WHAT DICKENS KNEW 13Macnish’s The Philosophy of Sleep (1830), but Dickens was always keen to test
theoretical formulations against his personal experience. Recounting dreams
and hearing others’ dreams never failed to arouse his curiosity. After the
death of his young sister-in-law Mary Hogarth he dreamed of her every
night until he broke the spell by telling his wife about it, he reported to his
mother-in-law in May 1843 (3.483–84). A year and a half later he wrote to
Forster from Italy with a sentence-by-sentence account of a dream dialogue
he had held with a female figure he “knew” to be Mary’s spirit. Working
with the theory that dreams are made up of fragments retained from actual
recent experience, he attempted to list its immediate sources, only to find
them inadequate: “And yet, for all this, put the case of that wish being ful-
filled by any agency in which I had no hand; and I wonder whether I should
regard it as a dream, or an actual Vision!” The wish he referred to was a desire
to know “what the face was like” in a religious picture that had been removed
from a Roman Catholic altar in his bedroom (4.496–97). In his knowing
but unknowing fashion, he had stumbled close upon the idea of dreams as
wish fulfillments, by the way attesting to an attraction for the Mariolatry of
the very Catholicism he took pains to protest in his waking life. In Dickens’s
novels, characters’ dreams similarly express wishes or feelings that are rigor-
ously suppressed in their conscious self-representations.
By 1851 Dickens had developed a full critique of the standard “scien-
tific” dream theories of his time: that dreams reflect recent impressions or
respond to bodily states during sleep and that they reflect the moral char-
acter of the dreamer. His ideas were summarized in a remarkable letter of
2 February 1851, written in response to Dr. Thomas Stone’s submission of
an article on dreams for Household Words (6.276–79). His dreams and those
of others were more likely to take place in the distant past, Dickens claimed,
and “I should say the chances were a thousand to one against anybody’s
dreaming of the subject closely occupying the waking mind—except—and
this I wish particularly to suggest to you—in a sort of allegorical manner.”
Here he gave an example: if he has been perplexed in his writing during
the day he might dream of other frustrating situations like trying to shut a
door that will not close, or driving a horse that turns into a dog and can’t be
driven. “I sometimes think,” he concludes, “that the origin of all fable and
Allegory—the very first conception of such fictions—may be referable to
this class of dreams.”
If, as some critics have suggested, Dickens’s narratives bear some relation
to the action of dreams, they did not arise in a mind unconscious of what
it was doing. On the contrary, it would seem that Dickens had learned a
great deal from watching his own dreams: he recognized, for example, that