ANOTHER MAN 105fortable. They are feverish, restless, flighty, excitable, uncontrollable, wrong-
headed; under no sort of wholesome self-restraint; and bred to think the
absence of it a very intellectual and brilliant thing” (4.400). In flight from his
own feverish excitement, he stepped right into Mr. Weller’s role as the heavy
father and maintained it throughout Fred’s marriage, which ended, unhappy
and impoverished, in a separation.
Christiana, too, came in for her share of reassessment. When Dickens
saw the married pair in 1846, he reported to Madame de la Rue that
“Mrs. Thompson disappoints me very much. She is a mere spoiled child, I
think, and doesn’t turn out half as well as I expected” (4.604). With his oldest
friend Thomas Mitton, he was more snide: “She seems (between ourselves) to
have a devil of a whimpering, pouting temper—but she is large in the fam-
ily way, and that may have something to do with it” (4.615). The next year
he found the Thompsons “not happy... he screws and pinches her (I don’t
mean with his fingers) villainously, I am told, in respect of common com-
forts” (5.42–43). Despite Dickens’s self-consoling critiques, the pair seems to
have carried on somehow, producing, in the second of their daughters, the
future Alice Meynell. The families met occasionally in later years; no doubt
it would have consoled Dickens further had he known that Thompson’s little
girl was later to publish an essay defending the dignity and felicity of his liter-
ary style against the dismissive contempt of many Victorian critics.
While most biographers have understood the Christiana Weller episode as
a revival of the Mary Hogarth fantasy or as an instance of an arrested sexual
instinct revealed in Dickens’s attraction to young girls, it becomes even more
interesting as a set of triangulated desires and rivalries among men. In turns,
Dickens both patronized and identified with three different men: Thompson,
Mr. Weller, and his brother Frederick. He plays all possible roles except that
of the legitimate lover, although he manages to slip in a good deal of seduc-
tive talk under cover of his role as mediator. His intense identification with
Thompson’s courtship suggests a desire to control him much as a ventriloquist
would a dummy. And his inability to stay out of these entanglements—none
of which demanded his participation—makes it clear that he was compelled
to play out imaginary scenarios at which we can only guess.
Fascination and Knowledge
In Dickens’s novels, prolonged mutual eyeing between characters frequently
places them in relationships of fascinated, unspoken exchange. Fascination
has long been associated with the power of the eye. In “Fascination, Skin,