88 KNOWING DICKENS
her resentment reduce every person she encounters to an instance of the
self-interested hypocrisy she expects to discover. It is not impossible that
Dickens recognized in this stripped-down portrait a secret and lonely part of
himself. Forster, at least, recognized in him at times “a stern and even cold
isolation of self-reliance side by side with a susceptivity almost feminine and
the most eager craving for sympathy” that, he speculated, arose from “a sud-
den hard and inexorable sense of what fate had dealt to him in those early
years” (Forster 39).
“George Silverman’s Explanation” spooked even its author. He wanted
to disavow it; as he wrote to W. H. Wills, “I feel as if I had read something
(by somebody else) which I should never get out of my mind!!!” The story
came from the part of his mind that was planning The Mystery of Edwin Drood,
in which the murderer John Jasper was to tell his own story as if it were
someone else’s: “The main idea of the narrator’s position towards the other
people, was the idea I had for my next novel in A. Y. R.” (11.385). Indeed
“George Silverman’s Explanation” opens as if the narrator were attempting
to overcome his reluctance to make a particular confession; the first two
abandoned chapters begin “IT happened in this wise,” but the reader is never
to discover just what the IT is. Instead we get a fictional autobiography that
might have been written by one of Dickens’s “savage children,” had he been
allowed to grow up, sit for a Cambridge degree, and take orders. Born and
then orphaned in a Preston cellar, Silverman describes himself as a wild child
who sometimes resembles the Jo of Bleak House assailed by the rhetoric of
hypocritical Chadband-like preachers. His problem lies in a secret terror
of his own “worldliness,” which has been instilled in him by his mother’s
epithet, “worldly little devil,” and deepened by the pious exhortations of his
so-called benefactors. His life unfolds as a long and fruitless attempt to prove
that he is not worldly or mercenary, ending with his dismissal by an employer
who accuses him of precisely those faults. His “explanation” is an effort to
prove that his motives, always generous and self-denying, were persistently
misread by others.
Just as Miss Wade’s narrative turns the spotlight on a neurotic response
to childhood shame, this story displays George Silverman’s misreading of
himself. His continuing obsession with punishing himself for the “world-
liness” of having essential needs for food, warmth, recognition, and love
turns him into an isolated being whose secretive ways give rise to rejection
and distrust in others. This is the story of an abused and neglected child
who cannot grow out of the mental condition engendered by his early
deprivation, in part because he cannot bring himself to speak directly to
other human beings, and in part because he is overly devoted to cherishing