44 KNOWING DICKENS
Dickens’s inward association of Leigh Hunt with John Dickens made its
way into the note Dickens wrote to calm down Hunt’s distress about Skim-
pole. It is an uncomfortable performance, in which Dickens apologizes for
giving Hunt pain and tries to dissociate him from the fictional character
even as he admits that Hunt was his model. He ends, “The character is not
you, for there are traits in it common to fifty thousand people besides, and
I did not fancy you would ever recognize it. Under similar disguises my own
father and mother are in my books, and you might as well see your likeness
in Micawber” (7.460). As in the writing of Skimpole, Dickens is driven to
tell his feelings in spite of himself. Somewhere in the life of his psyche, Hunt
might as well have been his father.
After Hunt’s death in 1859, memories of the Skimpole-Hunt connection
began to circulate in the press. Hunt’s eldest son Thornton requested that
Dickens publish some comment in All the Year Round that might quell the
revived rumors. Dickens graciously complied, telling Thornton through For-
ster that he would say what he had earlier said to Leigh Hunt: “that there are
many remembrances of Hunt in little traits of manner and expression, in that
character and especially in all the pleasantest parts of it, but that is all” (9.141).
On Christmas Eve 1859, Dickens published “Leigh Hunt: A Remonstrance,”
in which he chides newspapers for reviving the “false” notion that Leigh
Hunt was the original of Harold Skimpole. His method in the piece offers
further evidence of the familial connection in his imagination: much of the
article consists of quotations from Thornton Hunt’s introduction to a new
edition of his father’s autobiography. Dickens gets much of his work done
by corroborating the son’s words of praise about the father; this section fills
about two-thirds of the article.
Turning finally to his own responsibility for the Skimpole connection,
Dickens, writing in the third person, admits that he had “yielded to the
temptation of too often making the character speak like his old friend.” Then
he has a happy thought: “He no more thought, God forgive him! that the
admired original would ever be charged with the imaginary vices of the
fictitious creature, than he has ever thought of charging the blood of Desde-
mona and Othello, on the innocent Academy model who sat for Iago’s leg
in the picture” (Dent 4.18). It is others, it seems, who are guilty of suspicion,
not this innocent author. Dickens concludes the article with a turn to the
sentimental: “He cannot see the son lay this wreath on the father’s tomb, and
leave him to the possibility of ever thinking that the present words might
have righted the father’s memory and were left unwritten. He cannot know
that his own son may have to explain his father when folly or malice can
wound the heart no more, and leave this task undone” (18–19). Recently