68 KNOWING DICKENS
phantasmagoric fictions served as the prelude to the brief, fragmented set of
autobiographical reminiscences he designed for a private audience of one.
The Autobiographical Fragment
We come, then, to the question of childhood trauma. Was it or wasn’t it? Why
did Dickens remain silent about it for so long—was it social shame, or was he
loyal to the family policy of pretending it hadn’t happened? Does the fully
conscious experience of a twelve-year-old qualify as formative trauma? And
where does the biographical emphasis properly fall: on the moment of a boy’s
psychological development or on the act of writing about it that occurred
more than twenty years later? Can a twentieth- or twenty-first-century critic
make a psychoanalytic diagnosis of a nineteenth-century child? If so, what
were the pubescent child’s dominant emotions: guilt at repressed aggression
against the father, anguish at abandonment by the mother, the confusion
and the heightened sense of being looked at that accompany shame? Was
the fragment itself a deep indulgence in self-pity written by an adult who
was too self-absorbed to recognize the pressures that had acted upon his own
parents? Were those four or five months at Warren’s Blacking—give or take
a number, depending on your critic—really so unusual? Was the fragment a
retrospective reevaluation of the early event as a trauma? Was it a document
written from the pride and stability of his present success, as an explanation
of his aggressive ambition?
These questions constitute a very brief summary of a critical history famil-
iar to students of Dickens. The most recent twist in the tale has been provided
by John Drew, who discovered an advertising jingle for Warren’s Blacking
written by the twenty-year-old Dickens for the True Sun in 1832. “The Turtle
Dove,” as the verse parody is called, tells of a mourning dove who, seeing its
own reflection in the mirror of shiny blacked boots, is deluded into thinking
she has found her true love (Drew, Dickens 18). Drew’s discovery makes it clear
that Dickens had contact with Warren’s well after his release from the ware-
house. Indeed, sly references to poets who wrote for Warren’s Blacking crop
up frequently in Dickens’s early works. “Seven Dials” features a “shabby-genteel
man in a back attic” who, it is rumored, “writes poems for Mr. Warren” (Dent
1.74). Tony Weller’s idea of the “unnat’ral” quality of poetry comes from
reading “Warren’s blackin’ ” poets among others (PP 32). The well-named
Mr. Slum offers, for a mere five shillings, to revise his Warren poem to suit
Mrs. Jarley’s Waxworks (OCS 27). Like the many references to blacking,
blacking bottles, blacking brushes, and highly polished boots that Dickens