LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 23response they provoke. In particular, there are characters whose production
of language is an event in itself, characters that tend to render critics speech-
less, either murmuring phrases like “comic genius” or quoting a particular
passage as if it were a joke that can’t possibly be explained. What are such
characters actually doing with language, and what impact does their speech
have on other characters, and on the narrator? Are such classically Dickensian
figures—often described as obsessive or mechanical or static—readable from
the inside out?
Dickens projects different parts of himself upon every character in a novel,
and his letters corroborate that notion when he speaks of living inside his
creations and coming to knowledge of them. Does this mean that Dickens
“knows himself ” in his characters? Since both characters and narrators parody
a range of languages, and since Dickens parodies on one page a kind of lan-
guage we are asked to feel seriously about on another, what is the connection
between parody and self-knowledge? It is with such questions in mind that
I set Dickens the indignant letter-writer and journalist next to a line of his fic-
tional talkers talking variants of what I like to call “language on the loose.”
The Great Protester
Dickens the letter-writer commanded as broad a range of languages and
voices as did Dickens the novelist. He could be affectionate, playful, frus-
trated, or monitory. If he writes angrily and willfully on one page, he is
generous and psychologically skillful on another. Sometimes he is the wildly
exaggerating storyteller making comic episodes from his own life, sometimes
the earnest consoler who feels the closeness of life to death, sometimes the
brilliant observer of a new place. Every correspondent has his or her own
mode of address; every relationship its own special language. Among these
many voices, there is one that calls a special kind of attention to itself through
the discomfort it raises. It greets the reader of Dickens’s early letters in par-
ticular, but it never goes away entirely. This is the voice of indignation and
self-justification set off, apparently uncontrollably, by incidents in which
Dickens feels slighted, misread, taken advantage of, or unjustly criticized.
More explicitly than any other mode of letter writing, it raises questions
about feeling and language in Dickens’s art.
A few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, Dickens wrote a letter break-
ing off his flirtation with Maria Beadnell, the young lady who has long fig-
ured in Dickens biography as the first love who broke his heart (1.16–17). It
is impossible to gauge the actual nature and extent of the relationship, which