1Chapter 1
What Dickens Knew
In April 1939 Virginia Woolf began to write an
experimental memoir that was to be published posthumously as “A Sketch
of the Past.” Just a few pages in, Dickens showed up. Woolf had been specu-
lating about what made her a writer: a capacity to receive sudden shocks
from life, combined with an ability to make the world whole again by find-
ing the words to explain, and so to blunt “the sledge-hammer force of the
blow.” Writing is essential to her for this reason, she muses, yet this internal
necessity “is one of the obscure elements in life that has never been much
discussed. It is left out in almost all biographies and autobiographies, even
of artists. Why did Dickens spend his entire life writing stories? What was
his conception?” (Woolf 1985, 72–73). Woolf ’s instinct was to reach for the
name of a writer who could hardly be more different from herself, a writer
decidedly out of fashion among her Bloomsbury cohort. What, we might
wonder, was her conception? Did she sense some kinship that linked the all-
too-popular Victorian writer with her own modernist art of interiority?
Our only clue lies in Woolf ’s most extended meditation on Dickens, a
brief review of a new edition of David Copperfield published in the Nation
of 22 August 1925. On first reading, the review appears to be a pungent
condensation of critiques that had become familiar ever since the later part
of Dickens’s career, with an added layer of feminist hostility to Dickens
the Victorian man. Like so many others before her, Woolf grants Dickens’s