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Biofiction, Legacy, and the Hero-Protagonist

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Biofiction, Legacy, and the Hero-Protagonist SCHOOL OF LITERATURE, LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY Doctor of Philosophy “I LOST COURAGE AND BURNED THE REST”: BIOFICTION, LEGACY, AND THE HERO-PROTAGONIST SPLIT IN CHARLES DICKENS’S LIFE-WRITING NOVELS Word Count 87,170 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The Australian National University July 2018 Kathryne Hoyle Ford © Copyright by Kathryne Hoyle Ford 2018 All Rights Reserved 1 Signed Declaration I hereby declare that this research dissertation is my original work, that all sources have been fully cited, and that it has not been submitted for any other qualification. Kathryne H. Ford 13th July 2018 Perth, Australia 2 Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Kate Mitchell, for her prudent guidance, unwavering patience, and heartfelt support—all of which have helped make this project possible. I am also grateful to my supervisory panel: A/Prof Ian Higgins, Dr. Monique Rooney, and Dr. Russell Smith, for their productive insights into specific portions of the thesis. Special thanks must likewise go to colleagues in SLLL who extended encouragement along the often-arduous PhD journey. In particular, the ANU “Nerd Herd”—and especially Ashley Orr—have provided much-needed commiseration and celebration (depending upon what the situation required!). I am indebted to the Charles Dickens Museum, London—specifically Louisa Price for her gracious invitation—and to the British Library, for their invaluable access to archives. Thank you to Dr. Tony Williams, (then) President of the Dickens Fellowship, for allowing me to join the London Fellowship’s excursion to Gad’s Hill Place in September 2016. Listening to the first chapter of Great Expectations (whilst sitting inside the Cooling, Kent, church which most likely inspired the scene) will forever be a highlight! I am deeply obliged to Jennifer Ide, for proactively facilitating my inclusion in this adventure. An earlier version of Chapter 5 was published in The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies Vol 21, No 1 (2016) as “Rehabilitating Catherine Dickens: Memory and Authorial Agency in Gaynor Arnold’s Neo-Victorian Biofiction Girl in a Blue Dress.” My earnest thanks to the AJVS editors, A/Prof Meg Tasker and Professor Joanne Wilkes, and to the two anonymous peer reviewers, for helping refine the article for publication. Other parts of this thesis have been presented in various forms at the following conferences: The Australasian Victorian Studies Conference, The University of Auckland, New Zealand; The Graduate Dickens Conference, The University of Tennessee (Knoxville), USA; The British Association for Victorian Studies Conference, Cardiff University, Wales. I 3 am appreciative of the feedback received at these conferences, which has productively challenged me in expanding my talks for the thesis/publication. This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship, for which I am exceedingly grateful. Sincere thanks must also go to The School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics, and to the Australian National University, for helping fund my conference and fieldwork opportunities via HDR Travel Grants. I warmly thank my family, in particular my parents, Les Hoyle, and Carol Galey Hoyle. Mom taught me to read, and she subsequently nurtured a love of story with regular trips to that most magical of places, the local library. And Dad’s enthralling childhood “Sally and Cottontail” stories (which inevitably concluded with a cliff-hanger) instilled an early fascination with Dickensian-esque serialisation. Last, but most certainly not least, I could not have completed this thesis without the support of my dear husband and friend, Dr. Shannon Ford, who has faithfully encouraged me—both in word and in action—to pursue this dream. I am also profoundly thankful for the joy and imaginative delight imparted by our three sons: Caleb, Watson, and Brandt, for whom I hope to become “Dr. Mama.” This thesis is dedicated to my boys. 4 Abstract Charles Dickens sought to control the narratives of everyone he encountered, both in life and on the page. He even edited his own identity by burning both his correspondence and an early attempt at autobiography. Dickens’s reputation has since become public domain, however, and neo-Victorian authors are re-imagining the Dickensian. Scholarship has previously examined Dickens’s notorious fusing of fact and fiction, his angst about legacy, and his shifting authorial identity. However, what has not been made explicit is how these concerns manifest in a curious pattern, wherein Dickens’s professed protagonists—the ostensible hero/ine/s of their respective texts—are often deposed; overshadowed, as it were, in their own life histories. I trace this trend through Dickens’s novels self-consciously exhibiting the tenets of life-writing—which I refer to as his life-writing novels—including David Copperfield’s (fictional) autobiography, the memoirs of Mr. Pickwick and Oliver Twist, and Little Dorrit’s biography. Such a focus privileges the life-writing of Dickens’s most famous characters, through whom he asked to be remembered. Invoking Dickens’s early anxieties about his authorial identity, and his later anxieties over his “lost [autobiographical] courage,” I analyse the implications of this Dickensian hero- protagonist split. Dickens enlisted these life-writing novels as sites to rehearse composing a successful life story—thereby engaging in “biographilia”—but bizarrely, his central characters are continually compromised. I subsequently probe the tension between Dickens’s fixation upon legacy, and the ongoing neo-Victorian penchant for biofictionally re- constituting the eminent Victorian author; he could not retain narrative control forever. Nonetheless, Dickens was captivated by the consequences of being (or not being) “the hero of my own life,” to quote David Copperfield. These (thesis) pages must therefore show the complexities inherent in this examination, which expands our understanding both of an anxious Dickens, and of his characters—through whom he attempted to construct and control his legacy. 5 Contents Signed Declaration .................................................................................................................................. 2 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................. 3 Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 5 Preface: Dickens and Daughters ............................................................................................................. 8 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 12 Dickens’s Legacy: “‘The immortal memory’ is the toast of the Dickens Fellowship” ....................... 29 Dickens’s “Life-Writing Novels” ........................................................................................................ 33 Chapter Summaries ........................................................................................................................... 42 Chapter 1 (The Continuum of Dickensian Biofiction): .................................................................. 42 Chapter 2 (Memoir): ..................................................................................................................... 43 Chapter 3 (Fictional Autobiography):............................................................................................ 45 Chapter 4 (Fictional Biography): ................................................................................................... 47 Chapter 5 (Neo-Victorian Literary Legacy): ................................................................................... 48 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 50 Chapter 1: The Continuum of Dickensian Biofiction ............................................................................. 54 Dickens Writing Dickens (or not) ...................................................................................................... 54 Others Writing Dickens Part 1: Dickensian Biography ...................................................................... 60 Life-writing Novels and Biographilia ............................................................................................. 83 Others Writing Dickens Part 2: Biofiction and Dickens’s (Sometimes Heroic) Legacy ..................... 84 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 93 Chapter 2: Memoir ................................................................................................................................ 94 Memoir: Clarifying the Genre, and the Legacy Issue ........................................................................ 95 The Life of Charles Dickens, or, A Tale of Two Authors, Editors, and Narrators .............................. 99 Boz: An Identity Abandoned ........................................................................................................... 102 The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi: Another Editorial Façade .........................................................
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