LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 29a classic return to reality—acts as yet another bit of dismissive aggression,
addressed in this case to an American who had sent him a pamphlet support-
ing the international copyright. Many years later, at the end of 1859, Dickens
wrote a wonderful satire on the two-bit gossip of journalists who appear to
“know” the inner intentions of their highly placed subjects through private
and confidential interviews granted only to them; he called it “The Tattle-
snivel Bleater” (Dent 4.19–26). By that time he had had the experience
of a celebrity author pushed by gossip into making a public defense of his
separation from his wife. His continued sensitivity to pretensions of inside
knowledge gave the article its especially biting edge.
Dickens simply could not be, would not be, at fault; any suggestion of
it generated an overflow of defensive language. When, at twenty-nine, he
answered a note from a former colleague of his reporting days, he spent
virtually the whole letter disputing the possibility that anyone could think
he could forget old friends in his days of fame. As usual, he writes himself
into extravagant claims: “I have never in my life—and especially in my later
life—no, not once, treated any single human being with coldness or hauteur”
(2.241–42). For the reader of Dickens’s letters, such claims become familiar
parts of his character, signs of an inner imperative that would not be altered.
Peter Ackroyd comments, “the truth was always a very fluid concept for
Dickens; he did not so much lie as believe in whatever he said at the time”
(1002). This sounds right, especially in conjunction with Dickens’s belief
that what he discovered about his characters was true because he “knew” it
to be true. Of course, it leaves many questions unanswered. The question of
origins—what made Dickens this kind of man?—cannot, I think, be ade-
quately answered by successive generations. A deep-seated expectation that
trust or belief will be rewarded with indifference or betrayal is likely to have
originated in a period of childhood earlier than the blacking factory episode,
though that experience would of course have deepened the expectation and
given it a full-fledged story.
It is also tempting to think that the talkative Dickens was his father’s
son, and that he reproduced his father’s highly elaborated patterns of denial
exactly because he was so horrified by them. His acute sensitivity to delusive
speech patterns and his power of parody may well have been nourished on
John Dickens’s circumlocutions, and from the gradual and painful recogni-
tion that the father was not as good as his word. Forster quotes a fragment of
an 1844 letter in which Dickens juxtaposes his own direct language with a
parody of his father’s: of a departing physician, he writes, “We are very sorry
to lose the benefit of his advice—or, as my father would say, to be deprived,
to a certain extent, of the concomitant advantages, whatever they may be,