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1. Memory’s Bonds Associationism and the Freedom of Thought It is a dangerous attempt in any government to say to a Nation, Thou shalt not read.—Thought, by some means or other, is got abroad in the world, and cannot be restrained, though reading may. Thomas Paine (1792) During one of his solitary walks to the Meagles family cottage at Twickenham after Pet Meagles’s marriage to Henry Gowan, Arthur Clennam learns that Mrs. Tickit, the housekeeper who presides over the cottage in the owners’ absence, has caught a glimpse of Tattycoram, the orphan who lived as companion and maid to Pet, until she ran away with Miss Wade. This brief exchange, in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57) bears an even greater weight of meaning than the speculations Mrs. Tickit raises about Tattycoram ’s motives in her clandestine visit to the home of her former employers and benefactors. Mrs. Tickit reports that when she saw Tattycoram she was not exactly dozing but ‘‘I was more what a person would strictly call watching with my eyes closed.’’ Clennam asks her to continue: ‘‘Well, sir,’’ proceeded Mrs Tickit, ‘‘I was thinking of one thing and thinking of another. Just as you yourself might. Just as anybody might.’’ ‘‘Precisely so,’’ said Clennam. ‘‘Well?’’ ‘‘And when I do think of one thing and do think of another,’’ pursued Mrs Tickit, ‘‘I hardly need to tell you, Mr Clennam, that I think of the family. Because, dear me! a person’s thoughts,’’ Mrs Tickit said this with an argumentative and philosophic air, ‘‘however they may stray, will go more or less on what is uppermost in their minds. They will do it, sir, and a person can’t prevent them.’’ Arthur subscribed to this discovery with a nod. 31 32 Associationism and the Freedom of Thought ‘‘You find it so yourself, sir, I’ll be bold to say,’’ said Mrs Tickit, ‘‘and we all find it so. It an’t our stations in life that changes us, Mr Clennam; thoughts is free!’’1 Mrs. Tickit’s mind not only has been ranging over the Meagles family history but has also, simultaneously, been entertaining the problem of its own operations: Mrs. Tickit has been thinking about thinking. She is not only a housekeeper, it seems, but also a sort of amateur psychologist who has even developed a theory about a state of consciousness between waking and sleep.2 Arthur initially dismisses the housekeeper’s report, deciding that she had ‘‘clearly been started out of slumber’’ and therefore that Tattycoram’s appearance must have been a dream, until he himself encounters both Tattycoram and her companion, Miss Wade, on the Strand in London shortly after this incident (509). If Mrs. Tickit’s thoughts tend to stray freely, it is also no coincidence that they lead us directly to the stray girl who has rebelled against her servile condition in the Meagles’s household, absconding to live domestically with another rebellious single woman. Mrs. Tickit’s argument about thinking carries significant social and political implications that require a whole novel to explore. The most challenging part of Mrs. Tickit’s discourse is her assertion that ‘‘It an’t our stations in life that changes us, Mr Clennam; thoughts is free!’’ What does she mean by this, and what does Dickens mean by making her the author of this quasi-philosophical argument? Mrs. Tickit’s logic seems straightforward: she postulates that because her thoughts evade her control, they reveal a mental freedom that is common to everyone, as she indicates by drawing Arthur into her sense of a shared capacity for ranging thought—‘‘You find it so yourself, sir, I’ll be bold to say, . . . and we all find it so.’’ This mental freedom consists of the ability to be carried away by one’s own personal preoccupations ; her thoughts, though they may stray, pursue recurrent themes related to her life. But her friendly assertion that she and Arthur are basically the same as far as the operation, if not the content, of their minds means that there is no economic or social criterion for the tendency to be lost in one’s own thoughts. Mrs. Tickit’s statement also implies that, at a more autobiographical level, people become who they are through particular experiences. Her informal empiricist philosophy of mind posits a linkage between an individual’s mental freedom to be carried away by his or her own concerns and a vision of equality based...

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