2 KNOWING DICKENS
genius while bemoaning his inability to treat “the mature emotions.” Once
she focuses on the novel, however, her tune begins to change:
As we listen to Micawber pouring himself forth and venturing per-
petually some new flight of astonishing imagination, we see, unknown
to Mr. Micawber, into the depths of his soul.... Why trouble, then, if
the scenes where emotion and psychology are to be expected fail us
completely? Subtlety and complexity are all there if we know where
to look for them, if we can get over the surprise of finding them—as
seems to us, who have another convention in these matters—in the
wrong places.The “fecundity and apparent irreflectiveness” in such writing work, Woolf
notes, to “make creators of us, and not merely readers and spectators” (1925,
193–94).
Virginia Woolf ’s reflections raise intriguing questions. If, “unknown to
Mr. Micawber,” we can see “into the depths of his soul,” then who is doing
the knowing here? If it is the reader, as Woolf implies, then where does
the reader’s insight come from? Is Mr. Micawber’s unwitting self-revelation
comparable to Dickens’s own, or is the author in charge of it? And, if psy-
chological subtlety and complexity are not to be found in the usual places,
then where might they reside?
The astonishing array of critical work that makes up Dickens studies at
the beginning of the twenty-first century has become ever more attentive to
the revealing and concealing intelligence that lurks somewhere—but where,
exactly?—in Dickens’s writing. This book is my own attempt to capture
something of that knowing Dickens who eludes us. As an interpretive study,
it makes its home in the gap between the chronological imperatives of biog-
raphy and the literary imperatives of criticism, following some representative
clusters of thought and feeling that link Dickens’s ways of talking in letters
with his concerns in fiction and journalism. When I began this project, the
things I wanted to know were similar to those expressed by Virginia Woolf
as she meditated on the unsatisfactory nature of biography and autobiogra-
phy. What are the internal plots this writer carried around throughout his
life, his characteristic patterns of experience, response, and counterresponse?
What internal shapes recur in the various forms of writing and acting that
make up this life? To what extent is it possible for us to know what and how
Dickens knew?
Dickens comes burdened with a long history of critical condescension
that arises from just the “apparent irreflectiveness” that Woolf named and
questioned. Whether in delight, sorrow, or outrage, it has always been easy