So it’s all right to confuse Podsnap and Pecksniff, or to ask whether the incident of the mutton chops in the fireplace is at Mrs. Todgers’s establishment or Mrs. Jellyby’s, and whether the missing baby belongs to either or both of them, or to Mrs. Gamp—a character over whom Dickens quite lost control. The same goes for the settings: the Circumlocution Office and the High Court of Chancery—indeed the whole vast apparatus of the Jarndyce-and-Jarndyce lawsuit—are all part of the same narrative. Cut into it at any point and you have taken a simultaneous tranche out of Sydney Carton and the “infant phenomenon.” That Dickens should have had the nerve to call himself, simply, “the Inimitable” may seem conceited. All right then, so it was.

We can’t hope to “read” all of Dickens by the light of this single candle of access to boyhood. He showed his biographer John Forster a section from the autobiography he never completed that said quite a lot about his apprenticeship to the grime and shame of the blacking factory so that Forster could write about “the attraction of repulsion” as the spring of David Copperfield, and indeed of everything he wrote. This leaves a nice little area of darkness in which we can speculate about the motives of the lad as he maneuvers for his liberty. On the other hand, we don’t have so much guidance on which to rely when it comes to the pallid, worried, wraithlike little girl who slips disturbingly through so much of Dickens’s fiction, taking here the shape of Little Dorrit, and of Florence Dombey with her brother, and then the infant Agnes and—above all—Little Nell. It seems impossible that no such rapidly evaporating diminutive female haunted Dickens’s own life at some stage. Possibly he simply and shrewdly “knew” that Victorian guilt about the endangerment of such creatures was a continuous “draw” (“Is Nell dead?” they say the New York crowds cried out as the dreaded installment of The Old Curiosity Shop was freighted to the waiting wharf), but we have to draw our own conclusions from scanty evidence.

For instance, and from a deep boiling layer of anxiety and rage that goes well beyond anything Dostoyevsky might or might not have been told about, we have the Dickens who wrote to his best female friend, Angela Burdett-Coutts, in 1857, telling her of his yearnings to “exterminate” the Indian rebels against British rule. We have the Dickens who joined his friends Thomas Carlyle and Ruskin against Darwin, T. H. Huxley, J. S. Mill, and the other Victorian humanitarians, to support Governor Eyre of Jamaica in his war of torture and execution and reprisal against the rebels of that country. We have—this is in some ways the most depressing of all—Dickens’s surreptitious hatred for Americans, even as he was making his way from one scene of their immense hospitality to the next in the 1840s. Admittedly, he had a qualified beef with those Yankee publishers who wouldn’t part with royalties, but this hardly licences what he wrote in private to his friend the actor William Macready about America’s being “a low, coarse and mean nation” that was “driven by a herd of rascals Pah! I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt, ’till I travelled in America.” The Dickens mean streak is quite something when you strike it.

This renders it all the more impressive when he tries to make restitution. For instance, he was obviously very impressed when a prominent Jewish lady, Mrs. Eliza Davis, wrote him an anguished letter after the 1838 publication of Oliver Twist. She was obviously terribly upset about the character of Fagin and was not even quite willing to concede that some Jews had been involved in the stolen-goods racket. At any rate, Dickens went into the matter and convinced himself that he’d been part of an injustice. He thereupon did three things: He softened the description of Fagin in later versions of the book. When he himself took part in public “readings” from the story, he downplayed the “Jewish” characteristics of the villain. And he then created a whole new character to order. In Our Mutual Friend, we encounter a Jewish moneylender named Mr. Riah, who is friendly and helpful to Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren. I admit that I find this personage almost too altruistic to be true, but it says something for Dickens, surely, that he would take someone who had the same occupation as the infamous Shylock, but none of Shylock’s vices, and insert him at the heart of business, at a time when vulgar prejudice was easy to stir up. The story isn’t as well known as it ought to be.

The next instance of the victory of the large spirit comes from his second visit to the United States, in 1867. Dickens did his very best to clean up after himself, once again accepting lavish hospitality, but this time not taking revenge for it in a nasty, boring novel named Martin Chuzzlewit or a cruel and hastily written travelogue named “American Notes” (For General Circulation), in which the not-too-clever pun suggests that American currency is bankrupt. Having successfully miscalculated the exchange rate, Dickens publicly offered to include a speech of praise for the U.S.A. in reprints of his two books about the country—and actually kept the promise even after the wild applause had died away and he had gone back home to England. Possibly he would not be an American hero if he had not performed this now forgotten act. But then, the “attraction-repulsion” principle, of which he spoke so readily, seems to have meant that he could sometimes let himself be “claimed” by those—from his neglected children to the mobs that he so feared—who loved him in spite of himself.