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Chapter 4
Another Man
“Another Man” shows up regularly in Dickens’s
fiction. He often plays the role of a romantic rival, but he is more than likely
to double as part of the self. Dickens took great delight in the idea of “t’other
one,” and rarely missed an opportunity to play it out in different keys. Augus-
tus Moddle sounds the note of comic pathos as he flees from marriage with
Charity Pecksniff: “I love another. She is anothers. Everything appears to be
somebody else’s” (MC 54). Years later, in Our Mutual Friend, multiple dou-
blings and triplings of male figures structure the whole novel, and rivalries
among men can turn murderous. Rogue Riderhood’s designation for Eugene
Wrayburn, “t’other governor” has to be supplemented by “t’otherest gov-
ernor” when he meets Bradley Headstone, while John Harmon appears as
“Another Man” in a series of different guises.
Dickens also loved to turn himself into “another man” onstage in amateur
theatricals. Sometimes he used the phrase when he imagined himself in two
parts, the observing self split off from the acting one. From his first Ital-
ian sojourn he wrote to Forster about rediscovering his own acting talents:
“I assure you, when I was on the stage at Montreal (not having played for
years) I was as much astonished at the reality and ease, to myself, of what
I did as if I had been another man” (4.244). In an 1857 letter to Miss Coutts’s
companion Mrs. Brown, he returns to the theme of distanced self-observation
in a more meditative vein: “The vague unhappiness which tracks a life of