14 KNOWING DICKENS
dreams are closely linked to memories, that fragments of experience we
have not consciously noticed during the day would be likely to appear in
dreams, that certain types of dreams are common to everyone regardless of
class, gender, moral status, or experience, and that we are often conscious
of being in critical dialogue with dreams as they are occurring. “We all
confound the living with the dead, and all frequently have a knowledge or
suspicion that we are doing it,” he writes to Stone; “we all astonish our-
selves by telling ourselves, in a dialogue with ourselves, the most astonishing
and terrific secrets” (6.279). Dickens’s interest in ways of knowing what
we don’t know, and not knowing what we do know, is fully in evidence.
His attention to the workings of his own mind, no less than his observation
of London streets, was a form of research that contributed directly to his
creative representations.
The chapters of this book are built around certain recurrent clusters of
thought and feeling in Dickens’s writing, in order to illuminate some of the
ways of knowing that drove his creative life. With some important excep-
tions, critical studies of Dickens tend to ascribe significance to parts of novels
as they contribute to a reading of the novel as a whole; the assumption that
novels can be read as self-contained systems of meaning is still with us, sur-
viving all the recent shifts in theoretical approach. In the course of writing
these pages, I was amused to find myself reviving the nineteenth-century
notion that Dickens wrote in pieces rather than wholes. Familiar passages
light up differently when they are momentarily lifted out of their novels
and set in the alternative contexts provided by letters and journalism. Those
contexts have allowed me to understand the depth and strangeness of certain
intensely charged scenes, and to focus on odd moments when Dickens’s
evocative language suggests layers of knowledge that remain otherwise unar-
ticulated. The process has also convinced me that Dickens’s ways of know-
ing were often more fully invested in the dialogue of his characters and the
shape of his plots than in his omniscient narrative voice.
Each of the following chapters juxtaposes letters, stories, articles, and sec-
tions of novels that bear on its subject area, discovering patterns that are
common to the life and the writing. If the topics themselves appear to make
an idiosyncratic collection, the stories told in each chapter are intended to
illuminate different facets of a complex but recognizable inner dynamic, in
which projection outward functions as a primary mode of self-recognition.
I have also organized the chapters in ways that cut across familiar story lines
in Dickens biography and criticism, in the hope of shedding new perspec-
tives on old ground.