Clowns

Dickens, inspired by Shakespeare and pantomime, firmly believed in the cultural value of clowns. Developing his conviction that clowns operate within life away from the stage, he peoples his work with comic characters who adapt the traits of clowning to momentarily ‘play the fool’. His clowns explore the constructed nature of identity to undermine pretension and authority, but expose their own fragile selfhood. They also disrupt the predictable habits of institutions such as the law, which threatens the integrity of the work they inhabit. Clowns are granted this licence to interrogate society’s rules and taboos, because they remain outside the society; Dickens’s clowns similarly inhabit the margins, but subvert their apparent minor status through their imaginative attractiveness to both author and reader.