WHAT DICKENS KNEW 19the autobiographical fragment in the context of Dickens’s increasing atten-
tion to memory during the 1840s; I suggest there that Warren’s was traumatic
for Dickens in the sense that trauma can be recognized through its afterlife
in consciousness. When he came to record the memories of his blacking days
in 1848, Dickens created a multifaceted metaphor of his being. Each part of
the autobiographical fragment had already been and would again be elabo-
rated, in life and in writing, in one variation after another. That is why it is
impossible to read Dickens without hearing echoes of the autobiographical
memory in many different situations.
One such moment in David Copperfield stands out because it makes a
direct link between Warren’s and the problem of knowledge. After he runs
away from his warehouse work and lands safely at Dr. Strong’s genteel school,
David reports on the lingering anxieties of his early days there. He wor-
ries about what his middle-class schoolmates might think of him if they
knew of his experiences in the lower-class worlds of prisons and pawning;
was there anything about him that would cause them to “find me out”?
Even more troublesome, however, is the fear that they might learn what he
knows: “How would it affect them, who were so innocent of London life,
and London streets, to discover how knowing I was (and was ashamed to be)
in some of the meanest phases of both?” (DC 16). Having the wrong kind
of knowledge is (at least partly) associated with shame; gentility and social
acceptance depend upon hiding both the knowledge and the shame from the
observation of others. Telling without telling that he’s telling, the game Dick-
ens played with his readers throughout his career, rehearses the simultaneous
pride and shame in a knowingness that does not want to speak its name.
To ask the question “What did Dickens know?” is, then, to embark on the
study of an always open, always compelling question, not because Dickens
displayed so uncommon a set of behaviors and defenses, but because of his
extraordinary ability to transform them into writing. Just as he made superb
comedy from the most ordinary situations, he could, pen in hand, make
uncanny representations of the most ordinary feelings. Whether such trans-
formations occur in letters and essays, or in the extended phantasmagoria of
novels, the conscious and unconscious artfulness of Dickens’s self-creation
remains one of the most fascinating aspects of his writing.