214 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
and the adult-as-child within cultural and literary contexts of the Victorian period.
When it comes to Dickens’s conflation of present and past, there are too many
instances to count. Articles of direct use to me have been Robert L. Patten, “Serial-
ized Retrospection in The Pickwick Papers,” in Literature in the Marketplace, ed. John O.
Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 123–
42; William T. Lankford, “ ‘The Deep of Time’: Narrative Order in David Copperfield,
ELH 46 (1979): 452–67; and Kevin Ohi, “Autobiography and David Copperfield’s
Temporalities of Loss,” Victorian Literature and Culture 33.2 (2005): 435–49.
Mary Poovey’s “David Copperfield and the Professional Writer,” from which I have
quoted, forms chapter 4 of her Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in
Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 89–125. I have
taken up other aspects of David Copperfield in “Knowing and Telling in Dickens’s
Retrospects,” in Knowing the Past, ed. Suzy Anger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2001), 215–33. A fine account of Little Dorrit as a virtual fictional memoir in which
it is impossible to come to terms with the past may be found in Nancy Aycock Metz,
“The Blighted Tree and the Book of Fate: Female Models of Storytelling in Little
Dorrit,” Dickens Studies Annual 18 (1989): 221–41.
For a powerful reading of the dangers of female storytelling, see Joss Lutz Marsh,
“Good Mrs. Brown’s Connections: Sexuality and Story-Telling in Dealings with The
Firm of Dombey and Son,” ELH 58.2 (1991): 405–26. Deborah Thomas makes the
useful linkage of Miss Wade’s “The History of a Self-Tormentor” with “George
Silverman’s Explanation” in Dickens and the Short Story (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 122–31. She emphasizes the dubiousness of the narra-
tive perspective in both tales, while previous readers tend to see Silverman mostly as
the puzzled victim he claims to be. The final chapter of Harry Stone’s The Night Side
of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
1994) is devoted to “George Silverman’s Explanation” as a sort of container for
any and every sort of autobiographical resonance. Sometimes Silverman is what
Dickens should have been; sometimes he is the embodiment of Dickens’s shaping
by the necessity of circumstance; in every case Stone’s claims for the story are quite
melodramatic.
4. Another Man
An account of the thousands of Dickens letters that were destroyed by vari-
ous friends and family members may be found in the Preface to Volume 1 of the
Pilgrim Letters. A vivid sense of the daily visits, dinners, and notes between men
in the Forster-Dickens circle is given in The Diaries of William Charles Macready,
1833–1851, ed. William Toynbee (London: Chapman and Hall, 1912). Macready
often complains about his friends, Forster most of all, but Dickens seems to have been
a charmed exception. James A. Davies’s John Forster: A Literary Life (Totowa, N.J.:
Barnes and Noble, 1983) gives a sympathetic account of Forster’s many friendships
and his remarkable generosity as mediator and mentor. Glimpses of Daniel Maclise
are available in W. Justin O’Driscoll, A Memoir of Daniel Maclise, B.A. (London: Long-
mans and Green, 1871), and Nancy Weston, Daniel Maclise: Irish Artist in Victorian