84 KNOWING DICKENS
identity (GE 2.20). Pip “knows” Magwitch, but he does not remember him
because he has been there all along as an unintelligible tangle of innocence,
sympathy, guilt, and shame, apparently buried but never left behind. Recogni-
tion does not open the way for nostalgia, however. After crushing Magwitch’s
own nostalgic desire to embrace the memory of the cherished child, the
novel strips Pip of his final delusion, the fantasy that he might go home to
the forge and Biddy.
Dickens was capable of turning the insights of these novels to personal
purposes. Forster reports a fragment of a letter dated sometime in 1862:
“I must entreat you, to pause for an instant, and go back to what you know
of my childish days, and to ask yourself whether it is natural that something
of the character formed in me then, and lost under happier circumstances,
should have reappeared in the last five years. The never-to-be-forgotten mis-
ery of that old time bred a certain shrinking sensitiveness in a certain ill-
clad, ill-fed child, that I have found come back in the never-to-be-forgotten
misery of this later time” (10.97–98). The five years in question were the
ones in which Dickens had left Catherine and entered into a “vagabondish”
double life with Ellen Ternan in one compartment and his public readings in
another. In a strange way he had invited the traumatic return, as if he could
not help smashing through the appearance of bourgeois gentility he had so
assiduously courted for many years. The “never-to-be-forgotten” misery is
not quite a remembered misery; the phrase suggests both the impossibility of
forgetting and the timelessness of experience that is never-to-be-forgotten
even as it is occurring. Yet the fact that Dickens was making himself a char-
acter in a condensed version of one of his fictions invites further scrutiny.
Because of the marital separation, the relationships with Ellen Ternan and
Wilkie Collins, and the reading tours, Forster and Dickens were somewhat
alienated from each other. But Dickens was still relying on Forster to act as
his biographer, and to tell his story sympathetically. The letter is partly an
appeal to their old confidences, partly an interpretation of his present behav-
ior that casts him in the role of sufferer rather than the source of others’ suf-
fering. The narrative of traumatic return is a sad story, but it has its uses.
Tales of Resentment
While Dickens’s negotiations with memory and forgetting were developing
in the ways I have outlined, he was also experimenting in fiction with the
pleasures and dangers of telling one’s own story. I refer not to the prolonged
fictional autobiographies of David, Esther, and Pip, but to moments when a