Charles Dickens Read Free Page A

off by the man’s lawyer does he speak in coherent sentences. When the lawyer suggests that £50 is a “good round sum—a man like you could treble it in no time—great deal to be done with fifty pounds, my dear sir,” Jingle has no trouble responding “coolly,” “More to be done with a hundred and fifty.” Jingle’s mode ofexpression is funny in itself, partly because it is mechanical and repetitive in rhythm and partly because the associated phrases are unexpected, and the shift to a more normal speech pattern reveals and underscores Jingle’s duplicity. This is the absolute heart of Charles Dickens’s idiosyncratic genius: what Jingle communicates to the reader, and what Dickens communicates through him, accumulates meanings and layers with every piece of dialogue and is simultaneously interesting and economical. And Jingle’s style stands in contrast with the narrator’s and the Pickwickians’ more discursive manner, adding yet another layer.
    Throughout his life, Dickens had a superb talent for mimicry, for speaking in voices, that almost amounted to allowing the voices all around him to speak through him. It was a talent he cultivated, but also himself marveled at, telling Forster that his characters came to him and spoke through him. David Lodge, one of the foremost comic novelists of our own day, and an experienced theorist, has written in After Bakhtin that the only way successfully to come to terms with the variety and scope of the novel is through analyzing it as a chorus of individual voices speaking in varying styles and tones, rather than as a single rhetorical expression. This is certainly true of Dickens as much as or more than any other novelist. But it is important to remember, too, that all of these voices are filtered through Dickens’s consciousness, that every character is Dickens, whoever happened to be the original inspiration. Otherwise it is impossible to come to any comprehension of the variety, and variability, of the man himself.
    Perhaps the most famous and best-loved character in The Pickwick Papers is Sam Weller. In the first few numbers of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens ascribes qualities of wisdom and benevolence to Pickwick himself, and to his friends, but these qualities remain rather abstract until the introduction of Sam, who is eloquently easygoing, street smart, and kindly. He is a foil for Pickwick’s own bland innocence, and he provides commentary on what could easily become a series of meaningless episodes. His voice substitutes for the voice of the narrator, which the young Dickens has not yet mastered as he soon will. Sam Weller’s voice is free, whereas the narrator’s voice is still inhibited by middle-class convention and eighteenth-century diction. The innate skill for writing compelling voices that Dickens shows so well with Jingle and several of the other characters he practices and develops in Sam Weller. As soon as he introduced, he is interesting: “Well, you are a nice young ’ooman for a musical party, you are. Look at these her boots—eleven pair o’ boots; and one shoe as b’longs to number six, with the wooden leg. . . .” His dialogue has accent and rhythm; it expresses his character while showing what he is doing and what he has observed. He adds something unexpected to the narrative every time he opens his mouth. Very soon after Sam appears and disappears, the Pickwickians witness the Eatanswill election. In this scene we have the beginnings of Dickensian social satire. The narrative style is slightly more ironic than earlier, but neither the narrator nor Pickwick himself can assume such an ironic voice without materially changing how they have already been presented. It is no coincidence that Sam returns to the narrative soon after, the perfect solution to the problem of how to comment upon the events of the narrative without betraying the tone of what has