Note 5 to Chapter 5 of the author's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter which Clarendon Press published in 1972. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author and of the Clarendon Press, which retains copyright.
Notice how even the worldly wise Chester practises the same evasion: "Men who are thoroughly false and hollow, seldom try to bide those vims from themselves; and yet in the very act of avowing them, they lay claim to the virtues they feign most to despise" (XXIII).
Last modified: 1 May 2001