36 KNOWING DICKENS
unmasking the dynamics of self-deception. No doubt on the face of it
most people concede that art cannot be made without a mysterious interplay
between conscious and unconscious energies—and Dickens, always fasci-
nated by the unconscious mind, would have been the first to agree. What to
make of the specifics is another, more difficult matter.
Consider two early examples. In Oliver Twist, Fagin parodies middle-class
pieties of affection and domesticity, the prostitute Nancy dresses up as a
frantic housewife and parodies sentimental distress to get Oliver back, while
the Dodger and Charley Bates parody the ideology of work in their attempt
to convince Oliver to get with the thieves’ program. Meanwhile Dickens lays
on the sentimental and the praise of domestic discipline in the portion of
the novel where the good middle-class characters reside. In Nicholas Nickleby
the narrator makes fun of a Parliamentary petition proposed by the United
Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual
Delivery Company. The petition calls for eliminating the company’s com-
petition by outlawing all muffin and crumpet sellers; “a grievous gentleman”
supports this motion by waxing eloquent about “the cruelties inflicted on
muffin boys by their masters,” which he evokes in pathetic detail (NN 2).
A few chapters on, the barbarous treatment of boys at Dotheboys Hall
becomes the serious (though still comically inflected) preoccupation of the
text. In both novels, of course, the “bad” characters parody sentiment or
moral cant in order to work on the susceptibilities of their dupes and gain
their self-serving ends, while the narrator relies on the same kind of language
in order to move his audience toward moral indignation or approval. The
intention is all; the method is the same.
What do such unacknowledged juxtapositions tell us? Dickens’s central
subject was the use and misuse of language; he demonstrates everywhere the
problematic clash between the two. The knowingness inherent in parody and
self-parody is, however, a special kind of knowledge. Parody says, “I simultane-
ously rely on and ridicule this language”; it represents a bearable self-knowledge,
an acknowledgment that is also a disavowal, distanced and controlled by com-
edy. It is self-recognition projected outwards, a way of knowing and not know-
ing at the same time. Dickens’s narrators and his language villains are alike in
that they both ride on other peoples’ languages in order both to achieve and
to disavow their ambition to persuade others of their good intentions. Dickens
recognizes and celebrates an aspect of himself in writing Fagin, as he know-
ingly calculates the effect on his readers of his own sentimental appeals.
Dickens’s interest in the relation between parodic imitation and self-
knowledge was evident as he prepared to publish his great book of hypocrites
and self-deluders, Martin Chuzzlewit. In his preface to the 1844 edition, he