The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Dodson and Fogg may be scoundrels but they are not wicked men; though they cause undeserved suffering in others, they have no malevolent intent—the suffering they cause gives them no pleasure. To them, their clients are the pieces with which they play the legal game, which they find as enjoyable as it is lucrative. So, too, when Sergeant Buzzfuzz expresses his detestation of Mr. Pickwick's character, or Mr. Sumpkins bullies the unfortunate witness Winkle, what their victims feel as real hostility is, in fact, the mock hostility of the player: had they been engaged for the Defense, their abuse would have been directed against Mrs. Bardell and Mrs. Chappins, and they will have completely forgotten about the whole case by the next morning. The Guild Hall which is a Purgatory to Mr. Pickwick is to them what Dingley Dell is to him, an Arcadia.

When he is found guilty, Mr. Pickwick takes a vow that he will never pay the damages. In so doing he takes his first step out of Eden into the real world, for to take a vow is to com­mit one's future, and Eden has no conception of the future for it exists in a timeless present. In Eden, a man always does what he likes to do at the moment, but a man who takes a vow commits himself to doing something in the future which, when the time comes, he may dislike doing. The consequence of Mr. Pickwick's vow is that he has to leave his Eden of clean linen and polished silver for a Limbo of dirty crockery and rusty broken toasting forks where, in the eyes of the Law, he is a guilty man, a lawbreaker among other lawbreakers.

The particular class of lawbreakers among whom Mr. Pick­wick finds himself in The Fleet are debtors. In selecting this class of offender rather than another for him to encounter, one of Dickens' reasons was, of course, that he considered the English laws of his day concerning debt to be monstrously unjust and sending his fictional hero there gave him an op­portunity for satirical exposure of a real social abuse. But in a world where money is the universal medium of exchange, the notion of debt has a deep symbolic resonance. Hence the clause in the Lord's Prayer as it appears in the Authorized Version of St. Matthew—"Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors"—and the parable of the forgiving and unforgiv­ing creditor.

To be in debt means to have taken more from someone than we have given whether the more refers to material or to spiritual goods. Since we are not autonomous beings who can create and sustain our lives by ourselves, every human being is in debt to God, to Nature, to parents and neighbors for his existence, and it is against this background of universal human debt that we view the special case of debt and credit between one individual and another. We are bom unequal; even if all social inequalities were abolished, there would remain the natural inequalities of talent and inherited tendencies, and circumstance outside our control will always affect both our need to receive and our capacity to give. A rich man, in what­ever sense he is rich, can give more than a poor man; a baby and a sick person need more from others than a healthy adult. Debt or credit cannot be measured in quantitative terms; a relation between two persons is just if both take no more than they need and give as much as they can, and unjust if either takes more or gives less than this.

In prison, Mr. Pickwick meets three kinds of debtors. There are those like Smangle who are rather thieves than debtors for they have borrowed money with the conscious intention of not paying it back. There are the childish who believe in magic; they intended to return what they borrowed when their luck changed, but had no rational reason to suppose that it would. And there are those like the cobbler who have fallen into debt through circumstances which they could neither foresee nor control.