WHAT DICKENS KNEW 7Freud’s idea of the uncanny as a return of repressed but intimately familiar
material is something Dickens knew, not in theoretical terms of course, but in
experiential ones. He was, as Kate Flint has put it, an explorer of “the inces-
sant interaction between the conscious and the unconscious mind,” fasci-
nated “with the blurred ground between the inner and the outer self ” (Flint
34, 39). Such descriptions are most often generated by Dickens’s middle and
later work, and it is true that he grew increasingly capable of writing in a
recognizably psychological way. But surely there is something to be said for
the understanding of a young novelist who reports that Mr. Pickwick must
fall asleep rather than absorb the contents of morbid interpolated tales about
intra-familial suffering and violence.
Dickens’s minimal formal education complicated his relation with con-
ventionally defined knowledge. As a child he was a voracious reader. For
about two years between the ages of ten and twelve he had no schooling, and
when he attended the Wellington Academy he got a mediocre training. He
left school at fifteen for a position as solicitor’s clerk, continuing his educa-
tion by reading in the British Museum and faithfully attending London the-
aters. Thereafter he learned from friends and mentors, sometimes developing
interests born from contacts with literary and professional associates. When
he died, he left a library at Gad’s Hill that gives some idea of the range of his
curiosity. He had a substantial collection of English and American literature
from Chaucer through the mid-nineteenth century (though it included very
few works by women; no Austen or Brontë novels, for example). Travels,
voyages, and adventure narratives filled many shelves, as did naval tales and
naval military histories. His two trips to the United States left him with a
large collection of American history and biography. Classical writers and
ancient history had a substantial place. There were many books of natural
history (including Darwin and Lyell), encyclopedias and literary collections,
and anthologies of eccentric characters. There were piles of Blue Books and
pamphlets on contemporary social issues, prison memoirs, and books about
London and its history.
Many of the books were presentation copies, so we cannot be sure of what
Dickens actually read. His range of reference (whether serious or facetious)
suggests a man whose head was always full of sentences gathered from a
wide variety of sources. Among them, in a category I have not yet named,
are over thirty books on the workings of the mind, ranging from contempo-
rary studies in physiological psychology to miscellanies on the spirit world
covering ghosts, apparitions, omens, dreams, daemons, “and other Magical
Practices,” as one early-eighteenth-century title proclaimed. Dickens learned
a good deal from his friend and family physician Dr. John Elliotson, who