80 KNOWING DICKENS
sets forth in Dickensian style what the implicit assumptions of the tyranny
were (DC 4). In a description of the prisoners he met while his father was in
the Marshalsea, Dickens had made similar claims about the sexual knowing-
ness of the child. As he goes upstairs to borrow a knife and fork, he observes
the family of one Captain Porter: “I knew (God knows how) that the two
girls with shock heads were Captain Porter’s natural children, and that the
dirty lady was not married to Captain Porter. My timid, wondering station
on his threshold, was not occupied more than a couple of minutes, I dare
say; but I came down again to the room below with all this as surely in my
knowledge, as the knife and fork were in my hand” (Forster 14). The inno-
cent child, it turns out, is the knowing child in disguise.
The genial tone of David Copperfield might be read as a long effort to
mitigate the shameful knowingness of this child, and to replace it with
the polite charm of genteel nostalgia. Uriah Heep, who can see through
this project, wonderfully parodies the strategy when he forces David, for
the sake of old times, to call him by his given name: “Thank you, Mas-
ter Copperfield! It’s like the blowing of old breezes or the ringing of old
bellses to hear you say Uriah” (DC 25). He knows what David does not
tell, as well as the reader does. The hovering of the narration in the space
between knowing and telling, or knowing and condemning, was Dickens’s
solution to the problem posed by the prospect of autobiography. In fiction
he could continue to charm his audience, while allaying the anxiety about
the damaging effects of autobiographical confession he had explored in The
Haunted Man.
The mood of David Copperfield lingered in Dickens, as if he wanted to
prolong its mixture of nostalgia and indirect confession. The Christmas issue
of Household Words for 1850 included his most detailed sentimental memory,
“A Christmas Tree,” followed in 1851 by “What Christmas Is, As We Grow
Older.” “Where We Stopped Growing,” which appeared on New Year’s Day
1853, celebrates the idea that childhood passions may continue to be held by
the adult in their “original” forms. Dickens recalls incidents from books he
had loved as a child as well as places and figures that had fascinated him in the
London streets; he even smuggles in a prison memory: “We have never out-
grown the rugged walls of Newgate, or any other prison on the outside. All
within, is still the same blank of remorse and misery.” The “within” merges
the insides of prisons with the mind of the narrator. Nonetheless the piece
ends in gratitude for those moments of arrested growth: “If we can only
preserve ourselves from growing up, we shall never grow old, and the young
may love us to the last” (Dent 3.112). This mood would not have presented
a problem had its sentiments remained in storybook forms. But when the