Knowing Dickens

ANOTHER MAN 109

attentively, it made me uncomfortable to observe that, every now and

then, his sleepless eyes would come below the writing, like two red suns,

and stealthily stare at me for I daresay a whole minute at a time, during

which his pen went, or pretended to go, as cleverly as ever. (DC 15)

Throughout the novel Uriah’s eyes can read “below the writing” David does
about himself, discerning there the closeted skeletons of David’s class shame
and desire.
When Uriah entraps David into a silent collusion with his own design
to destroy Mr. Wickfield and marry Agnes (a plot that plays deliberately on
David’s unarticulated love), Uriah turns into an uncanny rival who elicits
David’s murderous but still unconscious sexual jealousy:

I believe I had a delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of the

fire, and running him through with it... the image of Agnes, outraged

by so much as a thought of this red-headed animal’s, remained in my

mind when I looked at him.... He seemed to swell and grow before

my eyes; the room seemed full of the echoes of his voice; and the

strange feeling (to which no one, perhaps, is quite a stranger) that all

this had occurred before, at some indefinite time, and that I knew what

he was going to say next, took possession of me. (DC 25)

The déjà vu feeling marks the action of the unconscious in the scene, point-
ing to Dickens’s knowledge of just what he is doing with those highly sex-
ual images. It also works to blur the psychic boundaries between the two
characters, in ways that are only underlined as the scene proceeds. David
instantly discerns Uriah’s motives for confessing his ambitions and making
David a party to them: “I fathomed the depth of the rascal’s whole scheme,
and understood why he laid it bare.” He sees all too well how Uriah’s mind
works; much as he hates it, he knows his man. When Uriah borrows David’s
nightcap and sleeps next to his fire, the unconscious identification between
the two men is sealed. It should come as no surprise that, in the very next
chapter, David falls in love with his boss’s daughter and goes after her with
an active aggression that is distinguished from Uriah’s only through its noble
steadiness of purpose and the sentimentality of its diction.
The contest of dark knowledge between David and Uriah develops further
when Uriah exposes David’s secret suspicion that Annie Strong has betrayed
her husband’s love. David is furious at having his hidden doubts displayed in
public. As the two male figures “stood, front to front,” David breaks out of
politeness and into violence for the first and only time in his story. When he
slaps Uriah’s face, Uriah “caught the hand in his, and we stood, in that con-
nexion, looking at each other. We stood so, a long time; long enough for me