60 KNOWING DICKENS
one. Dickens’s fear of it may be discerned in a letter of advice he wrote to
his fellow-novelist Elizabeth Gaskell in 1850 about a young ex-prostitute and
thief she was readying for emigration to a new life in Capetown: “Let me
caution you about the Cape. She must be profoundly silent there, as to her
past history, and so must those who take her out... this caution is imperative,
or she will either be miserable or flung back into the gulf whence you have
raised her” (6.29). Dickens was, of course, thinking practically about the girl’s
prospects. But his phrasing and emphasis suggest his identification with the
notion that telling the past is dangerous, not only to the aspirations of the
teller but also to his or her psychological condition.
Like all famous writers, he was harassed by requests for biographical infor-
mation from various quarters, but he rarely provided it. As he wrote to
Wilkie Collins in 1856, “I do not supply such particulars when I am asked
for them by editors and compilers, simply because I am asked for them every
day.” For Collins, he went on to violate his rule, but the emotional effect
of constructing even a brief curriculum vitae emerges at the end of the letter:
“This is the first time I ever set down even these particulars, and, glanc-
ing them over, I feel like a Wild Beast in a Caravan, describing himself in
the keeper’s absence” (8.130–32). The image is resonant in more ways than
one. The absent keeper is presumably Dickens the secret-keeper, the part
of himself who carefully controls the public displays of the circus animal,
Dickens the performer. The sense of guilt and danger suggests as well that
Dickens knew he was lying: the curt summary of his early years rewrites his
childhood, extending the years of schooling and eliding the period of family
debt, bankruptcy, and blacking. He was also wrong when he claimed to be
breaking his rule for the first time, though it would not be altogether surpris-
ing had he forgotten a letter written eighteen years earlier to the German
journalist J. H Kuenzel, which offers a similarly pruned mini-autobiography
(1.423–24). In both accounts, Dickens emphasizes his extraordinary suc-
cess as a parliamentary reporter, his precocity as a child reader, writer, and
actor, and the fact that he was married to the daughter of a man who was a
great friend of Walter Scott. In both cases his autobiographical “particulars”
were destined for publication in foreign-language publications, which may
have mitigated his usual fears of exposure to the class prejudices of English
society.
On the rare occasions when Dickens responded to the curiosity of his
(usually foreign) correspondents, he exudes “manly” pride about his youth-
ful physical condition or about the status he has fairly won through the
independent profession of Literature. Yet despite his deeply determined rule
of reticence, he flirted intermittently with the idea of autobiography, if only