Twice during his novelistic career Dickens attempted to speak in the voice of a woman--extensively, in the first-person narrative of Esther Summerson in Bleak House, and, controversially, in the first-person confession by Miss Wade in Little Dorrit in a chapter entitled, "The History of a Self-Tormentor." In what follows I will argue that to these two examples of Dickensian self-portraits in women's clothing one might add an earlier example, namely, that of Mrs. Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit. While Dickens never speaks in the first person through the voice of Mrs. Gamp, as he does with both Esther and Miss Wade, he has nevertheless produced in this portrait of an elderly, alcoholic nurse-midwife an alter ego, an emanation of his own creative self. And he has done so despite the fact that, in theory, he disapproves of Mrs. Gamp. With Mrs. Gamp, Dickens has painted a portrait of the artist as a character creating a character. Dickens presents this self-portrait in a number of ways, most obviously through his propensity for doubling. He was certainly not the only nineteenth-century author who was fascinated with the theme of the doppelganger, or double, and this literary trope can be found in many of the notable works of the period, from Poe's "William Wilson," to Dostoevsky's "The Double," to Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, among numerous others. Most critical accounts of the double, such as Lawrence Kohlberg's 1963 study of doubles in Dostoevsky emphasize the psychological dimensions of the concept--that the double sets up a relationship between the self and its projected image, or between the self and the other, that the image of the double is a form of splitting of the individual into two antithetical or complementary parts. (1) The double seems to address the duality of human nature, at the same time as it comforts the reader with reassurances of sameness. Doubles can represent the personality at war with itself, or the personality in harmony, its two sides co-existing as the yin and yang of an integrated whole.
