62 KNOWING DICKENS
They have no thought of, and no care for, my existence in any other light”
(3.575). This ancient anger about being unknown and unappreciated by his
nearest relations was to erupt again in the autobiographical fragment. Mean-
while, Dickens gave specific body to the figure of the unwelcome Shadow
in another letter to Mitton of February 1844, exactly twenty years after he
had begun his stint at Warren’s Blacking: “For anything like the damnable
Shadow which this father of mine casts upon my face, there never was—
except in a nightmare” (4.45). The restless desire to live away from England
that overtook Dickens during the 1840s may suggest attempts to run away
from that shadow. Yet his wanderings abroad correspond with his growing
attention to memory itself, both in the letters I have mentioned and in the
Christmas Books written between 1843 and 1848.
Several personal experiences stimulated recollection during this period, as
Dickens was heading toward the autobiographical fragment. He shared early
memories during frequent visits with his sister Fanny Burnett as she lay dying
of tuberculosis in 1848. In that year his carefully protected, well-educated
eldest son Charley was approaching the age at which Dickens had been
sent to work. Nostalgia for the reporting exploits of his youth is on display
during his brief flirtation with editing The Daily News in 1845–46. Before
beginning the editorship Dickens bragged about his extensive “express and
post-chaise experience” in a letter to Forster; after resigning, he proclaimed
to his Genoese friend Emile de la Rue, “I am again a gentleman” (4.460–61;
4.498). The whole affair, which included working with his father as a staff
member, seems to have awakened troubling memories; he wrote to Forster
months later that he feared to publish his new novel with Bradbury and
Evans, who put out The Daily News.
Dickens’s unconscious memory also came into play in the quite different
arena of public affairs. A striking complication of his expanding social con-
science during the 1840s was his inability to respond to the plight of child
workers in mines and factories. Under the leadership of Lord Ashley, the
Commission for Inquiring into the Employment and Condition of Chil-
dren in Mines and Manufactories issued reports and drawings substantiating
the abuses of young children and women in industrial settings. Dickens
was sent preliminary versions of two reports (December 1840 and February
1843) by one of the commissioners, Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith. Smith
hoped to enlist Dickens’s voice in support of protectionist legislation—a
natural subject for the creator of Oliver Twist, Smike, and Little Nell, he
might justifiably have thought.
Dickens’s actual response, full of conflict and unkept promises, is the more
interesting for being unexpected. The drawings of small children laboring