32 KNOWING DICKENS
language from the identity of its speaker. The competition for credibility
matters intensely. If it did not, the language would not be generated at all.
Parody and Knowingness
Pompous, hypocritical, and delusional language flourishes in a line of Dick-
ens’s comic and not-so-comic figures, stretching from Mr. Pickwick to
Mr. Dorrit. Such characters encase themselves in language as if their lives
depended on it—and their lives do depend on it. As Dickens unfolds their
rhetoric, he emphasizes both its parodic nature and its social and psycho-
logical power to silence its audiences. Through these exaggerated fictional
talkers, Dickens suggests his capacity to know with one part of his mind the
rhetorical defenses he mounts in his own dealings with others.
In the first action of The Pickwick Papers, rhetoric is punctured. Mr. Pick-
wick, holding forth to his club in the pride (and conventional humility) of
his authorship, begins to wax hyperbolic, imagining the heroism of travel
when coaches are upset, boats overturn, and boilers burst everywhere. A
single “No” from his audience turns Pickwick suddenly hostile; he accuses
the speaker of jealous rivalry. The naysayer calls Pickwick a humbug. The
rest of the scene is a hasty cover-up operation, in which the insult is defanged
by the absurd concession that “he had merely considered him a humbug
in a Pickwickian point of view” (PP 1). But the speech is waylaid forever.
Dickens’s debut as a fictionist stages a kind of primal scene: language takes
off on its own course; it is seen through and deflated; the speaker attacks the
deflator, revealing his sensitivity to opposition; harmony is declared with no
admissions on either side.
After establishing self-protective rhetoric at the center of his fictional
world, Dickens introduces the con artist Jingle, whose fractured sentences
call special attention to the phenomenon of language on the loose. Like his
creator, Jingle can produce shorthand comic parody in any genre: he bounces
from strings of old saws to lower-class slang to a heartless tale about a mother
who loses her head going through an archway: “children look round—
mother’s head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head
of a family off—shocking, shocking.” Hearing of Mr. Snodgrass’s love of
poetry, Jingle invents a turn as a warrior poet: “Epic poem—ten thousand
lines—revolution of July—composed it on the spot—Mars by day, Apollo
by night—bang the field-piece, twang the lyre.” By the time he reaches his
soliloquy on Gothic ruins, he is running to seamy anti-Catholicism: “Old
cathedral too—earthy smell—pilgrims feet worn away the old steps—little