LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 51by a false sense of empowerment. Her chapter, which Dickens thought of as
central to his novel’s themes, aims to expose the endpoint of knowingness as
a kind of self-delusion powered by class resentment.
Dickens’s discomfort with his own propensity to “detect designs” every-
where led him to overvalue innocent characters who manage to blind or
deafen themselves to the ways others make use of them. He came to more
direct terms with the subject in the story “Hunted Down,” first published
in the New York Ledger in late August 1859. Sampson, the story’s narrator, is an
insurance executive whose suspicions of the smooth-talking Julius Slinkton
lead him to organize an elaborate counterplot that finally unmasks Slinkton’s
designs to poison his victims and inherit their money. The tale followed from
two articles on current poisoning cases that Dickens had published in House-
hold Words. “The Demeanour of Murderers” (14 June 1856) concerns the
trial of the surgeon William Palmer for poisoning a racing associate; “The
Murdered Person” (11 October 1856) was set off by the case of William
Dove, who had gradually poisoned his wife with strychnine. Both murderers
aroused interest because of their behavior during and after trial—Palmer for
his calm assumption of innocence, and Dove for his extreme Methodist piety.
Dickens, of course, goes after the notion that such behaviors were evidence of
lingering sensibility; the two provided good examples for his crusade against
members of the public who are taken in by con men. “The Demeanour of
Murderers” is especially interesting for its claim that the faces and bodies of
murderers are legible, if their words are not: “we will express an opinion that
Nature never writes a bad hand. Her writing, as it may be read in the human
countenance, is invariably legible, if we come at all trained to the reading of
it” (Dent 3.378). Dickens proceeds quite convincingly to read every move
of Palmer’s as part of the structure of villainy that allowed him to plan and
carry out the murder in the first place.
In “Hunted Down” Dickens establishes a tension between belief and
suspicion in the person of his narrator Sampson, who opens the tale repeat-
ing the mantra of the Household Words piece: “There is nothing truer than
physiognomy, taken in connection with manner.” We have all learned to read
faces, he suggests; we “are not to be taken in.” And yet he has been taken in,
“over and over again.” Why? Because, although his “first impression of those
people, founded on face and manner alone, was invariably true[,] My mistake
was in suffering them to come nearer to me and explain themselves away.”
Sampson plays out the clash between watching and listening in his responses
to Julius Slinkton, a smooth, well-dressed fellow who arouses his suspicion
because of the way his hair is parted straight up the middle, as if to say
“ ‘You must take me, if you please, my friend, just as I show myself. Come