50 KNOWING DICKENS
more pronounced; when his daughter looks at him with concern he denies
that he is tired and immediately assumes “an astonishing superiority to his
brother’s failing powers” (LD 2.19). Dickens has perhaps never been quite
so clear about how such projections work to protect a character’s threatened
image of himself.
It is not long before Mr. Dorrit’s lifelong self-delusion attacks him from
the inside, and he reverts to his prison identity during an elegant dinner party.
His secret is Dickens’s secret; his extreme irritability, as well as his ability to
feel ashamed of it, is Dickens’s own. Had Dickens not known that, he could
not have written this: “He had a sense of his dignity which was of the most
exquisite nature. He could detect a design upon it when nobody else had
any perception of the fact. His life was made an agony by the number of
fine scalpels that he felt to be incessantly engaged in dissecting his dignity”
(LD 2.3). It is a perfectly rendered description of the paranoid letter writer
with whom this chapter began, a testimony to the self-knowledge Dickens
could enclose in the safety of his fiction, and to his recognition that the
prison of the mind is inescapable.
The Pleasures of Suspicion
Little Dorrit as a whole is filled with contrasts between suspicion and gen-
erosity. Clennam fights that battle within himself, speaking generously, for
example, against Mrs. Gowan’s fraudulent suspicions of the Meagleses while
feeling guiltily suspicions of his own parents. As if to inoculate himself and
his readers against the disease of suspicion, Dickens includes the extreme case
study of Miss Wade, whose self-explanation appears in the chapter called
“The History of a Self-Tormentor” (LD 2.21). Miss Wade, an illegitimate
orphan surrounded by improbably kind friends, is knowingness personi-
fied to the point of perversity. “From a very early age,” she begins, “I have
detected what those about me thought they hid from me. If I could have been
habitually imposed upon, instead of habitually discerning the truth, I might
have lived as smoothly as most fools do.” The moment of her enlightenment
comes at the age of twelve, the time of Dickens’s own disillusionment. From
then on, Miss Wade interprets every word and act of generosity or com-
passion as “insolent pity,” condescension designed to make her friends and
employers feel good about their patronage. Like a Harold Skimpole turned
inside out, she bites back against any sign of social dependency by attacking
the motives of anyone who becomes attached to her. Having reduced the
world to nothing but pretense, she condemns herself to isolation supported