LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 47because his apparently honest self-description is his rhetorical weapon, he
defies knowing or understanding; Dickens offers no clue as to what he might
feel or need to protect. His speeches are so audacious as to be simply unan-
swerable; arguing with him is useless because there is nothing in him that
responds to any appeal. Not unlike Dickens in his defensive mode, he cannot
be in the wrong.
Dickens makes the heartless advocate of sympathy a thoroughly unsympa-
thetic character, but he retains the capacity to trouble the mind. Skimpole’s
power to dissociate himself from his doings extends to his final scene, where
he agrees not to visit Richard and Ada not because he is damaging to them, as
Esther tells him, but because they are damaging to him: they now see him as
someone who owes them money, and so cause him pain. Then, with a look of
“disinterested benevolence” that Esther finds “quite astonishing” he further
agrees to stay away so as not to be the cause of pain to them either (BH 61).
Richard and Ada no longer have a half-penny to give him, but he finishes
his fictional career persuading himself that he is not an accomplice in slow
murder but an emotional protector. In the same fashion, he argues that he
is “above” taking bribes, and that the bribe is “more blameable in Bucket—
because he is the knowing man.” Esther well knows that the only answer is to
take her departure (BH 61). Skimpole is the apotheosis of Dickens’s conflict
between innocence and knowingness; in his character the proclamation of
innocence becomes an agent of aggression. And Dickens makes it clear that
Skimpole can get away with all of it, at anybody’s expense.
When Mr. Dorrit appeared, Dickens touched for the first and last time on
the quick of his own injuries. Dorrit is not one of Dickens’s rhetorical stunt-
men, so he may seem odd company in the sequence I have been tracing. But
he gathers up strands that run throughout this history. His carefully polite
speech is a mode of psychological survival during his undeserved twenty-
five-year incarceration in the Marshalsea Prison; it nurtures and preserves
his sense of continuing gentility. Dorrit’s speech is strongly marked through
the perfectly placed “hems,” “ahems,” and “ha’s” that precede the utterance
of his euphemisms. As he begins to beg from Arthur Clennam, he refers
discreetly to the “Testimonials” that he extorts from others: “ ‘Sometimes,’ he
went on in a low, soft voice, agitated, and clearing his throat every now and
then; ‘sometimes—hem—it takes one shape and sometimes another; but it
is generally—ha—Money. And it is, I cannot but confess it, it is too often—
hem—acceptable’ ” (LD 1.8). The shades of Micawber are audible, but where
Micawber’s interruptions are bursts of honesty within tracts of pompous cir-
cumlocution, Dorrit’s suggest that the enunciation of each word is a painful
stay against internal dissolution into shame or humiliation.