Knowing Dickens

Afterword

205 Afterword I began to write this book because Dickens always surprised me. The canniness and honesty about human fantasy that are so consistently woven into the fabric of his writing would catch me off guard time after time. He is the great English realist of the fantasy life. That is very different from saying that he is a fantasist, that he writes like a dreamer, or, as Taine and Lewes put it in the nineteenth century, that his work is monomaniacal or hallucinatory. It means instead that Dickens had a peculiar access to his own fantasy; he was capable, as many people are not, of catching and registering it clearly enough to bring it to immediate life in characters imagined through the point of his pen. In the midst of this private and mysterious process, he refrained from explaining or judging it out of existence, though his plots guaranteed that each brand of fantasy was eventually recuperated into a recognizably moral scheme. The absence of analytical distance was probably essential to this process; it allowed him to create nostalgic and wishful sentiment as readily as self-defensive, rivalrous, or murderous obsession. A good deal of the history of Dickens criticism has concerned itself with valuing one kind of fantasy over another. I do so myself in privileging his treatment of psychic distress over passages that dissolve distress into sentiment. Perhaps the perfect reader of Dickens would embrace both the disturbing and the self-comforting fantasies with equal humanity. 206 KNOWING DICKENS As I come to the end of this project, Dickens surprises me still. I look at the actions and reactions recorded in his letters; I form opinions, make judgments. In some turn of his art, he has already been there. He has seen himself; he knows what the psyche does; but he does not tell everything he knows. Whether that silence originated in an instinctive reflex to protect his good opinion of himself, or from a desire to limit his audiences’ knowledge of his knowingness, would be difficult to say; most probably they are aspects of the same tendency. The special quality of that powerful and troubled relation between knowing and telling may finally be suggested by two moments when Dickens used the image of being turned inside out. John Forster quotes from a letter of 21 October 1850, written as Dickens was drawing David Copperfield to a close: “I am within three pages of the shore, and am strangely divided, as usual in such cases, between sorrow and joy. Oh, my dear Forster, if I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel tonight, how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside-out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World”(Forster 547). These sentences reach out to the intimacy between the two friends as directly as anything in Dickens’s letters ever does, in the very act of telling Forster how little he actually knows about the strangeness of Dickens’s feelings. The “Shadowy World” in which those feelings are embedded is the world of fiction,or perhaps the world in which the unknown reader’s mind meets the author’s fantasy, and knows, or does not know, what he or she is reading . Confession and concealment are inseparable, both in Dickens’s letter and in his fiction; one does not appear in a sentence or paragraph without the other. Being turned inside out, even to Forster, was imaginable only as the unimaginable. Near the end of his life, Dickens came back to the image in a very different mood. “A Fly-Leaf in a Life,” in the final series of Uncommercial Traveller pieces, was published in All the Year Round on 22 May 1869. This unusually personal piece is an attack on members of the public who presumed to offer analysis, advice, or criticism to Dickens during the period of enforced rest that followed the sudden cancellation of his final Farewell Tour of public readings a month earlier. Tellingly, he imagines the period of rest as a blank page—a fly-leaf—in “the book of my life”;its blankness is violated,however, by the intrusion of public responses to the breakdown of his health. His first line of attack is to claim that he had already written this experience when he satirized the rumors that fly to explain the death of Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit. Quoting two full paragraphs from the novel, he seems...