12 KNOWING DICKENS
retreat: “She tells me that she has seen a Shadow for an instant—the Shadow
of the Bad Shadow—passing in a great hurry; escaping observation; hanging
its head; and nearly worn away” (4.323). Dickens “knew” somehow that he
had intertwined Mme de la Rue’s Shadow with his own; he told her husband
that he had woken up in “a state of indescribable horror and emotion” one
night, that he thought about his patient both in waking and in sleep, and
that he had “a sense of her being somehow a part of me” (4.264). The full
extent of the mutual transference between the two participants in this bizarre
episode can only be imagined.
When, in the autumn of 1848, Dickens wrote a story about a ghost Dop-
pelgänger who holds the power to erase the troubled memory of his dou-
ble, he recurred to his mesmeric experiments, while registering some doubt
about their effects. The Haunted Man, like its predecessor A Christmas Carol,
personifies its hero’s submerged fears and resentments in the form of ghostly
figures that bring his interior tortures to light, at the cost of spreading moral
chaos to everyone he knows. Although such tales mix psychological probing
with optimistic moralized plotting, they attest to Dickens’s interest in a kind
of interior knowledge that flies under the radar for psychological realism.
He was quite clear about what he was doing. In a letter of January 1849 to
George Howard, the earl of Carlisle, he defended the atmospheric opening
of The Haunted Man: “the heaping up of that quantity of shadows, I hold
to be absolutely necessary, as a preparation to the appearance of the dark
shadow of the Chemist. People will take anything for granted, in the Ara-
bian Nights or the Persian Tales, but they won’t walk out of Oxford Street,
or the Market place of a county town, directly into the presence of a Phan-
tom, albeit an allegorical one” (5.466–67). Realities played second fiddle to
fictional effects, but the effects stood for inner realities in allegorical fashion.
An often-repeated formula about the construction of ghost stories is built
on a similar wish to naturalize the meaning of literary ghosts. One version
appears in the review of Catherine Crowe’s book; another in an 1859 letter
to a fellow writer, William Howitt, who was involved with the spiritualist
movement: “I have not yet met with any Ghost Story that was proved to me,
or that had not the noticeable peculiarity in it—that the alteration of some
slight circumstance would bring it within the range of common natural
probabilities” (9.116). Presumably the formula included his own ghost tales:
as allegories, his Phantoms were clearly exterior embodiments of common
and naturally occurring aspects of the inner life.
The idea of allegory also helped Dickens when it came to thinking about
dreams. His ideas about dreams, along with other sensations along the con-
tinuum of waking and sleeping states, were certainly stimulated by Robert