MEMORY 59is ever present to me, ever fresh and new to me” (4.642). In other letters of
the mid-1840s good experiences “blot out” or “drown” the recollection of
unpleasant ones (4.280; 4.664). Perhaps the most stunning example of Dick-
ens’s will to erasure may be found in a later letter of February 1864, in which
Dickens responds to Angela Burdett-Coutts’s suggestion that the death of his
son Walter might bring him into greater sympathy with his wife Catherine
Dickens, from whom he had separated six years earlier. Dickens denied that
emotional connection of any kind was possible, insisting “that a page in my
life which once had writing on it, has become absolutely blank, and that it
is not in my power to pretend that it has a solitary word upon it” (10.356).
The strange writing metaphor implies that a part of the mind over which he
has no control had written his marital page in disappearing ink.
Time traveling, or making the past present, was another persistent trick in
Dickens’s negotiations with his own history. Confronted with a voice from
the past, Dickens sometimes liked to pretend that the intervening years had
vanished. When at forty he writes to George Beadnell, the father of his first
love Maria, he sends love to the Beadnell daughters, noting, “I am exactly 19,
when I write their names” (6.660). In a similar vein, he writes to his former
Chatham schoolmaster, the Rev. William Giles, in October 1848, “I half
believe I am a very small boy again; and you magnify, in my bewildered sight,
into something awful, though not at all severe. I call to mind how you gave
me Goldsmith’s Bee when I left Chatham (that was my first knowledge of
it) and can’t believe that I have been fledging any little Bees myself, whose
buzzing has been heard abroad.” Such time traveling connects his Chatham
childhood directly with his literary success, eliding the years between. It is
also a way to cover his current domestic frustration with epistolary charm:
“—As to Mrs. Charles Dickens, there is manifestly no such person—It is
my mother, of course, who desires to be cordially remembered to yourself ”
(5.432–33). Pretending that he is still a child living with his parents allows
him to eliminate his wife for the space of a sentence; his invocation of cordial
memory covers a powerful desire to forget the present.
In Dickens’s correspondence, autobiographical writing of one sort or
another was usually triggered either by moments when he was compelled to
defend himself from what he perceived as attack, or by incidents in which
the stresses of daily life could be transformed by writing himself up as a sort
of third-person comic hero called the Inimitable, the Sparkler, or Dick. The
comic mode provides much of the energetic charm in the letters, whether
Dickens is describing himself as a lurching body on board an Atlantic steamer,
or as an anxious householder fretting about repairs to the drainage system at
Gad’s Hill. The idea of autobiography itself was, however, always a troubled