For a less naive spectator, however, there is
no deception or confusion over identity.
Vincent Crummies and his troupe, for
example, perform both on and off the stage
to give pleasure to themselves and to their
audiences; their posing and gesturing and
intoning hyperbolically express their real
selves, without misleading anyone. Role-
playing for them is just that: playing. For a
rascal such as Jingle, on the other hand, the
intention differs fundamentally; he is not
trying to please others with his histrionic
talent, but to gull them for his own
advantage. His attempt to convince others
that he is what he appears to be alters the
very nature of the activity of acting as
Dickens knew it: in Jingle's hands theatrical
mirroring of life, in which awareness of the
mirror's presence is essential to the shared
delight, gives way to dishonest imposture.
Similarly, hypocrites and villains such as
Bumble and Squeers put on masks specifically
to pass themselves off as being in reality
what they enact in pretence. For such
characters, role-playing is not acting in the
manner of contemporary theatrical
entertainment, but rather duplicity for self-
seeking ends. Awareness of nineteenth-
century stage conventions clarifies the sharp
distinction in Dickens's work between the
performance of an entertainer and the
hypocrisy of a villain.
Such awareness can also enable us to
recognize the presence of pantonime
structures and techniques in Dickens's
novels, without reductively attributing to
this theatrical genre the key to everything
essential in his art. The animation of
Dickens's style, for example, in which inert
objects take on lives of their own to the
discomfiture of mere human figures,
undoubtedly owes much to the world of
pantomime, in which Clown is endlessly
persecuted by just about everything he sees
or touches. The relatively stable clusters
of characters of the pantomime harlequinade
-- Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, and
Clown - just as the novels' happy endings
in the face of seemingly insurmountable
obstacles may be related to the magical
transformations which enable an ideal
resolution to be achieved in pantomime.19)
At the same time, however, there are
important differences. With rare exceptions,
such as Montague Tigg's metamorphosis into
Tigg Montague or John Wemmick's total
separation of his existence in Jaggers's
office in Little Britain from his life in his
Gothic castle at Walworth, characters in
Dickens's novels do not undergo
transformations as overt as those of the
pantomime. Comic characters are among the
chief glories of Dickens's works, yet no
Clown, not even Mrs Gamp or Mr Micawber,
dominates the action as Joey Grimaldi did in
the harlequinade. Positively surreal objects
abound in the linguistically inventive
Many wondrous secrets of Nature had I
come to the knowledge of in that
sanctuary: of which not the least terrific
were, that the witches in Macbeth bore
an awful resemblance to the Thanes and
other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and
that good King Duncan couldn't rest in
his grave, but was constantly coming out
of it and calling himself somebody
e/se.1®)
