210 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
of the unconscious, see Jonathan Miller, “Going Unconscious,” in Hidden Histories of
Science, ed. Robert B. Silvers (New York: New York Review, 1995), 1–35.
The often disturbing peculiarities in Dickens’s treatment of women both inside
and outside his fiction have been discussed at length; six times as many results show
up in a search for “Dickens and women” as for “Dickens and men.” Michael Slater’s
Dickens and Women (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983) offers a full, balanced,
and informed account. Jack Lindsay’s Charles Dickens: A Biographical and Critical
Study (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950) gives a speculative Freudian reading
of Dickens’s neurotic relationships with his mother and his sister Fanny. More recent
criticism tends to read Dickens’s work as a representative instance of Victorian gender
structures as they were mobilized in novels. Most relevant is Catherine Robson’s Men
in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2001). Robson places Dickens among a series of nineteenth-century
writers for whom the young girl functioned as a nostalgic image or as a continuation
of the lost, feminized childhoods of older gentlemen. The definitive work on Ellen
Ternan is Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles
Dickens (New York: Viking, 1990). Lilian Nayder is currently at work on a biography
of Catherine Dickens.
On the status of the blacking warehouse narrative see Alexander Welsh, From
Copyright to Copperfield (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 1–8 and
156–62. Linda Shires comments on Welsh’s position in “Literary Careers, Death, and
the Body Politics of David Copperfield,” i n Dickens Refigured: Bodies, Desires, and Other
Histories, ed. John Schad (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 118–21.
For more extensive bibliography relating to the blacking narrative, see the notes to
chapter 3, “Memory.”
2. Language on the Loose
Quotations from Dickens’s working notes are taken from Charles Dickens’ Book
of Memoranda, transcribed and edited by Fred Kaplan (New York: New York Public
Library, 1981). In Dickens: The Dreamer’s Stance (41–45), Taylor Stoehr introduces
examples from these notes as evidence for Dickens’s almost hallucinatory projection
into his characters.
Garrett Stewart’s Dickens and the Trials of the Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1974) is the best study of Dickens’s parodic style that I know;
in particular Stewart’s chapters on The Pickwick Papers and The Old Curiosity Shop
are models of brilliant writing and analysis that resonate consistently with my own
instincts and readings in this chapter, although they serve a different argument. John
Kucich’s chapter “Mechanical Style” in Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles
Dickens (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), also touches on some of my
concerns; Kucich’s analysis of the mixture of parody and satire in Dickens’s narra-
tion is especially fine. Although Kucich suggests the unconscious desires that fuel
self-parody, he overestimates the extent to which Dickens’s parody and self-parody
are “mechanical” and merely repetitive. Tore Rem returns to the subject of Dickens’s
parody and self-parody in Dickens, Melodrama, and the Parodic Imagination (New York:
AMS Press, 2002); he is primarily interested in Dickens’s parodies of the literary