40 KNOWING DICKENS
counters in the money market. (Dickens was all too familiar with his father’s
propensity to use or forge his famous son’s name as a security on bills with-
out informing him.) This character does not lie about himself; on the con-
trary he is all too willing to launch into elaborate circumlocutions about
his “pecuniary difficulties” at any opportunity. For Micawber, language is a
substitute for action as well as a defense against it; if he talks, he imagines he’s
doing something about his family’s poverty. His grandiose Latinate diction
and his many literary allusions are meant to guarantee his gentility, much like
the “imposing shirt-collar” that adorns his shabby dress (DC 11). The lan-
guage allows him to feel he is conferring hospitality on those whose money
he takes; like the IOUs he writes up for creditors as small as the ten-year-old
David, the word is in effect the deed. Yet from the beginning he is given
the endearing quality of puncturing his own rhetoric—“in short,” of saying
exactly what he means.
In the early childhood scenes the Micawbers are entwined with Dickens’s
autobiographical memories of his father’s weeks in the Marshalsea. They
are part portraits and part wishful versions of his parents, washed clean of
responsibility for putting the child into the blacking warehouse. When they
leave the child they have confided in as a fellow-adult, Dickens gives himself
what he thought his parents did not, a scene in which the Micawbers pay full
attention to David’s talents and virtues, and—David fancies—Mrs. Micaw-
ber realizes “what a little creature I really was” (DC 12). Once the Micawbers
turn up again—and again—in the text, Dickens deepens his analysis of the
folie à deux of their marriage and shows how each partner produces delu-
sional rhetoric in their shared anxiety about Mr. Micawber’s employment
prospects. Mrs. Micawber is hardly reducible to the mantra—“I will never
desert Mr Micawber”—with which she has been fixed. She stokes the fan-
tastical fires by extolling her mate’s talents, blaming her family and the world
for ignoring them, and envisioning him famous and exalted the moment
there is the whiff of a job in the air. If her husband knows better, as Dickens
sometimes hints, he is too caught up in his own forms of rhetorical excess to
do anything but play the marital game.
His part is to veer wildly between melodramatic assertions of failure and
the garrulous good cheer that turns up with the appearance of good food
or drink. The great comedy of Micawber lies in these instant mood shifts,
especially in Dickens’s renditions of Micawber in rhetorical despair. He is
always on the verge of the grave, whether it’s death by shaving razor or other
means. “The die is cast—all is over. Hiding the ravages of care with a sickly
mask of mirth, I have not informed you, this evening, that there is no hope
of the remittance! Under these circumstances, alike humiliating to endure,