A Self-Made Man: Hard Times and the Dickensian Impostor

ZAA 2019; 67(4): 359–374

Wieland Schwanebeck* A Self-Made Man: Hard Times and the Dickensian Impostor https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2019-0027

Abstract: This essay examines the impostor trope within the works of Charles Dickens, focusing on the example of Josiah Bounderby, the villain of Hard Times (1854), in particular. As a product of the Victorian age’s obsession with character- building and the spirit of industriousness as epitomised in the work of Samuel Smiles, Bounderby not only embodies much of what Dickens found objectionable about utilitarian thought but also a number of tropes that were and remain crucial to the cultural imaginary of the United States (even though Hard Times only briefly alludes to America). As a charismatic rogue who tinkers with his own biography, Bounderby foreshadows the coming of the impostor in turn-of-the- century European literature, an aspect of Hard Times that has so far been over- looked in critical accounts of the novel.

1 Introduction

Hard Times (1854) is an unusual text within the Dickensian oeuvre: not only is it the shortest of all of the author’s novels, but it has been singled out as a particularly hard one to love (see Marsh 2015, 195). Allegedly, its author aban- doned a number of his trademark qualities in favour of a didactic tale that over- emphasises its humanist message.1 At the same time, this highly “polemical work,” in criticising the “materialism, acquisitiveness, and ruthlessly competi- tive capitalist economics” of mid-Victorianism (Lodge 1992, 69), threatens to fall apart at the seams as the novel struggles to reconcile all of its inherent contradic- tions. It attempts to speak up in favour of its subaltern dramatis personae, yet it is not free of a patronising attitude towards them.2 Moreover, Dickens’s oft-quoted

1 The reviews gathered in Norman Page’s casebook on the novel testify to how little love Dickens’s contemporaries had for Hard Times (see Page 1992, 29–36). 2 This is especially true of the character of Stephen Blackpool, whose portrayal evokes ‘noble savage’ stereotypes of the colonial adventure story. See also Shaw’s critique of the character of Slackbridge, the trade union organizer, as “a mere figment of the middle-class imagination” (Shaw 1985, 33).

*Corresponding author: PD Dr. Wieland Schwanebeck, Institute of English and American Studies, TU Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany, e-mail: [email protected] 360 Wieland Schwanebeck resolution to have “no love at all” (qtd. in Gallagher 2006, 71) in the novel would later produce the overall impression that the characters never come alive, merely serving as functional agents that contribute to the novel’s considerable social agenda. Tellingly, the book’s most charismatic figure is its chief antagonist, the cold-blooded impostor Josiah Bounderby. It is the aim of this essay to highlight the importance of the impostor trope within the Dickensian oeuvre, using the example of Bounderby, Hard Times’s chief villain, a character who embodies not only the creed of utilitarianism but also a number of tropes linked to the impostors and con men who would rise to prominence at the turn of the century.

2 Dickensian Impostors

Josiah Bounderby is by no means the only imposturous character to populate the Dickensian world. After all, men who make their own fortune by radically reinventing themselves and rewriting their biography permeate quite a few of his novels, and though “many Dickens characters fail to develop” (Marsh 2015, 199), this is never down to lack of ambition. In Great Expectations (1861), Pip is intent on leaving his milieu behind in order “to be a gentleman” (116), and his fundamental desire to “mak[e] myself uncommon” (66) propels much of the plot, his association with Miss Havisham and Estella, as well as his subsequent failure to reconnect with Joe and his old family. By virtue of its critical take on the ‘rags to riches’ narrative, Great Expectations acknowledges the underlying social tensions and the potentially damaging effects of these narratives of self- fashioning. Not only does the novel abstain from taking a rose-tinted view of the working-classes and rather elaborates on Pip’s fundamental inferiority complex, but it also underlines that it is Pip’s internalised shame that gives rise to dubious morals and fraudulence. The protagonist, utterly swept away by the Havisham household, frequently voices his ambitions and a spirit of can-do (“the world lay spread before me,” 146), yet he soon descends into self-consciousness and identity crisis. Even before Pip learns that his unknown benefactor is an escaped convict, his moral compass is off course: having been repeatedly belittled by Estella as “a common labouring boy” (59), Pip becomes a habitual liar in order to be deemed acceptable, and he is transformed into a social climber who cannot go back: “What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the natural light from the misty yellow rooms?” (87). A Self-Made Man: Hard Times and the Dickensian Impostor 361

Pip, who believes himself destined “for London and greatness” (134), is one of many borderline self-delusional, grandiose, and somewhat larger-than-life protagonists who populate Dickens’s novels. The author himself repeatedly reinvented himself in the public eye in order to cast a magnetic spell over his readership, to whom his brief flirts with mesmerism and some of the most charismatic frauds of the Victorian era followed logically from his activities as the contemporary publishing phenomenon (see Waterfield 2002, 189–192). The example of Dickens can serve to underline the frequently articulated claim that there is something inherently imposturous about the nature of writing fiction, just as there is, in turn, something artistic (and artificial) about the work of some of the greatest impostors. A few decades after Dickens’s death, early psychoanalysis as well as criminal anthropology began to theo- rise the figure of the impostor in psychological profiles and frequently drew upon best-selling authors of fiction to illustrate their claims. Erich Wulffen, author of the first comprehensive study of the impostor, dedicates a whole chapter to the psychological overlap between poets and impostors. Accord- ing to Wulffen, their shared inclination towards the realm of the fantastic leads them “beyond the sphere of factuality,” into “thousands of possibilities and impossibilities” (Wulffen 1923, 78; my translation). The same argument is reiterated by well-known writers and philosophers as diverse as Thomas Mann, Mark Twain, and Hanif Kureishi. Gottfried Keller, a contemporary of Dickens and one of the best-selling authors on the continent, adapts the idea into his sonnet, Der Schulgenoß (‘The Schoolmate,’ 1846). The speaker runs into a former schoolmate and hardly recognises the person who was once his dearest friend and with whom he used to spin adventure tales, two ‘swindlers in good faith’ (“Wie haben wir treuherzig uns betrogen,” Keller 2009, 101). As the former friend, now a vagabond in torn clothes, walks past the speaker, the latter realises how the two have ended up in two such different positions in life, not in spite but because of their shared point of origin: one has turned out a rascal, the other one a poet (“Du bist ein Schelm geworden – ich Poet!” Keller 2009, 101). Given this peculiar nexus between the art of fiction and the imposturous trade, it is not a coincidence that so many sociological and psychological studies turn to literary testimonies of impostors in order to study their psychopathology, their methodology, and their social environment. Usually, the acquisition of reliable data presents a key methodological problem: while many convicted impostors and confidence men took up writing and often found their true vocation as authors of their own biographical accounts, the factuality of their memoirs and the thoroughness of their introspection must remain dubious. By definition, an impostor’s autobiography challenges the 362 Wieland Schwanebeck autobiographical pact, because the reader is asked to believe in the claims of a narrator whose very reputation rests upon his lack of sincerity. For these allegedly reformed swindlers, the writing process comes as a logical extension of their former occupation which, after all, consisted in the re-writing and re-fashioning of biographical narratives. Impostors – and Dickens’s Josiah Bounderby is no exception – come into being through the very act of narration, and there has always been an eager audience to whom they could sell their stories. Georges Manolescu, arguably the first celebrity impostor to emerge in the early twentieth century media environment, happily participated in the literary exploitation of his own myth and even credited his own imposturous alter ego, Prince Lavohary, as the co-author of his memoirs (Ein Fürst der Diebe, 1905). Throughout the twentieth century, more best-selling memoirs by former con men were to follow, the list includes Joseph ‘Yellow Kid’ Weil’s Autobiography of America’s Master Swindler (1948), Frank Abagnale, jr.’s Catch Me If You Can (1980), and Clifford Irving’s The Hoax (1981). All of them gradu- ated from being deceitful con men towards making their living as picaresque story-tellers. Phyllis Greenacre, who in two key publications of the 1950s elaborates on the similarities between impostors and artists, argues that both are united by their “sense of ego hunger and a need for completion – in the one, of the artistic self; in the other, of a satisfying identity in the world” (1958, 540). This “need for completion” corresponds to the permanent, unfulfilled desire that psychoanalytic assessments of the impostor phenomenon frequently single out. Hanif Kureishi, in his essayistic approach to the topic, stresses how the confidence man touches “the G-spot of your wishes” and always “conjures fantasy in you,” and the same goes for creative artists engaging in “games of deception, deceit and mischief.” Kureishi goes so far as to suggest that all writers belong to a class of “con artist[s] or spellbinder[s], telling stories for their life like Scheherazade, drawing the other into a conspiracy of lies, convincing them to turn the page and believe in flapdoodle” (2015, 181–182). It is a point that would not have been lost on Dickens, who based heroes like David Copperfield or Oliver Twist on his own humble upbringing, and who made a name for himself by chronicling street life in the booming nineteenth century metropolis of London. He started out by entertaining the persona of Boz and would later bring countless other literary alter egos into life. There is a telling iconographic parallel between the most well-known portrait of Dickens and a later artistic approximation of the impostor: Robert William Buss’s unfinished painting Dickens’s Dream (Buss 1875), in which various fictional characters and literary scenes are conjured up by the sleeping author, prefigures George Grosz’s drawing of Alphonse Daudet’s Tartarin de Tarascon (1924), the A Self-Made Man: Hard Times and the Dickensian Impostor 363 beloved scoundrel who became popular through a number of stories published at the end of the nineteenth century (Figures 1 and 2). The juxtaposition of both images indicates that there is a close affiliation between these two story-tellers: their yarn-spinning seems to happen without them putting in any conscious effort or being able to control it. In Great Expectations , Pip voices a similar experience when he recounts to Joe how his various lies have come about: “[Estella] had said I was common, and […] I wished I was not common, and […] the lies had come of it somehow, though I didn’t know how” (64). This lack of agency is frequently invoked to exonerate impostors from their guilt and to declare them pathological cases, suffering from inflictions like pseudologia phantastica. While the weaving of tales is usually aimed at an audience, it also emerges as a somewhat anti-social activity. In this respect, some of Dickens’s characters seem to look ahead to the tragic liars of Henrik Ibsen, who cherish fundamental delusions about their own potential and life-choices, and who perform their versions of make-believe for their own sake as much as for their next of kin. Reverend Crisparkle, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), embodies the lighter side of this kind of self-deception: even

Figure 1: Dickens’s Dream (Robert William Buss, 1875). 364 Wieland Schwanebeck

Figure 2: Tartarin de Tarascon (Daudet 1924).

though he has “the eyes of a microscope and a telescope combined,” he pretends for his own sake “that he himself could not read writing without spectacles,” wearing them even though they “seriously inconvenienced his nose and his breakfast” (MED 53–54; original emphasis). A Self-Made Man: Hard Times and the Dickensian Impostor 365

3 Josiah Bounderby: A Nineteenth-Century Success Story

Once he has properly entered the scenery in the fourth chapter of Hard Times, Josiah Bounderby quickly emerges as a character perfectly equipped to illustrate the second part of the novel’s central dualism of ‘fact vs. fancy.’ Together with Gradgrind, he is an emblem of Benthamite utilitarianism (Pollatschek 2013, 278) and “perfectly devoid of sentiment” (HT 20). In the course of the novel, Bound- erby serves as the ruthless antagonist who represents everything Dickens found objectionable about utilitarianism, mainly its “damaging impoverishment of the moral and emotional life of the individual” (Lodge 1992, 70). The reader learns that Bounderby is not only a rich and respected citizen of Coketown but that he holds numerous positions that even Dickens’s omniscient narrator cannot be bothered to elaborate on in full: “banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare and a metallic laugh” (HT 20). While the narrative voice does not seem to take Bounderby entirely seriously and undercuts his pompous appearance by likening him to an inflated balloon (20), it does not immediately exercise its privilege of omniscience to reveal the truth. Quite on the contrary, throughout the first few chapters, the narrative voice recedes into the background, leaving it to Bounderby himself to flesh out his character in lengthy intradiegetic accounts – thus temporarily adopting the homodiegetic, picaresque mode of narration that characterises a lot of impostor fiction. All of these mono- logues culminate in the same refrain: “I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, and that’s enough for me!” (128) Throughout the novel, Bounderby keeps returning to the same narrative of various hardships he claims to have suffered as a young child, a litany that, in retrospect, seems to prefigure the famous Four Yorkshiremen routine which was to become a staple of Monty Python’s live shows.3 In this sketch, four successful middle-aged gentlemen take turns telling increasingly outrageous stories that emphasise their deprived upbringing: “We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank!” It amounts to a bizarre inversion of typical impostor rhetoric, as the four men attempt to outdo each other by offering less, not more. It is easy to imagine Bounderby puffing a cigar in their midst and offering his account: “I hadn’t a shoe on my foot. As to a stocking, I didn’t know such a thing

3 The sketch was co-written by Graham Chapman and John Cleese, but it actually originated with At Last the 1948 Show (1967) before Monty Python incorporated it into their live shows. 366 Wieland Schwanebeck by name. I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty. That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday. Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch” (HT 21). He later emphasises again that he not only lived in a ditch but was born in one (37), grew up as a “ragged-street boy, who never washed his face unless it was at a pump” (107), and – in a turn of phrase most clearly evocative of one York- shireman’s claim that he lived “in a shoebox in the middle of the road” – boasts that his alcoholic grandmother kept him

in an egg-box. That was the cot of my infancy; an old egg-box. […] I pulled through it, though nobody threw me out a rope. Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter, clerk, chief manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. Those are the anteced- ents, and the culmination. (HT 22)

Bounderby’s mentioning of the “egg-box” that used to house him indicates some underlying “anxiety about reproduction,” a sign of the character’s overall sterility. He may be “a walking erection” (Samuelian 1992, 59–60), yet he remains personified impotence and his marriage to Louisa without consummation. When the impostor appears on the scene, he depends upon his environment’s inability to see behind the outdated and stereotypical nature of his façade, and as a result, he advertises retrograde conduct and relies on the overpowering effect of outdated normative behaviour scripts. Though Bounderby is a character whose mythologisation is based on his highly exaggerated past, Hard Times also looks ahead when it comes to its deployment of the impostor trope, foreshadowing a number of generic developments. In choosing the circus as the setting for what passes as the spatial alternative to the architectural joylessness of Coketown, where “fact, fact, fact” becomes manifest even in “the material aspect of the town” (HT 28), Dickens anticipates the satirical, neo-picaresque impostor novel which will emerge at the dawn of the twentieth century. A few decades after the publication of Hard Times, the circus episode will have turned into a staple element of this emerging genre. Typically, the aspiring young impostor undergoes a customary rite of passage as a spectator in the circus ring, learning about the importance of never touching the ground and rising to dizzying heights. Guy de Maupas- sant’s Bel-Ami (1885), Georges Duroy, gazes at the trapeze artists at the Folies Bergère when he hatches his plan to climb on the social ladder (Maupassant 1975, 38); the eponymous hero of Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull (1954) watches a tightrope walker’s performance and observes that “[her] basic pattern is the salto mortale” (Mann 1970, 167; original emphasis); and Patricia Highsmith’s Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) is overwhelmed by the sight of a group of acrobats just before he decides to kill his companion in order to absorb his identity A Self-Made Man: Hard Times and the Dickensian Impostor 367

(Highsmith 2008, 96).4 The philosophical foundation for this motif comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, who employs the tightrope dancer as a metaphor of the human condition in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1886). Zarathustra points to the rope dancer to explain to his ignorant listeners that man himself is “a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman – a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting” (Nietzsche 1917, 29). In Hard Times, the circus provides the direly needed realm of ‘fancy’ which Bounderby and Gradgrind desire to annihilate completely. Failing to see the merits of the circus world which is “not at all orderly,” where people show “remarkable gentleness and childishness” as well as “a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice” (HT 40), the two men attempt to ‘rescue’ Sissy Jupe from her accustomed milieu, a plan which not only fails but which will come back to haunt Gradgrind when his own son has to go on the run from the law and can only escape with the help of the circus troupe, dressed as a clown. Gradgrind has no sense whatsoever for the realm of the artistic and remains oblivious to Sleary’s insistence that “[p]eople mutht be amuthed” (282). Naturally, his attempts to turn Sissy into his very own Pygmalion experiment by making her drop her nickname, forget about her past, falsify her life-story, and rehearse a more acceptable autobiographical narrative result in disaster. Ironically, of course, it is Gradgrind’s fact-minded companion Bounderby who is much more successful when it comes to falsifying the story of his life, in spite of his frequently proclaimed disdain for “idle imagination” (HT 25). Gradgrind advises Sissy “to begin your history” anew (HT 51), but it is Bounderby who really puts the lesson into practice. Unbeknownst to Gradgrind, his closest ally is thus the most fanciful character in the novel (Pollatschek 2013, 279). Bounderby rewrites his life-story to fit middle-class ideology, which includes his self-proclaimed commitment to character strength and his rejection of the pro- verbial “gold spoon” (HT 235). In fact, he lays it on so thick that the readers are encouraged to see through him even before the last-act revelation that he has, in fact, been telling lies.5 Dickens’s satire is evident in the Bounderby scenes, even though a number of critics refused to view the Bounderby chapters as in any way comic. George Bernard Shaw, for one, argued that Bounderby was far too real to

4 The circus trope is also used in a variety of other impostor texts, including Frank Wedekind’s The Marquis of Keith (1901), Walter Serner’s Handbrevier für Hochstapler (‘Impostor’s Manual,’ 1927), and Michael Frayn’s Skios (2012). 5 The truth is eventually revealed by “the mysterious old woman” (HT 250), that is: Bounderby’s mother, who explains that Bounderby paid her money in order to stay away. 368 Wieland Schwanebeck merit any amusement; to him, England was “full of Bounderbys” and “we are all to a quite appalling extent in their power” (1985, 30–31). Bounderby remains, essentially, a primitive brute whose narcissism lacks the sophistication and wit of other literary impostors, but he manages to apply some of their more refined techniques of self-adulation. We learn “that he not only sang his own praises but stimulated other men to sing them” (HT 47), a skill later perfected by Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, who, as a narrator, frequently puts compliments to himself into other people’s mouths.6 Like his subsequent broth- ers-in-spirit, Bounderby is widely admired by the world, though not very much by the readers, due to his lack of humour and natural charm. His narcissism ensures his downfall, though, as Bounderby falls prey to the same mechanisms which cost many impostors their anonymity. Rather than forfeiting the spotlight and seeking out the virtues of adaptability and of discreet blending-in,7 he insists on acting as the illustrious braggart who frequently gets carried away by homodiegetic tales of his own invention, the way it is hinted at in Grosz’s drawing of Tartaron, another loud-mouth led astray by his inability to separate fact from fiction. Well-known impostor characters often suffer this fate; Highsmith’s Tom Ripley even elaborates on his non-existent relationship with Dickie Greenleaf in a letter to Dickie’s parents: “he got so carried away that it went on for eight or ten pages and he knew he would never mail any of it” (Highsmith 2008, 39).8 Bounderby’s manners may be blunt and his wit far from sophisticated, yet for the better part of Hard Times, he is allowed to present himself as a Victorian success story; the paradigmatic illustration of a type which was well-known at the time of its composition although it only found its most well-known formu- lation in England five years after the publication of the novel: Self-Help (1859), Samuel Smiles’s anecdotal and instructive ode to the virtues of perseverance and character-building. While Dickens himself is not cited as an exemplary man in Self-Help,9 the book’s key lessons could have been formulated with Bounderby in

6 The Marquis calls Felix “an elegant fellow” (Mann 1970, 219), and the King refers to him as an “Adonis” (297). 7 In one respect, though, he does opt for adaptability: he is one of the few characters in the novel to speak Standard English, “the language of wicked people” in Dickens’s novels (Vázquez 1996, 219). 8 Phyllis Greenacre is one of the few scholars to point out that the homodiegetic narrative voice favoured in many impostor tales is, in fact, not really appropriate for a successful impostor: “The fact that the story [of Felix Krull] is told in the first person vitiates its effectiveness and, for me at least, interferes with its ring of genuineness. The swindler may do these things or related things, and for the very reasons and with the complex feelings that Mann so artfully depicts. But he is not aware that he does them for these reasons, or in these ways” (Greenacre 1958, 534). 9 Smiles includes an example from Nicholas Nickleby, though (2002, 325). A Self-Made Man: Hard Times and the Dickensian Impostor 369 mind, particularly the central chapters on Application and Perseverance, Energy and Courage, and the True Gentleman. Fortune, Smiles informs his readers, is “usually on the side of the industrious” (2002, 90), and “resolute determination in the pursuit of worthy objects” is “the foundation of all true greatness of character” (190). To Smiles, a man’s energy accounts for more than his natural genius, for the former can very well compensate for lack of the latter, so that “energy of will may be defined to be the very central power of character in a man – in a word, it is the Man himself” (191). Smiles’s radical libertarian claims and his repeated insistence that “our will is free” and that “it rests solely with ourselves individu- ally” resonated well with the aspiring Victorian middle-class and made his book one of the fastest-selling titles of its time. The self-made man would emerge as “an apotheosis of the bourgeois ethos” (Adams 2005, 57). Where Dickens himself illustrates some of Smiles’s arguments, especially the latter’s conviction that even the poorest can aspire to greatness if they work hard enough to overcome all obstacles (Smiles 2002, 21–22), Bounderby could serve as an illustration of most of them, at least the more superficial ones. When it comes to the virtues of “[t]ruth- fulness, integrity, and goodness” and the “moral worth” of the true gentleman (Smiles 2002, 316 and 326), however, Bounderby is a far cry from the ideal that is advertised in Self-Help. Yet by singing the praises of those who take their destiny into their own hands and who refuse to be bound by circumstance, Smiles inad- vertently formulated the creed of the kind of grandiose swindler that would soon populate the mass media of the emerging twentieth century, several decades after Smiles’s book had been eagerly read by thousands. Amongst other things, Smiles’s conviction that education must never be limited to the conventional academic path and that the acquisition of knowledge cannot be trusted entirely to books and teachers (261–262) is echoed strongly in the character of Felix Krull, who disguises his fundamental laziness in a multitude of euphemisms, eventually formulating the idle man’s manifesto:

Education is not won in dull toil and labour; rather it is the fruit of freedom and apparent idleness; one does not achieve it by exertion, one breathes it in; some secret machinery is at work to that end, a hidden industry of the senses and the spirit, consonant with an appearance of complete vagabondage, is hourly active to promote it, and you could go so far as to say that one who is chosen learns even in his sleep. For one must after all be of educable stuff in order to be educated. No one grasps what he has not possessed from birth, and you can never yearn for what is alien. He who is made of common clay will never acquire education; he who does acquire it was never crude. (Mann 1970, 65)

Like Bounderby and Gradgrind, who demand that teachers instruct their pupils in “nothing but Facts” with a capital F (HT 9), Smiles and Felix Krull believe in the pragmatic command of knowledge, that is: one that is guided by the require- ments of the situation and not by any humanist insistence on acquiring knowl- 370 Wieland Schwanebeck edge for knowledge’s sake. “It is not then how much a man may know, that is of importance, but the end and purpose for which he knows it” (Smiles 2002, 272), and the most consistent application of this tenet can be found in Krull’s imposturous habit of using only a handful of mythological or scientific nuggets of wisdom in order to pass for an expert. Where Smiles emphasises that “[c]haracter creates confidence” (316), the confidence man and the impostor will invert this dictum, taking the game to the point where “fictions of self-fashioning devolve into more far-reaching and destructive webs of fraud” (Adams 2005, 57), nowhere more so than in Hard Times or the great social experiment of Great Expectations. The case of Bounderby, “who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self- made man” (HT 20), indicates that Dickens attacks the utilitarian philosophy of mid-nineteenth century industrialism as well as capitalism at large. In one of the novel’s few trademark Dickensian wry authorial asides, the narrative voice com- ments on the many “fictions of Coketown” when Bitzer claims that anyone can work his way up, including “the sixty thousand nearest Hands […]. What I did you can do. Why don’t you go and do it?” (118) Bitzer’s creed will find its most influential expression more than a decade later on the other side of the Atlan- tic, when Horatio Alger publishes the first instalment in his Ragged Dick series (1868), a work that is worth reading alongside Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838). The same urban environment in which Oliver joins Fagin’s gang of pickpockets and in which Ragged Dick encounters quacks, thieves, and counterfeiters will later prove a fruitful breeding ground for the rise of detective plots in the 1870s and 1880s, as it takes the modern police-force to keep up order and to protect citizens from the urban seducer who wants to invite everyone to a game of three-card monte. In this “new, socially heterogeneous milieu of the modern city it becomes nearly impos- sible to tell the true gentleman from the impostor” (Schwarzbach 2002, 239), and many crime novels of the second half of the nineteenth century have fun blurring the difference between the two: Jabez North, the villain in Mary Elizabeth Brad- don’s The Trail of the Serpent (1860), is a case in point. Initially introduced as a “model young man” and a highly respected pillar of his community (Braddon 2003 [1860], 9), North is subsequently revealed to be a murderer who not only washes his bloody hands in innocence but who proceeds to drink up the bloody water (22). The conclusion of Hard Times sees Gradgrind’s son Tom escape to America – the appropriate place, we are meant to infer, for gamblers and scoundrels. After all, it is in America where Alger’s resolute young bootblack Ragged Dick proudly asserts “that he had only himself to depend upon, and he determined to make the most of himself, – a resolution which is the secret of success in nine cases out of ten” (Alger 2005 [1868], 138). This creed would have resonated well with the rhetoric of entrepreneurial spirit and self-reliance that Bounderby and Smiles revel in, and that Dickens had grown increasingly suspicious of. Even before the A Self-Made Man: Hard Times and the Dickensian Impostor 371 bleak conclusion of Hard Times, the Dickensian oeuvre makes this point repeatedly. Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), the first novel that Dickens completed after his first trip to North America, portrays the United States as a place full of swindlers, hypocrites, and frauds (see Kluwick 2016, 457–468). The country had welcomed Dickens with open arms, and the author found himself drawn to its narratives of entrepreneurial spirit, but he soon learned that the American cult of the individual was but a fiction, and that “unbridled individualism” ultimately “reduced individ- uals to their primitive wants and aggressions” (Metz 2008, 226). This view would later inform the character of Bounderby, whose rhetoric of self-reliance arguably owes a debt to the nineteenth century cultural landscape of the United States. As a matter of fact, Smiles had taken the very phrase ‘self-help’ from an American reformer, before fashioning it into a key Victorian virtue (Briggs 1995, 87). Yet Hard Times is an intermediary work that engages with the popular rhetoric of the time and simultaneously deconstructs it, thus formulating an ambigu- ous portrayal of virtues that were still widely advertised in the various self-help manuals published in turn-of-the-century America. These texts typically employed gendered tropes of masculine success, like “potent spirits” and “erect character,” and they formed “part of the cultural apparatus that helped legitimize and estab- lish the hegemony of the new industrial order that emerged in the Gilded Age” (Hilkey 1997, 7–8). When Bounderby, “the Bully of humility, who had built his windy reputation upon lies” is eventually unmasked, the narrative voice declares him a “self-made Humbug” (HT 254). The choice of phrase not only echoes Eben- ezer Scrooge’s oft-quoted dismissal of festive spirits in Dickens’s 1843 A Christmas Carol (“‘Bah!,’ said Scrooge, ‘Humbug!,’” 36), it also prefigures American literature’s most iconic con man, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). When the allegedly ‘Great Wizard’ reveals himself to be “just a common man,” the Scarecrow calls him “a humbug,” a label that the little man gladly accepts, “rubbing his hands together as if it pleased him; ‘I am a humbug’” (Baum 1984, 154). It is not a coincidence that Baum’s popular tale has been read as an allegory of damaged masculinities during the industrial age (Kimmel 1996, 109) and as one of the quintessential tales about the deceptive nature of the so-called Ameri- can Dream. The sheer multitude of con-man legends associated with the Ameri- can cultural landscape has led critics to argue that capitalism itself is “little more than a confidence game” and that con men are “ghosts in the machine of Ameri- can capitalism” (Mihm 2007, 11, 14). This view also sums up the central proposi- tion of Hard Times, where Bounderby’s sanctimonious nature and his constant patronising of hard-working men like Stephen Blackpool, on whose workforce his wealth depends, are severely undercut by the eventual revelation that Bounderby is a complete fraud. Arguably, the ‘ghosts in the machine’ that Stephen Mihm talks about are not exclusive to American capitalism, even though they may 372 Wieland Schwanebeck haunt the American cultural landscape far more than the British one. Smiles, in his book, was convinced that self-help, “[when] exhibited in the lives of many, […] constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength” (2002, 17), an idea fully perverted in the fraudulent city-scape of Coketown, where everyone is constantly rewriting the story of their lives, though with harmful consequences. The Gradgrind family must deal with personal tragedy, and Bounderby fails in his tragicomic attempt to immortalize himself through his will. He eventually closes the door on the world, “projecting himself after his old explosive manner into his portrait – and into futurity” (HT 285).

4 Conclusion

At a time when even scientific discourse, in the spirit of Darwin, seemed to suggest that nature rewarded the virtue of adaptability, when self-help literature and the rhetoric of industriousness recommended self-fashioning, and when the stage was about to be set for the rise of the modern impostor who was to haunt the literary landscape all across fin-de-siècle Europe, Dickens remained ahead of the competition in producing the character of Josiah Bounderby, the main antagonist in one of his least popular novels. Admittedly, Bounderby never develops as much sterling charisma as other memorable rogues in the Dickensian oeuvre like Fagin (Oliver Twist) or Uriah Heep (David Copperfield, 1850), but then again, he is an important puzzle-piece in a deliberately didactic tale, which may be why his creator refrained from equipping him with too much of the alluring, demonic wit that would characterise the most memorable confidence men. Some of them were soon to appear on the other side of the Atlantic, in the works of Herman Melville (The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, 1857) and Mark Twain, and Hard Times makes a point of never fully succumbing to the charms of its chief impostor. Tellingly, unlike Pip in Great Expectations, Bounderby never serves as the narrative’s highest point of authority, with the narrative voice presenting his intradiegetic ramblings from a distance. However, we should not mistake Dick- ens’s scepticism regarding the narrative of Great Men who take destiny into their own hands for the attitude of a social progressive. Quite on the contrary, it rather bespeaks the views of a conservative who remained, by and large, highly scepti- cal about men attempting to rise above their station. This is as true of Bounderby as it is of the martyr-like Stephen Blackpool, not to mention Neville Landless in the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, or several of the characters in Great Expectations – not just Pip but also Magwitch, who fails to pass for a gentleman, as “there was something in him that made A Self-Made Man: Hard Times and the Dickensian Impostor 373 it hopeless to attempt to disguise him. The more I dressed him and the better I dressed him, the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on the marshes” (308). In Dickens, men still have the ‘decency’ not to get carried away by their self-fashioning, which is why Hard Times is not (yet) as radical and subversive as later examples of impostor fiction where identity develops into a fragile concept and is easily falsified and (re-)produced through repetitive performative gestures. It takes little more than a set of expensive cufflinks and a suit for Patricia High- smith’s Tom Ripley to become Dickie Greenleaf, the man whom he kills in order to absorb his identity, or for Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull to transform himself into the Marquis de Venosta. But in spite of these shortcomings, Hard Times remains an important and, in many respects, ground-breaking book, one that paves the way for subsequent developments in literature and that offers a substantial critique of the dominant ideology of its day.

I am indebted to Tatiana Ageeva, Nadja Langhammer, and to the students in my class on Victorian Literature, who inspired a number of observations in this article.

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