212 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
of narcissism, see Richard Currie, “ ‘As If She Had Done Him a Wrong’: Hidden
Rage and Object Protection in Dickens’s Amy Dorrit,” English Studies 72.4 (1991):
368–76.
On Dickens and the police, see Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (London: Mac-
millan, 1962), chap. 9. Collins sees Dickens’s view of the detective police as “lauda-
tory, indeed awestruck,” even as “boyish hero-worship.” He also notes that the police
force was largely drawn from the lower classes, which enabled Dickens both to praise
and to patronize them (205–6; 218–19).
3. Memory
The exact length of time that Dickens spent at Warren’s Blacking warehouse
remains controversial. Forster dates his second chapter containing the autobiographi-
cal fragment 1822–24, and refers to the ten-year-old David Copperfield as Dickens
himself, avoiding a direct statement about Dickens’s age at the time of his employ-
ment (Forster 23). When J. W. T. Ley published his edition of Forster’s Life in 1928,
he established the most common modern assumption: that Dickens had worked at
Warren’s Blacking for no more than six months at the age of twelve (Forster 37n.) In
1988 Michael Allen revised that opinion, estimating that Dickens worked at Warren’s
for thirteen or fourteen months, beginning just after his twelfth birthday. See Charles
Dickens’s Childhood (London: Macmillan, 1988), 81, 103–4. In the end, Dickens’s
remark, “I have no idea how long it lasted; whether for a year, or much more, or
less” (Forster 35), is the essential point: not knowing whether or when it would end
created a large part of the emotional distress.
It has proven comparably difficult to date the composition of the autobiographi-
cal fragment. Different sections of Dickens’s memories were probably written and
given to Forster at different times in the 1840s, and neither the original fragment nor
the manuscript of Forster’s Life has survived. For my 1848 dating of the full black-
ing warehouse memory I have accepted the generally acknowledged authoritative
source: Nina Burgis’s introduction to David Copperfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1981), xv–lxii. For Forster’s habit of rewriting and “improving” Dickens’s letters to
him see Madeline House and Graham Storey, Preface to Volume 1 of the Pilgrim
Letters. For doubts and issues that do not arise in Burgis’s narrative, see Philip Col-
lins, “Dickens’s Autobiographical Fragment and David Copperfield,” Cahiers Victoriens
et Eduardiens 20 (1984): 87–96.
Since Forster published the autobiographical fragment, biographers and crit-
ics have been divided about the significance of that early experience to Dickens’s
development. Forster began the tradition of seeing Warren’s Blacking as the source
of Dickens’s deepest personal difficulties, and Edmund Wilson established it for
twentieth-century readers as the most powerful source of Dickens’s fiction in “Dick-
ens: The Two Scrooges” in The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (1941;
New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 3–85. Up to the present day, some critics
focus on the trauma of the episode while others are primarily impressed with the
self-dramatizing or unforgiving aspects of Dickens’s retrospective account. Powerful
modern “traumatic” interpretations may be found in Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens:
His Tragedy and Triumph, vol. 1 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 27–46; Steven