WHAT DICKENS KNEW 9of cultivating a readership: he does not italicize much, he says, because “It is
framing and glazing an idea and desiring the ladies and gentlemen to walk
up and admire it.” With a kind of anti-intellectual truculence, he asserts his
policy: “if readers cannot detect the point of a passage without having their
attention called to it by the writer, I would much rather they lost it and looked
out for something else” (1.404). It’s not ideas but effects he’s after, Dickens
implies, as if—like his characters—he did not want to know what he knew.
Awake but paralyzed, Oliver sees Fagin’s greed displayed, and later becomes
terrified by the faces of Fagin and Monks peering into the window of his
safe pastoral retreat. In both scenes he knows something without bearing the
responsibility for knowing it, as one might know in a dream. His writing is
rather like that, Dickens suggests; it comes to him and then he admires it after
it has made its way onto the page. He is not required to discuss the sources
or nature of such ideas as may appear in his sentences, although he would,
throughout his career, vehemently defend their truth.
The touchy undercurrent in Dickens’s reply to Lewes’s question was to
emerge again fourteen years later, after Dickens described Krook’s death by
spontaneous combustion in Bleak House. By that time both writers were well
established. In 1847 Lewes had joined Dickens’s acting group in a produc-
tion of Every Man in His Humour arranged to benefit Leigh Hunt. Despite
their nominal friendship, Lewes found it necessary to take Dickens to task in
his journal The Leader for disseminating superstition in the tenth number of
Bleak House. Lewes argued that that contemporary science had proven that
a human body destroyed by spontaneous combustion was an impossibility,
and suggested that Dickens had “doubtless picked up the idea among the
curiosities of his reading” (qtd. Haight 54). Dickens responded in the next
number of Bleak House by inventing a passage that cites numerous writers
who had verified instances of spontaneous combustion, and staging it as a
satirical contest between so-called learned gentlemen and those in the know.
In two further open letters in The Leader, Lewes ridiculed Dickens’s sources,
explained the scientific facts, and asked Dickens to set the public right in a
preface to the novel.
It was clearly a contest between kinds of knowledge: the scientific versus
the anecdotal. Dickens refused to budge from his position, and sought out
further support from Dr. Elliotson, to whom he wrote, “It is inconceivable
to me how people can reject such evidence, supported by so much familiar
knowledge, and such reasonable analogy. But I suppose the long and short of
it, is, that they don’t know, and don’t want to know, anything about it” (7.23).
Siding with the officially rejected Elliotson, he claimed the high ground of
experiential knowledge that trumped scientific hypothesis and experiment.