MEMORY 63alone in dark mines, and the testimonies of uneducated young voices led on
by questions from grand commissioners may have touched him painfully,
perhaps in ways he did not fully understand. He announced to Forster, dur-
ing a trip to Scotland in the summer of 1841, that he had “made solemn
pledges to write about mining children in the Edinburgh Review, and will do
my best to keep them” (2.317); his phrasing suggests both duty and doubt.
Over the course of the next year Dickens wrote three times to the Review’s
editor Macvey Napier, requesting delays and finally suggesting in July 1842
that “our subject was too stale” (3.288–89). The Edinburgh Review was not
Dickens’s sort of periodical; clearly he was both tempted by and resistant
to a higher class of journalism than he normally practiced. But the greater
resistance was lifelong: Dickens simply did not write about children who
worked—as he had done—in nondomestic jobs for regular wages. (The
exception is of course chapter eleven of David Copperfield, partly transcribed
from the autobiographical fragment). In fact, when it came to wage-earning
children, he discovered he was not a protectionist at all. When he responded
to the second Commission report on 1 February 1843, he wrote to South-
wood Smith that, while he saw the need for a “mighty change,” he could not
“reconcile it to myself to reduce the earnings of any family—their means of
existence being now so very scant and spare” (3.436). His anti-protectionist
stance may have served to protect his own memory against the shame of his
childhood employment, by constructing the family past as a story of eco-
nomic necessity.
It is also quite likely that the public exposures of child exploitation acti-
vated Dickens’s own deeply held secret in a way that led him both to asso-
ciate himself with and to dissociate himself from the uneducated mass of
working-class children whose stories were coming to light. How could
his most painful memories compete with such unendingly downtrodden
lives? Leaving that difficult problem aside, Dickens turned instead to cham-
pion the Ragged School Movement. Early in March 1843, he had promised
Southwood Smith a cheap pamphlet, an “appeal to the People of England,
on behalf of the Poor Man’s child.” Four days later he withdrew the promise,
alluding to some other form of writing in which “you will certainly feel
that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force—twenty
thousand times the force—I could exert by following out my first idea”
(3.459; 3.461). A long critical tradition supposes that the blow was struck in
A Christmas Carol and The Chimes, published in 1843 and 1844. But neither
story is about children who work, and the child-figures of Ignorance and
Want, who appear at the end of Stave Three of the Carol, are the nightmare
fantasies who replaced child workers in Dickens’s imagination. They are