42 KNOWING DICKENS
enjoyment of his epistolary powers, in describing this unfortunate state of
things, really seemed to outweigh any pain or anxiety that the reality could
have caused him.” Just when he is vindicating Micawber’s character, the nar-
rator feels it necessary to spell out what he has dramatized without comment
throughout the novel. Micawber is soon associated with one of Dickens’s
pet peeves: “He read this passage, as if it were from an Act of Parliament,
and appeared majestically refreshed by the sound of the words.” Then the
monitory tone extends itself out of the novel altogether; suddenly Dickens is
lecturing the whole nation on its “relish in this formal piling up of words”
valued more for the sense of grandeur they impart than for their meaning
(DC 52). What has happened?
The glitch in the novel’s tone suggests Dickens’s sudden discomfort with
his own pleasure in writing Micawber’s linguistic extravaganzas. Reinvent-
ing the father meant becoming the father, and Dickens had done so with
enormous relish. When he turns to vaguely disapproving generalizations
about wordiness and pretense he covers over his more intimate analysis of
Micawber, and of himself: the way language stands in for action; the way
melodramatic fantasies serve to derail the self and others from focusing on
the mundane facts at hand; the way language functions as a pain-reducing
drug. Probably such insights fell too close to home; some disavowal of
his investment in the figure was necessary. Although Micawber is finally
allowed to flourish as a journalist in Australia, Dickens had first to send him
to the ends of the earth, exporting him as if he were a convict or a fallen
woman.
After the death of John Dickens in 1851, Dickens returned to the fray
with a more punitive rendition of the feckless talker. The case of Harold
Skimpole in Bleak House was complicated by the character’s resemblance to
Dickens’s literary colleague, the poet and essayist Leigh Hunt. Just as Dickens
had predicted in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit, the portrait was quickly
recognized by everyone except Hunt himself. Once Hunt’s friends had clued
him in, Dickens was forced to squirm through several embarrassing attempts
to convince Hunt that he had borrowed only the delightful aspects of his
character and invented the rest. He knew that was not the case; in September
1853 he had boasted in confidence to Lavinia Watson that Skimpole “is the
most exact portrait that was ever painted in words!... the likeness is astonish-
ing... It is an absolute reproduction of a real man.” His guilt came through
as well: “It is so awfully true, that I make a bargain with myself ‘never to do
so, any more’ ” (7.154).
Even as he was writing Skimpole, Dickens knew he was doing harm.
He was pleased that his illustrator Hablot Browne had drawn Skimpole as a