At first Dickens tried to deny that Harold Skimpole, the parasitical aesthete of Bleak House, had been based on his friend Leigh Hunt; but later he confessed, not a little proudly, that the character was 'the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words . . . it is an absolute reproduction of a real man.' Skimpole is a corrosive presence in the novel, a serene-faced sponger who claims to know nothing of 'the world'. 'I am a child you know,' he tells the young wards of John Jarndyce. 'You are designing people compared with me.' Skimpole's main similarity to his real-life source, apart from a talent for accepting handouts, is his conversational manner, which is peculiarly fanciful, fluent and charming, but there are other connections, too. Like the Hunt of the 1850s, he has been used to presiding over a large, disorderly household of befuddled and beautiful do-nothings; also like Hunt (whose earliest recollection was of his father's room in the King's Bench prison in 1784), he seems to have spent his entire life in debt.

LRB 18 December 2003 | PDF Download