A Spork in the Road

Is it just me, or is little old Smallweed from Dickens’ Bleak House a literary candidate for a Tourette’s diagnosis?

“You’re a brimstone idiot. You’re a scorpion—a brimstone scorpion! You’re a sweltering toad. You’re a chattering clattering broomstick witch, that ought to be burnt!” gasps the old man, prostrate in his chair. “My dear friend, will you shake me up a little?”

Smallweed’s verbally intricate outbursts are primarily directed at his demented elderly wife, but they have the flavor of coprolalia.

Under this provocation, Mr. Smallweed’s favorite adjective of disparagement is so close to his tongue, that he begins the words “my dear friend” with the monosyllable “Brim;” thus converting the possessive pronoun into Brimmy, and appearing to have an impediment in his speech.

And his requirement of being frequently shaken like a canned beverage, his particular obsession with money and signatures, even his cushion-throwing tic all suggest to me a Dickensian expression of Tourette’s, which would first be identified as a neurological disorder about 30 years after the publication of Bleak House.

“I had no such thing. I have nothing but his signature. Plague pestilence and famine, battle murder and sudden death upon him,” says the old man, making a curse out of one of his few remembrances of a prayer, and squeezing up his velvet cap between his angry hands, “I have half a million of his signatures, I think! But you,” breathlessly recovering his mildness of speech, as Judy re-adjusts the cap on his skittle-ball of a head; “you, my dear Mr. George, are likely to have some letter or paper that would suit the purpose.”

Granted, Dickens characters are a breed apart, peculiar and hilarious, but Dickens was an astute observer and grounded all his caricatures in very real character traits.

So what say you, oh my literary and/or psychoneurological enthusiasts? Smallweed: Tourette’s or ornery oddball?