MEMORY 65In one especially telling moment, Dickens parodies Londonderry’s ideas
about the easy life of the six-year-old trapper in the mines, who sits alone
in the dark to open and shut trap doors: “If I were not this great peer,
quoth Lord Londonderry, I would be that small trapper. If I were not a lord,
doomed unhappily in my high place to preserve a solemn bearing, for the
wonder and admiration of mankind, and hold myself aloof from innocent
sports, I would be a jolly little trapper. Oh, for the cindery days of trap-
per infancy!... Jolly, jolly trappers!” (3.281). Conflating the trapper and the
lord in one person, this little riff suggests a personal investment above and
beyond the Carlylesque denunciation of the letter as a whole. The “I” is
Dickens’s “I” disguised as Londonderry’s. The writing moment discovers
the grotesque connection between a self-serving nostalgia for childhood and
Dickens’s haunting fantasy: were he not this great author, he would be that
small trapper.
Dickens did little for the Factory Movement, but the Factory Movement
may have done quite a lot for Dickens, by providing external images that
stirred up internal memories in disturbing ways. The Christmas Books of
the 1840s begin to respond to the specific content of such memories, as well
as to the act of remembering itself. The Spirit of Christmas Past in Carol is
ingeniously constructed to represent the altered perspective from present to
past that characterizes the act of memory. He looks both like a child and like
an old man with “the appearance of having receded from the view, and being
diminished to a child’s proportions.” From his head springs “a bright clear
jet of light,” but this human candle of memory carries its own extinguisher
cap, representing the repression of memory that Scrooge has imposed on
himself. Like memory, “the figure itself fluctuated in distinctness,” changing
shape, melting away, and reappearing “distinct and clear as ever” (CB 25–26).
The domestic action of The Battle of Life is set on darker ground: an old and
“guilty” battlefield that lurks, largely forgotten, directly below the surface of
its present pastoral beauty (CB 239).
The Haunted Man, last of the Christmas Books, was—so far as we know—
written almost in parallel with the autobiographical fragment during the
fall of 1848. The Phantom who exactly doubles its protagonist Redlaw is
the internal voice of pained and resentful memory that finally surfaces with
a version of Dickens’s own story. The Phantom appears to Redlaw with
the announcement “I come as I am called.” “Unbidden,” Redlaw replies.
“Unbidden be it,” the Spectre replies. “It is enough. I am here” (CB 331).
In its uncanny way, the split figure dramatizes Dickens’s struggle with old
memory that returns unbidden yet half-consciously invited. Although the
Phantom is represented as a demonic tempter who promises to erase Redlaw’s