A Self-Made Man: Hard Times and the Dickensian Impostor
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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 objection- able 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 impostur- ous trade, it is not a coincidence that so many sociological and psychologi- cal 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 impostur- ous 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 psycho- analytic assessments of the impostor phenomenon frequently single out.