The Little
Witness (1885) by Lily Tinsley is a curious mix of melodrama and psychological
case study. It is a short, focused tale; there is only one plot line and only
four characters of any significance. With its emphasis on key scenes,
bursting with sentimentality and drama, there is an unmistakable theatrical
quality to the text. The five chapters that make up the tale are clearly structured,
each with a distinct setting and function. Despite being a little too mechanical,
this structure works quite well to keep the reader’s interest and to move the
story forward.
The Little
Witness opens with an idyllic countryside scene in “Harrodean Court – Lord
A-‘s country seat.” (The Little Witness,
p2): “The park is one of the most beautiful to be found in the lower counties.”
(The Little Witness, p1) In this
park, stands a gate-keeper’s lodge, surrounded by a magnificent rose garden:
“The whole place looked like a huge basket of flowers suddenly dropped from the
skies.” (The Little Witness, p2).
In this delightful setting, the night falls, and a man approaches the little lodge: “suddenly something bright like a knife or instrument glitters in his hold – the next instance the lattice is forced by a practised hand.” (The Little Witness, p5). A burglar forces his way in through a window into an empty study. “Suddenly, the door is flung open, a broad ray of light streams into the room” (The Little Witness, p6). It reveals the burglar to be “a man of middle height – raggedly clothed, and with a dark, ugly face disfigured here and there by more than one hideous scar – a face on which there is an expression of cunning and brutality which makes it positively repulsive.” (The Little Witness, p7). The burglar has been surprised by an old man and “a fearful struggle takes place” (The Little Witness, p9). The burglar brutally strikes the old man down. The Little Witness opens with murder.
From the start, the narrative shows interest in
the mind and moral character of the murderer: “The robber has gone the one step
which lies between crime and mortal sin.” (The
Little Witness, p10) He is aware of this and experiences “Horror
at what he has done.” He also fears for his own safety: “those bloodhounds,
the police … will follow and track a man until they bring him to death.” (The Little Witness, p11). As he stands
there in the dark, his situation becomes much worse: “Gran’dad!
Gran’dad!” “a sweet clear voice” sounds at the door. (The Little Witness, p13). “He turns like
a tiger brought to bay,” (Ibid.) to
confront the newcomer. The narrator praises the superbly dramatic scene she has
created: “It would have been a striking scene, this, for any artist’s brush,
could one have seen it.” (The Little
Witness, p14). This is a tableau of
melodramatic emotion and tension: the hideously scarred, brutal murderer
observes a little girl bending towards his victim’s beaten and broken body on
the floor: “stained and wet with the crimson tide of blood … her snowy
nightrobe, her golden curls … her baby-face … her blue eyes wide open with
wonder, her little bare feet …” (The
Little Witness, pp14-5) are all described to produce an image of innocent
sweetness. Although this vision of the brutal and disfigured criminal coming
across the idealized image of childhood over a blood-drenched dead body of his
victim is bursting with traditional Victorian melodrama, it is genuinely
disturbing.
The villain approaches the child: “Swiftly, with
eyes glittering with passion and craven fear, he glided with his cat-like tread
out from the darkness into the light; and once again his hand, with that
murderous-looking weapon held in an iron grasp, was raised above the golden
head - …” (The Little Witness, p18).
Three times the villain raises his hand ready to strike out “A life so fragile,
so frail, that it would cease to be if he but took that one step farther in the
evil path he had entered upon.” (The
Little Witness, p21).
The first chapter of Little Witness ends with this cliff-hanger – the murderer’s hand
raised against a beautiful female child. It is very effective. Not only does
the story open with a bang,
it immediately introduces a moral dimension: the villain falling deeper into depravity – he has become a murderer, will he now become a
child-murderer, too?
Tinsley uses the child to bring fresh drama into what
is quite a conventional Victorian murder scene. She is a pretty, little girl,
with all the characteristics of a sensational heroine: golden curls, blue eyes,
baby-face and even a white robe. The red blood on the little girl’s white night
robe has all the significance of both lost innocence and a break from childhood
into adulthood. Letting the villain raise his hand three times to strike her down, Tinsley right
away raises questions about the little girl’s influence on the criminal man.
She puts the little girl in the place of a traditional heroine of
melodrama.
In chapter two the narrator addresses the reader
directly: “And now let me go back a little in my story and make my reader
acquainted with the history of those with whom it has to deal.” (The Little witness, p23) This chapter is
the backstory to the crime. In a few pages it trots through the misfortunes of
John Hardy or “Old John” “the lodge-keeper,” (The Little Witness, p23), who marries Jessie and has a son Harry: “From
his birth idolised by both, and allowed to have his own way in almost every
matter” (The Little Witness, p24). This
way-ward, spoiled son marries against the wishes of his parents “a very poor
and amiable girl” (Ibid.) and the
young couple have a daughter. Then all the characters superfluous to the story
die: Jessie, Harry and finally Harry’s wife Annie; “her tired body dragged
out its weary life … leaving behind her … little Dora.” (The Little Witness, p28). Old John and her grand-daughter Dora are left to live alone in the lodge surrounded by
the rose garden: “They seemed to live for each other.” (The Little Witness, p28).
There is a series of sickly-sweet tableaux
of the little Dora helping her beloved Gran’Dad in various tasks. “It was a
pretty sight to see them thus ever side by side” (The Little Witness p29) sitting by the fireside or gardening
pushing wheel-barrows together or going to church in “a life of calm, unbroken serenity” (The
Little Witness, p33). While this chapter gives us the backstory of the
characters, it also builds an even more romantic image of the little heroine of
the story. She is a female companion to her widowed grandfather. “Dora becomes four years old” (The Little Witness, p34) and the “the village gossips” are already talking about her
desirability as a bride: “the man who got Dora Hardy would be very lucky.” (The Little Witness, p35). A little
unexpectedly Dora is here given a value in the romantic and sexual economy of
marriage at the tender age of four even if she is only a lodge-keeper’s granddaughter
and no great heiress. The purpose of this comment is clearly to establish a
general rumour in the neighbourhood that “Old John must have saved a tidy
amount by this time” (Ibid.), which would
attract burglars to his house. But at the same time, like the description of
her appearance in the first chapter, it gives Dora, who is still almost a
toddler, qualities of a romantic heroine.
Dora “one of the most perfect general lovers on
earth” (The Little Witness, p42), has
no fear of strangers, not even of Billy Doike, “a travelling tinker” who comes
around the village periodically looking for odd-jobs (The Little Witness, p39) and who is described as a spitting image of
the murderer we encountered in the first chapter.
The Little
Witness is not a detective story – by the end of chapter two it is expected
of the reader to figure out that Billy Doike has killed Old
John in the process of robbing his
savings and has been surprised in the act by
Dora.
The Little Witness shows vividly the
uneasy and unreconciled Victorian view of childhood: children are idealised as
innocent and good, but they are also seen as little savages with sexuality and
passions. Tinsley’s novel is certainly interesting for its characterisation of
little Dora Hardy. There she stands in a blood-stained night robe in the dark room about to be clubbered to death by murderous Billy Doike.
