WHAT DICKENS KNEW 15“Language on the Loose” makes connections between the keen sense of
injury expressed in Dickens’s angry or self-defensive letters and his portraits
of hyperbolic talkers, examining the interplay of hyperbole, parody, and self-
parody in Dickens’s work. “Memory” proposes a split between valorized and
fearful models of memory in Dickens, and follows his many peculiar ways
of setting up negotiations between past and present, particularly during the
autobiographical decade of the 1840s. “Another Man” is a study of triangular
desire, centering on the erotic fascination of identification and rivalry
between men in Dickens’s male friendships and in his fiction. “Manager of
the House” focuses on Dickens through the lens of his intense involvement
with houses: his ordering of family homes, his management of the Home for
Homeless Women, and the fictional houses that became prominent from the
late 1840s to the late 1850s, when Dickens’s managerial activities reached a
peak. “Streets” is concerned with the relationship between Dickens’s writ-
ing and the long-distance walking he found essential, both to his creative
process and as an antidote to his fears of solitude and solitary confine-
ment. Working between public and private writing, between biography and
criticism, I have hoped to develop a picture of Dickens’s mind and art that
emerges from his own connections between the inner world and its exterior
manifestations.
While chronological sequences appear within each chapter, the chapters
themselves do not trace out the course of Dickens’s career from beginning
to end. It has long seemed to me that chronology is the great limitation
of biography, at once the spinal column that holds the story together and
the straitjacket that prevents its freedom of motion. No matter how well
it is concealed by the biographer’s art and analysis, the plot is the same: the
movement from birth to death. Biographer and reader alike are enchanted
and enchained by the necessity of proceeding to the next day, week, or year.
There must be a childhood, a youth, an early and a later adulthood. But the
evidence available differs considerably from one period to another. Par-
ticularly when it comes to the years of childhood, there are many things we
cannot know; stories must nevertheless be told about them. Such necessities
create some of the problems that beset literary biography, along with its first
cousin biographical criticism. The biographer relies on a writer’s retrospec-
tive life writings—letters, diaries, or memory pieces—as if their recollections
were true, when they may have more to reveal about the moment of writing
than about the past to which they refer. The psychodynamics of the writer’s
early family life may be extrapolated from the fictions and built into explana-
tory narratives of formation. Characters may be identified as people the
writer knew, or people identified as models for characters.