76 KNOWING DICKENS
own person would require some way of negotiating with that suppressed
shame; Noggs can do so only by acting to rescue the younger generation
from a similar plight. Smike’s traumatic imprisonment in Ralph Nickelby’s
attic occurs in early childhood; followed by prolonged brutal treatment at
Dotheboys Hall, it leaves his memory damaged beyond repair. When Nicho-
las gently prods him, Smike claims, much like Newman Noggs, that he
once had a good memory, “but it’s all gone now—all gone.... I was always
confused and giddy at that place you took me from; and could never remem-
ber, and sometimes even couldn’t even understand what they said to me.”
When Nicholas draws him back to early childhood, Smike reveals the origi-
nal trauma, the imprisoning, frightening, almost empty room: “when I have
terrible dreams, it comes back just as it was” (NN 22).
At this point we hear Nicholas “abruptly changing the theme.” Chang-
ing the subject is a repeated recourse in Nicholas Nickleby; it happens often
when something shameful comes along, as if it were the only useful rem-
edy. It is, for example, the only way to divert the streams of association that
tumble out when Mrs. Nickleby cheers herself up by falling into “one of
her retrospective moods” (NN 35). Mrs. Nickleby may be wonderfully and
horribly ridiculous, but she is part of the novel’s meditation on the uses of
memory. In her case conjuring up the most trivial details of a lost daily life
is an exercise in nostalgia that helps to soften the blow of her present house-
less and penniless condition. Present and past mix freely in her mind, so
that the family’s bankruptcy is covered with a filigree of remembrance that
denies the existence of permanent change. Her blind desire for social status
makes her a dupe in ways that put her children in danger, but her method of
self-protection forms a clear counterpoint to the more damaging forms of
enforced forgetting dramatized in Smike and Newman Noggs.
In these and many other ways the early novels attest not only to Dick-
ens’s repeated representation of isolated traumatic experience, but also to his
keen interest in the mental processes that follow from it. During the 1840s,
Dickens became more occupied with his personal memories and with the
problem of whether and how to tell them. His decision in David Copperfield
to link the exploration of memory with a retrospective first-person voice
suggests his willingness to confront both the memory that erases and the
memory that persists.
Late in his life, in the Preface to the 1867 edition, Dickens referred to David
Copperfield as the “favourite child” among his novels. His impulse to imagine
the novel as a child suggests that he associates it with a fond remembrance of
things past. But his preference for this narrative may also rest on a sound artistic
judgment: he had achieved in it the most perfect tonal and structural balance