MEMORY 73that the claim is not literally true: his parents did provide young Dickens
with lodging, clothes, and family company. In the very next sentence, in
fact, Dickens restores his social status and tells us that he was treated differ-
ently from the other working boys, as a “young gentleman.” The hyperbolic
assertion of neglect is a kind of figuration that bears witness to the crisis of
interpretation displayed in the rhetorical oscillations of the fragment. Dick-
ens remembers himself among working boys, connected, observant, skillful
at his work. The passages of outrage deny the connection, swearing that the
whole experience was one of internal dissociation. The wound speaks, per-
haps, in the veering between. Dickens transforms himself, as he transformed
the Ragged School children, into a specter of uncouth crime, a little robber
or vagabond. His concrete memories of association engender violent asser-
tions of dissociation, both from his working-class companions and from the
parents who put him into their company.
The sense of flailing frustration in these rhetorically over-controlled pas-
sages shows the adult in an active replay of the baffled child’s suffering. But
I think it also arises from the unsatisfying and ultimately meaningless end of
the story. Dickens does not know why he was released from Warren’s when
he was. His father had left the prison after three months, but apparently
expected his son to go on working. When it finally came, the release felt
accidental; Dickens speculates that it might have followed from his father
seeing him at work in the warehouse window, or perhaps from an argument
between family members that remained obscure. “With a relief so strange
that it was like oppression, I went home,” he writes in a moment of nota-
ble emotional accuracy (Forster 35). After that, family silence prevailed; no
apologies or explanations were offered or at least remembered. His repeated
intention to “drop the curtain,” expressed in both the fragment and David
Copperfield, is not just a wish to forget, but a wish for an ending that makes
sense and stays in place. As it was, the memory had, so to speak, no solu-
tion; it muffled both the feelings and the motives of all its chief participants,
presumably generating an endless series of attempts to transform it into a
narratable story. So it was that the curtain went on rising year after year, on
newly displaced versions of the drama in which Dickens was free to invent
his own meanings and his own endings.
Fictions of Memory
By the time he came to incorporate fragments of the autobiographical story
into the narrative of David Copperfield, Dickens could afford the lightness of