Dora Hardy (Aged 4) - A Sensational Heroine

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.