Knowing Dickens (review)

Late in Knowing Dickens, Rosemarie Bodenheimer writes that the obscure Christmas story "Tom Tiddler's Ground" (1861) "reveals Dickens in his most stupid frame of mind, devoid of wit, nuance, sympathy, self-understanding, or anything except a willful desire to crush the image of rat-infested solitude out of existence" (202). This passage is striking not for its attention to one of the more obscure corners of Charles Dickens's oeuvre: by this point in the book, Bodenheimer's reader has come to take for granted her ability to range effortlessly across all his writings, both public and private. Nor does the passage leap out for its unblinking criticism, for while there is no mistaking Bodenheimer's admiration for Dickens, she never loses sight of his flaws and limitations. Rather, this passage is striking because the catalog of qualities Dickens is seen to lack captures so neatly those that Bodenheimer displays in such abundance throughout her book: wit, nuance, sympathy, and self-understanding.

Bodenheimer needs these qualities for her book to succeed, given the methodological challenge she sets herself. Working "between biography and criticism" (15), as in her previous book, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans (1994), Bodenheimer provides neither a chronological, narrative account of Dickens's life nor extended readings of texts. Instead, she identifies and explores certain "recurrent clusters of thought and feeling" in Dickens's letters, stories, articles, and novels in order to "illuminate some of the ways of knowing that drove his creative life" (14). Specific topics include Dickens's "animus against fraudulent speech" (30), remembering and forgetting, "fascinated looking [as] the conduit of secret half-conscious knowledge between men" (91), "the substitution of housekeeping for sexuality" (141), and the relationship between walking and writing. While more tentative in connecting the life to the work than the typical biographer, Bodenheimer is intent on making these connections; acutely aware of the status of both letters and novels as mediated texts rather than transparent windows, she reads them nonetheless for what they suggest about the mind of their author.

Bodenheimer's hybrid strategy risks satisfying the demands of neither biography nor criticism—or, more to the point, raising the hackles of readers committed to one or the other, or at least committed to keeping them separate. This reviewer, for one, simply cannot bring himself to care whether "the mood of Little Dorrit . . . reflects Dickens's personal sense of resignation and imprisonment in marriage" (83). Yet despite my own readiness to dismiss biographical explanations as reductive or uninteresting, I found Knowing Dickens richly rewarding. Again and again, Bodenheimer starts with a familiar Dickensian topos and makes us see it differently by tracking it to new places, identifying more complex patterns of repetition and variation in its appearances, or simply describing it with unusual precision and lucidity. In her chapter on memory, for example, she corrects the critical emphasis on "Dickens's habit of conflating past and present" by teasing out the tension between his "valorized idea of memory and the unwilled, negatively inflected recollections that return again and again to shape his work" (57); while this discussion lingers longest over David Copperfield (1849–50), it touches as well on at least half a dozen other novels, two or three Christmas tales, and Dickens's correspondence, before concluding with "George Silverman's Explanation" (1868). Returning to the similarly well-trodden ground of Dickens and walking, Bodenheimer challenges both the "absolute bonds that biographical speculation [has tended to] forge between blacking, walking, and writing" and the newer understanding of Dickens as Benjaminian flâneur (177); key to her argument here are differences she identifies between Dickens's "self-representations as a city walker" and "his self-portraits in letters" (187). Throughout this chapter, as throughout the book, she offers a stream of illuminating observations and generalizations: "the involuntary aspect of sound is regularly associated [in Dickens's writings] with disrupted walking, and with a loss of orientation in time and space" (184); "linking Toby's personification of the...