52 KNOWING DICKENS
straight up here, follow the gravel path, keep off the grass. I allow no tres-
passing’ ” (“Hunted Down” 175–76). The dubious parting that defies inves-
tigation keeps Sampson’s suspicions alive, but during his pleasant dialogues
with Slinkton he chastises himself for coldness and distrust. We seem to be
in the midst of Dickens’s own struggle with the problem of innocence and
knowledge.
By the third section, however, the story turns; now the reader becomes
the dupe while the narrator dramatizes his own machinations to ensnare
Slinkton, as if he were innocent of them. The discerning reader, alert to clues
planted by the author, experiences the usual seduction of half-knowledge,
while the story goes about its business of saving Slinkton’s intended victims
and exposing the murderer in a scene featuring a former victim, thought
to be dead, who has plotted behind the scenes with the narrator to get his
revenge. As usual, the collusion of several other “virtuous” plotters is required
to bring the designing plotter to bay. But the first-person narration gives the
story an additional twist. Sampson the teller is marked with the same brush
as Slinkton the swindler: both tell and withhold for the sake of their own
profits. In the tale Dickens gets as close as he ever does to the admission that
his profession depends on playing with his readers’ willingness to be duped.
That sense of his art had led him earlier to idealize and identify with the
detective police: what could be more tempting than a profession that relies on
perpetual suspicion and full-time distrust of what other people say? Inspector
Bucket of Bleak House nails Skimpole’s character seconds after meeting him,
and makes use of Skimpole to extract information for his own purposes; he
narrates that story to Esther with an easy, offhanded self-regard. Dickens,
I suspect, envied the freedom in this artful knowledge; police need not pre-
tend to value dangerous innocence, or write novels that would appeal to the
sentiments of a polite middle-class public.
The Scotland Yard detective branch of the London Metropolitan Police
had been created in 1842. Dickens spent several years in the 1840s fantasiz-
ing about becoming a Police Magistrate who would hear cases brought by
members of the force. In both 1843 and 1846 he wrote flattering letters to
noblemen mentioning this desire, in the hopes that they would help him to
a post for which—not being a barrister—he was unqualified. There may
have been various reasons for this fantasy during the decade when Dickens
thought about alternatives to full-time novel writing: a desire to emulate his
admired predecessor Henry Fielding, a notion that he could understand and
educate the poor from a position on the bench, or a wish to gather material
at first hand from actual incidents of cops-and-robbers’ con games. By the
end of the decade, his energy for direct social reform had been channeled