Mind Reading

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter traces Charles Dickens’s development of the introspective mode as a means to insist on the immateriality of the mind in two early novels, Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit. In the first chapters of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens frequently has his omniscient narrator narrate the thoughts of characters in the language of a dualist psychology. The novel is also explicitly dismissive of physiognomy, the idea that the body might serve as an index to the mind, yet Dickens’s characterization seems dependent on key tenets of that body of thought, such as its alignment of beauty and virtue. In Ralph Nickleby’s last moments, however, Dickens moves more definitively away from the outward depiction of consciousness and toward something approaching an introspective perspective. This shift toward introspection continues in Martin Chuzzlewit: Dickens offers a more skeptical assessment of the potential legibility of the body in that novel, eliding the distinction between physiognomy and phrenology and constructing the latter as a distinctly American belief, in line with the other expressions of materialism that so troubled Dickens in the United States. In an effort to cordon off mind from the (potentially legible) body, Martin Chuzzlewit ends with its own extended introspective representation of a character’s interiority, that of the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit. But Dickens’s depiction of Jonas’s beastliness presents its own problems for a dualist psychology, seeming to erode the essential distinction between humans and animals on which such a psychology insisted.