Dickens Wouldn’t Stand for It : THE ANTIQUE COLLECTOR, <i> By Glyn Hughes (Simon & Schuster: $20; 288 pp.)</i>

Jack Shuttleworth, a.k.a. Camellia Snow, is a character Dickens might have created . . . had that author explored sexual ambiguity.

Born of uncertain parentage in 19th-Century England, Jack learns at an early age that his ticket out of an oppressive orphanage and a lifetime of hellish factory work is drag--taking on the persona and clothing of a girl.

“The instinct to protect rather than punish a female is so strong, is it any wonder that I began to make use of it?” Jack asks early on in this fictional memoir.

The narrative possibilities for such a character struggling with his identity in Victorian, rural England are bountiful, and Jack indeed finds himself in a few tight situations. He is also, as an outsider, granted an objective, sharp view of the society in which he lives.

But the promise for Jack/Camellia as a character goes largely unfulfilled in “The Antique Collector,” a drab and unfocused novel by Glyn Hughes. The tale is not entirely uninvolving; a setup as intriguing as this can’t help but capture the reader, at least initially. It makes the tale’s failings, however, all the more heartbreaking.

The book begins in 1915 with a fully grown Jack traveling the provinces in a gypsy wagon, looking for music halls that have an opening on the bill for a drag act. The world has plunged into the Great War and the countryside is raging with patriotism.

Jack is on the run from a difficult situation in his past and sets down his memoir in an unyielding tone of anguish. “Living in a fantasy is so nervy, so exhausting,” he writes in a passage about the difficulties of finding love in drag. “A fantasy is much kinder, and becomes more real-seeming than the real world, because you have made it yourself, but its thin shell is easily broken. You never know when your dear friend is going to abandon the treaty that makes the madness work.”

As he delves into this past, we see that his uneasy treaty with his own dual nature begins forming in an orphanage where he is taken under the wing of a gruff and affectionate woman named Mary. She recognizes the androgynous nature of young Jack, referring to him as “my boy-girl,” but she also tells him approvingly of the horrific way villagers treated two men found engaged in an act of love.

Talk about your dysfunctional mother-son relationships!

In any case, Mary dies, Jack is sent to work in a factory and, after a long siege of introspection that not only stops the story in its tracks but also seems too sophisticated for a boy not yet a teen-ager, he escapes to a nearby town and a job in a tavern. It is here that he gets his first taste of performing and discovers his excitement at trying on bits of women’s clothing.

Here is where the serious failings of “The Antique Collector” become apparent. Jack’s self-training in drag performing, which could have provided insights into the developing character as well as good drama, is scarcely explored. His emerging sexuality, whatever its nature (we are never quite sure how gay, straight or both he is) likewise is hardly mentioned.

Jack’s inner voice--even if it is mostly one of confusion--is thus never fully formed. And bits of action that have great potential are given only cursory treatment. Hughes never, for example, satisfactorily describes Jack’s stage act. A crucial scene, in which Jack manages to alter completely the meaning of a play he is in simply by changing the inflection of his performance, is tossed off in a couple of lines.

In the last part of the book we get a few scenes of Jack--who by this point has completely accepted his alter ego and woven her into his everyday life--interacting with villagers. These dialogue scenes breathe life into Jack as well as some of the villagers, who are in almost equal measure repelled and fascinated by his dual persona.

These scenes are all too brief before the book becomes at the very end an anti-war tract, with Jack seemingly the only person able to see the madness going on around him. The final plot point becomes whether Jack will get swept up in the blinding patriotism of the time and, in his long quest to “belong,” give in to society’s pressure to join the fight.

The choice Jack makes is a poignant one, but by the end of a narrative almost devoid of vivid personalities and humor (Dickens would never have stood for that!), it is hard to care.