55Chapter 3
Memory
In Dickens’s first fantasies about editing the
periodical that was to become Household Words, he imagined a collective nar-
ratorial presence called “the SHADOW,” calling it “a kind of semi-omniscient,
omnipresent, intangible creature.” He elaborated his idea in a letter of Octo-
ber 1849 to John Forster, after completing the sixth number of David Cop-
perfield, in which David tries to forget the dark knowledge of his child-
hood sufferings, and becomes “A New Boy in More Senses Than One”
(DC 16). The capitalized and personified Shadow adumbrated in the pages
of Dickens’s letter is a very odd creature indeed. Despite its ominous name,
it is, Dickens claims, “a cheerful, useful, and always welcome Shadow.” Then
again, it is a “Thing” that clings and won’t let go: “the Thing at everybody’s
elbow, and in everybody’s footsteps. At the window, by the fire, in the street,
in the house, from infancy to old age, everybody’s inseparable companion”
(5.622–23). Omnipresent, then, both spatially and temporally, this Shadow-
Thing emerges hot from Dickens’s inner life at the moment when he has
figuratively pulled the curtain on Copperfield’s painful past. His insistence
on its cheerful and companionable qualities reads as a willful desire to wrest
new narrative life from the stubborn persistence of old grief.
Forster immediately saw the murkiness in his friend’s idea, and the Shadow
was banished from the prospective title page of the new journal. It quickly
turned up again in a new guise, as Shadows tend to do. Once Household Words