205Afterword
I began to write this book because Dickens
always surprised me. The canniness and honesty about human fantasy that
are so consistently woven into the fabric of his writing would catch me
off guard time after time. He is the great English realist of the fantasy life.
That is very different from saying that he is a fantasist, that he writes like
a dreamer, or, as Taine and Lewes put it in the nineteenth century, that his
work is monomaniacal or hallucinatory. It means instead that Dickens had
a peculiar access to his own fantasy; he was capable, as many people are not,
of catching and registering it clearly enough to bring it to immediate life
in characters imagined through the point of his pen. In the midst of this
private and mysterious process, he refrained from explaining or judging it
out of existence, though his plots guaranteed that each brand of fantasy was
eventually recuperated into a recognizably moral scheme. The absence of
analytical distance was probably essential to this process; it allowed him to
create nostalgic and wishful sentiment as readily as self-defensive, rivalrous,
or murderous obsession. A good deal of the history of Dickens criticism
has concerned itself with valuing one kind of fantasy over another. I do so
myself in privileging his treatment of psychic distress over passages that dis-
solve distress into sentiment. Perhaps the perfect reader of Dickens would
embrace both the disturbing and the self-comforting fantasies with equal
humanity.