ANOTHER MAN 125the self. Fascination does not end or get diverted to other channels; it floats,
in a perpetual state of knowing and testing the limits of the self through
the other. Dickens’s fascinated men are enthralled with—and by—the men
they might have been but for their pride, their shame, their age, their class
position, or their need for respectability. They are, to put it another way, in
love with their own transformational possibilities, the potential, yearned-for
multiplicity of themselves.