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4. The Pleasures of Memory, Part II: Epitaphic Reading and Cultural Memory
- Fordham University Press
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4. The Pleasures of Memory, Part II Epitaphic Reading and Cultural Memory Miss Prism: . . . You must put away your diary, Cecily. I really don’t see why you should keep a diary at all. Cecily: I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn’t write them down, I should probably forget all about them. Miss Prism: Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us. Cecily: Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened. I believe that Memory is responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends us. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) The previous chapter’s account of the remediation of didactic literature and patterning of reception in The Old Curiosity Shop raises the question whether, for Dickens’s contemporaries, the social reform effects of his writings were demonstrable. In the 1838 preface to Oliver Twist (1837–39), Dickens claims that the novel’s representation of London’s criminal underworld ‘‘attempted something which was needed, and which would be a service to society.’’1 In his next novel, Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), Dickens incorporated an exposé of the abuse of children at certain Yorkshire schools that he hoped would instigate both a governmental investigation and a boycott that would be fatal to the schools, or that at least would pressure them to reform. In his study of Dickens’s views on education, John Manning describes the slow dissolution of the Yorkshire schools, which contemporaries attributed to the effect of Nicholas Nickleby, so that by the late 1840s they had virtually disappeared.2 Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd also reports 177 178 Epitaphic Reading and Cultural Memory the perception that Dickens’s fictional attack on the Yorkshire schools had been effective: ‘‘Pupils were withdrawn; establishments closed and, within a year of the publication of Nicholas Nickleby, the Quarterly Review stated that ‘. . . the exposure has already put down many infant bastilles’—the reference to ‘bastilles’ linking them to the London workhouses which had the same nickname.’’3 In the 1840s, then, Dickens gained a reputation as a writer whose novels had precipitated specific reforms. In light of Dickens’s avowed interest in popular education, it is not surprising that the type of institution he seems to have succeeded in uprooting was a school. In the preface to the 1848 First Cheap Edition of the novel, Dickens links the Yorkshire schools’ existence to the government’s failure to provide universal education: ‘‘Of the monstrous neglect of education in England, and the disregard of it by the State as a means of forming good or bad citizens, and miserable or happy men, this class of schools has long afforded a notable example.’’4 Dickens implies that the potential social effects of his novel reach beyond the particular case it illustrates.5 He also explains in detail how prior to writing the novel he obtained firsthand knowledge of the abuses perpetrated by the Yorkshire schoolmasters by personally investigating several schools during an information-gathering trip to Yorkshire in early 1838. Accompanied by the artist Hablôt Browne (‘‘Phiz’’), who later illustrated Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens went incognito, taking Browne’s name as his own. He adopted the role of an agent for ‘‘a supposititious little boy who had been left with a widowed mother who didn’t know what to do with him’’ (49). The trip demonstrates Dickens’s practice of seeking an empirical basis for his social criticism and also links his early serial fiction directly with his initial career as a journalist.6 John M. L. Drew has shown that Dickens’s early journalism was significant in shaping ‘‘Boz’s’’ authorial influence by ‘‘cultivat[ing] in the presence of . . . [his readers] the persona of an individual reporter with a wider than usual brief, who . . . roves from Parliament Square, through the Great Metropolis, and out into the provinces , indulging his faculty for detecting analogies between areas of the contemporary scene normally kept discrete in newspaper columns.’’7 As Dickens asserted in the 1839 preface to the original edition, closer to the immediate effects of the novel’s publication, ‘‘Mr. Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they should be deemed impossible’’ (45). By basing his novel in journalistic social investigation, Dickens can argue that its fictional treatment crystallizes the problem so...