206 KNOWING DICKENS
As I come to the end of this project, Dickens surprises me still. I look
at the actions and reactions recorded in his letters; I form opinions, make
judgments. In some turn of his art, he has already been there. He has seen
himself; he knows what the psyche does; but he does not tell everything he
knows. Whether that silence originated in an instinctive reflex to protect his
good opinion of himself, or from a desire to limit his audiences’ knowledge
of his knowingness, would be difficult to say; most probably they are aspects
of the same tendency.
The special quality of that powerful and troubled relation between
knowing and telling may finally be suggested by two moments when
Dickens used the image of being turned inside out. John Forster quotes
from a letter of 21 October 1850, written as Dickens was drawing David
Copperfield to a close: “I am within three pages of the shore, and am
strangely divided, as usual in such cases, between sorrow and joy. Oh, my
dear Forster, if I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel tonight,
how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside-out! I seem to be
sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World” (Forster 547). These
sentences reach out to the intimacy between the two friends as directly as
anything in Dickens’s letters ever does, in the very act of telling Forster
how little he actually knows about the strangeness of Dickens’s feelings.
The “Shadowy World” in which those feelings are embedded is the world
of fiction, or perhaps the world in which the unknown reader’s mind meets
the author’s fantasy, and knows, or does not know, what he or she is read-
ing. Confession and concealment are inseparable, both in Dickens’s letter
and in his fiction; one does not appear in a sentence or paragraph without
the other. Being turned inside out, even to Forster, was imaginable only as
the unimaginable.
Near the end of his life, Dickens came back to the image in a very differ-
ent mood. “A Fly-Leaf in a Life,” in the final series of Uncommercial Traveller
pieces, was published in All the Year Round on 22 May 1869. This unusually
personal piece is an attack on members of the public who presumed to offer
analysis, advice, or criticism to Dickens during the period of enforced rest
that followed the sudden cancellation of his final Farewell Tour of public
readings a month earlier. Tellingly, he imagines the period of rest as a blank
page—a fly-leaf—in “the book of my life”; its blankness is violated, however,
by the intrusion of public responses to the breakdown of his health. His first
line of attack is to claim that he had already written this experience when
he satirized the rumors that fly to explain the death of Mr. Merdle in Little
Dorrit. Quoting two full paragraphs from the novel, he seems to say, “Little
can happen in life that I have not already known in my fiction.” As for the