16 KNOWING DICKENS
The problematic nature of such interpretive practices helps to explain
why biographical criticism went out of fashion for much of the twentieth
century, during the successive reigns of formalism and New Historicism. Its
gradual revival at the turn of the twenty-first depends on the recognition
that an individual career can be a significant window into a cultural his-
tory, and on the loosening of the boundaries between psychoanalytic and
historical approaches to interpretation. The practice of literary biography or
biographical criticism at this juncture calls on us to discover plausible ways
of negotiating between “the life” and “the work,” or what we might now
call the lost “real” and the textual imaginary. In effect, the distinction itself
cannot hold. We cannot go back and forth between life and work because
we do not have a life; everything we know is on a written page. To juxtapose
letters and fiction, as I am doing, is to read one kind of text alongside another.
Neither has explanatory power over the other; all we can do is observe, make
connections and interpretive suggestions.
My story begins, then, with a twenty-one-year-old Dickens in 1833, the
year of the first significant group of surviving letters. I discuss his ways of
negotiating with memory, but not his childhood as such. The most famous
piece of evidence about his youth, the autobiographical fragment in which
Dickens told John Forster the story of his work at Warren’s Blacking ware-
house as a child of twelve, is treated in “Memory” as a piece of writing
performed in 1848, when Dickens was thirty-six years old. I do not know or
pretend to know what really happened at Warren’s in 1824, what Dickens’s
relationships with his father or mother were like, or what transpired in the
privacies of his marriage with Catherine Hogarth or in his long relationship
with the young actress Ellen Ternan. When I do take guesses about matters
I cannot be sure about, I have tried to draw attention to the speculative nature
of my comments. But no one invents a project like this without desiring the
strange kind of intimacy that arises in the relation between a biographer-critic
and her subject, and that gives any such work its own tinge of projection—or,
as Virginia Woolf would have it, that makes us creators, not just readers and
spectators. For various reasons I have been compelled to attempt once more,
after all the other attempts, to bring certain aspects of Dickens to life. The
fascinating complexity of this figure does not diminish even after almost
everything we can imagine has been said and written about him.
Dickens is, of course, a bit of a Tough Subject. Were he among us now,
many would call him a narcissist and a control freak. Some of the most
dramatically neurotic episodes in his life include the extravagant mourning
after the death of his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law Mary Hogarth in 1837,
the contemptuous silence he maintained about his mother during his adult