BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 211modes in which he was most invested, sentiment and melodrama. Both Stewart
and Rem touch on the possibility of silence as the ultimately “authentic” form
of response to the world. I am not so much interested in the possibility of finding
authentic moments among Dickens’s many rhetorical styles as I am in the competi-
tion for credibility as an ongoing dynamic within Dickens.
Of the general theorists of parody, the most useful to me has been Linda Hutch-
eon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York:
Methuen, 1985), which gives a generous assessment of the range of affective inten-
tions in parody.
On the question of what Dickens’s parodies of himself might signify, my brief
summary of questions is derived from disparate opinions expressed in Barbara Hardy,
The Moral Art of Dickens (London: Athlone Press, 1970), John Carey, The Violent Effigy:
A Study of Dickens’s Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), John Kucich, Excess
and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens, Steven Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to
Dombey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), Tore Rem, Dickens, Melodrama, and
the Parodic Imagination, and Alexander Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield.
Richard D. Altick, in “Harold Skimpole Revisited,” quotes several other Victo-
rian writers whose accounts of the Hunt family corroborate the genuine similarities
between Hunt’s and Skimpole’s styles of speech and willful incompetence in money
matters. Altick suggests that Dickens was shocked by that incompetence, but that
the likeness of Hunt to Skimpole would have been recognizable only to an in-group
of people who knew Hunt well. See Robert A. McCown, ed., The Life and Times
of Leigh Hunt (Iowa City: Friends of the University of Iowa Libraries, 1985), 1–15.
K. J. Fielding has explained Dickens’s compulsion to fashion Skimpole after Leigh
Hunt as a protest against “artistic bohemianism and irresponsibility just when he was
seriously working for what he and Forster delighted to call ‘The Dignity of Litera-
ture,’ ” in “Leigh Hunt and Skimpole: Another Remonstrance,” Dickensian 64 (1968):
5–9. Adam Roberts makes an interesting juxtaposition of Skimpole’s speeches with
some of Leigh Hunt’s writings, attempting to redeem both Dickens and Hunt by
calling Skimpole an ironic or reverse portrait of Hunt; see “Skimpole, Leigh Hunt,
and Dickens’s ‘Remonstrance,’ ” The Dickensian 92:4 (1996): 177–86. Peter Ackroyd
briefly suggests a more personal investment: Dickens “was Skimpole and had to exor-
cise him” (652–53). My speculations about the inward sources of Dickens’s defenses
against shame and the betrayal of trust are indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s read-
ings of shame and paranoia in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performance ( Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003), chaps. 1 and 4.
For the initial reading of incestuous fantasy in the Dorrit-Amy relationship, see
Dianne F. Sadoff, Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot, and Brontë on Fatherhood (Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 55–57. Variations on the theme are
frequent; see for example Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles
Dickens (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 74–94, and Patricia Ingham, “Nobody’s
Fault: The Scope of the Negative in Little Dorrit,” in Dickens Refigured, ed. John
Schad, 107–16. Janice Carlisle’s essay “Little Dorrit: Necessary Fictions” (Studies in
the Novel 7.2 [1975]: 195–214) was an early breakthrough in the critical tradition of
belief in Amy Dorrit’s goodness; Carlisle explores the lies Amy tells to sustain the
myths of the Dorrit family and connects them with the peculiar storytelling of the
novel as a whole. For a diagnosis of Amy Dorrit based on psychoanalytic definitions