46 KNOWING DICKENS
to retain the transferred impression of having been arrested since dinner”
(BH 6). The “enchantment” he spreads—at least in his early appearances—
makes Esther feel that it is she, not Skimpole, who is worldly and designing.
By such means Skimpole manages to abuse those who help him; there are
serpents lurking in his “light and airy” pastoral monologues. The morning
after being bailed out by Richard and Esther, he attacks the busy productiv-
ity of bees and praises the idle Drone, who will be fed by the labor of the
bees. All will be well, he suggests, “always supposing the Drone to be willing
to be on good terms with the Bee: which so far as he knew, the easy fellow
always was, if the consequential creature would only let him, and not be so
conceited about his honey!” The choice is his, whether to grace his self-
satisfied hard-working friends with his dependency. His actual shrewdness,
along with his hostile resentment of his benefactor, is neatly expressed in
the observation that no Manchester manufacturer would allow his product
to be taken from him, as bees do—and as Jarndyce does when he pays for
Skimpole (BH 8).
The emphasis in Bleak House returns to the con game, and to the ways
that Skimpole’s friends try not to know that they are being manipulated by
the apparent innocence of his discourse. Even before we meet Skimpole we
meet Jarndyce’s defense against his own suspicion: Skimpole is presented
as a grown-up child “in simplicity, and freshness, and enthusiasm, and a
fine guileless inaptitude for all worldly affairs” (BH 6). He protects Skim-
pole, while the young characters protect Jarndyce from his unacknowledged
knowledge that Skimpole is a very clever con man. When Jarndyce gets wor-
ried, they assure him that Skimpole is only a child. The silliness of his relief
at such junctures is not simply comic at his expense; Dickens successfully
suggests that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between true incapacity
and a con game. Nevertheless Skimpole damns himself as a self-regarding
leech whenever he opens his mouth, and Jarndyce’s deafness is complicit to
a dangerous degree—as it later appears when Skimpole systematically bleeds
the dying Richard of his ever-waning funds.
Because Skimpole is presented through Esther’s narrative, we get a medi-
ated view of Jarndyce’s culpability. When it comes to Skimpole, Esther is a
strong guide who can think like a Dickens narrator; from the start she records
her “confusion” at Skimpole’s “contradictions” and “inconsistencies”; as the
novel proceeds she moves to outright suspicion and finally to stern rebuke.
Esther ventures to point out Jarndyce’s yearning “to find one perfectly
undesigning and candid man... I should be sorry to imply that Mr Skimpole
divined this and was politic: I really never understood him well enough to
know” (BH 15). That is what makes Skimpole a scary character. Exactly