22 KNOWING DICKENS
he attempts to link his mother with Dorrit’s imprisonment, he imagines her
reasoning: “I admit that I was accessory to that man’s captivity. I have suf-
fered for it in kind. He has decayed in his prison; I in mine. I have paid the
penalty” (LD 1.8). In the published satirical essays, brief slides into the “I” are
generally a way to undermine the speaking voice through its blatant lack of
logic or sensibility, but the identification is equally compelling. Such passages
present an odd variation of the technique of free indirect discourse, which
normally retains the third-person past tense, but allows the reader a critical
perspective on a character’s train of thought. They are especially intriguing
because they suggest an inward habit of moral and psychological analysis that
is normally submerged in Dickens’s fictional world.
Dickens insisted that characters must display and reveal themselves on the
page, unassisted by a narrator’s interpretation. Soon after he opened shop as
the editor of Household Words, Dickens rejected one submission in no uncer-
tain terms: “It is not enough to say that they were this, or that. They must
shew it for themselves, and have it in their grain. Then, they would act on
one another, and would act for themselves whether the author liked it or no.
As it is, there is not enough reason for your writing about them, because they
do nothing and work out nothing” (6.87). The “Show, don’t tell” dictum
included the relationship offered to the reader as well as the relation between
writer and character. Dickens had little but praise for Wilkie Collins when
he read The Woman in White, but he felt compelled to worry about the “DIS-
SECTIVE property” of Collins’s internal narrators, “which is essentially not
theirs but yours.” He would prefer to get more out of them “by collision
with one another, and by the working of the story.” To tell too much, Dick-
ens thinks, is “to give an audience credit for nothing—which necessarily
involves the forcing of points upon their attention—and which I have always
observed them to resent when they find it out—as they always will and do”
(9.194–95). Forster also attests to Dickens’s success in this art: “There never
was any one who had less need to talk about his characters, because never
were characters so surely revealed by themselves; and it was thus their reality
made itself felt at once” (Forster 121).
Dickens, of course, did and did not abide by these precepts in his own
writing. It would be difficult to find a reader who did not feel that points
had been forced—and repeatedly forced—by many of his narratives. But it
is worth taking his assertions seriously, because they gesture toward aspects
of his art that are particularly difficult to talk about. The image of characters
acting upon or colliding with each other gives a central importance to the
impact of dialogue. Dickens, everyone agrees, is theatrical, but it has always
proved tricky to describe the dynamics of his characters’ utterance and the