38 KNOWING DICKENS
“seemed to defy suspicion and challenge inquiry. There is no doubt that by
day Mr Swiveller firmly believed this secret convenience to be a bookcase
and nothing more; that he closed his eyes to the bed, resolutely denied the
existence of the blankets, and spurned the bolster from his thoughts.” No
one is allowed to allude to the real purpose of this piece of furniture: “To be
the friend of Swiveller you must reject all circumstantial evidence, all reason,
observation, and experience, and repose a blind belief in the bookcase. It was
his pet weakness and he cherished it” (OCS 7). Swiveller both knows and
refuses to know that the bookcase is a bed. The fact cannot be mentioned in
his presence; his “pet weakness”—Dickens does know how people cherish
their delusions—demands a colluding silence from his friends. If we take the
bed out of Swiveller’s room and put in into Pecksniff ’s head, the situation is
similar, though the analysis is more probing and far less benign.
Pecksniff does not want to know that he is a designing character who
entraps young men to pay fees for an architect’s apprenticeship that will
benefit only himself, so he drapes himself in the language of moral contem-
plation and sentiment. He arranges himself and his daughters in apparently
artless, unconscious displays of innocent work when visitors are expected.
He enforces on his daughters a collusion of silence which teaches them to
read his meaning through his rhetoric: when he makes statements like “We
are not all arrayed in two opposite ranks: the offensive and the defensive” or
“let us not be for ever calculating, devising, and plotting for the future” the
daughters take heart, knowing that he has been active in what he disavows
(MC 2). When he is angry and vengeful, he professes—like young Dickens in
his letters to Maria Beadnell—to be wounded but forgiving. When he wants
to arrange a match between Charity and Jonas Chuzzlewit, he pretends to
be innocent of Jonas’s desires, until Anthony foils him “in the exercise of his
familiar weapons” by appropriating and parodying his sentimental rhetoric:
“You have never thought of this for a moment; and in a point so nearly
affecting the happiness of your dear child, you couldn’t, as a tender father,
express an opinion; and so forth.” Anthony disarms Pecksniff by stating the
fact and insisting “that we do see it, and do know it” (MC 11). Less cynical
characters learn that their only defense against Pecksniff ’s arsenal is to get as
far away from him as possible. Even the narrator pretends to collude in the
conspiracy of silence by never quite mentioning outright that Pecksniff is
a drunk and a lecher. The problem does not lie in knowing what Pecksniff
is up to, but in the difficulty others have in negotiating with a figure who
systematically refuses to recognize or admit anything about himself. Such
characters are common in Dickens, and they go on being themselves no mat-
ter what humiliations come their way.