MEMORY 61as a way to correct the many inaccurate accounts of his life that found
their ways into journals. Responding to one of these during his 1842 tour
of the United States, Dickens jokes, “If I enter my protest against its being
received as a veracious account of my existence down to the present time, it
is only because I may one of these days be induced to lay violent hands upon
myself—in other words attempt my own life—in which case, the gentleman
unknown, would be quoted as authority against me” (3.61). The image of
autobiography as suicide, emerging as it does from Dickens’s word play, sug-
gests that he was holding the terror and self-division associated with the story
of his life on a comically distanced verbal plane.
From then on, Dickens spoke of autobiography only in connection
with his own death. In November 1846, as he invented Paul Dombey and
Mrs. Pipchin, he confided to Forster that he had been pulled back into
his own childhood. Characteristically, he backdates the Pipchin memory
that properly belonged to his twelve-year-old self: “It is from the life, and
I was there—I don’t suppose I was eight years old.” And then, abruptly, he
swerves toward the prospect of further confession: “Shall I leave you my life
in MS. when I die? There are some things in it that would touch you very
much” (4.653). Since Forster was exactly his own age, there was no reason
for Dickens to assume that he himself would die first. It was simply that
autobiography had to be linked with a posthumous time. Some years later
he twice refused material to the classicist and editor Edward Walford, who
hoped to include his story in a collection of contemporary biographies; one
of his reasons was his plan “to leave my own auto-biography for my child-
rens’ information” (8.200; 8.612). By this time Dickens had given Forster the
narrative describing his father’s imprisonment for debt and his own dark days
as a child factory worker. He may have wished his children to read a version
of that narrative after his death, before Forster published it in his biography.
Or, he may simply have been staving off yet another hungry journalist with
a version of his long-standing formula.
Whether he hid it or idealized it, Dickens’s childhood would always feel
to him like a Shadow that clings and will not be forgotten. No matter how
often he transformed it from a bad memory into a good fiction, it persisted,
repeating itself in a series of ever-ingenious guises. Sometimes it appeared
in the all-too-familiar form of his feckless father, John Dickens. In a letter
of September 1843 to his old family friend and lawyer Thomas Mitton, the
outraged son writes, “Even now, with the knowledge of him which I have
so dearly purchased, I am amazed and confounded by the audacity of his
ingratitude,” and describes his family as exploiters: “He, and all of them, look
upon me as something to be plucked and torn to pieces for their advantage.