ANOTHER MAN 103Thompson, a man of Dickens’s age, had been a family friend since sometime
in the 1830s. He was a gentleman of leisure living on his grandfather’s for-
tune, a widower with two children who were under the care of his sister. He
had been waiting to greet Dickens when he arrived in Liverpool and took
part in all of the festivities there. When Dickens opened Thompson’s letter,
he claimed in his reply, “I felt the blood go from my face to I don’t know
where, and my very lips turn white. I never in my life was so surprised, or
had the whole current of my life so stopped, for the instant, as when I felt, at
a glance, what your letter said.” Allowing for the usual exaggerations, Dick-
ens claims to have had the knowledge before Thompson could tell it to him,
as though he were specially tuned into Thompson’s frame of mind. Dickens
admits that he thought Thompson temperamentally incapable of such a feel-
ing as he, Dickens, could cherish: “although I knew that the impression she
had made on me was a true, deep, honest, pure-spirited thing, I thought my
nature might have been prepared to receive it, and to exaggerate it uncon-
sciously, and to keep it green long after such a fancy as I deemed it probable
you might have conceived had withered” (4.69–70). This bizarre sentence
mixes a competitive assertion of emotional superiority with some accuracy
in self-analysis. Dickens seems to sense that the young girl’s image has taken
hold through unconscious processes, but he prides himself on the ability to
“keep it green” longer than any other man could.
Thompson had no impediment that would prevent an actual courtship,
so Dickens’s fantasy of winning at a chaste competition of adoration was set
at naught. The result of that recognition was that he poured himself into a
courtship by proxy: his language soars into sentimental rhetoric as he tells
Thompson what he would do in his place. As his imagination takes wing,
Dickens begins to argue as if he were talking directly with Mr. Weller, urging
the marriage as if it were the only way to save a threatened girl from early
death at the hands of a father who had forced her into a fatal apprentice-
ship to her piano. Like Master Humphrey in the Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens
imagines himself pleading for the girl’s life against the father’s willful inat-
tention to her needs. It would take a Dickens, he implies, to effect such a
change of heart in the father. And so, fighting on behalf of one man against
another for the possession of an eighteen-year-old girl, Dickens entered the
quadrangle of the Thompson-Weller marriage negotiations.
He was quite out of control. He fantasizes that Thompson will marry
Christiana and all three of them will then enjoy a “quiet happiness” abroad,
“in some delicious nook, where we should make merry over all this” (4.70).
He hints to his rival that Christiana would have given her heart to Dick-
ens himself had he been free (4.72–73). He becomes violently interested in