AFTERWORD 207possibility of being known by others, Dickens oozes contemptuous scorn
as he imagines an ignorant field-preacher who had questioned his religious
faith: “He was in the secrets of my heart, and in the lowest soundings of my
soul—he!—and could read the depths of my nature better than his A B C,
and could turn me inside out, like his own clammy glove” (Dent 4.388–89).
Attempts to turn him inside out, he threatens, will expose only the more
unpleasant parts of the unwelcome intruder.
Dickens yearned to be known, and was horrified by the possibility that
he would be. The tension in his work between suspicious knowingness and
idealized innocence—so often implicated with one another—lays out the
shape of this charged territory, though it cannot tell us just what Dickens
knew and what he withheld from conscious knowing. To read between fic-
tion and correspondence, as I have been doing, is to alternate between amaze-
ment at his self-defensive strategies and amazement at the specificity with
which he portrays those strategies in his characters and sometimes in himself.
In a similar way he moves from identifications with turbulent characters to
rhapsodies on idealized characters, just as the mind recognizes itself and then
covers up what it knows. What does seem clear, however, is that Dickens was
engaged in a life-long process of self-observation as keen as the observation
he brought to bear on others. Those others—both male and female—were
containers for the isolation and projection of an inward way of being that
knew itself by mirroring its aspects on external screens. Dickens wanted to
contain multitudes, and, in his way, he did.
To focus so exclusively on the subjectivity of Dickens may seem odd
in a portrait of a writer so actively engaged in the social and political con-
troversies of his time. Yet social ideologies thrive only when they take root
in human fantasies. Dickens channeled the myths and fears of his period
perhaps more frankly than other Victorian novelists, but he did so in ways
that were peculiar to him. He was deeply suspicious of other cultures, but
he expressed his racism through the fear of being duped. If he was an anti-
feminist, he was one who idealized young unmarried women, turned sexual-
ity into housekeeping, and discovered his erotic imagination through rivalry
and identification among men. His views about social class were deeply
ambivalent, alternating in an inchoate way between a paternalism that looked
down and a resentment that looked up; these oscillations were conditioned
by a personal experience of class instability that he could neither discuss
outright nor stop representing. He was in himself both a model of Victorian
hard work and self-discipline, with its attendant fears of uncertainty and
disorder, and a man who could not sustain such a life without building in
daily avenues of violent-feeling escape. If he perpetuated middle-class ideas