3cpath%20d='M13.5752841,0%20L1.34943182,0%20C0.59375,0%200,0.586666667%200,1.33333333%20L0,22.6666667%20C0,23.4133333%200.620738636,24%201.34943182,24%20L17.6505682,24%20C18.40625,24%2019,23.3866667%2019,22.6666667%20L19,5.36%20L13.5752841,0%20Z%20M13.5752841,1.89333333%20L17.0838068,5.36%20L13.5752841,5.36%20L13.5752841,1.89333333%20Z%20M1.34943182,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,5.36%20C12.1988636,6.10666667%2012.7926136,6.69333333%2013.5482955,6.69333333%20L17.6235795,6.69333333%20L17.6505682,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,22.6666667%20Z'%20id='Shape'%20fill='%23595959'%20fill-rule='nonzero'%3e%3c/path%3e%3ccircle%20id='Oval'%20stroke='%23595959'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20fill='%23595959'%20cx='9.5'%20cy='13.5355339'%20r='5.5'%3e%3c/circle%3e%3cpolyline%20id='Path-2'%20stroke='%23FFFFFF'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20transform='translate(9.500000,%2013.035534)%20rotate(45.000000)%20translate(-9.500000,%20-13.035534)%20'%20points='8%2016.0355339%2011%2016.0355339%2011%2010.0355339'%3e%3c/polyline%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)
IN THE MELODRAMATIC FINAL MOMENTS of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Bumble the ex-beadle is exposed for helping to obliterate Oliver's patrimony. When he attempts to shift the blame for his unlawful actions onto Mrs. Bumble, Mr. Brownlow will not allow such a move because, as Brownlow declares, “‘in the eye of the law’” the husband is the “‘more guilty of the two…for the law supposes that [his] wife acts under [his] direction’” (335; ch. 51). While a model of oppressive officialdom and petty tyranny in his public life, Bumble is no match for the termagant he has married; and the revelation of his private humiliation leads him to reply: “‘If that's the eye of the law, the law's a bachelor’” (335; ch. 51). It is easy to dismiss Bumble's assertion that the “law's a bachelor” as an instance of Dickensian wit, but this essay contends that Oliver Twist is a serious exploration of the “bachelor law.” Specifically, it explores one aspect of the New Poor Laws that did favor Britain's bachelors– the bastardy clause.
Oliver Twist's indictment of the workhouse system in the wake of the 1834 poor law reforms that instituted the infamous eligibility test, wherein life in the workhouse was suppose to be made “less eligible” than life out of it, has been amply canvassed by critics.1
For example, Fielding reads Oliver Twist as a critique of the Benthamite utilitarianism that subtended the poor law reforms, while Schlicke argues that Dickens had little interest in the philosophical origins of the workhouse, but a great interest in the “actual oppressiveness of the Poor Laws” (149). More recently, Hadley connects Dickens's use of melodrama to “melodramatic tactics” deployed by the opponents of the poor law reforms, and Stokes identifies Oliver Twist as a poor-law novel that is aware of the “theoretical limitation of contemporary attempts to understand and engage with the social” (712).
The 1834 reforms of the Elizabethan poor laws have interested historians for nearly a century, beginning with Sydney and Beatrice Webb's English Poor Law History. Until recently, however, historians have largely ignored the bastardy clause. The one exception was Henriques, who penned the 1967 article, “Bastardy and the New Poor Law.” Only during the last decade has the bastardy clause as well as the role of gender in the poor law debates become a topic of general interest to historians. See Clark's “The New Poor Law and the Breadwinner Wage,” Rose's Limited Livelihoods, Lees's The Solidarity of Strangers, Levine-Clark's “Engendering Relief,” and Cody's “The Politics of Illegitimacy in an Age of Reform.”
On the surface, Oliver Twist offers a straightforward critique of the bastardy clause. The novel takes as its hero a bastard, whose destitute and unmarried mother dies in a workhouse, leaving her young offspring to the tender mercies of the parish authorities. Oliver Twist then begins a search for the boy's true parentage and performs what the bastardy clause explicitly disallows: it ultimately names the father, a naming that the text scripts as a resolution to the sufferings of poor, orphaned Oliver. It is only when Oliver's patrimony is restored that Oliver can move from the novel's underworld of crime and poverty into the sunshine of bourgeois domesticity, where he belongs by birth and disposition.
Additionally, like many opponents of the revised poor laws, Dickens draws on the popular rhetoric of melodrama to script his resistance to them.3
See Clark's “The Politics of Seduction in English Popular Culture” as well as Hadley's chapter on the poor laws in Melodramatic Tactics.
With its scathing criticism of the workhouse system for its heartless management of the bastard Oliver, Dickens's novel seems to be opposing the poor law reforms. Indeed, Dickens claimed to oppose the New Poor Law “to the death” (Letters 545n). However, that opposition apparently did not extend to the new law's bastardy clause because in representing the women in the novel, Oliver Twist is ultimately as much in step as out with the poor law reforms. The novel's lasting reputation as a humanitarian document, a screed against bureaucratic abuses and the pitiless regard of society's most vulnerable members, was cemented in the middle of the last century by a number of influential critics. Humphry House praised the book as being one of Dickens's “great moral campaigns” (92); Arnold Kettle celebrated it for “its consideration of the plight of the poor” (130); Steven Marcus lauded its author for his recognition of Benthamite ideology as a “violation of humanity, in its offense against life” (59). While this essay does not question the moral passion Dickens brought to the writing of Oliver Twist, it does suggest that its status as an anti-poor law novel may have to be reconsidered in light of the novel's complicated embrace of key aspects of the New Poor Law.
To trace out the novel's complicity with the bastardy clause, one must explore the larger ideological issues at stake in the passage of the New Poor Law. As Elaine Hadley notes in Melodramatic Tactics, the poor law debates entailed a struggle between “conflicting definitions of identity,” with the opponents of the New Poor Law defining the human subject through “status hierarchies” and its proponents rooting identity in “classificatory categories” (116). Moreover, these two different subject positions are, Hadley contends, aligned with two different literary idioms (melodrama and realism), and thus Oliver Twist's formal untidiness, its lurches between melodrama, romance, and realism, can in large part be attributed to the conflicting visions of subjectivity embraced by the novel (Hadley 116). What Hadley's important argument about subjectivity, melodrama, and realism overlooks, however, is the way in which the novel genders these competing subjectivities, a gendering that is related to the debates over the bastardy clause, in which the true nature of the female character was vigorously contested.4
In an argument that also places competing subjectivities at the heart of Oliver Twist, Bodenheimer reads Oliver Twist as an attack on the “determinist ideology that framed the New Poor Law of 1834 in such a way that the indigent would be conditioned out of their reliance on the parish, or punitively ‘reformed’ by the regulations of the union workhouses” (120), and posits a Wordsworthian pastoral, which creates “a history of character that is separate from its social surroundings and actions” (116) as the subjectivity that Dickens' opposes to social determinism. Bodenheimer's argument intersects with Hadley's in many key ways; however, both critics overlook the gendered subjectivities of the novel.
Oliver Twist's formal and ideological confusions are best understood by separating out the male and female plots of the novel. The novel scripts not only a parish boy's progress (as the subtitle indicates) but also a parish girl's progress through its three female protagonists: Oliver's “weak and erring” (350; ch. 53) mother, the prostitute Nancy, and the domestic angel Rose. Melodrama infuses both the male and female plots, but Dickens connects the women with a subjectivity associated not with melodrama but with the poor law reforms and novelistic, or psychological realism. The organizational logic of the New Poor Law classified groups of people into economic classes made up of individuals who shared “intrinsic, essential features” (Hadley 89); aligned with this classificatory system was a subjectivity that anchored criminal and immoral behavior in the private reaches of the individual soul. By attributing moral behavior to “individual conscience” (Hadley 116), the poor law reformers not only privatized poverty by making it the result of individual moral failure, but they also embraced a vision of human subjectivity in line with the psychological realism of the mid-Victorian novel. As one of the new law's chief architects, Nassau Senior, optimistically declared in 1841, “character has again become valuable” (33), by which he meant that, with the reform of the old poor laws, men and women now prospered (or didn't) depending on their individual characters.
This brand of psychological realism, with its allied insistence that character is fate, stands in opposition to the melodramatic construction of subjectivity embodied by Oliver. A passive hero who is defined less by his actions than by his family connections (and thus his place within a status hierarchy), Oliver stands apart from Nancy, Agnes, and Rose, occupying a generically different idiom (melodrama, not realism) than the women who surround him. As a workhouse bastard defined by an unshakable innocence as well as perfect grammar, Oliver defies the New Poor Law's classificatory impulse. While the New Poor Law tried to conflate poverty and depravity, Dickens–at least in Oliver's case–refuses to allow good character to become the sole possession of the well-to-do, so he embeds Oliver within a melodramatic plot that represents virtue as the common property of all citizens. His novel gleefully skewers the workhouse's impulse to cast poor Oliver as one of “‘these dreadful creeturs, that are born to be murderers and robbers from their very cradle’” (39; ch. 6) by insisting that he can simultaneously be both morally good (he is “the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance” [xxv; preface]) and dead broke. If anything, Oliver's case seems to disprove Senior's dictum on the value of character because it is not Oliver's goodness that saves him but the willingness of Mr. Brownlow and the Maylies to accept him, despite the aura of criminality surrounding him, as one of their own.
So while Dickens deploys Oliver's unflappable goodness in order to highlight the problematic nature of the New Poor Law's classificatory system, which, in Oliver's case, wrongly reads poverty as the outward sign of an inner moral deficiency, the women's movement through the novel confirms what Oliver's trajectory calls into doubt. In particular, Nancy's story reaffirms the association between bad morals, crime, and poverty that was essential to the New Poor Law. Moreover, by allowing Rose to revise the Edwin Leeford/Agnes Fleming coupling as well as the Nancy/Sikes union, Dickens (in line with the New Poor Law) figures self-discipline–the essentialized moral virtue Rose exerts when she initially refuses Harry Maylie's offer of marriage–as the one thing separating the resolutely middle-class Rose from the text's poor women, Agnes and Nancy.
Perhaps the best way to re-envision Oliver Twist in light of the bastardy clause and the gender issues that emerged out of it is as a double mystery: the novel must clear up the obscurity of Oliver's parentage and also determine the “truth” of women's nature. The first is a whodunit (who fathered the illegitimate boy) with links to melodrama; the second is a whydunit (how do we account for his mother's fall) with links to the debates over the bastardy clause. Oliver's true identity is restored to him when he is reunited with his family, and through this Dickens scripts the redemption of English society that is melodrama's aim. In the logic of melodrama, Oliver must be both the poor, outcast child and the lost son of the upper classes because melodrama wishes to revive a paternalistic world in which the poor are recognized as part of the family, not as intruders, impostors, or imposers. In parallel fashion, the truth of female identity is also disclosed by the novel's end, although the mystery resolves itself through the women's actions–Nancy's most strikingly–and not through the romance of familial reunion. Long a puzzle to readers of the novel as well as to the characters within the novel, the truth of Nancy's nature (like Agnes's and Rose's) finally resides in her essential character and the moral behavior to which it gives rise.5
Bowen points out that “readers have disagreed sharply about the portrayal of Nancy in the novel” and catalogs some of the disparate responses, ranging from Wilkie Collins to William Thackeray. He then observes that “these disagreements between men about Nancy, disagreements about real wenches and ‘female nature,’ about shadows, existence, and all sides of a woman's character, begin not in criticism but in the novel itself, whose characters, narrator, and readers often ask what she means and what she is doing, whether she is speaking truthfully or not, whether she is acting or sincere, innocent or guilty, alive or dead, questions that return to the fact or question of her desire (or love, or sexuality), figured through a body described as hysterical” (99–100).
I
THE AIM OF THIS ESSAY, ultimately, is twofold: to show that Dickens's response to the New Poor Law, when one takes the bastardy clause into account, is more complicated than previously thought, and to suggest that Oliver Twist's patchwork of melodrama, romance, and realism– and the different subjectivities embedded in each–is deeply gendered and related to the controversy over the New Poor Law's bastardy clause. While Dickens relates the parish boy's progress through the language of melodrama, which enables and delimits his critique of the poor law reforms, he traces out the parish girls' progress in the developing idiom of realism. The novel's turn to realism, however, aligns Dickens with the advocates of the New Poor Law and thereby partially disables the very critique the novel sets out to make.
II
BEFORE TRACING OUT Dickens's complex representation of poor women in Oliver Twist, it is necessary to pause and examine the role bastardy played in the new classificatory regime the poor law reformers hoped to legislate into existence. The Poor Law Amendment Act, and the decades-long debate about the status of the poor in England that preceded it, was fundamentally about how to classify, define, and therefore represent the poor. In her history of the British poor laws, Lynn Lees notes that a representational crisis emerged in the early nineteenth century when the poor “changed from neighbors in a face-to-face society to strangers who menaced the respectable through their disorderly lives” (113). The Royal Commissioners, who produced the Poor Law Report of 1834 from which the Poor Law Amendment Act was drafted, were generally “committed to just two classes of the poor, those who work and those who cannot work” (Hadley 92). However, this classificatory system could not adequately represent poor women, whose productive and reproductive lives were often in conflict. So while, as Marjorie Levine-Clark observes, the “New Poor Law held that some women should participate in productive labour to maintain their independence from parish relief” (107), it nevertheless represented women “primarily as dependents of men. Pauperism was understood to be a male problem, as it was men who were associated with work, independence and ablebodiedness” (110). Not surprisingly, bastardy–where the tension between women as mothers, workers, and dependents comes so dramatically into focus–emerged as one area of female experience of special interest and anxiety to the poor law reformers because they could deploy it as the site of another, important classification: one that divided women into those who achieved respectable, dependent domesticity, and those who did not.
To be sure, the New Poor Law itself was at odds with the developing social order of nineteenth-century Britain in which the domestic female was figured as the “natural” counterpart to the independent, bread-winning male. Anna Clark observes that the poor law commissioners “believed that if a man could not support his family, he should not marry, and if a woman could not find a husband who earned enough, she must support herself and her children by earning wages” (“New Poor Law” 261). By denying outdoor relief to the destitute and offering them instead the cold comforts of the workhouse, the New Poor Law aimed to discourage pauper marriages and ensure that working men married only when they were capable of maintaining their families without state aid. Thus, in contrast to many working men and women, the New Poor Law of 1834 scripted the domestic ideal of a male breadwinner and a female homemaker as a privilege of the lucky few (those with sufficient incomes) rather than as the right of all Englishmen (Clark, “New Poor Law” 261). What the bastardy clause offers us, then, is insight into the role the poor law commissioners assigned women in helping those handful of elite working men achieve the privileged domestic ideal that, Clark acknowledges, would over the next few decades come to be seen as the norm for all English families. The New Poor Law did not actively promote female domesticity, but the bastardy clause does disclose the conditions the commissioners believed were necessary to create working-class domesticity and respectability by highlighting the female character required to enable both.
The domesticity that subtends the bastardy clause is not just another example of that all-powerful ideology, rooted in Victorian evangelicalism, exerting itself. Rather, it is an example of Malthusian political economy at work. The commissioners' link between domesticity, bastardy, and poverty derives from Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), a seminal pre-text for the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Reforming the old poor laws increasingly occupied Malthus's attention in the later editions of his Essay. Malthus's long-term goal was to abolish the English poor laws altogether because he believed that they sustained the conditions they aimed to relieve by offering the poor an incentive to reproduce early and often through parish handouts. Exacerbating this situation, according to Malthus, were the allowances granted unwed mothers to support their children: if poor women were solely responsible for their bastards, so Malthus argued, the illegitimacy rates (and hence the overall population figures) would decline. The poor law commissioners uncritically adopted Malthus's assumptions about illegitimacy. However, and this is just as important, they accepted the economic theories in which his discussion of illegitimacy was entangled: the Malthusian belief that married female dependency was as important as male independency to the economic vitality of the nation.
At the center of Malthus's thinking lies the common eighteenth-century understanding of desire as the engine of economic growth, wherein a “spiral of human wants” powers an expanding economy (Ignatieff 332–33). Gender is key to this economics of arousal because, according to the Essay on Population, it is the male desire for domestic life (wife, children, cozy cottage) that stimulates economic activity, leading men to practice moral restraint and to avoid improvident marriages. Malthus writes: “It is clearly the duty of each individual not to marry till he has a prospect of supporting his children; but it is at the same time to be wished that he should retain undiminished his desire of marriage, in order that he may exert himself to realize this prospect, and be stimulated to make provision for the support of greater numbers” (215). Committed to the notion that man in a state of nature was an idle slug, Malthus nevertheless believed that a good woman could transform the slothful male into a hardworking husband-to-be by arousing his desire and delaying its gratification until he earned enough to support her and her offspring in lawful domesticity. The role of women in the Malthusian economy was clear: they needed to remain sexually unavailable until their boyfriends amassed enough capital to marry, at which point they assumed the position of the dependent wife.6
It is important to note that Malthus thought that most workers would never earn enough to support wives and children and thus assumed celibacy as the status quo for large swatches of the poorer classes (Clark, “The New Poor Law” 263). To be sure, Malthus expected that a working man's wife would add to the family income, but Malthus–and the poor law reformers he inspired–envisioned women's work as merely supplemental to the family economy. They could make this assumption because of the social transformations of the late eighteenth century, wherein many of women's customary occupations disappeared. For the reasons and consequences of this disappearance, see Valenze.
Predictably, the unwed mothers who show up in the anecdotal evidence marshaled by Edwin Chadwick and Nassau Senior, the most active and influential members of the Royal Commission, are the very opposite of the model Malthusian woman. While the Royal Commissioners may have expected poor women to act as autonomous economic agents, they nevertheless (and somewhat contradictorily) largely envisioned them as dependent daughters or as domestic servants before marriage and as dependent wives afterwards.7
Clark in “The New Poor Law,” as well as Cody in “The Politics of Illegitimacy in an Age of Reform,” argues that the New Poor Law, in Cody's words, extended the “ideology of the autonomous individual in the unfettered marketplace” to women (134). While certainly there is some truth in this, I agree with both Levine-Clark's and Lees's contention that the commissioners' notion of female autonomy in the marketplace was circumscribed by gender. As Lees notes, the commissioners saw women “primarily as daughters and wives,” and believed that the ideal occupation for the unmarried working-class woman was domestic service, which placed her in a domestic setting and theoretically at least under the careful watch of her master or mistress (141–43).
Cody notes that “under the paternalistic Old Poor Law, women seemingly possessed unlimited power, which the commissioners portrayed as alternately feminine and masculine, pauperish and aristocratic. The old paternalism allowed for social and gendered irrationality and, thus, undermined ‘natural’ power relations” (145).
The unmarried mothers who applied for poor relief under the old poor laws were seen as dangerous to a Malthusian economic order that relied on female sexual restraint before marriage and dependency afterwards to prod men towards modest prosperity. Promoting “appropriate” female behavior consequently became the reformers' goal. “If our previous recommendations are adopted, a bastard will be what Providence appears to have ordained that it should be, a burthen on its mother, and, where she cannot maintain it, on her parents. The shame of the offence will not be destroyed by its being the means of income and marriage,” the Poor Law Report declared (482). In order to promote a social order in which women's sexual restraint might be rewarded with marriage but in which their premarital sexual license would almost certainly be punished with poverty, the New Poor Law transformed bastardy into the purely private matter of a woman's moral weakness (her “shame”) and thereby reaffirmed the commissioners' belief in the “intrinsic, essential features” of the pauper class. Under the New Poor Law, only female sexuality as manifested through restraint could become “the means of income and marriage” for women.
This slide from economics to morals was easy to make, and indeed part of the legacy of Parson Malthus, a servant of god and political economy who invented a system which allied moral behavior to economic well-being and envisioned the law of population as part of God's plan.9
For example, see Book IV, Chapter II of the Essay, where Malthus reconciles the punitive laws of population with his faith in a benign Creator.
It is important to remember, as Lees points out, that pauperism and not poverty was what the poor law reformers set about eradicating. According to the commissioners, poverty was an irremediable condition that derived from “unemployment, the maldistribution of labour and the misuse of wages,” whereas pauperism “arose from individual immorality and the fecklessness encouraged by public policy” (118). Despite the fact that the Royal Commission was set up to explore the roots of pauperism, the commissioners were blinded by their pre-conceptions about pauper immorality. George Boyer notes that “the instructions to the assistant commissioners requested them merely to ascertain whether unemployment was caused by the indolence of labourers or by increases in population brought about by the allowance system” (63). Cowherd traces the Commissioners faulty methodology back to the Edinburgh school of political economy, which privileged universal truths over local evidence: “According to the methods of Senior and Whately, the investigations into the poverty and pauperism of England and Ireland should be undertaken only by those men who were acquainted with the principles of political economy. The learned opinion of the political economist was to be given precedence over the testimony of such practical men as the overseer of the poor and the justice of the peace who were responsible Poor Law officials” (213).
The translation of bastardy into an issue of individual morality was nearly complete by the time parliament took up the controversial bastardy clause of the New Poor Law. While the poor law reforms generally met with bipartisan support, the bastardy clauses provoked opposition, particularly from paternalistic Tories and Radicals (Cody 147). But whether a friend or foe to the bastardy clause, when MPs took up the issue, they overwhelmingly framed the debate as a referendum on the moral nature and true character of women. For their part, the clause's Whig supporters, influenced both by Benthamite and Evangelical discourses, presented a wearily familiar, bipolar vision of femininity. They insisted that women were schemers and perjurers who would sleep around and then charge the wealthiest man in the parish with their bastards. At the same time, however, as they represented fallen women as ruthless gold diggers, they promoted the flip side of this negative inscription. Following Malthus, the Whig supporters venerated good women and promoted them as the keystone of the social order. Lord Althorp, the Whig's Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared:
a virtuous woman was regarded as the bond of society, and when she once lost her virtue, “a pearl of great price,” adieu to all decorum and decency in society; and if female chastity was once at a discount, not merely would the bonds of society be loosened, but actually burst asunder. Could there be any doubt of this? With the woman the decision of the question rested. Without her consent the consent of the man was useless, and the law of the land decided that the great part of the blame rested with her. (Hansard 3rd ser. 25 [1834]: 608)
While the supporters of the clause emphasized the unwed mother's moral agency, the parliamentary opponents of the bastardy clause reversed this formula and denied women any agency, choosing instead to highlight women's vulnerability and victimhood. Deploying the common rhetoric of melodrama, the bill's opponents insisted that women were fragile creatures, the easy prey of libertines and seducers. Again and again, they conjured up the same scenario, in which the man was “the most guilty party” and the woman “defenceless” against his entreaties (Hansard 3rd ser. 24 [1834]: 522; 531). Certainly, this myth of seduction “contributed to a wider rhetoric of the poor as weak and passive victims who needed to be protected by kindly paternalists” (Clark, “Politics” 61), and in that sense is deeply political language. Representing poor women as the innocent victims of seduction plots, the bastardy clause's opponents countered the classifying impulse of the New Poor Law by insisting that a women could simultaneously be virtuous and poor. Nevertheless, the focus on female purity demanded by this melodramatic defense did nothing to change the fundamental issue of the debate, which remained the moral status of women.
III
OLIVER TWIST BEARS THE IMPRINT of the parliamentary debates, which Dickens attended and transcribed in his official capacity as a reporter for The Morning Chronicle. Indeed, Oliver's mother is a seduced maiden who seems to have walked out of a melodrama scripted by the parliamentary opponents of the bastardy clause, as does Oliver's father, who takes “‘all the guilt’” upon himself in his deathbed letter to Agnes (332; ch. 51), a letter that reveals that Agnes's is the old tale, one in which a false promise of marriage led to an innocent girl's downfall. By portraying Agnes's fall to be mostly Edward's responsibility, Dickens seems to be defending female purity and passivity in tones strikingly similar to those used by the clause's detractors. However, when we place Agnes alongside the text's other women, it becomes clear that Dickens's novel negotiates the various positions within the parliamentary debates and that Oliver Twist's representation of poor women owes as much to Lord Althorp (and even Malthus) as it does to the bastardy clause's critics.
To focus solely on Agnes is to ignore the text's symbolic structure, which figures the three main female characters as versions of each other. The text blurs the boundaries between all female familial roles so that, for example, Rose functions as Oliver's aunt, mother, and sister, while Nancy variously recalls Agnes (both die to give Oliver life) and Rose (both claim Oliver as a long-lost brother). More particularly, the text pairs the fallen Agnes with the prostitute Nancy, and it contrasts both with Rose, Dickens's pure flower of Victorian femininity. By linking Oliver's mother with a prostitute, the novel might seem to be breaking down the class divisions that separate middle-class women from poor women in order to represent their membership in the social family conjured up by melodrama. In fact, the contrary is true. These narrative doublings and triplings serve to hold Agnes and Nancy accountable for their own destinies and establish a classificatory system, resembling the New Poor Law's, based on individual character and responsibility. Despite some melodramatic behavior on their part, Nancy, Agnes, and even Rose are all ultimately “realistic” characters classified according to their “essential features.” Indeed, what we learn from reading Agnes's and Nancy's stories against Rose's is a formulation of female character that allows Dickens to straddle both positions within the parliamentary debate: Oliver Twist defends the virtue of poor women like Nancy, who provides the cover story for the buried plot of Agnes, while at the same time it grants them the free agency that makes them criminally responsible for their fates.
The novel's conflation of its two female figures of transgressive sexuality reflects its embeddedness in the New Poor Law discourse, where an analogy between bastard-bearers and prostitutes was constantly deployed. Exploiting the semantic instability of the term “prostitute,” which in the 1830s could refer to both “paid sex” and “illicit sex in general” (Wolff 235), the bastardy clause's supporters insisted that unwed mothers and prostitutes were one and the same because both profited from their sexuality. The clause's opponents repudiated this claim, predicting that it was the clause itself that would erase the distinction between the two by forcing every single mother to “become a common prostitute, and every workhouse of which such women are inmates to be a common receptacle of prostitutes” (Hansard 3rd ser. 25 [1834]: 1100). Dickens moves between these two positions: he never places Nancy or Agnes within a system of sexual barter (like the clause's backers), nor does he (like the clause's detractors) anticipate that the New Poor Law will force unwed mothers into prostitution. Instead, Dickens collapses Nancy and Agnes because the two share the same self-defeating character flaw. In a move strikingly similar to Malthus's, Dickens suggests that Agnes's and Nancy's failure to exert self-control and avoid “previous concession” has a corrupting, destructive effect on the men they love. Because they both elude the Malthusian standard, the distance between the prostitute and the single mother– between Nancy and Agnes–falls away for Dickens.
In a complicated move, Dickens endows each woman with the other's identity: he condemns the unwed mother as a sexual outlaw and recuperates the prostitute by transforming her into a seduced maiden in order to emphasize the criminality both women share and the compassion they both deserve. So while Oliver Twist evidences enormous sympathy for Agnes as a stray lamb of god, structurally the novel does exactly what the critics of the New Poor Law claimed the reforms did: the text criminalizes the poor, unwed mother by aligning her with Nancy as well as the text's other lawbreakers. At the end of the novel, Agnes is memorialized by a stone that bears no family name, just the inscription “Agnes.” Like her hovering but unhoused spirit in the novel's last paragraph, Agnes floats free of Victorian domesticity and is dangerously unhitched, dependent neither on father nor husband. With no patronym (she is neither a Fleming nor a Leeford) and hence no space within patriarchal Victorian culture, Oliver's mother remains an outsider resembling no one more so than the street walking Nancy, who also has “‘no certain roof but the coffin-lid’” (258; ch. 40) and no last name. Agnes's homelessness dooms her in Oliver Twist, a novel incapable of imagining any sphere for women except the legitimate world of domesticity and the illegitimacy of the streets. As a result, the novel situates her within the only shelters routinely available to the text's criminals–prison cells and coffins–the two enclosed spaces closely linked by the text's metaphoric patternings, established at the novel's opening, when Oliver graduates from the workhouse (the poor law Bastille) to sleep among the coffins at Mr. Sowerberry's shop. Oliver's journey from prison to coffin enacts in miniature the future life of crime the poor law authorities imagine for him; and it is the trajectory enacted by the text's arch criminal, the thieving Fagin, as well as the fallen Agnes.
Once we recognize the text's criminalization of Agnes, we can see that Nancy's narrative is a retelling of Agnes's, about whose love affair with Edwin Leeford the novel remains mostly silent. And if Nancy is Agnes's double, it is not surprising to discover that she more closely resembles the seduced maiden of a poor law melodrama than the prostitute Dickens declares her to be. Despite the 1841 preface's after-the-fact attempt to classify Nancy as a whore, she is never seen to profit from her sexuality, nor to be a slave to it. Like Agnes, she possesses a loving but undisciplined heart. No ungovernable desire for sex or money stains Nancy, who is ultimately done in by her self-sacrificing female nature and her romantic entanglement with Sikes. Dickens goes to great lengths to establish Nancy's underlying decency and to defend her from the charges leveled against poor women by the poor law reformers. In their eyes, such women were liars and cheats, but Nancy, who ostensibly dwells among thieves and makes her living selling her body, retains the pure gold of angelic womanhood beneath a bruised exterior. Once the crisis of Oliver's paternity arises, Nancy emerges in the text as a tragic figure of truth, the mother substitute who sacrifices herself to establish Oliver's parentage. When forced to account for Nancy's illicit relationship with Bill Sikes, Dickens offers up an explanation suggesting that Nancy is simply too good for her own good.
Grounding Nancy's fallenness in her (self) abuse of her radiant femininity, Dickens anticipates one of the explanations for prostitution ventured by Henry Mayhew in the definitive mid-Victorian social exposé, London Labour and London Poor. At the beginning of the section on prostitutes, Mayhew writes:
The love of woman is unusually pure and elevated. But when she devotes her affections to a man who realizes her ideal, she does not hesitate to sacrifice all she holds dear for his gratification, ignoring her own interests and her own inclination. Actuated by a noble abnegation of self, she derives a melancholy pleasure from the knowledge that she had utterly given up all she had formerly so zealously guarded, and she feels that her love has reached its grand climacteric, when, without the slightest pruriency of imagination to urge her on to the consummation, without the remotest vestige of libidinous desire to prompt her to self-immolation, without a shadow of meretricious feeling lurking within her, she abandons her person beyond redemption to the idol she had set up in the highest place in her soul…This heroic martyrdom is one of the causes, though perhaps not the primary or most frequently occurring, of the stream of immorality that insidiously permeates our social system. The greatest, and one equally difficult to combat, is the low rate of wages that the female industrial classes of this great city receive. (212–13)
Only a few pages later, Mayhew declares that “literally every woman who yields to her passions and loses her virtue is a prostitute” (215). It is also clear from Mayhew's language, with its insistence that women are not motivated by “the remotest vestige of libidinous desire,” that he shares the conventional mid-Victorian attitude towards female sexuality as “dormant prior to sexual initiation” (Walkowitz 43). Dickens also seems to ascribe to this view, since neither Agnes nor Nancy is motivated by any desire other than the one for self-sacrifice.
Nancy's aboriginal goodness and melodramatic appeal fully emerge from the shadows during her first interview with Rose. In that conversation, Nancy's self-destructive loyalty to Sikes becomes evident as she refuses to betray him despite his brutal treatment: “‘I am drawn back to him through every suffering and ill-usage: and should be, I believe, if I knew that I was to die by his hand at last’” (258; ch. 40). In this passage, Nancy admits her willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice (her life) for Sikes, just as years before Oliver's mother made a similar forfeiture for Edwin Leeford (her virtue and her life). A fallen angel whose fallenness arises from an uncontrollable femininity, Nancy confesses to Rose:
“When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are…give away your hearts, love will carry you all lengths–even such as you, who have homes, friends, other admirers, everything to fill them. When such as I, who have no certain roof but the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us? Pity us, lady–pity us for having only one feeling of the woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgment, from a comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering.” (258–59; ch. 40)
So in spite of Nancy's and Agnes's bedrock goodness and the sacrificial air of their deaths, Dickens reveals them to be essentially flawed characters: they may not have committed capital crimes (despite the extreme punishment measured out to each), but they evidently stand in need of some correction, or at least some time spent in a House of Correction. Indeed, both Agnes and Nancy understand the extent of their criminal responsibility and rehearse their own punishments. Agnes flees her comfortable home only to end up incarcerated in a workhouse, while Nancy briefly hopes to redeem Sikes through Rose's offer to emigrate, to which she adds her own condition that the pair “‘never see each other more’” (303; ch. 47), thereby hoping to duplicate both the penal sanction of transportation and the workhouse's infamous, prophylactic separation of pauper men and women.
Moreover, Nancy and Agnes possess the same psychology as the other outlaws in the novel, of whom they are the literal or figurative associates. While Hadley contends that Dickens endows both Sikes and Fagin with a psychological realism that arises out of “the panoptic procedures of the modern principle of classification” and results in a “self-regulating subjectivity” (124), it is also evident that Dickens extends this realism to his female protagonists, and not only to Nancy and Agnes, but also to the unstained Rose, albeit in an attenuated form. But in contrast to the men's, the women's realist subjectivity is not allied with alienation (as Hadley argues) or with deviancy (as Juliet John argues in Dickens's Villains) but with the truth of female character.12
In an argument similar to but wider in scope than Hadley's, John contends that Dickens, throughout his novels, conflates realist subjectivities with deviancy. Proposing that we read all of Dickens's novels as melodramas, John writes: “the notion of ‘psychology,’ as we have since come to understand it, is itself deviant in the Dickens world. Dickens's belief in the principles of communality and cultural inclusivity made the notion of a psyche-centred approach to people and society seem individualistic, divisive and potentially elitist” (3).
Schor also observes that Dickens associates Nancy with truth in the Preface, but she argues that it is because Dickens seizes “on the figure of a woman to exemplify his fictional method and morals”: what Nancy particularly represents for Schor is the “devious and twisting figure” of Dickens' own art (19).
The poor women's characterological defects become stunningly visible when Rose is brought into the analysis. Rose revises both women's stories through her triumphant interactions with Harry Maylie and indirectly throws the blame for their lapses back onto their own “weak and erring” characters. In her interview with Rose, Nancy proclaims: “‘Oh, lady, lady!…if there was more like you, there would be fewer like me’” (255; ch. 40), and the logic of the text supports this: if more women exerted the self-control that Rose displays in her romantic dealings with Harry Maylie, there would indeed be fewer fallen women. Hilary Schor contends that the contrast between Rose and Nancy raises “the question of the social formation of character” (25) and answers it by suggesting that “the neglect of Nancy…makes her a prostitute” (26); however, Schor's interpretation ignores the salience of Rose's otherwise inexplicable rejection of Harry Maylie's initial marriage proposal. Harry Maylie and Rose Fleming are Dickens' response to the double tragedies of Edwin/Agnes and Nancy/Sikes, although the happy lovers most obviously rewrite the Edwin/Agnes coupling. While the weak-willed Agnes is seduced and inadvertently abandoned by the aristocratic Edwin, Rose exerts her moral agency to prevent even a lawful marriage until Harry relinquishes his aristocratic ambitions. In a text that disavows the connection between illegitimacy and moral impurity (it is the legitimate Monks who has a stained soul, not the immaculate bastard Oliver), how else do we make sense of Rose's refusal to marry Harry Maylie on the grounds that her illegitimate blood will taint him (she wrongly believes herself a bastard), unless we see it as necessary to the text's display of Rose's moral power, her ability to exert self-control?
At the moment of Rose's agonized rebuff of Harry, Dickens briefly grants her a degree of psychological realism and tortured subjectivity that are the hallmarks of the text's women as well as its criminals; but in spite of the psychological pain it inflicts, Rose's rejection of Harry is what ultimately distinguishes her, in class terms, from both Nancy and Agnes. As she tells Harry when she declines his first proposal, “‘a friendless, portionless girl, with a blight upon my name, should not give your friends reason to suspect that I had sordidly yielded to your first passion’” (221; ch. 35). In a move that would make Malthus proud, Rose refuses to yield– not to her own desire for Harry but to Harry's desire for her–and thus escapes the trap into which both Nancy and Agnes fall. Unlike the text's poor women, who fail to perform their anaphrodisiac role, Rose tames Harry's “first passion” by exerting self-control over her own desire for feminine self-sacrifice. So important is Rose's power of refusal that it leads to the moral redemption of the seemingly innocuous Harry Maylie, who exchanges the worldly advancement that his “‘great talents and powerful connections’” promise for a rural vicarage (222; ch. 35). Harry repudiates “‘power and patronage’” as well as “‘relatives of influence and rank’” (338; ch. 51) for Rose, and in this way Rose's denial accomplishes what Agnes's love could not: she reforms the text's aristocrat into the moralized, domesticated gentleman of the middle ranks.
In the end, what ultimately separates poor, disreputable women as a category from respectable middle-class wives in Oliver Twist is not work (no one is seen as having a relationship to any means of production), but self-control that must be directed outward in the service of masculine self-discipline: women are relative creatures indeed, in that their self-discipline must ultimately bolster that of the men they love. In other words, Dickens creates in Rose the ideal domestic woman as defined by Nancy Armstrong. Possessing a “female subjectivity that posited a basis for the self prior to any social identity” and that is rooted “in sexual desire and in one's ability to channel such desire toward socialized goals” (Armstrong 164), Rose is a paragon of domestic virtues. If the aim of the New Poor Law was to produce classed beings classified according to their essential characteristics, then that is surely what Oliver Twist effects: it produces middle-class, domestic women as having no relationship to the marketplace but as possessing the self-control poor women lack. So while Dickens speaks his opposition to the New Poor Law through the novel's melodramatic language, he ultimately adopts an understanding of female character more in line with the bill's supporters than its opponents. Like Lord Althorp, who declared that a “virtuous woman” was “the bond of society,” Dickens ascribes to the virtuous woman extraordinary power: in the case of Oliver Twist, the power to bring into being the middle-class man and perhaps, by extension, the middle class itself.
In making such a claim, I am suggesting that we ultimately read Oliver Twist not only as a melodrama and a mystery but also as an origin myth about the birth of the middle class. The idea that the middle-class materialized in the 1830s is less ridiculous than it seems if one considers the argument Dror Wahrman makes in Imagining the Middle Class. According to Wahrman, the middle class emerges as a category “crucially central to the organizing social and political experience” (333) of Britain only after the Reform Bill of 1832. At the same time, “the aftermath of the Reform Act witnessed not only the decisive proclamation of the ‘middle class’ as a powerfully rising social constituency at the core of the ‘public’; it also witnesses a complementary proclamation of the ‘middle class’ as the epitome of heart and home, at the core of the ‘private’” (381). As useful and innovative as Wahrman's account is, it never fully explains why the association between domesticity and the middle classes surfaces in the 1830s. Oliver Twist provides one possible answer: the connection was forged during the debates over the poor laws and in the controversy swirling around the bastardy clause, where female nature was itself under contention. Grounding that nature in a woman's innate character, the clause's supporters forged the link between classification, self-discipline, and domesticity that shows up in Oliver Twist. Dickens's novel ends with a domestic idyll of bourgeois felicity brought about by Rose Maylie's ability to just say “no” to Harry Maylie; and in this way, Oliver Twist performs the ideological work of the newly imagined middle class.
