“Neck or nothing” in Thomas Hardy’s “The Trumpet-Major” (1880)

In Thomas Hardy's "The Trumpet-Major" (1880), while they are trying to protect Bob Loveday from a press gang, Matilda Johnson tells Anne Garland that "it is neck or nothing with us now." Although I did understand "neck or nothing" immediately, I would have said "all or nothing". My sense is that I had never heard the expression before, but it has a long history: the entry for the expression Oxford English Dictionary has citations from 1673 to 1968, whose authors include Jonathan Swift and William Cowper. There's even a quotation from Charles Dickens – but it's from "Sketches By Boz" (1836), which I didn't read when I read all of Dickens's novels. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 November 2024)

Update: Of course now I have found the phrase in Dickens’s “Martin Chuzzlewit” (1844): “[…] he'll fill his wehicle with passengers, and start off in the middle of the road, neck or nothing […]”. But according to the online Dickens concordance, that’s the only use of the phrase in one of CD’s novels.