The Violent Effigy- A Study of Dickens' Imagination by John Carey

Author:John Carey [Carey, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Literary Criticism, Non-Fiction
Publisher: London : Faber and Faber
Published: 1973-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

'an ambling stranger, with one eye screwed up into extinction, and the other framed and glazed*. Zephaniah Scadder, the evil land-agent in Martin Chuzzlewit, has a face which divides exactly down the middle: one half paralysed, with a blind eye in it, always looking coldly attentive, and one half shifting according to mood. When he has cheated Martin, he turns his blighted profile towards him so as to look serious, while in the mobile side 'every little wiry vein' is 'twisted up into a grin'. Phil, the shooting gallery attendant in Bleak House, though a benevolent character, suffers from the same affliction. Owing to some explosion, one half of his face is blue and speckled, and lacks an eyebrow, while the other half sprouts a bushy black one. Mrs. Merdle, in Little Dorrit, has odd hands, 'the left being much the whiter and plumper of the two'.

With this inclination to break his characters into fragments it's not surprising that Dickens' first success, Pickwick Papers, already contains two medical students, Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen, whose function is to exchange anecdotes about the dissection of corpses, particularly at meal times. Characters often treat themselves as if they were dissectable. Pecksniff, when striving to impress the elder Chuzzlewit with his sincerity, keeps his hand in his waistcoat as though, says Dickens 'he were ready, on the shortest notice, to produce his heart for Martin Chuzzlewit's inspection'. Spottletoe, enraged, holds his clenched fist under Pecksniff's nose, 'as if it were some natural curiosity from the near inspection whereof he was likely to derive high gratification and improvement'. Scadder sits with one leg doubled up under him, 'as if he were hatching his foot'. Magwitch on the marshes shudders with cold and hugs himself 'as if to hold himself together'. Inspector Bucket has a fat forefinger which he shakes threateningly at suspects, and presses to his ear as if it were whispering information. Jaggers in Great Expectations also treats his forefinger as a foreign body, biting it constantly. Wemmick, his assistant, has a mouth like a letter-box, and at lunch time throws pieces of biscuit into it impersonally, as if he were posting them. Mr. Fips, in abstracted moments, takes up a metal stamp and stamps capital F's all over his legs. Mr. Pocket pulls at his own hair as if he were trying to lift himself out of his seat. On one occasion he does lift himself several inches. Vholes fingers the pimples on his face as if they were ornaments. It's not only comic figures who treat pieces of themselves as foreign bodies. Mr. Dombey, contemplating Suicide, sees a 'spectral, haggard, wasted likeness of himself in a mirror. He

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