58 KNOWING DICKENS
century, and they “focused principally... on patterns of hidden memory
within the individual” (Taylor 2000, 580). Dickens was fascinated by work
on the unconscious reservoir of inaccessible memory traces that might be
called up through the association of ideas. He owned a copy of Robert Mac-
nish’s The Philosophy of Sleep (1830), which emphasized the in-between state
of dreams, and their capacity for “renewing long-forgotten ideas” (Taylor
and Shuttleworth 103). Such fascinations shape many an uncanny fictional
moment, but they cohabit with Dickens’s equally intense desire to employ
memory as a handmaiden of willed and willful consciousness.
In letters written before and during the 1840s, Dickens made no hard and
fast distinction between the terms “memory” and “recollection,” although
he shows a general tendency to “recollect” when he is talking about social
matters like forgetting dates or recalling friends to mind. After his sister-in-
law Mary Hogarth died in 1837, Dickens began to write of memory as a
sacred power; at times he imagines, in letters of condolence to others, that
memory overrides the break between life and death, bringing the affec-
tions of the living and the dead closer than ever. By the late 1840s the idea
of memory is more often linked with the association of ideas, as if Dickens
were growing increasingly interested in the independent process of memory
and its selection of associations. Thus, for example, he writes to his Lausanne
friend W. F. de Cerjat, in 1850: “When I write your name, I have always an
association with that night at Martigny when we walked up and down before
the Inn, smoking Cigars, and our party were singing inside.—You remem-
ber? Why my memory should select that particular time, I don’t know—but
it always does” (6.184). Writing Cerjat’s name triggers a memory endowed
with an unnamed emotion that links the two men in the past, and again in
the present appeal. The point of the pen, Dickens implies, is an important
actor in the associative process.
The letters also reveal Dickens’s repeated articulation of a wish to erase
bad memories or to replace them with good ones. The impulse emerges in
a comically exaggerated apology Dickens wrote in 1839 to one William
Upcott. “As antiquaries do sometimes suffer themselves to be deceived and
take new lamps for old ones,” Dickens wrote, “so I am not without hope that
you will ante-date my apparent neglect and consider it so old as to be quite
beyond the memory of man” (1.623). New memories for old: the plot of
David Copperfield was to enact just such a “deceiving” exchange. Closer to
home, Dickens rather ingenuously proclaimed to his friend Douglas Jerrold
that a bad review “will throw me into a violent fit of anger for the moment,
it is true—but his acts and deeds pass into the death of all bad things next
day, and rot out of my memory. Whereas a generous sympathy like yours,