MEMORY 57past. It is often said that Dickens uses memory in a regressive way, in the
form of a yearning for innocent pastoral childhood or a bachelor world of
male camaraderie. Dickens’s habit of conflating past and present, and other
instances of suspended temporality in his writing, have been noticed in a
variety of critical contexts. I want to redirect these observations by positing
a complex fracture between Dickens’s valorized idea of memory and the
unwilled, negatively inflected recollections that return again and again to
shape his work.
This distinction between memory and remembering makes it possible to
revisit Dickens’s most famous recollection, the autobiographical fragment
narrating the story of his employment as a twelve-year-old child worker in a
blacking warehouse during and after his father’s three-month incarceration
for debt. My interest lies primarily in the autobiographical fragment as a
piece of writing shaped by the particular contexts of the 1840s and finally set
down by the thirty-six-year-old novelist, probably during the late months of
- Yet the actual context of this document extends from the beginning to
the end of Dickens’s career. The memory Dickens wrote for Forster is indeed
a “fragment,” not of an uncompleted memoir, but of a lifetime writing proj-
ect that included fictional portraits of traumatized children, doubts and fears
about the act of autobiographical telling, evocative memory-writing, and a
series of novels that turn on differences between resentful remembering and
strategic forgetting.
The Dangers of Autobiography
Dickens took pride in the accuracy of his visual and verbal memories, and
cultivated them rigorously. As Peter Ackroyd tells us, he would give long
speeches without notes by mentally organizing his topics as if they were the
spokes of a wheel; as he finished each section he would mentally flick away
its imaginary spoke (423). Dickens’s letters also make it clear that he had
absorbed current theories of memory, both through his reading and through
his close association with Dr. John Elliotson, whom he met in 1838, and
from whom he learned theories of mind and the practice of mesmerism. He
was quite aware of the distinction between spontaneously occurring memory
and willed recollection, established by the philosopher Dugald Stewart in
- In the 1840s psycho-physiological work on memory and amnesia had
not yet brought the distortions and erasures of memory to center stage.
However, as Jenny Bourne Taylor explains, debates about double conscious-
ness and its shaping of the self were well underway in the early part of the