degradation of Boffin. The passage in which Boffin appears as
a sort of miser, and then afterwards explains that he only assumed the
character for reasons of his own, has something about it highly jerky
and unsatisfactory. The truth of the whole matter I think, almost
certainly, is that Dickens did not originally mean Boffin's lapse to be
fictitious. He originally meant Boffin really to be corrupted by wealth,
slowly to degenerate and as slowly to repent. But the story went too
quickly for this long, double, and difficult process; therefore Dickens
at the last moment made a sudden recovery possible by representing that
the whole business had been a trick. Consequently, this episode is not
an error merely in the sense that we may find many errors in a great
writer like Dickens; it is a mistake patched up with another mistake. It
is a case of that ossification which occurs round the healing of an
actual fracture; the story had broken down and been mended.

If Dickens had fulfilled what was probably his original design, and
described the slow freezing of Boffin's soul in prosperity, I do not say
that he would have done the thing well. He was not good at describing
change in anybody, especially not good at describing a change for the
worse. The tendency of all his characters is upwards, like bubbles,
never downwards, like stones. But at least it would probably have been
more credible than the story as it stands; for the story as it stands is
actually less credible than any conceivable kind of moral ruin for
Boffin. Such a character as his--rough, simple and lumberingly
unconscious--might be more easily conceived as really sinking in
self-respect and honour than as keeping up, month after month, so
strained and inhuman a theatrical performance. To a good man (of that
particular type) it would be easier to be bad than to pretend to be bad.
It might have taken years to turn Noddy Boffin into a miser; but it
would have taken centuries to turn him into an actor. This unreality in
the later Boffin scenes makes the end of the story of John Harmon
somewhat more unimpressive perhaps than it might otherwise have been.
Upon no hypothesis, however, can he be made one of the more impressive
figures of Dickens. It is true that it is an unfair criticism to object,
as some have done, that Dickens does not succeed in disguising the
identity of John Harmon with John Rokesmith. Dickens never intended to
disguise it; the whole story would be m