Dickens's rejection of theater carries both an intra- and an extrapsychic component – just like everything else. This chapter explores both. It tries to uncover the psychic associations Dickens's traumatized narcissism projected onto acting. And it also tries to recover the meaning (or meanings) contemporary acting was likely to convey to Dickens. Rather too neatly, the chapter separates these two considerations, aligning the first with the first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), and the second with the third, Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839). But that division is both artificial and misleading. Nickleby not only inherits but plunges even further the actor's devaluation begun by the earlier novel. Indeed, if there is one through-line connecting both texts it is this: it is not just an anxious Dickens who finds theater shame-inducing. The theatrical profession itself, to anyone's finding, was already and everywhere seared with shame.

EXCEPT ACTORS SOMETIMES

Dickens's first “villain,” Alfred Jingle, is also, paradoxically, his first comic hero. It's no surprise that a deracinated, plebeian Dickens should start out siding with an impecunious, on-the-make Jingle against the fatuous, bourgeois dilettanti of the Pickwick Club.