56 KNOWING DICKENS
was launched, Dickens invited Charles Knight to write a series of papers
entitled “Shadows,” which treated early English letter-writers and memoir-
ists whose manuscripts had been published in the nineteenth century. Knight
began with the memoirs of Lucy Hutchinson and went on to the letters of
Margery Paston. On receiving the second paper, Dickens intervened, urg-
ing Knight to use the present tense rather than the past. “I understand each
phase of the thing to be always a thing present, before the mind’s eye—a shadow
passing before it. Whatever is done, must be doing. Is it not so?”(6.446). The
shadow appears this time in a more recognizable shape, as a visual image cast
by the imagination, or a shape projected by a magic lantern. Yet it retains the
omnipresence of the earlier image, along with its refusal to go away: what
is done, completed, must be doing, its action ongoing. Knight’s project, as
Dickens saw it, was to bring back a long-dead life history that had been hid-
den in various forms of autobiographical writing. As Dickens had done in
the markedly retrospective sections of David Copperfield, Knight was to pre-
serve his subjects by memorializing them in the present tense. At this point
editorial advice begins to shade into a theory of autobiography:
For example. If I did the Shadow of Robinson Crusoe, I should not
say he was a boy at Hull... but he is a boy at Hull—there he is, in
that particular Shadow, eternally a boy at Hull—his life to me is a
series of Shadows, but there is no ‘was’ in the case. If I choose to go
to his manhood, I can. If I choose to go to his boyhood, I can. These
shadows dont change as realities do. No phase of his existence passes
away, if I choose to bring it to this unsubstantial and delightful life, the
only death of which, to me, is my death—and then he is immortal to
unnumbered thousands. (6.446–47)This is not just an instance of Dickens’s desire for immortality through
the “unsubstantial and delightful life” of writing. His insistence that “there
is no ‘was’ in the case” asserts that boyhood and manhood exist simultane-
ously and eternally in Shadows that are always accessible by choice. Shad-
ows, then, are memories eternalized by writing; at the same time the passage
suggests a reluctance to admit either loss or change. To be “eternally a boy
at Hull”—or, in Dickens’s case, eternally a boy at Chatham—is to freeze
time at a moment before chaos strikes: before Robinson Crusoe goes on his
disastrous voyage, before Charles Dickens goes to London and works in a
blacking factory. The boy and the man coexist; how the boy becomes the
man is elided.
I have begun with these letters of 1849 and 1851 because they are so
suggestive about complications in Dickens’s ideas about memory and the