ANOTHER MAN 91constant aim and ever impels to some new aim in which it may be lost, is
so curious to consider, that I observe it in myself sometimes, with as much
curiosity as if I were another man” (8.422). By the 1860s Dickens was rent-
ing houses for Ellen Ternan under false names, and visiting her in the guise of
another man. Threads linking Dickens’s actual friendships with his written
renditions of “the other man” suggest his fascination with intense relations
among men, in which identification and rivalry are intimately linked.
The blurring of boundaries between another man and the self is appar-
ent in Dickens’s fiction as early as chapter two of The Pickwick Papers, which
stages a slapstick mixup of identities in the mistaken duel between Mr. Win-
kle and Dr. Slammer. The novel as a whole features repeated scenes between
male characters whose acquaintance begins in jealousy and ends in vows of
everlasting brotherhood. From Pickwick through Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens
created overwhelmingly male scenarios in which women most often func-
tion as occasions for rivalry among men, as comically denigrated figures—the
shrew, the hysteric—or as sentimental heroines endangered by male aggres-
sion. In the two-year interval between completing Chuzzlewit (1844) and
beginning Dombey and Son (1846), Dickens began to remake himself as a
Victorian writer more seriously concerned with the complexity of fam-
ily emotions. At the same time, his representations of male friendship and
rivalry deepened into studies of fascination, in which connections between
male characters are eroticized by anxiety about class status, power, and mas-
culinity. From the beginning, however, questions of identity and knowledge
are raised when two male figures are linked in the gaze of fascination. From
Oliver Twist’s vision of Fagin at the window, “with his eyes peering into the
room and meeting his” (OT 34), through the murderous rivalry of Eugene
Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone, fascinated looking is the conduit of secret
half-conscious knowledge between men.
Dickens and His Friends
Dickens himself lived primarily in a world of men. His career began in the
eminently male domain of cheap newspaper publication and competitive
reporting. His higher literary tastes were formed by the masculine worlds of
the eighteenth-century novelists Fielding, Sterne, Smollet, and Goldsmith, as
well as essayists like Johnson, Addison, and Steele. Both his professional and
his leisure hours were centered on friendships or working relationships with
other men. It is not altogether surprising that relationships between men
in his fiction are more fully charged with erotic energy and conflict than