LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 33Saxon doors—confessionals like money-takers’ boxes at theatres—queer cus-
tomers those monks”—and so forth (PP 2). After five pages of this, each
Pickwickian has found an image of his own obsession in one part of Jingle’s
repertoire, and his credibility is established—for a few chapters, until the
imposter is unmasked, banished, and replaced by his worthy and benevolently
knowing double, Sam Weller.
The comedy depends not only on the reader’s recognition of Jingle’s pa-
rodic shorthand, but also on the spectacle of a con man who goes unrecog-
nized by his fictional audience. Jingle brings onstage the other side of Pick-
wick’s self-protective rhetoric: language as inventive aggression. Pickwick
seals himself off from the world’s horror and insult through his polite abstrac-
tions (and through his capacity to fall asleep in the face of unpleasantness);
Jingle slides into languages with the virtuosity of the bit-part actor who
sings for his supper. Both figures recognize aspects of Dickens himself: the
aggressive potential of his freewheeling parodic gift as well as his vulnerable
dependence on his audience’s willingness to suspend their disbelief. As Dick-
ens developed his line of talkers, the two aspects gradually merged into a sin-
gle syndrome, retaining and deepening the focus on the necessary collusion
between duper and duped that troubles Dickens’s letters and journalism.
Entering the Dickens world as a reader entails becoming witness to innu-
merable con games—a fact so obvious that it goes unmentioned in a good
deal of commentary. Characters “work” other characters through parodies
of sentiment that extract information or collusion; characters who represent
themselves as knowing or possessing information pull in innocent characters
who believe in their knowingness and yearn to participate in it; characters
with designs appeal to the pretensions of characters who are desperate to be
seen as upwardly mobile and in the know. Dickens takes immense pleasure
in detailing the strategies of these miniature plots, and for the most part he
allows readers to participate in that pleasure by showing us exactly how it’s
done, or at least by allowing us to be more knowing than the characters who
are being duped before our eyes.
Criticism focused on plot tends to emphasize the melodramatic morality
of such transactions, but Dickens is clear from the beginning that it’s not just
a matter of good (and boring) innocents versus bad (and interesting) schem-
ers. The innocent are curiously deaf to the linguistic strategies of the schem-
ers, and their lack—or suppression—of suspicion is often self-serving. For
Dickens knowingness is at once corrupt and essential to survival; the tension
between the two is rarely resolved in his art. He gets his readers to participate
in the tension by allowing us to smile at the dupers at work while our hearts
beat—and our impatience rises—for the duped and the entrapped. Readers