LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 27blacken retrospectively a relationship that had brought him pleasure or profit
for a while is hardly an unusual human impulse, but in Dickens’s case it
suggests a high susceptibility to feeling imposed on or taken in. If a relation-
ship had gone wrong for him, he suspected that the other person had been
cheating him all along, and that he had finally seen through the imposture.
The anger aimed at the other was in part the reflex of an anxiety about his
own innocence, his youthful appearance, or his unworldliness. In two early
letters that anxiety appears straightforwardly: once when he asks a friend to
hire the horses for an outing with the Beadnells because “I never did any-
thing in the money way without being imposed upon” (1.13–14) and again,
six years later, when he reports to Catherine that he has successfully taken
a cottage for his parents in Exeter. He has invited his mother down to help
put the place to rights, “and I shall be saved—not only a world of uneasi-
ness but a good deal of money, for the people will take me in and I can’t
help it” (1.518). The expression of that fear disappeared from the later let-
ters as Dickens grew in experience and lost his very youthful looks. But his
books never grew out of their obsession with innocents in the hands of con
men, nor did his partings—the abandonment of his wife being the extreme
case—become less accusatory.
Displays of unacknowledged feeling in reckless accusations are particu-
larly interesting in a correspondent who seems otherwise to command the
many voices he inhabits, even when they speak—as they so often do—in
exaggerations. The episodes that carried such displays into the public domain
are particularly telling, because they worked against Dickens’s own best inter-
ests. When he toured the United States in 1842, Dickens’s propensity to
embrace the new with unabated enthusiasm and turn savage at the first sign
of disappointment was played out on an international stage. The turn came
about a month after he had landed, when he read the American press attacks
on a speech in which he had argued for an International Copyright agree-
ment that would prevent the works of British authors from being pirated in
America. A budding friendship with the mayor of Boston, Jonathan Chap-
man, was shaken after Dickens chose him as a confidant:
I have never in my life been so shocked and disgusted, or made so
sick and sore at heart, as I have been by the treatment I have received
here (in America I mean), in reference to the International Copyright
question. I—the greatest loser by the existing Law alive—say in perfect
good humour and disinterestedness (for God knows I have little hope of
its ever being changed in my time) that I hope the day will come when
Writers will be justly treated; and straightway there fall on me scores