Rivista di Studi Vittoriani VII (Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio”, 1999), 33-57.

DICKENS AND MEMORY

MITSUHARU MATSUOKA

I

As the year 1848 drew to its close, Charles Dickens was struggling to write The

Haunted Man, the fifth and last of his Christmas Books. He then found himself on the verge

of a mental crisis brought on by the pressures of work, his fear of failure, family problems, and

the demons of his past. It is probable that he, at 36, felt himself to be as broken and deprived

of will and desire as his creation, the 40-year-old Arthur Clennam of Little Lorrit (1855-7),

who was haunted by memories of a repressed childhood and a laborious life. Dickens’s

depressed mental state revived in him the memories of his passionate love for Maria Beadnell

and his grievous disappointment when he failed to win her, the too early death of his beloved

sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, and, above all, the burning shame of his childhood experiences at

Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. The unpublished autobiographical fragment, which he sent to

John Forster in 1847, reveals his deepest feelings about these traumatic experiences: “My whole

nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now,

famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and

children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.”1

In his Warren’s Blacking period Dickens used to go to a coffee-shop, of which he

recollected only that there had been an oval glass plate in the door facing the street with “Coffee-

Room” painted on it. “If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but

where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side MOOR-

EEFFOC (as I often used to do then, in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood.”2

The glass has two faces, one looking towards the street, to the outer world of actual life with its

activity, its constant change, its colour, and its lightsome highways; the other looks inward, to

the shop, to the inner world of the mind and perception with its chiaroscuro landscape of

memory. Dickens himself had two faces, the Janus factor we all share. Apart from the public

persona, the successful speaker, writer, and entertainer, he had his darker inner side, perhaps

the one he would prefer not to admit to, other than through his writings, as though it came from

imagination rather than life. Dickens has deliberately sought to draw us into his darker world

through the window of his soul, and in so doing to encourage us to do likewise. This shadow

world can only be read in a state of “dismal reverie”. Finding himself in that dismal world of

“MOOR-EEFFOC”, Dickens triggers the haunting power of memory. If reading awakens his

demons of memory, writing about them helps him to come to terms with those very same

demons. It is in the fictional account of Warren’s Blacking that Dickens confronts the horrors

of his memory, and at the same time accepts his memories as painful realities.

By the time he had finished Dombey and Son in April 1848, Dickens may have feared

in himself the very qualities of coldness, callousness, and solitariness that he had attributed to

his protagonist, Paul Dombey. Contemporary materialism is one of the factors that shape the

character of Dombey: “He might have been hung up for sale at a Russian fair as a specimen of a

frozen gentleman” (DS, 57).3 Pride in his public position has so overtaken him that it keeps

him from accessing his deeper feelings. He is more like one of the elegantly packaged products

that his firm sells than the husband and father his family would like him to be.

Dombey and Son marks a turning point from lightness to darkness of tone in Dickens’s

fiction. The Haunted Man, which he published in December 1848, reflects the aggravation of

his mental crisis and testifies to the therapeutic value of writing through past sufferings to

release pent-up sorrows and to expel phantoms. It also makes sense that David Copperfield

should follow in 1849, because David manages to break free from the traumas he experienced at

Old Blunderstone and the Murdstone and Grinby warehouse by writing about them:

The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much pain to me, with so much

mental suffering and want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to

examine how long I was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more,

or less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have

written, and there I leave it. (DC, 215)

Like Dickens himself, David dramatises the healing process and the mystery of writing through

past trauma. He commits the past to paper, thereby transforming it from a nagging pain in the

present to a memory that can be filed away in its proper place in the past.4

II

David Copperfield, which he completed in 1850, is the most memory-oriented of

Dickens’s novels.5 So it should be, for the narrative is a personal account of David’s own life.

It is very difficult, however, to make David the narrator look back into the tabula rasa of

infancy. Dickens resolves this difficulty by providing David with a photographic memory,

something common among small children:

This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go farther back

into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of

observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its

closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable

in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than

to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain

freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an

inheritance they have preserved from their childhood. (DC, 13)

This “power” or “faculty” is called ‘eidetic imagery’, a vivid and persistent kind of imagery

particularly common to very young children. The eidetic imagery revives an optical impression

with hallucinatory clarity. Undeniably, David’s memory of his infancy is based upon “fancy”.

However, we are easily led by the Wordsworthian association of a cherubic innocence among

“very young children” to the belief that David’s memory reflects the fact that the most vivid and

original fantasies are produced by eidetic children.

The function of memory is to guarantee to people the essence of their past experiences in

a manner that is acceptable to them. Memory is subservient to the ego. Nietzsche observed: “‘I

have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that’ - says my pride, and remains

adamant. At last - memory yields.”6 Memory, therefore, does not so much reflect objective

reality as distort it in order to please one’s pride, vanity, and ambition. This is especially true in

children whose recollections are often founded upon a certain magical reality. The fantastic

fabrications of children regarding their past experiences exemplify this primitive magic. The

very young child often cannot distinguish between his fabrications and reality. This

subordination of memory to subjective experience is also, to some extent, true of the adult

creative artist like David.

Theoretically, each experience affects the course of every subsequent experience.

Nothing, in a broad sense, is ever forgotten if, at the outset, it made a vivid impression. No

wonder, therefore, David tries to write down what happened as plainly as he beheld it: “I do not

recall it, but see it done; for it happens again before me” (DC, 784). Furthermore, the process

of memory should not be considered like the unwinding skein of yarn. David does not “go

farther back into such times than many of us suppose”, but relates prior experiences to

contemporary images. It is as though the past, like a template, were being superimposed upon

the here and now to form the observed images.7

Freud’s concept of memory is based upon his ‘pleasure principle’. The pleasure drive

is at work in the subconscious, and anything not related to the pleasure drive tends to be

expelled from consciousness and forgotten. In other words, Freud’s theory of memory is in

reality a theory of forgetting.8 His concept of repression stipulates that the need to reduce

anxiety results in a syndrome in which unacceptable feelings are driven into the unconscious,

where they are retained but are unavailable to memory. Some forgetting may be due to the fact

that some former experiences were disquieting. David does not always face his painful

memories; some of the unpleasant experiences in his past are apt to slip out of his memory. An

excellent example of this is the time of his wife’s death in the chapter called “Another

Retrospect”:

I sit down by the fire, thinking with a blind remorse of all those secret feelings I

have nourished since my marriage. I think of every little trifle between me and

Dora, and feel the truth, that trifles make the sum of life. Ever rising from the sea

of my remembrance, is the image of the dear child as I knew her first, graced by

my young love, and by her own, with every fascination wherein such love is

rich. Would it, indeed, have been better if we had loved each other as a boy and a

girl, and forgotten it? Undisciplined heart, reply! (DC, 768)

Here let us remember the truth that Mr. Redlaw in The Haunted Man realises in the end: “‘In

the material world as I have long taught, nothing can be spared; no step or atom in the

wondrous structure could be lost, without a blank being made in the great universe’”

(Christmas Books, 374). Although feeling “the truth”, David dares to erase the image of Dora

as impractical and faulty. He only draws up pleasant reminiscences from what he calls “the sea

of [his] remembrance”. David’s heart is then nearly as “undisciplined” as when he was told

about the death of his mother by Peggotty: “In her death she winged her way back to her calm

untroubled youth, and cancelled all the rest” (DC, 133). David declares that he remembers the

funeral of his mother clearly: “All this, I say, is yesterday’s event. Events of later date have

floated from me to the shore where all forgotten things will reappear, but this stands like a high

rock in the ocean” (DC, 131). His memory of his mother is also beautified by her death, and

none of its negative features ever rise up “like a high rock in the ocean” of his remembrance,

though she was as impractical and as gullible as Dora. A detailed analysis of David’s memory

reveals some self-righteousness behind his transformation of the past into fiction. His self-

righteousness is all the more noticeable in that we find more practicality in Dora than she has

ever before shown; she has matured enough to realise that she, at any rate, was not ready for

marriage and to understand the greater suitability of Agnes to be David’s wife (DC, 767-8).

“Memory”, Mildred Newcomb argues, “sometimes plays a further trick with actuality:

not only does it grant identical reality to past things actual and imagined, but it also frequently

assumes for ‘things that never were’ an on-going and continuous life extending into the

present.”9 Newcomb uses Melvin Twemlow in Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) as an example of

this, though she does not refer to the psychological term déjà vu, an illusionary feeling of

having previously experienced a present situation. There is no doubt, however, that Dickens is

aware that the present does sometimes produce a new experience of déjà vu:

We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of

what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time

- of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and

circumstances - of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we

suddenly remembered it! (DC, 566)

This is an illusionary feeling David experiences after Wilkins Micawber suggests that Agnes

should unquestionably have been his favourite without Dora. Dickens makes effective use of

David’s déjà vu to hint at his subconscious anxiety about the indiscretion of his younger years,

and about the role that Agnes will play in his future. This kind of déjà vu makes us doubt the

reliability of the narrator. It is a poor excuse for his own inconsistencies that he passes over in

silence.

An eloquent example of the fictitiousness of déjà vu is found in the characterisation of

William Dorrit. He depends upon a variety of self-deceptions to enjoy dolce far niente (sweet

doing nothing) and avoid facing the realities of his imprisonment. He uses euphemisms such as

“Testimonial” (LD, 83) instead of alms for the poor and “Spirit” (LD, 369) to describe the

humiliation he endures in the Marshalsea. In order to avoid these stern realities Dorrit fabricates

a glorious past: “‘I tell you, if you could see me as your mother saw me, you wouldn’t believe

it to be the creature you have only looked at through the bars of this cage. I was young, I was

accomplished, I was good-looking, I was independent - by God I was, child!’” (LD, 227)

God knows, Dickens comments, “to what extent a man, especially a man brought down as this

man had been, can impose upon himself” (LD, 230-1). Self-deception often leads to a feeling

that the present is a part of past experience. On the day of his release from the Marshalsea,

Dorrit tries to get his younger brother Frederick to throw a little polish into his usual

demeanour: “‘What you have forgotten you must now begin to recall, my dear Frederick. Your

position -’” (LD, 426). He manufactures the illusion that the present “position” is created to

forget all about the prison life. An alternative past is created to bury the very recent Marshalsea

past as one that is long past.

III

Among Dickens’s earlier works Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) could be selected as a

novel of memory. After Nicholas rescues Smike, the favourite target of Squeers’s brutality at

Dotheboys Hall, the grateful Smike follows him about afterwards with a dog-like devotion. As

they make their way to Portsmouth, Nicholas asks Smike if he has “a good memory” (NN ,

273). From their conversation we learn that Smike “began to lose [his] recollection” after hard

use by Squeers and his family. The wrongs he suffered at the school have ruined his sense of

identity as well as his memory. His amnesia suggests that both identity and intellect can be

damaged by emotional and physical trauma in childhood. Let us not forget, however, that

Dickens portrays Smike as an ‘idiot savant’ similar to Miss Flite in Bleak House (1852-3).10

Natalie McKnight overlooks this, although she regards Smike’s role as structurally significant:

“the posthumous discovery of his parentage serves as the central revelation in the resolution of

the plot”.11 Smike retains a vivid remembrance of the place where he slept as a little boy (NN ,

274). Dickens gives Smike specific, accurate knowledge in his memory of his boyhood. This

memory, repressed by the terrors of Dotheboys Hall, is refreshed and revived with Nicholas’s

encouragement after his rescue. More importantly, perhaps, Dickens makes paradoxical use

here of the idiot’s tenacious memory to foreshadow the disclosures that come later, that Smike

and Nicholas are, quite literally, related characters; that they are, in fact, cousins.

Dickens did not, however, so much develop the theme of memory in Nicholas

Nickleby as condense it in the interpolated story entitled “The Five Sisters of York”. The five

sisters are “all busily plying their customary task of embroidering” (NN , 58), which a black

monk denounces as wasting precious hours without purpose or object. Embroidery and mem-

ory are closely connected by the image of writing. Past experiences are written on the fabric of

memories. The close knit community of the sisters is safeguarded and strengthened against the

death of their youngest member, Alice, by bringing embroidery and memory into closer

communion. “‘If anything could soothe the first sharp pain of heavy loss, it would be - with

me - the reflection, that those I mourned . . . had prepared themselves for a purer and happier

world’” (NN , 65). Memory strengthens the family circle and, as we will discuss later, has a

circular function in time. The embroidering thread of love and affection is, in fact, what binds

them to the future: “‘If our affections be tried, our affections are our consolation and comfort;

and memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between this world and a better’” (NN ,

65).

This helps to explain, for example, why Dickens describes “the girls and mother

working still” (CB, 68) after the death of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843). His father

Bob Cratchit speaks of the spiritual significance of memory: “‘I know, my dears, that when we

recollect how patient and how mild he was; although he was a little, little child; we shall not

quarrel easily among ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it’” (CB, 68-9). The past

can be a store-house of delightful memories, which may well alleviate and enrich days of

humdrum routine, should the future, as well it may, bring sorrow and loss. We think here of

Meg, Trotty Veck’s daughter in The Chimes (1844), who argues against the wisdom of

deferring her marriage to Richard because of their poverty: “‘oh, father dear, how hard to have

a heart so full as mine is now, and live to have it slowly drained out every drip, without the

recollection of one happy moment of a woman’s life, to stay behind and comfort me, and make

me better!’” (CB, 92) The embroidery work of their memory is done with the Ariadne’s thread

of love and imagination, which binds their hearts together for the future and connects their

present to their past. Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is seen knitting with “the

golden thread which bound her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress and

companion, in a life of quiet bliss” (TTC, 74). Dickens employs knitting here as a metaphor for

remembering as well as weaving her severed family back together in “the disjointed time” (TTC,

265) of the French Revolution. Love and hatred are the qualities which most motivate

characters to remember. Madame Defarge, in contrast to Lucie, purposefully and silently knits

the thread of her hatred into the shrouds she makes to record the past wrongs and sufferings

inflicted upon her and her family.

IV

The idea of poetic justice attracted Dickens throughout his writings. There is a clear

borderline marked between good and evil ways of being. This is often the case in his earlier

works, though he suggests the ambiguity of the borderline in Oliver Twist (1837-9): “reality

and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost matter of impossibility

to separate the two” (OT, 255). The negative aspects and positive features of a thing are

described as closely linked rather than diametrically opposed. Figuratively speaking, flowers

and weeds have their roots inextricably intertwined under the ground. In the novels that follow

Christmas Books this ambiguity is even more distinguished. In a letter to Forster dated

November 21, 1848 Dickens says “bad and good are inextricably linked in remembrance, and

that you could not choose the enjoyment of recollecting only the good. To have all the best of it

you must remember the worst also.”12

In The Haunted Man Mr. Redlaw finds that “The Gift Bestowed” by his phantom alter

ego is a memory cleansed of all the sorrows and wrongs that he has suffered. It has left him

likewise bereft of all compassion, sensibility, and humanity. The moral amnesia conferred

upon him also infects those around him with hardness of heart. Everyone he touches loses

conscience, sympathy, and love. Shocked and fearful of this evil contagion, Mr. Redlaw,

despairing and thinking of death, shuts himself up in his room in the same savage condition as

the strange child, who has not been affected by his touch (CB, 337-8). Here Dickens displays

his shrewd grasp of a pathological aspect of communication. Some of his principal characters

in his later novels do not communicate; they turn their thoughts inward and isolate themselves

from others. Generally speaking, this self-imposed shutdown of communication is due to their

repression of painful memories. Memory, however, is a person’s silent communication

network linking the past to the present and both to the future; the pathology of memory is

manifested when a person, whether consciously or unconsciously, splits off from it mentally.

This process is to be noted in the characters of Arthur Clennam, Sydney Carton, and Philip

Pirrip. All of them are ‘introspective’ characters. They are motivated by noble personal and

social desires - desires that their saddest memories force them to repress. For them, in Diane

Elam’s words, “time exists as the ghost, as the return of the repressed, in the everyday, and . .

. the condition of the everyday is always haunted by the uncanniness of time, by the ghost of

memory.”13 Love - silent love inspired by Amy, Lucie, and Joe - is what enables these

characters to overcome their introspective states of mind, to increase their capacity for objective

self-scrutiny, and it is what ultimately restores them to wholeness. Love rouses them and leads

them away from their old, hopeless, and purposeless fates. They are regenerated by the

beneficial, therapeutic, and healing effects of love. It is also through love, through the

Christian forgiveness and charity of Milly Swidger, that Mr. Redlaw is able to regain his

memory.

V

Memory is always a matter of special concern to Dickens. Memory of their childhood is

the key that opens the hearts of emotionally imprisoned adults. There seems to be, however, a

widespread critical agreement that the effects of unhappy memories are beneficial rather than

damaging. Harry Stone writes on the death of Dickens’s sister Fanny a few weeks before he

wrote The Haunted Man: “Dickens . . . is, through Mr. Redlaw, once again affirming that he

too must accept past sufferings and wounds as concomitants of his present joys and powers,

his present humanity as well, indeed, as inseparable from them”.14 Milly Swidger explains to

Mr. Redlaw: “‘May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us to remember wrong that

has been done us? . . . That we may forgive it’” (CB, 393). No “softening memory of sorrow,

wrong, or trouble” (CB, 378) can enter us until we can feel for others. Scrooge begins to

recover his humanity when the Ghost of Christmas Past makes him recall his repressed

memories, and John Peerybingle, in The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), by remembering the

past, stops unjustly suspecting his wife, Dot, of infidelity for her secret interference in other

people’s affairs. In Dickens’s mind memory is, through imagination, closely connected to love

and sympathy.

In some of Dickens’s works, however, memory is not necessarily beneficial. It is

presented in a more ambiguous form. Memory must often hurt to heal, but sometimes it may

simply hurt, damage, or even destroy. Mr. Redlaw sensed this dangerous quality of memory

and attempted to make himself impervious to it. In The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1) Little

Nell’s grandfather, after her death, suffers in a similar manner, waiting at her grave like a

mournful dog: “Whatever power of thought or memory he retained, was all bound up in her”

(OCS, 545). His memory of her becomes his own death wish, a desire to be laid beside her

whom he loved so well. Memory prevents the apprehension of the present; the absence of the

loved one cannot be accepted, and so the mind creates phantoms to replace the dead. The

memory of Little Nell haunts him like so many ghosts until merciful death releases him from his

obsession. Death arrests the progress of memory’s disease. This less sanguine attitude

towards memory pervades A Tale of Two Cities as well. The memory of being buried alive in

the Bastille for eighteen years cripples Dr. Manette with traumatic neurosis. The weight of his

history, of his ‘death in life’ impedes his progress when he is “RECALLED TO LIFE” (TTC,

8).

There are important implications for fictional strategies in the dramatic representation of

isolated states. In his characterisation of Dr. Manette, Dickens explores the possibilities of an

enforced silence on the human mind. Like Sydney Carton, Dr. Manette suffers from a

repressed past that prevents his progress in the present. He shows his great strength of

character by dredging up the bitter memories of his treatment by the Evrémonde brothers so that

he may save his son-in-law from the death penalty. John R. Reed is correct when he comments

on the disclosure of Dr. Manette’s past: “His suffering having been made public, he is endowed

with a productive strength that repression could never produce.”15 Reed’s comment requires a

little modification, though. The public reading of Dr. Manette’s once hidden manuscript by

Madame Defarge at his son-in-law’s trial eventually reduces his strength to zero; he reverts,

probably for the rest of his life, to the utterly isolated figure he was in the Bastille.

Memory for Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit is crucial in justifying the existence of her

ressentiment. “D.N.F.” (LD, 355), the letters on the lining of the watch sent to her after her

husband’s death, is a maxim adopted as a rule of her present actions. Arthur Clennam tries in

vain to read the visible message from the past in the watch, but it is an indecipherable one that

Mrs. Clennam and her husband shared in their memory. Although she knows that the letters

mean “Do Not Forget”, she takes advantage of the fact that nobody else knows who should not

forget what. Etymologically speaking, a watch’s function is to ‘awaken’ someone, to bring

him or her to consciousness. Mrs. Clennam, however, uses her watch to suppress her

consciousness of her husband’s remorseful expiation. In this sense she is like Miss Havisham

in Great Expectations, who stopped all the clocks in her home at the moment she discovered

that she had been jilted. Mrs. Clennam forgets her obligations to the dead; she fixes in her

memory the wrongs done her as indelibly and in as distorted a manner as Miss Havisham does

in hers: “‘He died, and sent this watch back to me, with its Do not forget. I do NOT forget,

though I do not read it as he did’” (LD, 777). Her whole life is devoted to an implacable hatred

and self-destructive vendetta against the sins of her husband and those related to him. This

destructive energy has led her to spend her life imprisoned in a wheel-chair. Is this

psychosomatically induced paralysis a form of self-inflicted punishment for her own sins?

Mrs. Clennam clearly has some awareness that her motives are false: “she still abided by her old

impiety - still reversed the order of Creation, and breathed her own breath into a clay image of

her Creator” (LD, 775). In substituting herself for God she makes herself believe that she is

the agent of punishment in a world that she has turned upside down. We note her slip of the

tongue and her confused correction: “‘I am humbled and deceived! - Not I, that is to say,’ she

added quickly, as colour flushed into her face; ‘a greater than I. What am I?”’ (LD, 779) Self-

deception in Little Dorrit, whether betrayed by such Freudian slips or always kept

unconscious, is one of the most characteristic features in the psychology of characters confined

in their mental prisons.

VI

A topos that Dickens uses to show how characters deceive themselves into distorting or

suppressing painful memories is that of the world turned upside down. Perhaps the best

example of this is Pip in Great Expectations. As narrator, he draws us into this topos from the

very beginning of the novel, when he tells us of seeing the church “go head over heels” before

him and then realising that the convict Magwitch had “turned [him] upside down” (GE, 2).

This is richly suggestive of Pip’s future if the church represents conventional values. To use

Harry Stone’s words, “when outlawed Magwitch emerges from the graves and turns Pip’s

dawning consciousness topsy-turvy, the act epitomizes the inverted fairy tale that Dickens is

about to tell”.16 The topos of mundus inversus (an inverted world) is an ancient and

widespread one, but Dickens exploits it as part of a narrative strategy. Going on with his story

Pip continues to provide us with his privileged insight as narrator. Lewis Carroll, in Through

the Looking-Glass (1871), contrived a well-developed and complicated view of logic and

reality by portraying a world in which everything is reversed. Pip’s understanding of reality,

like Alice’s, is reversed when he looks at it through his newfound gentleman’s mirror. On the

chessboard of life he is a pawn suddenly changed into one of the gentry by means of

Magwitch’s money - and as such has a very limited view of the new reality into which he is

thrust. The last words of Carroll’s final poem are: “Life, what is it but a dream?”17 Pip

attempts to reconcile the realities of life with the romantic dreams of his great expectations - but

actual events do not live up to them.

Just as Dorrit leaves the Marshalsea in possession of a fortune, so too does Pip leave his

prison, the blacksmith household, in possession of great expectations. Both men are haunted

by the unpleasant memories of their imprisonment. But Pip’s obsession, unlike Dorrit’s, is

tinged by a sense of guilt. His sensitivity to the promptings of conscience saves him from

outright snobbery. He cannot quite manage to bury the past while looking to the future, and

this, in the end, saves him from complete self-deception. His suppressed memories of the

graveyard and Magwitch haunt him, but this very intrusion of the past into the present also

serves his true conversion. Magwitch’s gratitude and devotion help Pip to recognise his own

ingratitude to Joe and Biddy, and thus, to heal his relationship with them. The Red Queen, a

very queer character in Through the Looking-Glass, lives backward and remembers things

before they happen. Pip is haunted by his encounter with Magwitch in the churchyard,

particularly after he goes through the looking glass into the world of the gentry - to the world

turned upside down. Dickens uses this sense of enchantment in somewhat the same way as the

Red Queen’s memory of things before they occur. When Magwitch re-appears later on, the

reality and shock for Pip is all the greater. We can read this as a prolepsis or even as a

foreshadowing memory of the future.

Pip’s past, then, is also his future. Despite his efforts to suppress his troublesome

memories, the flow of events continues to push him back into confrontation with them. It is

significant in this sense that the first job assigned to him at Satis House is “to walk Miss

Havisham round and round the room” (GE, 79). This is borne out by the feelings he has when

he returns to Satis House to visit Estella, now returned as a beautiful young woman: “It was

like pushing the chair itself back into the past, when we began the old slow circuit round the

ashes of the bridal feast” (GE, 226). No matter how high up the social staircase he thinks he

has gone, Pip, as though in a dream, has actually been making a circular journey, like the figure

in M. C. Escher’s famous lithograph Ascending and Descending (1960).18 Pip is simply

trying to fit the square peg of his great expectations into the circular hole of his future

experiences. The one simply does not coincide with the other.

The title Great Expectations is ironically future-oriented. This raises the question of

foresight. Pip looks for a great inheritance as something due to him. Although he receives it,

he realises much later that he may not keep what he has not earned. His palindromic nickname,

Pip, reminds us of “the mustard seed” (Matt. 13:31; Luke 13:19), of something small in itself

yet capable of tremendous development.19 Just as the seed contains in itself both the memory

of its origins and its future, so too does the memory of the protagonist of Great Expectations.

Through it he tells us and himself that he was destined to return from whence he came. His life

and experience bring him back to the place where as a small child, confused, fearful, and

reluctant he decided to help Magwitch. Pip experiences anew the same conflicting emotions as

an adult; yet by extending a second, but this time consciously chosen, help to Magwitch, he is

able to recover his lost identity and childhood innocence.

VII

The past is used as a healing power in several of Dickens’s works. Pip is restored to

himself by returning in memory to the scenes of his childhood in the countryside. In Oliver

Twist Mrs. Maylie and Rose move Oliver to the countryside with them after the attempted

burglary at Chertsey leaves him wounded and near death:

The memories which peaceful country scenes call up, are not of this world, nor of

its thoughts and hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh

garlands for the graves of those we loved: may purify our thoughts, and bear

down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this, there lingers, in the

least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of having held such

feelings long before, in some remote and distant time, which calls up solemn

thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath

it. (OT, 237)

Perhaps while writing the above passage, Dickens was thinking of Mary Hogarth’s death in his

home one year before. Acceptance of her death with quiet resignation may have required him to

call up childhood scenes of pastoral purity and simplicity, a stream of thought found in the

works of Rousseau, Blake, and Wordsworth as well as his own. In their works a young child

is taken as a symbol not only of imagination and sensibility but of nature itself set against the

industrial expansion that was then transforming society. We must remember here that Dickens

himself enjoyed a happy early childhood amid such pastoral scenes in the countryside of Kent.

The movement away from the city back to the countryside in Oliver Twist amounts to a

return to the past, and is a bridge to the future over the stern realities of the present. Eternal life

lies in the future, spiritual death lurks in the present. The countryside, for Dickens, is the

unifying power that, through imagination, enables him to see inner relationships between “some

remote and distant time” and the “distant times to come”. As David Paroissien has pointed out,

“Wordsworth describes the importance of childhood memory and the mind’s ability to use the

past as a source of spiritual well-being.”20 Dickens uses childhood memories to unite past to

future over the chasm of “this world” in such a paradoxical way that the very future which

brings us death may also obliterate it.

What makes Dickens’s mind so remarkable is that he is able to perceive almost

everything from two opposite points of view. He seems to understand that the concept of the

sublime is likewise dependent upon the dangers inherent in the countryside. In Our Mutual

Friend, for example, Eugene Wrayburn is viciously attacked by Bradley Headstone in a village

where “one might watch the ever-widening beauty of the landscape” (OMF, 689), while Lizzie

Hexam, ironically, has left London on his account. In the countryside there is more than meets

the eye. As a metaphor for the past its mystery is solved by opening it to the rational gaze of the

present. Conan Doyle presents the English countryside as sinister in “The Copper Beeches”

(1892). Sherlock Holmes declares to the astonished Watson that “the lowest and vilest alleys in

London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful

countryside.” Holmes sees the countryside as threatening because he knows it lies beyond “the

whole machinery of justice”,21 the urban surveillance and control that he himself embodies,

compared to the unseen watcher in the central tower of the Benthamic Panopticon.

VIII

Dickens uses the earliest memories of characters to transcend approaching death; the

past and the future are united over the abyss of the present. Death might not be accepted

without the idea of human life as a circle: the next life must be taken as the beginning of eternal

life. Returning to the past is associated with a new life. Rochester, in Kent, which is located

next to the Chatham of Dickens’s early childhood, is the model for the cathedral town of

Cloisterham where much of the action of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) takes place. In

Chatham, writes John Forster, “the most durable of his early impressions were received; and

the associations that were around him when he died were those which at the outset of his life

had affected him most strongly.”22 Dickens’s description of Christmas Eve in Cloisterham

supplies us with a psychological picture of those in their “dying hours” afar off who once were

Cloisterham children:

. . . they have imagined their chamber-floor to be strewn with the autumnal leaves

fallen from the elm-trees in the Close: so have the rustling sounds and fresh

scents of their earliest impressions revived when the circle of their lives was

nearly traced, and the beginning and the end were drawing close together. (MED,

154)

Christmas Eve is that time of year when “the end” of the dying year and “the beginning” of the

new one meet; it is a metaphor for the “dying hours”, the point where birth and death meet.

Although the London of his youth and adulthood is the locus of much of his fiction, he returns

to the countryside of his childhood for his swan song. After his last public reading on March

15, 1870, he disappeared from public view to apply what remained of his energy to the swan

song. His preference for the countryside of his childhood may have much to do with the

awareness, conscious or otherwise, of his own approaching end. His earliest memories help

him to trace in his mind, beyond death’s grasp, “the circle of [his life]”.

To people who believe in Christ death is not “the end” of all but “the beginning” of

eternal life. Sydney Carton’s sacrifice of himself in A Tale of Two Cities must be read in the

light of this belief. In the following dialogue between Carton and Jarvis Lorry, whose days on

earth are drawing to their close, the younger man asks the older whether his childhood seems

far off:

‘Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and

closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It

seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is

touched now, by many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty

young mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when what

we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in

me.’ (TTC, 295)

Lorry’s answer is an important preliminary to the frequent recurrence to Carton of Christ’s

words: “I am the resurrection and the life”. Reversion to infancy facilitates the ideological

replacement of death with eternal life. The reversion is justified by the idea of human life as a

circle - the idea of the cyclical recurrence of the seasons in nature as well as in the calendar. It is

one of the human mind’s rational attempts to cope with the great mystery.

Carton is portrayed as reticent, secretive, and mysterious throughout the novel.

Thematically related to human psychology and structurally to concealed plots, “secret and

mystery” (TTC, 10) are always binding forces in Dickens’s fiction. Still, after his Christmas

Books, they come to have much to do with wrongs and sufferings in the past. Many characters

recover from their traumatic memories by uncovering their secret pasts or by sharing them with

someone else. Carton’s silence, however, is the result of his suppression of painful memories.

What, then, really causes him to sacrifice himself for Lucie and Charles Darnay? Lucie entreats

her husband to understand Carton and “to believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom

reveals, and that there are deep wounds in it” (TTC, 198). Enough is told through Dickens’s

strategies of silence to assure the reader that no one but Lucie can fathom the secrecy and

mystery of Carton’s heart. These strategies make us feel, without being told, that she can enter

into his feelings without direct communication. Their communication is of the kind which no

third person could possibly understand. Dickens aims to show us this communication by

means of silence rather than through the senses. Their communication is the silent

communication of heart speaking to heart, and as such it provides the most likely explanation

for his decision to accept as his own the death sentence meted out to Darnay. However, it is not

until Carton’s dormant memories are returned to life by the influence of Lucie that a momentous

change is wrought in his mind. He heroically gives up his life to “hold sacred the one good

remembrance . . . that [his] name, and faults, and miseries were gently carried in [her] heart”

(TTC, 145). This is a kind of everlasting life to Carton.

Significantly, Mr. Stryver, whose success is due to Carton’s secret labours, calls him

“Memory” (TTC, 81). “Memory Carton”, Dickens’s phrase, draws attention to the importance

of remembering; he included it in a list of possible titles for A Tale of Two Cities. This attaches

peculiar significance to Carton’s letter. At the denouement Carton orders Darnay to write a

letter to Lucie from him, and dictates it to him in the prison cell: “If you remember . . . the

words that passed between us, long ago, you will readily comprehend this when you see it.

You do remember them, I know. It is not in your nature to forget them” (TTC, 334). Andrew

Sanders notes that “Darnay’s letter is never finished, though the few words he has written will,

we presume, hold meaning for him in the unknown future which Carton will not share.”23 The

words carry more meaning to Lucie than Darnay can presently grasp. The letter is unfinished

and has no sender’s name on it, but Lucie can divine its intent and content; she has made a tacit

agreement with Carton. Carton’s love and his metaphysical silence, transcending time and

space, will be translated by Lucie with the code she shares with him.24 Dickens has connected

the power of memory to “the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate”

(TTC, 350). Memory is a source of love and affection for the future. All we have to do, in the

end, is recollect Estella’s warning to Pip: “‘You must know . . . that I have no heart, if that has

anything to do with my memory”’ (GE, 224).

NOTES

1 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (1872-4; London: J. M. Dent & Sons,

1966) I, 23.2 Ibid., I, 25.3 All quotations are taken from the Oxford Illustrated Dickens edition (London: Oxford

University Press). All further references by page number are to this edition and will be

incorporated into the text.4 It is structurally significant that Dickens describes the Memorial of Mr. Dick in the

chapter in which David finishes writing about his boyhood trauma. Mr. Dick was saved by

Betsey Trotwood from the lunatic asylum to which his brother would have sent him. He

continually begins the construction of the Memorial in order to get over his trauma, but can

never forget the fact that King Charles the First lost his head. The Memorial is, as it were, an

autobiography of Mr. Dick, though he never speaks of his incarceration without having to have

recourse to the simile of King Charles the First: “‘the recollection of it is oppressive to him even

now’” (DC, 204), explains Betsey to David. Malcolm J. Woodfield appreciates the narra-

tological significance of Mr. Dick’s Memorial, but fails to read anything parodic in it: “David’s

suspicion of the reliability of Mr. Dick is the source of David’s authority, it is what makes him

the reliable narrator” (Malcolm J. Woodfield, “The Endless Memorial: Dickens and Memory/

Writing/History.” Dickens Studies Annual [New York: AMS, 1991] XX, 84), but a similarity

in the names Dickens and Mr. Dick seems to parody the text of David the narrator. David

himself refers to the text as “my written memory” (DC, 690, 817). There are a great number of

passages which describe David as a person of retentive memory. Poor memory would certainly

make him an unreliable narrator. For example, the helplessness of David’s mother against his

father-in-law Murdstone comes to be more and more vaguely described, until it is as soon out

of his memory as it is beautified by her death. This is why the fate of King Charles the First,

which prevents Mr. Dick from proceeding to write the Memorial, could be regarded as a parody

of those unpleasant memories which the narrator has repressed in writing the text. We must

wait for Pip as narrator to face up to most of his bitter memories.5 Alan Shelston points out the significance of the year 1850 when “quite coincidentally,

the two long and very great poems of memory in English were published” (Alan Shelston,

“Thomas Hardy and the Literature of Memory.” The Thomas Hardy Journal [1996] 46). They

are Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. The Prelude seems more

important in reference to David Copperfield, in that it is a poetic autobiographical account of

the ‘growth of a poet’s mind’. The poet is characterising himself by using both his abilities of

memory and imagination. The selective recollection and the evaluation of facts are employed to

exemplify what the poet imagines himself to have been; he asserts that, for him, the

remembered facts and their imagined and asserted significance are inseparable. It is the

mother’s presence that, by a type of induction, arouses the feelings of the infant - a presence

communicated by touch as well as by sight. Her presence validates the infant’s feelings,

endowing them with strength and power “in all sentiments of grief, / Of exultation, fear and

joy” (William Wordsworth, The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind, ed. Ernest de

Selincourt [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959] 58). The question then arises as to how the

registry of the self is to be elaborated, when memory provides only a partial and perhaps faulty

record, and when language itself is continually on the point of betraying Dickens’s purpose.

6 F. W. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,

trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973) 72.7 Of all the senses, according to cognitive psychology, olfactory and gustatory senses

have the greater power of calling up memories. When Pip suggests to Biddy in Great

Expectations (1860-1) that she should educate Joe better for a rise in station, she is quietly

incensed: “Biddy having rubbed the leaf to pieces between her hands - and the smell of a black-

currant bush has ever since recalled to me that evening in the little garden by the side of the lane

- said, ‘Have you never considered that he may be proud?’” (GE, 141) Dickens attaches more

value to the effects of certain smells and their ability to communicate and alter memories than he

does to the misleading visual sensation. The sense of smell is used here to underline the

reliability of a discerning eye which Biddy has for things as they are. The sense of taste

reminds us of the involuntary recall of a childhood memory that Marcel Proust experienced in

January 1909 when he tasted a rusk dipped in tea. It is described as a madeleine in the first

volume “Du côté de chez Swann” (Swann’s Way) of A la recherche du temps perdu

(Remembrance of Things Past, 1913), a book where Proust attempted the perfect rendering of

life through art, of the past re-created through memory. By a curious coincidence Proust was

related by marriage to Henri Bergson, the philosopher of ‘creative time’. The term creative time

aptly describes the psychological time which Proust explores, seeks, and recovers. Bergson’s

influence on Proust makes his philosophy important for 20th-century literature. Matter and

Memory (1911) contains a detailed consideration of the problem of aphasia, leading to a

profound study of the means, namely through memory, by which existence is made

continuous. Bergson presented reality in its durational aspect, whereas Spinoza had presented

it in its eternal aspect. He substituted “I am a thing which continues” for the phrase of

Descartes, “I am a thing which thinks”. The Bergsonian cogito defines memory as the

colligation of the past and the present that are oriented toward the future. This is a new meaning

that Bergson has assigned to the term memory. For him memory is not a specified faculty to

repeat or to reproduce the past in the present, but it is consciousness itself as creative duration:

“the recording, by memory, of facts and images unique in their kind takes place at every

moment of duration” (Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and

W. Scott Palmer [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919] 94).

8 Sigmund Freud, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness” (1898). The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey

(London: The Hogarth Press, 1981) III, 289-97.9 Mildred Newcomb, The Imagined World of Charles Dickens (Columbus: Ohio State

University Press) 173.10 Miss Flite is a crazy old woman but displays brilliance in a specific area related to

memory skills; she is able to recite all the names of twenty five small birds she keeps in cages.

It is the more symbolically significant that the name of the thirteenth bird, standing in their

centre, is “Madness” (BH, 819), because they represent those who are mentally imprisoned in

the Chancery Court. Although Allan Woodcourt describes Miss Flite’s madness as caused by

her traumatic experience of death in her house, the most likely explanation, perhaps, is that the

cause is the loss of memory brought on by her obsession with the Chancery Court: “‘But my

memory has been drawn out of me, with everything else, by what I mentioned. Ve-ry strong

influence, is it not?’” (BH, 500)11 Nalalie McKnight, Idiots, Madmen, and Other Prisoners in Dickens (New York:

St. Martin’s Press, 1993) 69.12 Graham Storey and K. J. Fielding, eds. The Letters of Charles Dickens (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1981) V, 443.13 Diane Elam, “‘Another day done and I’m deeper in debt’: Little Dorrit and the debt

of the everyday.” Dickens Refigured: Bodies, Desires and Other Histories, ed. John Schad

(Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1996) 170. The notion of the uncanny or

unheimlich (literally un-homely) was originally explored by Freud as a response to a particular

feeling of disturbance. Freud argues that liminality remains an important characteristic of the

uncanny. This liminality destroys the clear distinction between the apparent opposites of

heimlich and unheimlich (literally homely and un-homely), thereby exacerbating an anxiety

associated with a loss of control of the self. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919).

Standard Edition, XVII, 219-52.14 Harry Stone, The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity

(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994) 467-8.15 John R. Reed, Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness (Athens:

Ohio University Press, 1995) 260.

16 Harry Stone, Dickens and the Invisible World (London: Macmillan, 1979) 299. G.

R. Stange also makes a comment to the same effect: “While he is held by the convict, Pip sees

his world upside down; in the course of Dickens’ fable the reader is invited to try the same way.

This particular change of viewpoint is an ancient device of irony, but an excellent one: Dickens’

satire asks us to try reversing the accepted senses of innocence and guilt, success and failure, to

think of the world’s goods as the world’s evils.” G. R. Stange, “Expectations Well Lost:

Dickens’ Fable for His Time (1954).” The Dickens Critics, ed. G. H. Ford and Lauriat Lane,

Jr. (New York: Cornell University Press, 1961) 297.

17 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass,

The World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) 245.18 Maurice Cornelis Escher, The Graphic Work of M. C. Escher (London: Oldbourne

Press, 1961) 35.19 Schwarzbach regards the palindromic name Pip as “mirroring the journey of his life

which begins and ends in the same place”. F. S. Schwarzbach, Dickens and the City

(London: The Athlone Press, 1979) 193.20 David Paroissien, The Companion to Oliver Twist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 1992) 209.21 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Copper Beeches.” The Penguin Complete Sherlock

Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988) 323.22 Forster, op. cit., I, 4.23 Andrew Sanders, Introduction to A Tale of Two Cities. The World’s Classics

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) vii.24 Carton’s silent love will keep his memory green for Lucie; the silence will keep its

meaning there to all eternity. “Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity” (Thomas Carlyle,

Sartor Resartus and Lectures on Heroes [London: Chapman and Hall, n.d.] 134), as Thomas

Carlyle, Dickens’s mentor, puts it. Dickens’s intention of conveying such a religious vision is

never embodied in Carton’s speech; it is clarified by his silence.