LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 31task of translating speeches, as fast as they were made, into the shorthand
language of squiggles and dashes—a kind of parodic enterprise in itself.
Whatever its sources, Dickens’s sense of outrage was consistently fed by any
discernible gap between language and feeling or intention, the more so, per-
haps, because he sensed that gap in himself.
Even his blatant and unashamed racism is inflected by this special concern
with the misuse of language. In “The Noble Savage,” which appeared in a
June 1853 issue of Household Words, Dickens gets right to the point, describ-
ing the savage as “cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to
grease, entrails, and beastly customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift
of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty, monotonous humbug” (Dent
3.143). “Boastful” savages and whites who believe them, or who invoke the
romantic ideal of the Noble Savage, are called to account for false verbal
representations; both the con artists and the conned figure in Dickens’s no-
holds-barred prose as humbugs who must be found out.
In “The Lost Arctic Voyagers” of December 1854, Dickens was deeply
exercised by a report written by Dr. Rae suggesting that the lost crew of
Sir John Franklin’s 1845 polar exploration had resorted to cannibalism in
their last throes of starvation. His arguments against this possibility include
a good deal of attention to distorted interpretations of the hearsay evidence
offered by the “Esquimaux” who had talked to Dr. Rae. He reaches finally
for the suggestion that the Inuit were themselves the killers of the expedi-
tion crew: “It is impossible to form an estimate of the character of any race
of savages, from their deferential behaviour to the white man when he is
strong. The mistake has been made again and again; and the moment the
white man has appeared in the new aspect of being weaker than the savage,
the savage has changed and sprung upon him” (Dent 3.260). The familiar
pattern reappears, now projected onto a racialized landscape: if you allow
yourself to trust another’s self-representation, you will be ambushed and
betrayed.
Officials guilty of what Dickens calls “a preposterous encouraging and
rewarding of prison hypocrisy” (Dent 3.403) repeatedly receive the same
treatment for believing falsely penitent speech or writing designed by the
criminal to fit the specifications of prison reformers. Against all perpetra-
tors and dupes of deceptive language, Dickens brings on his homeopathic
weaponry: rhetoric vs. rhetoric, his credibility against the credibility—or cre-
dulity—of his targets. The linguistic world he creates is a world of rhetorical
performances on high horses vying to claim the high ground of credibility.
Although we are tossed from one language zone to another, Dickens does
not run a postmodern language circus that exposes the disconnection of all