26 KNOWING DICKENS
refused “to retract one syllable of the letter” even some weeks later, after
Easthope published a strongly favorable review of the first number of Bent-
ley’s Miscellany (1.220).
The road to Dickens’s resignation from the Miscellany in January 1839 was
also paved with an acute sense of ill treatment. Understandably exhausted
after producing three overlapping novels, and pressed under his contract to
begin installments of Barnaby Rudge, Dickens asked for a six-month’s post-
ponement. When Bentley agreed to it in a note couched in legal and con-
tractual terms, Dickens was infuriated, and set himself on course for resig-
nation: “as one who is enriching you at the expense of his own brain, and
for a most paltry and miserable pittance, I have a right to some regard and
consideration at your hands; and secondly, because such postponements are
matters of common literary custom, taking place as you well know every
day, and in three-fourths of the arrangements in which you are concerned.”
In closing, he threatens to break his contact altogether “if you presume to
address me again in the style of offensive impertinence which marks your last
communication” (1.495). He had pushed himself through an extraordinary
amount of work, and he wanted an extraordinary kind of recognition—not
the nagging feeling that Bentley begrudged him terms that he would readily
make with any other author.
Not long after he resigned from his brief and ill-conceived editorship of
The Daily News in February 1846, he wrote to one of the newspaper’s pub-
lishers, Frederick Evans, to complain about Evans’s partner William Bradbury;
both were men he had worked with for years. Bradbury, Dickens argued, had
been disrespectful, contributing to the failure of his editorship: “he seems to
me to have become possessed of the idea that everybody receiving a salary
in return for his services, is his natural enemy, and should be suspected and
mistrusted accordingly” (4.506). Attempting to insert his own distrust into
the bond between the partners, Dickens succeeded only in displaying his own
suspicion that anyone who paid him for services rendered “at the expense
of his own brain” was bound to be “his natural enemy.” It is not difficult to
hear echoes of the bright child whose brain was considered expendable so
long as he could earn a few shillings a week in the blacking warehouse. Even
his way of accusing one partner while confiding in the other sounds like a
repetition of the old distinction between his parents: the father who finally
took him out of the warehouse; the mother who wanted him to go back. The
paranoia he projects in his accusations is the public face of his sensitivity to
shame and his—always belated—means of protecting himself against it.
In all of these situations, Dickens himself was the one on his way out the
door, yet his rage is the rage of the one cheated or abandoned. His need to