30 KNOWING DICKENS
resulting from his medical skill, such as it is, and his professional attendance,
in so far as it may be so considered” (4.243–44). Earlier that year Forster
had heard the same voice when Dickens worried about a dinner party in
a rented house: “Investigation below stairs renders it, as my father would
say, ‘manifest to any person of ordinary intelligence, if the term may be
considered allowable,’ that the Saturday’s dinner cannot come off here with
safety” (4.133). So far as I know these sentences are Dickens’s only parodies
of John Dickens in his own person. Their back-and-forth rhythm suggests
a great self-consciousness—on someone’s part—about each pompous phrase
as soon as it is uttered. Someone, presumably the father himself, is listening
to the language phrase by phrase, and calling it into question. The intimate
connection between speech and skeptical hearing resides, then, within the
sentence itself.
The scope of Dickens’s sensitivity to language as a kind of con game
becomes especially evident in certain familiar topics to which he returned
again and again with a vehemence that brooks no subtlety or opposition.
These topics are highlighted in his journalism for Household Words and All
the Year Round, though they show up in the fictions as well. The rottenness
of Parliament belongs at the top of the hit list, which also includes elaborate
funerals, savages, Temperance Societies and other fashionable social move-
ments, murderers who go unpunished, schools that do not teach, and middle-
class condescension to the poor. Politically, the positions are inconsistent
and at times incoherent; Dickens was not a political thinker but a critic and
satirist of language. What unites these disparate targets is his animus against
fraudulent, pretentious, or manipulative speech, fueled by his readiness to feel
himself deceived and betrayed.
At the age of nineteen or twenty, Dickens became a Parliamentary re-
porter, doing shorthand transcription from the galleries of the old Houses of
Parliament during the stimulating years of the 1832 Reform Bill. Despite his
admiration for certain speakers, Dickens left that job with a fund of hostility
to government institutions that lasted a lifetime. Every Dickens reader learns
to expect nothing but satire on the “circumlocution” subject; as Forster
so tactfully puts it, “of the Pickwickian sense which so often takes the place
of common sense in our legislature, he omitted no opportunity of declaring
his contempt at every part of his life” (Forster 64). The contempt may have
sprung in part from what Forster calls his intolerance for “suspense of any
kind... The interval between the accomplishment of anything, and ‘its first
motion,’ Dickens never could endure, and he was too ready to make any sac-
rifice to abridge or end it” (87). The conviction that Parliament generated
nothing but obfuscating oratory may also have arisen from Dickens’s actual