ANOTHER MAN 107persons who render themselves liable to it, impelling them onward to the
acquisition of a frightful notoriety.” But the “strange fascination” is equally
observable in “tens of thousands of decent, virtuous, well-conducted people,
who are quite unable to resist” anything to do with “the bloodiest and most
unnatural scoundrel with the Gallows before him. I observe that this strange
interest does not prevail to anything like the same degree, where Death is not
the Penalty. Therefore I connect it with the Dread and Mystery surround-
ing Death in any shape, but especially in the avenging form.” He concludes
that, through its power to fascinate, the death penalty “produces crime in
the criminally disposed” and “a diseased sympathy—morbid and bad, but
natural and often irresistible” in the non-criminal mind (4.340). Dickens’s
understanding that fascination depends on “Dread and Mystery” was based
on intimate experience—and not only on his own well-known fascination
with hangings and corpses displayed in morgues. Through characters of the
same sex who are paired in the gaze of fascination, Dickens suggested the
dread and mystery that reside in hidden parts of the unarticulated mind.
Prolonged face-to-face staring contests in the earlier novels invoke pri-
marily the evil eye, wielded by a villain and confronted or resisted by the
fascinated gazer. Such scenes can range from the melodramatic to the comic.
When Nicholas Nickleby meets his wicked uncle Ralph, they “looked at
each other for some seconds without speaking”; this mute confrontation is
enough to stir in Ralph a deep competitive hatred of his nephew (NN 3).
The internal violence generated by such gazing takes a comic turn in The Old
Curiosity Shop when Dick Swiveller meets the ogre-lady Sally Brass across the
desk they share. Unable to keep his eyes from her, Dick begins to develop
“horrible desires to annihilate this Sally Brass,” until he calms himself down
by waving his ruler around like a sword (OCS 33). In the same novel the
vicious Quilp makes up for his dwarfish stature through the power of his gaze,
which enforces submission on his targets. In Barnaby Rudge, Dickens treats the
face-to-face encounter more consistently as an image of suspected but secret
knowledge of identity or paternity: Barnaby is always entranced, fixated, and
fascinated by the appearance of the man he does not know to be his father,
while Mr. Chester and his son, unknown to each other, play out a game
of dominance and fascinated submission that includes another long staring
scene. Long gazes always point to secrets, intuited but inaccessible; in the early
novels the secrets tend to be actions, past or plotted crimes against others.
The power of the eye begins to enter a more psychological realm in the
middle novels Dombey and Son and David Copperfield, where knowledge of
others’ secrets figures as a tool of power in relationships of resentment and
rivalry. Mr. Carker the Manager, marked as a villain of melodrama by his