209Bibliographical Notes
1. What Dickens Knew
John Bowen invokes George Henry Lewes and George Eliot as critics of Dick-
ens’s failure to write psychologically or politically realistic characters as he begins
Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
16–30. Bowen turns his discussion toward the more-than-realistic “representational
radicalism” of Dickens’s language, which can “stretch our notions of psychology,
aesthetics and politics alike” (29). The Dickens-Lewes battle over spontaneous com-
bustion is summarized by Gordon Haight in “Dickens and Lewes on Spontane-
ous Combustion,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 10.1 (1955): 53–63. Rosemary Ashton
comments wisely on this controversy and on Lewes’s essay “Dickens in Relation
to Criticism” in G. H. Lewes: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 143–47 and
256–59. Dickens’s emphasis on fiction’s emotional effects on the reader was shared
by his contemporaries: see Nicholas Dames, “Wave-Theories and Affective Physi-
ologies: The Cognitive Strain in Victorial Novel Theories,” Victorian Studies 46.2
(2004): 206–16.
The contents of Dickens’s Gad’s Hill library at the time of his death are listed in
Catalogue of the Library of Charles Dickens, ed. J. H. Stonehouse (London: Piccadilly
Fountain Press, 1935).
For relevant work on Dickens and the unconscious mind, see these studies: War-
rington Winters, “Dickens and the Psychology of Dreams,” PMLA 63.3 (1948):
984–1006; Catherine Bernard, “Dickens and Dream Theory,” in Victorian Science
and Victorian Values, ed. James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1985), 197–216; Jenny Bourne Taylor, “Obscure Recesses:
Locating the Victorian Unconscious,” in Writing and Victorianism, ed. J. B. Bullen
(London: Longman, 1997), 137–79; Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hid-
den Springs of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Taylor Stoehr,
Dickens: The Dreamer’s Stance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965); and Robert
Newsom, Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: “Bleak House” and the Novel
Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
In part 1 of “Dickens and Women’s Stories” (Dickens Quarterly 17.2 [2000]: 67–
76), Margaret Flanders Darby gives an analysis of Dickens’s unacknowledged auto-
biographical projection during his mesmeric treatment of Augusta de la Rue. Fred
Kaplan gives a full account of Dickens and the de la Rues in chapter 4 of Dickens
and Mesmerism; in subsequent chapters Kaplan discusses the ways that mesmerism and
related ideas about trance, self-encounter, the past, and the power of one person over
another appear in Dickens’s fiction. For a brief and cogent discussion of the various
claims for mesmerism and its place in the development of nineteenth-century theories