MEMORY 83Little Dorrit retains Dickens’s moral contrast between those who remem-
ber resentfully (like Miss Wade and Mrs. Clennam) and those who transform
past pain into generous sensitivity (like Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam).
But the costs of each procedure are evident as never before. Even the comic
relief provided by Flora Finching, Dickens’s hostile and generous tribute to
Maria Winter, is based on her memory for every detail of her former love
for Arthur Clennam; Flora’s inability to separate the past from the present is
wonderfully played out as a massacre of English syntax. The senile dementia
of Mr. F’s aunt renders any and every time as emotionally present; her sudden
eruptions can be located nowhere in temporal sequence. Too much memory
and too little memory come to the same thing: in this novel the present is
relentlessly drenched in the past.
The mood of Little Dorrit also reflects Dickens’s personal sense of res-
ignation and imprisonment in marriage. Like Maria Beadnell, Catherine
had grown very stout; her bodily presence may have been an unwelcome
reminder that time was passing and transforming their lives. Destroying
the marriage was a kind of prison break, an attempt to start afresh which the
author of Little Dorrit already knew to be futile. So did the author of A Tale
of Two Cities and Great Expectations, the shorter novels in weekly installments
written soon after the breakup, to stimulate sales of Dickens’s new journal
All the Year Round. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens presented a case study of
traumatic return. The story of Dr Manette’s amnesia drew on contemporary
writing about “double consciousness,” which describes and attempts to
explain patients who move between two states of identity, and who, when in
one, cannot remember the other. Dickens connected this phenomenon with
traumatic knowledge: when the recovered Doctor receives disturbing infor-
mation about Charles Darnay’s identity, he experiences a nine-day return of
the silent shoemaker self he had become during his long imprisonment in the
Bastille. Speaking as a doctor about his other self the patient, Manette reveals
that he had both dreaded and expected the relapse because of “a strong and
extraordinary revival of the train of thought and remembrance that was
the first cause of the malady” (TTC 2.19). In Great Expectations, Dickens
revised the narration of Copperfield in another fictional autobiography, this
time exposing and derailing its narrator’s fantasies of an ascent to gentility,
and cutting off the possibility of nostalgic return. The reappearance of Mag-
witch as Pip’s secret benefactor is a strong example of traumatic repetition,
underlined by the distinction Pip makes when he recognizes his convict of
old: “I could not recal a single feature, but I knew him!” The wind and the
rain drive away all “the intervening years” and there they are again, “face
to face on such different levels” in the classic Dickens position of mirrored