LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 45fallen from the respectability of his bourgeois marriage, full of his own need
to be “righted” in his abandonment of Catherine, Dickens now reads Hunt,
father and son, through the lenses of his own life, his own father, and his
own son.
Skimpole is Dickens’s most profound and terrifying portrait of a dis-
sociated character. Esther comments that he speaks of himself as if he were
describing another person; he boasts of himself as a lover of beauty, nature,
and universal harmony who knows nothing of money, nothing of business,
nothing of practicality, responsibility, or principle. In his professed view, the
universe exists in order to give him pleasure, and he manages to imply that
those who are occupied with responsibility, enterprise, and effort are delight-
ful to contemplate and exist to exercise his sensibility and admiration. Slaves
on an American plantation, for instance: “I dare say theirs is an unpleasant
experience on the whole; but, they people the landscape for me, they give it a
poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their exis-
tence” (BH 18). As for those whose generosity keeps him afloat, he is, in his
own view, their benefactor: “I almost feel as if you ought to be grateful to me,
for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity” (BH 6).
His response to chronic indebtedness is simply to deny that he can have any-
thing to do with payment; instead he makes up entertaining stories about his
dialogues with creditors who persist in misunderstanding his nature.
Dickens attacks the sinister aspects of Skimpole’s “philosophy” through
his ruthlessness to real children, who threaten to steal his thunder and others’
charitable attentions. The orphaned children of the debt-collector Neckett
of Coavinses give rise to his fantasy that “he had been giving employment
to a most deserving man; that he had been a benefactor to Coavinses; that he
had actually been enabling Coavinses to bring up these charming children in
this agreeable way, developing these social virtues!” (BH 15). When Jo turns
up at Bleak House with smallpox Skimpole advises Jarndyce to turn him
out immediately. Jo, he argues, should turn criminal and get himself taken
care of in prison: society owes him a spoon and he should insist on getting
it. Skimpole, who thinks the world owes him a living, is perfectly willing to
sacrifice a child who threatens his health; later that night he accepts a bribe
from Inspector Bucket, tells him where Jo is hidden, and lies about Jo’s
departure to his benefactors. Meanwhile, he amuses himself by inventing a
sad song about an abandoned orphan.
Insisting on this “childlike” version of his character in every scene, Skim-
pole becomes virtually unassailable by others. Every unwelcome part of him-
self is cannily projected onto someone else. When Esther and Richard keep
him out of jail by paying his debts, Esther remarks, “Richard and I seemed