54 KNOWING DICKENS
in dark scenes of mass disorder. Time and again “the flaming eye” of the
sergeant’s lamp singles out a face and body from the crowded, shadowy
dark. Field addresses these men as if he were a tough schoolteacher among
children or the warden of a lunatics’ asylum, expecting and finding subservi-
ence and obedience. Dickens represents the poor and the criminals among
them as if they were entirely subject to Field’s paternalist domain. As the
detective’s “roving eye” reaches every corner, there is—or so Dickens would
have it—nowhere to hide from his all-encompassing knowledge. Field him-
self had been an amateur actor in his youth, and may have contributed his
share of exaggeration as he showed his tricks to the famous novelist. But
Dickens’s attraction to the notion of absolute knowingness wedded to pater-
nalist control colors his point of view throughout the article. Nothing can
fool Inspector Field; allied with him Dickens is safe from the world of con
men who raise the ancient specters of deceit and betrayal.
For one paragraph, however, the novelist disentangles himself from the
police detective. Inspector Field is “at home wherever we go. He does not
trouble his head as I do, about the river at night. He does not care for its
creeping, black and silent, on our right there, rushing through sluice gates,
lapping at piles and posts and iron rings, hiding strange things in its mud,
running away with suicides and accidentally drowned bodies faster than a
midnight funeral should, and acquiring such various experiences between
its cradle and its grave. It has no mystery for him” (Dent 2.367). Dickens
asserts here the claim of the emotional imagination that knows of things it
does not know. He recalls the artistic power that gives humanity, biography,
and mystery to a river that had haunted him since he was a child working
on its edges. Inspector Field cares about what he can see. Dickens also cares
about what he can’t quite see or know, the strange things hiding in the mud
at the bottom of the river as it takes its course through life.