Knowing Dickens

LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 25

could assure himself that his feeling was beyond censure. Luckily for both of
them, Maria did not take up his offer.
Much of this episode belongs to the annals of young love, and Dickens
made several charming parodies of the obsessive and hopeless young lover
when he created characters like Augustus Moddle in Martin Chuzzlewit and
Toots in Dombey and Son. But the essential pattern of response shows up
in very different circumstances throughout Dickens’s correspondence. His
own intentions and behavior are always exemplary, while others accuse him
unjustly or take advantage of him without crediting his excellence. He is not
angry or aggressive, only sometimes “hurt.” Underlying it all, there is a sense
of perpetual disappointment that takes the form of feeling conned.
The turbulent history of Dickens’s relations with his publishers is a com-
plicated labyrinth that I will not enter, except to look at some examples of
the writing it set off. In November 1836, the twenty-four-year-old Dickens
resigned from his job as a reporter for the Morning Chronicle. Pickwick was
in train with Chapman and Hall, and he had just signed a new contract
with another publisher, Richard Bentley, to edit Bentley’s Miscellany. Dick-
ens’s career in fiction was taking off, and he could afford to leave reporting
behind, with a polite letter of resignation to John Easthope, a proprietor of
the Chronicle. A week later, having accepted Dickens’s resignation, Easthope
was treated to one of Dickens’s blasts of indignation. Apparently he had
failed to show enough appreciation for Dickens’s extraordinary service. In
his anger, Dickens supplied the missing acknowledgment himself:

on many occasions at a sacrifice of health, rest, and personal comfort,

I have again and again, on important expresses in my zeal for the inter-

ests of the paper, done what was always before considered impossible,

and what in all probability will never be accomplished again. During

the whole period of my engagement wherever there was a difficult

and harassing duty to be performed—traveling at a few hours’ notice

hundreds of miles in the depth of winter—leaving hot and crowded

rooms to write, the night through, in a close damp chaise—tearing

along, and writing the most important speeches, under every possible

circumstance of disadvantage and difficulty—for that duty I have been

selected. (1.196–97)

No matter that Dickens expresses his zest for just that kind of competitive
activity in other letters; here the breathless rhetoric is used to beat Easthope
for his inattention to the prodigy who had just left his service. Easthope him-
self was rather confounded, and wondered whether Dickens’s current illness
was making him irritable (1.195n.). He did not know his man: Dickens