66 KNOWING DICKENS
memory, it speaks in powerfully personal ways, its sense of abandonment
audible in the iambic cadence of “a stranger came into my father’s place
when I was yet a child’ (CB 332). The same voice that tells the resentful tale
aloud promises freedom from it, as the temptation of autobiography might
promise exorcism. The condition of that freedom is a kind of publication,
a mysterious diffusion that blights the memory and the moral capacities
of everyone in Redlaw’s life. He does not know exactly how his blighting
power works; like publication, or infection, it spreads beyond his control or
knowledge. The Haunted Man might then be read as an allegory of auto-
biographical anxiety: what uncontrollable damage might result from giving
away ineradicable memories? What would happen to Dickens’s relationship
with his audiences if he revealed his low past, or his personal anger and
shame?
Redlaw’s acceptance of the Phantom’s bargain precipitates the appear-
ance of a monstrous child, a second double figure who follows Redlaw as
his shadow. This beast-like wild child, another of the savage children that
haunted Dickens’s writing during the 1840s, is immune to all fellow feeling,
and cares only about accumulating money and food. He is a recognizably
guilty version of the child in the autobiographical fragment, obsessed with
counting shillings and meals, who “might easily have been, for any care that
was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond” (Forster 28). The wild
child’s only sign of humanity lies in his frantic desire to be near the redemp-
tive woman: maternal love, like money and food, is counted among his basic
deprivations. Enclosed within the story’s allegory, the figure of the wild child
emerges as an acknowledged part of Dickens’s own psyche.
While the Christmas stories venture ever more deeply into memories
of abandonment, their plots struggle to maintain a moralized account of
memory as a benevolent power. In A Christmas Carol, it is relatively simple:
Scrooge’s ability to look upon his abandoned young self in the schoolroom
brings self-pity; self-pity brings tears, awakening feeling; feeling leads to
sympathy for others. Five years later, in The Haunted Man, memory is a curse,
and brings with it a powerful desire to forget. Redlaw accepts the Phantom’s
Faustian bargain to destroy painful memories, including “the inter-twisted
chain of feelings and associations, each in its turn dependent on, and nour-
ished by, the banished recollections” (CB 335). When Redlaw finds that he
has the power to destroy memory in every person he encounters, the results
are predictably chaotic: as failures of memory lead directly to failures of sym-
pathy, all bonds of love and friendship are threatened. A good deal of highly
sentimental plot machinery goes into action to cover up the damage. The
moral of the story is that one must live with those enchained associations of