LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 21suddenly released from the mind’s suppressions. For Dickens what results is
true—possibly more true than the provable law of gravity—precisely because
it arrives from the unknown within. His “absolute” certainty on this point
marks the habit of exaggeration that comes into play when doubt lies in his
vicinity, but it underlines Dickens’s belief that his characters are true and real
because they emerge from a partly unconscious psychological process.
Forster’s biography follows Dickens in attributing verisimilitude to his
characters, and defends Dickens against the condescension of critics who see
only exteriority in his work. “There are plenty to tell us that it is by vivid-
ness of external observation rather than by depth of imaginative insight, by
tricks of manner and phrase rather than by truth of character, by manifesta-
tion outwardly rather than what lies behind,” he writes. With some acerbity
about the George Henry Lewes–George Eliot school of realism, he asserts that
it was not Dickens’s way “to expound or discuss his creations, to lay them
psychologically bare, to analyse their organisms, to subject to minute dem-
onstration their fibrous and other tissues.” Instead, he implies, Dickens had
genuine fellow feeling: “no man had ever so surprising a faculty as Dickens
of becoming himself what he was representing” (Forster 561–62). As Dickens
once put it himself, criticizing another writer’s work, “It seems to me as if
it were written by somebody who lived next door to the people, rather than
inside of ’em” (6.453).
In his journalism, as well as in the notes for novels that have been preserved
in his Book of Memoranda, Dickens sometimes slides from the third to the
first person as he becomes invested in the mind of a character he is invent-
ing or parodying. He can “become” any sort of character: Flora Finching,
for example: “The lady, un peu passé, who is determined to be interesting.
No matter how much I love that person—nay, the more so for that very
reason—I MUST flutter and bother, and be weak and apprehensive and ner-
vous and what not. If I were well and strong, agreeable and self-denying, my
friend might forget me” (Memoranda 5). Or, Mr. Dorrit: “I affect to believe
that I would do anything myself for a Ten Pound note, and that anybody
else would.... While I affect to be finding good in most men, I am in reality
decrying it where it really is, and setting it up where it is not” (9). Or, a pros-
titute: “I am a common woman, fallen. Is it deviltry in me—is it a wicked
comfort—what is it—that induces me to be always tempting other women
down, while I hate myself!” (11). These notes reveal that moving into the first
person is a mode of analysis as well as a form of identification with poten-
tial characters: the “I” speaks itself by giving or searching for reasons for its
behavior. The narrative of Little Dorrit includes a moment in which Arthur
Clennam’s mind moves from free indirect discourse into his mother’s “I.” As