Knowing Dickens

2. Language on the Loose

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Chapter 2 Language on the Loose Dickens wrote little about his own art. Even his letters to John Forster—who claimed to have read everything Dickens wrote before it was published (Forster 89)—are more likely to express his difficulties with deadlines or the agonies of beginning a new book than to throw any light on the private process of composition. The few comments he did make tell a consistent story: Dickens saw himself as inhabiting his characters from the inside, and he believed that characters should reveal themselves in dialogue without a narrator’s analysis or explanation. To the generations of readers and critics who have either attacked or justified Dickens’s failure to give his characters credible or complex interior lives, he might easily have objected, “I write my characters inside out.” Out from his inside, to begin with. As he was writing the early chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens wrote to Forster, “As to the way in which these characters have opened out, that is, to me, one of the most surprising processes of the mind in this sort of invention. Given what one knows, what one does not know springs up; and I am as absolutely certain of its being true, as I am of the law of gravitation—if such a thing be possible, more so” (3.441). Dickens is hardly the first or last writer to speak of the way characters develop themselves during the fiction-writing process, but the emphases are peculiar to him. Conscious knowing sets off unconscious knowing, which “springs up” into language on the page as though it were LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 21 suddenly released from the mind’s suppressions. For Dickens what results is true—possibly more true than the provable law of gravity—precisely because it arrives from the unknown within. His “absolute” certainty on this point marks the habit of exaggeration that comes into play when doubt lies in his vicinity, but it underlines Dickens’s belief that his characters are true and real because they emerge from a partly unconscious psychological process. Forster’s biography follows Dickens in attributing verisimilitude to his characters, and defends Dickens against the condescension of critics who see only exteriority in his work. “There are plenty to tell us that it is by vividness of external observation rather than by depth of imaginative insight, by tricks of manner and phrase rather than by truth of character, by manifestation outwardly rather than what lies behind,” he writes. With some acerbity about the George Henry Lewes–George Eliot school of realism,he asserts that it was not Dickens’s way “to expound or discuss his creations, to lay them psychologically bare, to analyse their organisms, to subject to minute demonstration their fibrous and other tissues.” Instead, he implies, Dickens had genuine fellow feeling: “no man had ever so surprising a faculty as Dickens of becoming himself what he was representing”(Forster 561–62). As Dickens once put it himself, criticizing another writer’s work, “It seems to me as if it were written by somebody who lived next door to the people, rather than inside of ’em” (6.453). In his journalism,as well as in the notes for novels that have been preserved in his Book of Memoranda, Dickens sometimes slides from the third to the first person as he becomes invested in the mind of a character he is inventing or parodying. He can “become” any sort of character: Flora Finching, for example: “The lady, un peu passé, who is determined to be interesting. No matter how much I love that person—nay, the more so for that very reason—I MUST flutter and bother, and be weak and apprehensive and nervous and what not. If I were well and strong, agreeable and self-denying, my friend might forget me” (Memoranda 5). Or, Mr. Dorrit: “I affect to believe that I would do anything myself for a Ten Pound note, and that anybody else would....While I affect to be finding good in most men, I am in reality decrying it where it really is,and setting it up where it is not”(9). Or,a prostitute : “I am a common woman, fallen. Is it deviltry in me—is it a wicked comfort—what is it—that induces me to be always tempting other women down,while I hate myself!”(11). These notes reveal that moving into the first person is a mode of analysis as well as a...