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Chapter 2
Language on the Loose
Dickens wrote little about his own art. Even his
letters to John Forster—who claimed to have read everything Dickens wrote
before it was published (Forster 89)—are more likely to express his difficul-
ties with deadlines or the agonies of beginning a new book than to throw
any light on the private process of composition. The few comments he did
make tell a consistent story: Dickens saw himself as inhabiting his characters
from the inside, and he believed that characters should reveal themselves in
dialogue without a narrator’s analysis or explanation. To the generations of
readers and critics who have either attacked or justified Dickens’s failure to
give his characters credible or complex interior lives, he might easily have
objected, “I write my characters inside out.”
Out from his inside, to begin with. As he was writing the early chapters
of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens wrote to Forster, “As to the way in which
these characters have opened out, that is, to me, one of the most surpris-
ing processes of the mind in this sort of invention. Given what one knows,
what one does not know springs up; and I am as absolutely certain of its
being true, as I am of the law of gravitation—if such a thing be possible,
more so” (3.441). Dickens is hardly the first or last writer to speak of the
way characters develop themselves during the fiction-writing process, but
the emphases are peculiar to him. Conscious knowing sets off unconscious
knowing, which “springs up” into language on the page as though it were