70 KNOWING DICKENS
recognize the instability of the account that Forster organized and edited
for his own purposes after Dickens’s death. I will work only with the mate-
rial that Forster puts in direct quotation, but it’s worth noting that Forster
sometimes calls attention to “blanks” in the written narrative, and tries to fill
them in. The very form of the fragment may attest to a failure of sequential
storytelling, and thus to an eternally present experience that would resist
integration with a full-life narrative.
As he renders the minute details of places, eating houses, food shops, and
shillings, Dickens frequently draws attention to the act of memory. The rat-
ridden warehouse and its dirt and decay “rise up visibly before me, as though
I were there again.” He can’t quite recall whether he earned six or seven shil-
lings a week, but decides, since both numbers are in his head, that it was first
one and then the other (Forster 25). He locates the two pudding-shops and
the three coffee-shops he frequented by their street addresses as well as by
other distinguishing details. Of one coffee-house he can “only recollect that it
stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass-plate, with
COFFEE-ROOM painted on it, addressed toward the street.” When he’s now in a
coffee-room with the same inscription, the present narrator says, “a shock goes
through my blood,” and he recalls the “dismal reverie” of the child inside the
coffee-room reading the word “backward on the wrong side” (Forster 28). The
shock might be read as a shock of fright at the identity of this adult and that
child, stuck on the wrong side of the glass. At the same time it’s the verifying
shock of truth. In this kind of writing, Dickens is clearly enjoying the oppor-
tunity to remember; he is also determined to persuade himself and his reader
that the incident happened exactly the way he tells it. He succeeded brilliantly:
these details form the “factual” basis of every subsequent biographical account.
When Dickens tells us that certain shops—and the warehouse itself—are pres-
ently razed or gone, he only adds to the apparent authenticity of the evidence.
So does his capacity for ironic humor, which does not desert him even in
moments of pathos. For example, he describes pretending to co-worker Bob
Fagin that a house far from the prison is his home: “As a finishing piece of
reality,” he jokes, he rings the bell and asks “if that was Mr Robert Fagin’s
house” (Forster 30). In these sections humor and observation blend lightly with
the adult narrator’s message: all of this happened too soon; a child should not
have to attend so early to details of food, or money, or shame.
In the scenes of specular encounter, Dickens complicates the relation between
the adult narrator and the child: the staged child, and those who look at him in
the past, become objects of the narrator’s present gaze. Eating-houses in partic-
ular are theaters for the display of the child-as-spectacle. When the child goes
into “the best dining-room in Johnson’s alamode beef house,” the narrator