ANOTHER MAN 113as close as they had once been, Dickens continued to appeal to Forster as his
bar of conscience and respectability, providing him with letters that recorded
his thoughts and experiences for posterity.
Dickens also wanted to persuade Forster of Collins’s virtues. In a letter
describing Collins’s response to the new portrait of Dickens by the Parisian
artist Ary Scheffer, Dickens wrote, “Scheffer finished yesterday; and Collins,
who has a good eye for pictures, says there is no man living who could do
the painting about the eyes.” Dickens, however, could not see himself in the
portrait. “And so I come to the conclusion that I never do see myself ” (8.66).
This was his typical response to portraits or photographs; he had already
complained to Forster that the Scheffer portrait “does not look to me at all
like, nor does it strike me that if I saw it in a gallery I should suppose myself to
be the original” (8.9). By 1861 he had made a rule of it: to Richard Lane, who
had engraved a Dickens photograph, he wrote, “I do not pretend to know
my own face. I do pretend to know the faces of my friends and fellow crea-
tures, but not my own” (9.523). Apparently proud of his inability to “see” his
own face, Dickens may have been expressing resistance to the notion that he
could be captured in stasis, when he was capable of becoming so many dif-
ferent kinds of men. Collins’s remark, that representing Dickens’s eyes would
be beyond the skill of any painter, would have been a welcome mirroring, in
Collins’s “good eye,” of Dickens’s own wishes. But Dickens’s comments also
reveal an awareness that his way of gathering knowledge, including knowl-
edge of the self, was to look outward into the faces of others.
In letters to Collins Dickens could be informal and honest about his
less-than-respectable feelings, his night wanderings, and his curiosity about
figures he saw in the streets. As the friendship moved toward literary col-
laboration, the two writers dramatized the differences in their characters as
part of their inventive process. Dickens was “the Genius of Order”; Collins
“the Genius of Disorder” (8.161); Dickens the fanatical worker, Collins the
dreamy idler. From 1854 until 1861, when his own career took off after the
publication of A Woman in White, Collins contributed to the multi-authored
stories that made up the extra Christmas numbers of Household Words. In
1856 Dickens took Collins onto the permanent salaried staff of the maga-
zine and ran a long story of his with a byline, a distinction usually reserved
for Dickens himself. Recuperating from an illness in 1861, Dickens asked
Collins to substitute for him as the main speaker at a Benevolent Society din-
ner, writing of it as good training for public life (9.419). When Collins fell
ill the next year, he offered to help complete Collins’s novel No Name in a
manner “so like you as that no one should find out the difference” (10.142),
as if he could readily transform himself into a Collins clone. By that time