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

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

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.

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 ...... 104 American Notes: An Alternate form of Dickensian Life-Writing ...... 111 Oliver Twist’s Memoir of Uncertainty ...... 118 Pickwickian Narration, or, The Pickwick Papers as Mr. Pickwick’s Authentic Memoir ...... 121 Pickwick’s Papers and the Case of the Second Samuel ...... 131 The “illustrious” Mr. Pickwick? ...... 135 The “imperturbable” and overall “original” Sam Weller ...... 136 Mr. Pickwick’s Speeches: Enlightening or Irritating? ...... 138 Mr. Pickwick’s Propensity for Debacle, or Sam Weller Steals the Show ...... 141 Mr. Pickwick’s (Im)perfection: the Tension Between Heroism and Anxiety ...... 144 Conclusion ...... 147 6

Chapter 3: (Fictional) Autobiography ...... 149 Victorian Masculinity and the Tradition of Literary Heroism ...... 156 Dickensian Heroism: Self-Reliance, Perseverance, and the Significance of Being Right ...... 165 Agnes: the Hero/ine of David Copperfield’s Life? ...... 180 Shifting Names, Shifting Identity ...... 189 Conclusion ...... 191 Chapter 4: (Fictional) Biography ...... 194 “I became Little Dorrit’s biographer”: Life and Art Collide ...... 195 Failed Reunion with Maria Beadnell ...... 205 Anxious Author, Anxious Arthur: Doubt and the Dickensian Hero-Protagonist ...... 209 Perceptions of a Seeming Nobody ...... 216 A Tale of Two Biographers: Dickens’s Narrator and His Hero ...... 223 Conclusion ...... 231 Chapter 5: Neo-Victorian Literary Legacy ...... 233 Biographilia, Heteroglossia, and The (Tenacious) Legacy Issue ...... 237 Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress (2008): The Author’s (In)Visibility ...... 241 Productive Recollections: “I began to feel a person in my own right.” ...... 246 Woman of Letters: Dorothea’s Narrative Detective Work ...... 250 Dickensian Adaptations, Then and Now ...... 258 Ronald Frame’s Havisham (2012): Dickens’s Iconic Spinster, Reimagined ...... 261 Legacies Penned and Legacies Lived ...... 265 “‘We Never Recognise Ourselves’” ...... 271 Conclusion ...... 272 Conclusion ...... 275 Works Cited ...... 279

Preface: Dickens and Daughters

Dickens’s two daughters, Mamie and Katey, notoriously harboured vastly different opinions of their famous father. Mamie, Dickens’s eldest daughter, revered her father to the extent of editing his image in keeping with the heroic legacy she felt he deserved. Katey, on the other hand, often struggled in her relationship with Dickens. Despite purportedly being his favourite (and the most like him in looks and in temperament,1 hence, perhaps, the favouritism) Katey actively disputed her father’s public persona as the consummate family man. These opposing perspectives foreshadow Dickens’s eventual loss of control over his legacy; he could not even reconcile how his own daughters perceived him.

Katey’s portrayal is far less influenced by blind hero-worship and far more realistic.

She clearly loved her father, but she also recognised his shortcomings. Katey’s biographer,

Gladys Storey, records Katey remembering Dickens: “‘I loved my father better than any man in the world—in a different way of course...I loved him for his faults.’ Rising from her chair and walking towards the door, she added: ‘My father was a wicked man—a very wicked man’” (219). Nonetheless, at another point in the book, Katey “said that she could sum up the mistakes in her father’s life on one half-sheet of notepaper, and that she would commence with the words: ‘What could you expect from such an uncanny genius?’” (Storey 91).

Katey’s version of Dickens is far more fraught than that of her sister, Mamie, who completely idolised him.

Indeed, Michael Slater describes Mamie’s adoration of her father as “the dominant passion of her life” (Dickens and Women 191), while Martin Fido records how Mamie “took seriously [Dickens’s] injunction to his children to preserve his good name as their best inheritance” (Dickens 94). After Dickens died, Mamie devoted herself to preserving his

1 According to Philip Collins, Katey “of all the children most resembled their father in ability and force of character. She had her father’s face, Mamie their mother’s” (xxiii).

8 legacy: “She laboured with her aunt on an edition of his letters [and] she composed a little children’s book about him which she hoped might be the means of making ‘boys and girls love and venerate the Man—before they can know and love and venerate the Author and

Genius’” (Slater Dickens and Women 191). Both sisters reference their father’s genius, but for Mamie it is linked to veneration, while for Katey it is linked to uncanny wickedness.

Lillian Nayder reveals that Mamie and her Aunt Georgina destroyed any letters not in keeping with their version of the heroic Dickens selected to survive: “Georgina collected and heavily edited Dickens’s letters, cutting, pasting, and rearranging their contents so as to safeguard his reputation” (333). Nayder assigns the responsibility for this shaping to

Georgina, but she also acknowledges that this edition was “co-edit[ed], with Mamie” (333).

Mamie clearly adored her father and strove to protect his image, a goal she pursued further by writing a book about Dickens’s life entitled My Father as I Recall Him (1896). Here Mamie enthuses that “My love for my father has never been touched or approached by any other love. I hold him in my heart of hearts as a man apart from all other men, as one apart from all other beings” (2). She goes on to exalt his “tender and most affectionate nature” (4) and “his excessive thoughtfulness and consideration for others” (5). Mamie’s adoration contests

Katey’s conflicted stance towards Dickens, even as Katey’s ambivalence tempers Mamie’s esteem.

The sisters’ differences of opinion regarding their father’s image is especially evident in their reactions to his Father Christmas persona. Mamie praises the consummately

“Dickensian” Christmas festivities at Gad’s Hill, whereas Katey famously complained to

George Bernard Shaw: “If you could make the public understand that my father was not a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch,

9 you would greatly oblige me.”2 This, however, is the very image Mamie promotes, writing that her father “was the fun and life of those [holiday] gatherings, the true Christmas spirit of sweetness and hospitality filling his large and generous heart” (14). The sisters’ vastly different versions of their father is termed by Edmund Wilson as “Scrooge bursting in on the

Cratchits” (57). Katey’s flawed Scrooge thus casts a shadow over Mamie’s idealised scene of

Christmas cheer. Mamie’s and Katey’s competing perspectives regarding Dickens are further evinced by their disparate approaches to marriage. Katey’s union with Charles Collins— author Wilkie Collins’s younger brother—is often presented as a manoeuvre to “escape from

‘an unhappy home’” (Storey 105). Storey records that after her parents’ separation, Katey

“took her mother’s part in-so-far as it was possible for her to do so. But the situation was a difficult one, since Dickens had sternly impressed upon them that ‘their father’s name was their best possession’—which they knew to be true—and he expected them to act accordingly” (95). Conversely, Mamie went so far as to profess gratitude for spinsterhood, since it allowed her to forever retain the prized surname of Dickens (Slater Dickens and

Women 191).

Like her father, Katey wrote—and subsequently burned—an attempt at life-writing.

Katey’s professed purpose in undertaking this biographical mission was “clearing her mother of false accusations made at the time of their separation” (Storey 91). In his Introduction to

Interviews and Recollections, Philip Collins laments the loss of “Katey’s biography,” since

“in intelligence and independence it would have surpassed any of the other family accounts of Dickens…her destroying the manuscript for the reason stated, instead of turning it into cash, was a mark of the integrity that she would have brought to her task” (xxiv). Katey’s writing could also have helped clarify some of the lingering myths surrounding her father,

2 This particular quote appears repeatedly, most notably in Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman page 245, Charles Dickens: A Life page 414 (also by Tomalin), and Michael Slater’s Dickens and Women page 201.

10 such as the details concerning the occasion when Hans Christian Andersen overstayed his welcome at Gad’s Hill.

Gad's Hill was Dickens's home when he died; he had aspired to own it since childhood, and this achievement formed an integral part of the famous author’s identity. During an exploration of Gad’s Hill in September 2016, our tour guide related the story of Hans

Christian Andersen’s seemingly never-ending visit. Supposedly, after Andersen finally left,

Katey Dickens placed a note in the room where he stayed which read “Hans Christian

Andersen slept here—and he would not leave!” In the tour guide’s version of the tale,

Dickens subsequently removed Katey’s note. Conversely, in Gladys Storey’s Dickens and

Daughter (compiled primarily from interviews with Katey Dickens) it was Dickens himself who penned the note which read “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES!” (22). According to Storey, Katey removed the card and burnt it

(22). This reversal in responsibility—who complained versus who heroically granted

Andersen grace—represents the mythmaking qualities surrounding Dickens’s legacy. Edgar

Johnson, like Storey, identifies Dickens as the writer of the note, the details of which differ slightly. In Johnson’s version, the note includes Andersen’s middle name and “ages” is not capitalised (875). Johnson does not comment upon Katey removing it, although he does indicate that both Katey and Mamie viewed Andersen as “‘a bony bore’” (874). Although these differences may seem minute, they nonetheless represent how easily myth can arise: a few details are altered here, a tour guide reverses responsibility there, and over time—as retold by a variety of individuals—the story evolves.

During his lifetime, Dickens obsessively sought to control his legacy; however, after his death, others continue to toy with the threads comprising his life history. The opposing perspectives of Katey and Mamie Dickens represent the contradictions ever encircling the famous Victorian author. For all his efforts to manage the myths encircling him, Dickens

11 could not even reconcile how his own daughters viewed him. And much like his fictional counterpart David Copperfield, the question of what it means to claim heroic ownership of one’s own life perpetually haunts him.

Introduction

Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born

and why we have lived – Umberto Eco3

We search fiction for the real – Kym Brindle4

Fiction could give [Dickens] any number of second chances – Robert Douglas-Fairhurst5

When we think of Charles Dickens, anxiety is not the first attribute that springs to mind. This is, after all, the revered Victorian author who famously referred to himself as “The

Inimitable” 6 and insisted his grandchildren call him “Venerables.” His characters—Scrooge,

Pip, and Pickwick chief amongst them—have attained the legendary status that being known by a single name affords. On what would have been Dickens’s ninety-fifth birthday,7 the

Liverpool Courier queried, “What name is better known or more loved?” Near the turn of the twentieth century, G. K. Chesterton wrote of observing an “almost hysterical worship” of

Dickens (335) dating back to Chesterton’s own childhood. Dickens enjoyed immense popularity in his own lifetime, and he is still, as John O. Jordan relates, “unusual if not unique among canonical English-language authors in remaining at once a vital focus of academic research and a major figure in popular culture” (Cambridge Companion xix). Nonetheless, anxiety is always lurking, challenging Dickens’s heroes, heroines, and even Dickens himself,

3 Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (139).

4 Epistolary Encounters (144).

5 Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist (282).

6 Jenny Hartley notes that other nicknames Dickens used to describe himself such as “The Sparkler of Albion” and “the planet Dick” contribute to “underlining his role as national treasure and irresistible force of nature” (Letters xii).

7 7th February 1907.

13 in often perplexing ways. Dickens’s own insecurities about his value and identity manifest in a pattern whereby his central characters are consistently overshadowed by others: Mr.

Pickwick is repeatedly upstaged by his servant, David Copperfield is overly reliant upon

Agnes, and Little Dorrit seeks the shadows in her own life history.

As such, this thesis explores the tension between Dickensian heroism and anxiety— and its subsequent impact upon Dickens’s own legacy—in his novels based upon the tenets of life-writing, which I hereafter refer to as his “life-writing novels.” Specifically, this group contains the autobiographies of Pip, Esther Summerson, and David Copperfield, Little

Dorrit’s biography, and the memoirs of Mr. Pickwick and Oliver Twist. To some extent, of course, all Dickens’s novels can be loosely categorised as “life-writing novels” due to their shared interest in chronicling a character’s history. For instance, Nicholas Nickleby’s (1838-

1839) and Martin Chuzzlewit’s (1842-1844) extended titles commence with “The Life and

Adventures of…” However, the texts themselves are not self-consciously invested in the formal tenets of life-writing, whereas, by contrast, from the very first page of Oliver Twist

(1837-1839), Dickens glosses Oliver’s story as the youth’s “memoirs” (1). The Pickwick

Papers (1836-1837) is likewise carefully cast as an example of life-writing; from the introductory paragraph Dickens advises that Pickwick’s preliminary history has been gleaned—and subsequently edited—from the “Transactions of the Pickwick Club” (1).

Living records are thus wrought into a life history. In a similar manoeuvre, Dickens paratextually positions himself as “Little Dorrit’s biographer” (7) in the novel’s 1857 Preface.

For the purpose of this thesis, then, I emphasise Dickens’s novels explicitly presented as either autobiography (i.e. Dickens’s famous first-person child narrators, David, Esther, and

Pip), biography, or memoir. This selection is in keeping with Dickens’s own abandoned attempt at autobiography, which I discuss shortly.

An integral part of this exploration involves Dickens’s splitting of the typically fused term “hero-protagonist.” Traditionally, the protagonist of a given narrative is presumed to also be its hero; meaning, the character who claims ownership of the story at hand, or the one intended to most engage readerly interest.8 The Oxford English Dictionary defines a

“protagonist” as “The chief personage in a drama; hence, the principal character in the plot of a story, etc.” (675).9 Comparable definitions apply to “hero.” According to the OED, a hero is “The man who forms the subject of an epic; the chief male personage in a poem, play, or story; he in whom the interest of the story or plot is centred” (171).10 This assumption that the hero is also the protagonist often manifests in an amalgamation of terms, wherein the two words are joined by a hyphen: hero-protagonist. Another written incarnation of this conflation is hero (protagonist), wherein the parentheses denote implicit acceptance of the shared linguistic status. Merriam-Webster points out the Greek origins behind this interchangeability: “Struggle, or conflict, is central to drama. The protagonist or hero of a play, novel, or film is involved in a struggle of some kind, either against someone or something else or even against his or her own emotions. So the hero is the ‘first struggler,’

8 My third chapter discusses the tradition of literary heroism—including its connection to Victorian masculinity and the shift to more commonplace protagonists—in greater detail.

9 Merriam-Webster echoes that a “protagonist” is “the principal character in a literary work (such as a drama or story).” (“Protagonist.” Def 1.a. MerriamWebster.com. Merriam Webster Dictionary, Web. 27th June 2018.)

10 In a similar manner, the Encyclopaedia Britannica states that a literary hero is “broadly, the main character in a literary work.” (“Hero: Literary and Cultural Figure.” Britannica.com. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Web. 15 Oct. 2017.)

Likewise, a hero may be “The chief male character in a book, play, or film, who is typically identified with good qualities, and with whom the reader is expected to sympathize. [e.g.] ‘the hero of Kipling's story.’” (“Hero.” Def 1.1. OxfordDictionaries.com. Oxford Dictionaries, Web. 27th June 2018.) This definition pinpoints the further nuances inherent in the term, wherein “hero” typically indicates a strength of character beyond the value- neutral “protagonist.” A distinction is thus implied even as it is elided by the “hero-protagonist” conjunction.

A narrative’s protagonist may occasionally be an anti-hero; in this case, he or she is typically depicted as morally deficient in some manner. An anti-hero still appears centre stage though, commanding a certain measure of (even begrudging) deference, despite questionable character.

15 which is the literal meaning of the Greek word prōtagōnistēs.”11 Thus, the hero-protagonist conflation has a well established etymological precedent.12

Dickensian criticism is peppered with interchangeable references to his novels’ protagonists and heroes, hereby exhibiting an adherence to this tradition. For example, Beth

Herst argues that Dickens conjures “his own unique protagonist, a ‘hero of an English book’ who embodies the experience of the individual in society as Dickens perceives it…” (5).

Mark Wormald also fuses the figures of protagonist and hero, writing that “Dickens’s heroes were in danger of remaining mere animated collections of exploitable features…” (xix). Here

Wormald identifies character qualities which are not obviously heroic; however, in using the term “heroes” Wormald references the novel’s protagonists—in this case Mr. Pickwick and company. Similarly, the Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens identifies Nicholas as “the penniless young hero” (416) i.e. protagonist of his eponymous novel. Indeed, this terminological union pervades the analysis of heroic typologies: the bumbling hero, for instance, may be called a “hero” simply because he is the protagonist. The heroic designation here refers to the bumbling hero’s status as central character, rather than to a specific achievement on his part.

Nonetheless, while “hero” is often enlisted as a synonym for literary protagonist, it is important to acknowledge that the term has other significant meanings, since identifying the

Dickensian hero-protagonist split demands differentiating between the usages of “hero.”

There must, after all, be some scope for establishing how Dickens’s life-writing novels’

11 “Protagonist.” MerriamWebster.com. Merriam Webster Dictionary, Web. 27th June 2018.

12 Others have on occasion challenged this conflation. In The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (2004) Terence Dawson contends that the “effective protagonist is not the obvious hero or heroine, but an apparently minor figure whose critical function in the ordering of the events has been overlooked” (1; emphasis original). Dawson’s concern primarily pertains to which character evolves the most throughout the novel, and how a novel’s structure might reflect that its principle mission is in fact to relate the story of a seemingly more minor character. He does not discuss Dickens, although such an exploration would prove fruitful for future research, particularly in conjunction with the conception of a hero-protagonist split. 16 protagonists fail to be the hero/ines of their respective narratives—or how his hero/ines cannot truly be deemed the protagonists. Returning to the OED, a “hero” may also be “A man who exhibits extraordinary bravery, firmness, fortitude, or greatness of soul, in any course of action, or in connexion with any pursuit, work, or enterprise; a man admired and venerated for his achievements and noble qualities” (171). In this example, being a “hero” necessitates more than simply being the central figure; the designation also attests to a quality of character. While a hero may also be “A man distinguished by extraordinary valour and martial achievements; one who does brave or noble deeds; an illustrious warrior” (OED 171) this definition is not implicated in this thesis, since nineteenth-century novelists were already choosing more commonplace hero/ine-protagonists. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a well- known example of this Victorian shift away from the epic heroes of previous eras.

Probing the definitive divide between Dickens’s heroes and protagonists is not a quest for perfection—a hero may certainly be flawed—it is instead intended to illuminate how

Dickens’s hero-protagonists consistently fail to be both “noble” and “chief.” My exploration expands, and offers reasoning as to why, “Dickens’s central figures are overshadowed by the minor characters who surround them” (Woloch 132). In assessing this phenomenon, I move beyond the standard acknowledgement that Dickens’s supporting characters, with their array of vivid eccentricities, are often more memorable than the novel’s primary character. David

Copperfield is the protagonist of his autobiography, but I maintain that he is not its hero.

According to the components of Dickensian heroism which I discuss in Chapter 3 — perseverance, self-reliance, being right—it is Agnes, not David, who is the “hero of [David’s] own life” (1). Conversely, Little Dorrit is the hero/ine of the biography bearing her name, but, due to her repeated tendency to fade into the background, she is scarcely its protagonist in the most literal sense. Arthur Clennam in fact claims more page time than Little Dorrit’s title character.

This thesis proposes that analysing how the ostensible hero/ine-protagonists of

Dickens’s life-writing novels consistently fail to achieve heroic ownership of their own stories (whether by voluntarily disappearing or being undermined by lesser characters) provides the key to comprehending Dickens’s fraught relationship with writing his life and controlling his legacy. It argues that Dickens used these particular novels as sites to rehearse what it means to compose a successful life story; nonetheless, Dickens’s own anxieties continually challenged this rehearsal, ultimately splitting the traditionally fused role of the hero-protagonist. I have adopted the following primary research questions to refine my examination: How does the repeated undermining of Dickens’s life-writing novels’ hero- protagonists compromise Dickens’s own legacy, even as it illuminates his anxieties about the life-writing genre? What is the link between Dickens’s obsession with narrative control and his continued return to the (fictional) life-writing genre—including his current incarnations in

Neo-Victorian biofictions? The following pages address these questions.

Early in his career, Dickens was still trialling his authorial style and identity, mulling over whether (in his fictional works) to term himself an editor, a novelist, or a fully-fledged author. Dickens’s conceptions of hero and protagonist also evolve over time. In The Pickwick

Papers, for example, challenging the protagonist can be a comedic affair, and Sam Weller— servant of the supposedly “illustrious” Mr. Pickwick—is repeatedly required to rescue his master from misfortune. Still, Mr. Pickwick’s lacking heroism is glossed in more light- hearted terms in keeping with the comic elements in the novel. Then, commencing with

David Copperfield, the life-writing novels assume a darker tone. Little Dorrit is scarcely the prime subject in her own biography; Little Dorrit’s other professed protagonist, Arthur

Clennam, is a “nobody” who ends up imprisoned; Pip loses his expectations; and, of course,

David Copperfield frets over whether his own heroism will ultimately be realised.

I attribute this shift to the “lost courage” which Dickens references in the oft-quoted

22nd February 1855 letter to former lover Maria Beadnell. Here Dickens writes that “A few years ago (just before Copperfield) I began to write my life, intending the Manuscript to be found among my papers when its subject should be concluded. But as I began to approach within sight of that part of it [their ruined relationship], I lost courage and burned the rest”

(Pilgrim 7:543-544). Occurring in the late 1840s (and thus coinciding with his work on David

Copperfield) Dickens’s devastation with Maria was a deeply significant loss which drove him to burn his early attempt at autobiography; it also haunts his subsequent efforts at fictional life-writing.

Up to this point, Dickens had dabbled in the genre, primarily through adopting the stance of editor of fictional characters’ memoirs, including those of Mr. Pickwick and Oliver

Twist. Even though Nicholas Nickleby’s extended title mentions his Life and Adventures, at this stage Dickens privileged Nicholas’s “adventures” over his “life”; in the novel’s 1839

Preface, Dickens twice references “these adventures” (xlix; l). Then, once Dickens failed at writing his own life—ultimately losing courage to complete his autobiography—his novels reflect an increasingly self-conscious investment in the tenets of life-writing: all three of his autobiographical narrators (David, Esther, and Pip) appear after Dickens burned his own attempt.13 Moreover, nearly twenty years after Nickleby, Dickens explicitly frames Little

13 In the early 1840s, Dickens briefly experimented with first-person narration in The Old Curiosity Shop. Strangely, Master Humphrey voluntarily leaves the story after only three chapters, and the omniscient narrator assumes narrative responsibility. Master Humphrey’s “demise” (Dickens 6) was one which “freed [the author] to express some of his own opinions” (Brennan x). Unencumbered by the aging narrator, Dickens could present his characters’ stories in a more straightforward manner, rather than filtering it through Master Humphrey’s perspective. Although Master Humphrey’s three chapters employ first-person narration, his overt concern is not with chronicling his own story, but with introducing the novel’s central characters, including Little Nell, her grandfather, Dick Swiveller, and Daniel Quilp. However, Master Humphrey’s narratorial credibility is challenged by Dickens’s short-lived miscellany Master Humphrey’s Clock, which served as a complicated narrative frame to The Old Curiosity Shop. In the miscellany, Master Humphrey states, almost as an afterthought, that he was in fact present throughout the story under the guise of the character called the “Single Gentleman.” Scholars typically dismiss this revelation as “wildly unconvincing” (Slater Dickens 161), or even a “blunder” (Mundhenk 655) that Dickens exacerbated by attempting to reconcile the narrative inconsistencies between the novel (The Old Curiosity Shop) that was appearing in the serial (Master Humphrey’s Clock) featuring a character/narrator (Master Humphrey) who was awkwardly skirting both. In the 19

Dorrit’s story as biography, wherein he names himself as “Little Dorrit’s biographer” (7). In the aftermath of his own autobiographical attempt, Dickens’s focus shifted from his heroine’s adventures (as with Nicholas Nickleby) to her life.

Still, such a shift was not without its complications. Dickens’s burgeoning interest in the fictional life-writing genre coincides with a general darkening of subject matter, as

Pickwick’s comedic escapades give way to Pip’s forfeited expectations. David Copperfield’s unease about whether or not he will ultimately be deemed the hero of his own life is the inspiration for this thesis, and his fictional autobiography—with Agnes’s (arguable) appropriation of David’s heroic title—provides a fitting case study for the overarching tension between Dickensian heroism and anxiety. To further complicate matters, even when

Dickens’s protagonists adhere to the aforementioned principles of Dickensian heroism, their histories are still compromised by perplexing inconsistencies. Little Dorrit is a key example of this phenomenon: she exhibits all the tenets of Dickensian heroism, yet she is constantly maligned by those around her and even disappears for large portions of her own biography.

Dickens’s subjects cannot confidently claim heroic ownership of their own stories because their author lost his own autobiographical courage.

Bio-critical scholarship tends to frame Dickens’s fragment of autobiography in light of the trauma inflicted during his childhood experience working at Warren’s Blacking

Factory.14 “All roads, it sometimes seems, lead back to Warren’s Blacking” (Bodenheimer

Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel, editor Elizabeth Brennan notes that the frame of the serial was cut when The Old Curiosity Shop was published in novel form (xxv). Dickens explains in later Prefaces to the novel that once “the story was finished, that it might be freed from the incumbrance of associations and interruptions with which it had no kind of concern, I caused the few sheets of Master Humphrey’s Clock, which had been printed in connexion with it, to be cancelled…” (5). The novel itself is thus presented without reference to Master Humphrey’s return, or his “improbable” (Schlicke Companion 379) revelation as a character in the story. As such, I have excluded it as one of Dickens’s life-writing novels, since The Old Curiosity Shop in novel form is not glossed as an example of Master Humphrey’s life-writing. It was not until the end of the decade—after Dickens had attempted to write his own autobiography—that David Copperfield appears as the inaugural first-person narrator to sustain explicit relation of his own life history.

14 Alexander Welsh summarises that “Any reasonably attentive student of literature believes that the single most important event in the life of Dickens was not the writing of any novel, or his attaining of independence, 20

Knowing Dickens 17). However, while this episode deeply affected Dickens, he still addresses it in his fleeting attempt at autobiography; Warren’s was not the portion of his life history he could not face writing; Warren’s was not the impetus for burning the fragment;

Warren’s was not the memory that claimed his autobiographical courage. This (dubious) honour belongs to his failed romance with Maria Beadnell, whose desertion of Dickens left an indelible mark upon the author. As Jean Ferguson Carr observes, “Dickens cites his adolescent love for Maria Beadnell as the origin of his habits of repression. He professes that the love affair is too painful a memory to record, and later informs Maria that he found it an insurmountable barrier when trying to write his life history” (457). Carr concludes, however, that Dickens maintained a love/hate relationship with the episode, since he later retold it to

or his marriage and the births of his children, but the four months he spent in Warren’s Blacking warehouse at the age of twelve” (2).

“I suggest that Warren’s was traumatic for Dickens in the sense that trauma can be recognized through its afterlife in consciousness…it is impossible to read Dickens without hearing echoes of the autobiographical memory in many different situations” (Bodenheimer Knowing Dickens 19).

For Steven Marcus, Dickens’s autobiographical fragment “figures in some central way in every novel [Dickens] wrote; and we cannot understand the creative thrust of his life without taking into account his developing attitudes toward this episode, as we find them successively transmuted in novel after novel” (363). I accept this centrality yet shift the focus to Maria Beadnell’s role in Dickens’s abandonment of his autobiographical project. Moreover, I read this episode with Maria as engendering the theme of the hero/protagonist being repeatedly undermined in Dickens’s life-writing novels.

In the Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of David Copperfield, Andrew Sanders surmises how “It is extraordinary to find Dickens losing courage about any aspect of his writing, especially after having forced himself to describe the shame of the year in the Blacking Warehouse, a ‘shame’, a ‘humiliation’, and a ‘secret agony’ which, as he put it, ‘no words could express’” (ix). And yet, Dickens did describe his time at the Blacking Warehouse in his autobiographical fragment, unlike his failed romance with Maria.

Nicola Bradbury is likewise interested in the blacking factory experience, but she denotes something different as the most important aspect of the autobiographical fragment: “It is the betrayal of the mother, seduced by worldly considerations, that underpins the pain of the autobiographical fragment” (“Fragment” 21). While I agree that this pain is certainly formative for Dickens, he was still able to commit it to paper as part of his autobiographical attempt. It was not his mother’s betrayal nor the trauma at Warren’s Blacking that drove Dickens to burn his life history as his courage slipped away; rather, it was his memory of Maria Beadnell’s cruelty in playing with his youthful, romantic affections.

Forster and to others seeking the author in David Copperfield’s trials (457-458).15 Lest we discount how deeply this episode wounded Dickens, we should recall that “Charles Dickens had the sensitivity of an artist, and even calf love could remain a life-long painful memory for him” (Fido Dickens 23). Moreover, as Jon Mee points out, “scarcely anything could be less

Dickensian than the sense of the past as something that can be safely put away” (“Seeing”

185). As I detail in Chapter 4, the pain of Maria’s abandonment never left him; Dickens was not one to compartmentalise and “safely put away” past suffering. Dickens confided to Maria that she was the “one creature who represented the whole world to me” (Letters 286), and

Lucinda Dickens Hawksley likewise contends that her great great great grandfather

“remained emotionally scarred by his unhappy love affair” (16). Biographer Edgar Johnson observes how the misery Dickens felt over Maria’s treatment of him cemented the prior trauma of the blacking factory and his father’s imprisonment since “It revived and re- emphasized those shapes of suffering that he remembered so well: the suffering of helplessness and of undeserved humiliation” (81). Clearly, Dickens’s perception of his interactions with Maria assigned far more significance to events than would ordinarily be imputed to lost love; these intricacies are discussed further in Chapters 3 and 4. For the moment, I suggest that, although he never again attempted an autobiography as-such,

Dickens repeatedly returns to the life-writing genre in his fiction, in part to reclaim his “lost courage.” Nonetheless, this courage, once lost, continued to evade him, and his life—like many of his novels—exhibits a tension between heroism and anxiety, between revealing and concealing, between being known and self-preservation.

Dickens’s autobiography was not the only thing he burned; his attempts to document his own life were fractured at best. In an extreme attempt at narrative control, Dickens burned

15 Carr also ascribes Dickens’s repression—which he links to Maria’s ill treatment of him and claims adversely affected his relationships with his children—as stemming from difficulties relating to his parents (458).

22 most of his diaries, and much of his correspondence (received) comprised the (in)famous

Gad’s Hill bonfire of 1860, in which thousands of letters served as kindling. Dickens was “a great destroyer of letters” (Hartley viii) who eradicated the bulk of his incoming correspondence due to “the misuse of the private letters of public men” (Pilgrim 10: 465).16

In all fairness, Dickens did experience this “misuse” firsthand, most significantly in what is commonly referred to as “Violated Letter.” In 1858, Dickens outlined his perspective on the messy separation from his wife, Catherine, in a private letter to Arthur Smith. Unfortunately, the letter did not remain private for long, for it soon appeared in newspapers both in the

United Kingdom and the United States.

Dickens’s relationship with the American press was already strained prior to this unfortunate publication. Four months after returning from his 1842 American voyage, he bemoaned “the aspersions being greedily believed which make me out a lying adventurer”

(Letters 110). Fifteen months later, Dickens was still railing against his presentation by the

American press, writing to close friend William Macready that “the whole country is led and driven by a herd of rascals” (Letters 129). Upon completing his rant, Dickens closes the letter by admonishing Macready to “Burn this letter, lest it should be abstracted from your desk…and published in a newspaper” (Letters 129). The irony of this command now appearing in an edited collection of Dickens’s letters notwithstanding, his missive to

Macready is merely one example of Dickens’s proclivity for editing identity by requesting that his correspondence be burned. Fortunately for us, most recipients of Dickens’s letters were not similarly inclined to obliterate by fire.

16 A bit later in this letter, which was written on 20th December 1864 to Reverend S. R. Hole, Dickens confessed that “I destroyed a very large and very rare mass of correspondence. It was not done without pain, you may believe, but, the first reluctance conquered, I have steadily abided by my determination to keep no letters by me, and to consign all such papers to the fire” (Pilgrim 10: 465).

It is indeed perplexing that, despite this self-conscious fixation on constructing his legacy—and on having the final word in shaping his history—Dickens never penned a complete autobiography as such. This incongruity is addressed in detail later in this thesis, most extensively in the third chapter. While acknowledging that we do, of course, have a treasure trove of Dickens’s letters—upwards of 14,000 are published in the definitive Pilgrim edition—I also clarify that a specific focus on Dickens’s self-representation in his letters is outside the scope of my project. I quote from his letters throughout the thesis as a means of illuminating Dickens’s perspectives on himself and his characters. However, my primary focus is on those novels of Dickens’s self-consciously exhibiting the forms of autobiography, memoir, or biography—a vantage point which privileges the protagonists Dickens offered for public scrutiny, and whose legacies he bound up with his own. David Copperfield’s anxiety about “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show” (1) is evident in Dickens’s own life, except that there are few pages of “personal history” (to quote David Copperfield’s subtitle) by which to evaluate the hero of Dickens’s life, since they have mostly been burned. Hence my exploration of his fictional life-writing, which charts the life histories of the characters who comprise Dickens’s own legacy—and through whom he specifically requested to be remembered—since they form the foundation of the “published works” referenced immediately below.

Pyromaniacal tendencies17 aside, Dickens was notoriously controlling, particularly where his name was concerned. In his last will and testament (reprinted in full as an appendix to John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens) Dickens mandates that his legacy be forever evaluated in accordance with his publishing record. Here he states that “I rest my claims to

17 In “Burning: The Evidence,” Paul Lewis laments the loss of historical bounty in Dickens’s bonfire, deeming him “not so much the inimitable as the inimical” (198).

24 the remembrance of my country on my published works…” (827). Foucault reminds us of

“the kinship between writing and death” (1623) wherein Greek heroes achieved immortality through narrative. Dickens’s will reflects a similar concern: the connection between his legacy, his name, and his publishing history is evinced in the legal proceedings between

Dickens and his former publishers, Bradbury and Evans. A legal brief from the case—which concerned the dissolution of the journal Household Words—demonstrates Dickens’s staunch protection of his name:

But it concerns not only my pecuniary interests but my honor and reputation that my name should not be erroneously associated with any publication which I have ceased to conduct, and that the Public should know (as they have a right to know) that if any periodical is published subsequently to May 1859 under the name of Household Words, it is not the same publication which has hitherto borne that name. (10) 18 Honour, reputation—and legacy—are forever bound up in Dickens’s publishing record, and

Dickens demonstrates his acute awareness of his readers (the “Public”) whom he deems deserving of accurate information. Or, at least, what he deems accurate information.

Dickens’s desire for complete narrative control is exemplified in the “Personal

Statement” incident of the late 1850s—an incident which also wounded his pride and

(arguably) further discouraged any overt attempts at writing his own life. Prior to the break with Bradbury and Evans, Dickens used the journal Household Words as a vehicle to restore his readers’ good faith in him. Robert Sawyer relates Dickens’s attempt to “redeem his reputation” after separating from his wife amid rumours of multiple affairs: “Thinking that the public deserved to be told, Dickens published a ‘personal’ page-long statement in his magazine, Household Words, trying to defend his actions” (60). Unfortunately, the public was not as accepting of his statement as Dickens had hoped, and Sawyer speculates that

“what offended people was not so much his actions, but the sense that he had transformed his

18 “Charles Dickens’s Legal Papers.” 1837-1897. Western Manuscripts. Add MS 88903. The Britsh Library, London. The covering page clarifies that the documents pertain to the case of Bradbury v. Dickens heard 28th April 1859 in the Chancery Court.

25 domestic tragedy into a public drama” (60). Although Dickens had commenced burning his life-writing prior to this debacle, such a poor reception by his beloved readers would certainly not have encouraged future full disclosure. Between the courage lost to Maria Beadnell and the public humiliation suffered after revealing himself in Household Words, an outright

Dickensian autobiography drifted further outside the realm of possibility. Instead, Dickens continued to embalm himself through his fiction, where public adoration was expected.

However, as we shall see, heroism in his life-writing novels is anything but straightforward.

Further complicating matters is the presence of guilt in these life-writing novels. In his criticism of David Copperfield, a novel widely acknowledged as Dickens’s fictional autobiography, J. Hillis Miller suggests that Dickens experienced guilt in association with self-reliance, and pinpoints “the guilt which always hovers, for Dickens, over the man who takes matters into his own hands” (159). This stance is in opposition to other critics, such as

Jerome Meckier, who lobby for the triumph of self-reliance in David Copperfield. My analysis of the novel positions David as a protagonist who cannot ultimately claim heroic ownership of his own history. Despite his promise at the start of his autobiography that “these pages” will reveal whether or not he is the hero (1), David declines to explicitly state his verdict at the end of his narrative. I submit that the reason for this reticence is that David cannot bring himself to outright identify Agnes as the hero/ine of his life, although he signposts this truth throughout the text. Therefore, in my reading, the guilt in David

Copperfield stems from Dickens’s compromising of his self-professed “favourite child”

(Clarendon Dickens 752).

Similarly, guilt is evident in The Pickwick Papers, wherein the Papers’ ostensible hero, the “immortal,” “noble,” and overall “illustrious” Mr. Pickwick, is repeatedly upstaged by a seemingly lesser character, the irrepressible Sam Weller. In Chapter 2 of this thesis, I expand Wormald’s point that Sam Weller shares striking similarities to Dickens himself, to

26 suggest that Dickens overemphasises Mr. Pickwick’s heroism to atone for guilt about Sam stealing the show from the supposed hero. Guilt in The Pickwick Papers is particularly intriguing since the novel claims to have an editor. This slippage between Dickens’s alternating narratological roles in the Papers is discussed further in the second chapter.

Likewise, in Little Dorrit, Elaine Showalter pinpoints the narrator’s “guilt about an omniscient invasion” (31) wherein Dickens’s narratorial “secret self” (21) shadows Amy

Dorrit and Arthur Clennam, accessing (and revealing) secrets previously unknown. In

Chapter 4 of this thesis, I assess the precedent for Dickens—as self-professed biographer of

Amy Dorrit—to claim equal importance with the biography’s subject. According to Juliette

Atkinson, the biographer of a marginalised subject is often just as significant as the subject herself, since selecting “an ‘obscure’ subject inflated the importance of the biographer” by serving “as an act of patronage” even as it pinpointed the author’s ability to bring a nobody into the public eye (13). In Chapter 4, I complicate Showalter’s identification of narrative guilt by extending it to include Dickens’s selection of an insignificant character as biographical subject. Paradoxically, however, Dickens’s decision to honour a “hidden life” in turn illuminates Dickens’s own life-writing anxieties, via a vanishing heroine who disappears from her own life history even as Dickens once burned his. Little Dorrit thus joins the other fractured hero/ine-protagonists of Dickens’s life-writing novels.

Showalter’s pinpointed guilt about the narrator’s access to private information also applies to the biographer’s choices about who—and what—to include in Little Dorrit’s history. Rosemarie Bodenheimer concludes that Dickens felt guilty for “lying” via carefully editing his life history in (rare) responses to reporters clamouring for biographical information (“Writing” 50-51). Guilt is not the focus of this thesis, but it does form a noteworthy aspect of the Dickensian anxiety which I explore at length. Dickens’s life-writing novels are marked by the consistent inability of the professed protagonist to be deemed the

27 outright hero/ine of his or her own history (or in Little Dorrit’s case, for the heroine to be, in effect, the protagonist). Dickens’s “lost courage” haunts the narratives of his favourite characters, manifesting itself in the tension between heroism and anxiety—which in turn reveals Dickens’s compromising of his characters in his own anxieties about narrative heroism.

A tension between heroism and anxiety is also symptomatic of the entire Victorian age. Dickens’s celebration of perseverance and self-reliance is characteristic of, and indeed shaped by, that of the Victorian period more broadly. According to Alexis Harley, “The story of hard work and gradual improvement is the story of the Victorian novel (of Charles

Dickens’s David Copperfield, for instance), and the story of the Victorian self-made man

(Charles Dickens himself)” (16). Here, Harley embraces the typical laudatory conflation of

Dickens and the Victorian masculine ideal. However, on the other hand, the editors of the

Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age remind us that “Although many

Victorians shared a sense of satisfaction in the industrial and political pre-eminence of

England during the period, they also suffered from an anxious sense of something lost, a sense too of being displaced persons in a world made alien by technological changes that had been exploited too quickly for the adaptive powers of the human psyche” (980; emphasis mine). Similarly, Dickens, despite his overwhelming professional success, was plagued by restlessness and a similar “anxious sense of something lost,” which in his case can be attributed not only to the Victorian unease, but also to the complexity encompassing his “lost courage” and protecting his legacy. Indeed, David Copperfield’s recurring lament of “an old unhappy loss or want of something” (629) mimics the anxiety of the entire Victorian age.

Writing to John Forster in early February 1855, Dickens plaintively echoed, “Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits,

28 as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?”

(Pilgrim 7: 523). Courage was apparently not all Dickens feared he was missing.

Dickens’s Legacy: “‘The immortal memory’ is the toast of the Dickens Fellowship”19

Dickens—and his characters—are very much alive in the United Kingdom. They haunt alleyways, shop fronts, and even my coffee—at least when I visited the Charles

Dickens Coffee House on Wellington, near Drury Lane. Dickens once lived above this shopfront, which formerly housed his journal All the Year Round. Along the Kentish road from London to Higham (the town where Gad’s Hill is located) lies a tiny village called

Cooling. This village boasts St. James’ church, the location which arguably inspired the opening chapter of Great Expectations, where protagonist Pip meets convict Magwitch in the shadowy churchyard on Christmas Eve. The church proudly promotes its link (albeit unproven) to Great Expectations. On a kitschier note, the Dickens World theme park formed part of a strip mall near the Chatham Dockyards where Dickens’s father formerly worked.

Here one can channel Nicholas Nickleby by undertaking a lesson in humiliation at Dotheboys

Hall, wander past Peggotty’s boathouse, and tour a Victorian Village.

In Dickens’s birthplace of Portsmouth, tributes to the city’s most famous son abound.

A glimpse out my lodging’s window grants a view of “Estella” street, and Dickens’s birthplace-turned-museum is only a five-minute wander away. Portsmouth’s chapter of the

Dickens Fellowship organises occasional Sunday afternoon readings in the Charles Dickens

Birthplace Museum. Inside the Museum, the couch where Dickens died sits mere steps away from the room where he was born, an incongruity reminiscent of the paradox Dickens was himself. Interestingly, Portsmouth boasts the only full-sized statue of Dickens in Great

Britain; this statue is one of only three such statues worldwide. Such a surprising dearth (for

19 Martin Fido World (127).

29 an author so widely revered) almost certainly stems from Dickens’s personal dislike of memorialisation in this manner. Richard Lettis’s take on Dickens’s opposition to statues is that “One’s work should be one’s monument, all else was puffery, and would ultimately hurt literature” (10). Another (less humble but also more probable) interpretation is that Dickens did not approve of his image existing outside his control. He would most likely be dismayed, then, to see his Portsmouth statue being unceremoniously enlisted to cordon off the surrounding areas which were being cleaned; yellow tape denoting “do not enter” was draped through the statue’s arm.20

Dickens’s legacy—much like the man himself—is ever in motion. He has evolved over time, burgeoning into both jolly Father Christmas and grizzled Victorian veteran.21

University students now associate Dickens with the version of A Christmas Carol related by the Muppets. Is this type of remembrance honouring or horrifying to a man so fixated on controlling his legacy? Quite possibly a bit of both, since, like most things Dickensian, contradictions are expected. As Holly Furneaux pointed out during a roundtable session at the

2016 British Association for Victorian Studies conference, Dickens was a consumer of the

Dickensian even during his own lifetime, and the overlap between original Dickens versus

20 Repurposing the statue in this manner added insult to the injury of an already “distinctly uncomfortable” pose (O’Brien, np). Perhaps Dickens’s discomfort is in fact frustration over his loss of post-mortem control. The (full-sized) Dickens statue in Sydney, Australia’s Centennial Park is rumoured to be cursed. This superstition— stemming from unease about Dickens’s express wishes being disobeyed—further disseminates the mythology of the Dickensian.

21 As referenced in the Preface, Katey Dickens was famously dismayed over the jolly Father Christmas aspect of her father’s persona, complaining to George Bernard Shaw that “If you could make the public understand that my father was not a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch, you would greatly oblige me.” This quote appears repeatedly, most notably in Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman (245), Charles Dickens: A Life (414; also by Tomalin), and Michael Slater’s Dickens and Women page (201).

In the Introduction to Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, editors John Bowen and Robert L. Patten comment that “‘Dickens’ is often today taken as a code for Victorian (and therefore atmospheric and old- fashioned) literature, or a particular brand of characterization or sentimentality, or everything not modern” (2).

Dickens repurposed was already blurred.22 Therefore, while part of Dickens would be delighted that his characters live on today, he would—as evinced by the anxiety over his public image and staunch protection of his reputation—probably also take issue with their afterlives existing outside his control. As I detail in Chapter 5, the same applies to Dickens’s own afterlife, as evinced through his recent resurrections in neo-Victorian biofictional novels.

Indeed, Charles Dickens’s life and legacy, or his “personal iconicity” (1) as Charlotte

Boyce and Elodie Rousselot term it, have attracted additional interest in the past decade, due largely to the celebration of his bicentenary in 2012. Cora Kaplan points out how, “At the very least it has intensified the ways in which Dickens’s celebrity status as the great Victorian writer has skewed the critical treatment of his work and his life, and the relentless imbrication of the two” (“Coda” 198; emphasis original). Perfectly timed birthday gifts in the form of

Dickensian biographies by revered critic Michael Slater and esteemed biographer Claire

Tomalin arrived in 2009 and 2011, respectively. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s biography

Becoming Dickens was another 2011 offering. Biofictional novels melding aspects of

Dickens’s life with a fictional format also abounded around the bicentenary: Richard

Flanagan’s Wanting (2008), Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress (2008), Matthew Pearl’s

The Last Dickens (2009), and Dan Simmons’s Drood (2009) are key examples. Dickens’s characters have also experienced modern makeovers in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997),

Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006), and Ronald Frame’s Havisham (2012), to name a few.

As Cora Kaplan argues in her seminal Victoriana (2007), we are currently entranced by all things Victorian. Kaplan engages with Barthes’s famous “The Death of the Author” stance, which divorces biography and text, to propose instead that the “healthy demand for

Victorian literary biography and biofiction suggests either that the death of the author…has

22 Jay Clayton summarises that “In his own lifetime, Dickens saw the Little Nell Cigar, Pickwick Snuff, Gamp Umbrellas, and a host of other products bearing his characters’ names…there was no provision for licensing such spinoffs, but Dickens understood the publicity value that came from their wide diffusion” (153). I discuss Dickens’s complicated relationship with unlicensed adaptations of his works in Chapter 5. 31 been greatly exaggerated, or, conversely, that the threat has breathed new life into the idea of the author” (70-71). Kaplan references Victorian authors—Dickens and Henry James in particular—who return as characters in neo-Victorian biofictional novels and literary biographies. Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens is a chief example. Likewise, in “Disparate Images”

(2014), Julia Novak and Sandra Mayer argue that “The frequently proclaimed ‘rebirth of the author’ has given rise to fictional re-writings of authors’ lives in the past thirty years, which testify to an on-going fascination with authorship” (25). Victorian afterlives in general—and

Dickens’s in particular—are enjoying renewed scholarly as well as popular interest. Sally

Ledger and Holly Furneaux’s edited collection Charles Dickens in Context (2011) situates

“Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it” (Note on the Text, np) as a vital force in shaping the world around him. Ranging from class issues to the rise of celebrity culture, the book’s chapters flesh out Dickens in the context of the nineteenth-century and chart his ongoing impact. There is even a chapter on

Dickens’s influence over Christmas. However, Dickens’s current renderings are not all flattering, and Thomas Carlyle’s vision of “The Hero as a Man of Letters” is severely compromised, at least where Dickens is concerned. Gone is Carlyle’s conception of an author as a deific sage, as Dickens suffers writer’s block (Girl in a Blue Dress) and is unceremoniously murdered in a Wilkie Collins dream sequence (Drood). Dickens’s popularity may be enduring, but his individual laudability is now repeatedly questioned.

Other critics have commented upon Dickens’s fixation with his legacy, the associated anxieties, and how Dickens imbued his novels with aspects from his everyday life. However, what has not been made explicit is how Dickens’s “lost courage” haunts his life-writing novels, exposing the vulnerabilities of an author otherwise accustomed to maintaining control. Therefore, this thesis connects two main themes. First, I explore Dickens’s anxieties about legacy, especially as evinced through his life-writing novels, which exhibit a

32 characteristic Dickensian tension between heroism and anxiety. Namely, that the professed protagonist—the ostensible hero of the life-writing novel—is often undermined, sometimes even by the author himself. This pattern in turn precipitates the characteristic Dickensian hero-protagonist split. Dickens uses these life-writing novels as sites to rehearse life-writing narratives, thereby engaging in “biographilia” through writing biofiction before it was a genre as-such. Second, I situate Dickens’s fixation on controlling his image in conversation with the ongoing neo-Victorian fascination with legacy, reading Dickens as a site for this fascination. Examining the continuum of Dickensian biofiction allows me to interrogate how other authors and biographers have taken up the project Dickens commenced. Ultimately, despite his best efforts, he lost control of his narrative legacy, which has been repeatedly reimagined in the decades since his death.

Dickens’s “Life-Writing Novels”

As previously indicated, I have chosen to focus on the Dickensian texts which I refer to as Dickens’s “life-writing novels.” That is, his novels which are self-consciously formed around the principles of life-writing, such as David Copperfield’s autobiography, Little

Dorrit’s biography, and the memoirs of Mr. Pickwick and Oliver Twist. These particular novels become sites for Dickens to rehearse life-writing narratives: here—through the ostensible veneer of fiction—he can immerse himself in the issues of legacy which so possessed him. In the next chapter, I plot key forms of biofiction on a continuum, ranging from literary history on the more (ostensibly) factual end to historical fiction on the more

(obviously) fictional end. I situate life-writing novels between biofiction and historical fiction; biofictions are more purposeful in recreating a specific historical figure’s story, while historical fictions are propelled by invented characters set against a historical backdrop. Both biofictions and historical fictions may contain life-writing elements, although the invention levels vary between these forms. Life-writing novels are situated between these two forms

33 since they are less explicitly fictional than biofictions, yet they are more self-consciously invested in the tenets of life-writing than generic historical fictions.

Strangely, Dickens’s depictions of the protagonists in these life-writing novels call into question what it means to be the hero of the story, and a pattern emerges whereby the professed protagonist is often deposed by another, supposedly lesser, character. David

Copperfield declares he would be “nothing” without Agnes, Little Dorrit’s biography often veers away from its biographical subject, and “that great man” Mr. Pickwick must be repeatedly rescued by his servant. These struggles are productive sites to chart Dickens’s own anxieties, ranging from early concerns over his authorial identity to his later failure to reclaim the autobiographical courage once lost to Maria Beadnell. The legacies of Dickens and his characters are forever fused. As biographer Peter Ackroyd points out, over twenty-five famous Dickensian creations were also “born on this February day…but not dying with him, living on for ever” (1-2). Author and character are forever entangled. Dickens’s characters imbued him with vitality even as he wrote them into existence, and Dickens’s image—not

Nicholas’s—appears on the cover of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Nicholas

Nickleby. The ensuing pages may chronicle Nicholas’s Life and Adventures, but it is Dickens who visibly attracts readers.

Scholarship supports a certain conflation between reality and fiction. Historiographic metafiction recognises both history and fiction as constructs, but it tends to advance the view that this very constructedness imbues fiction with as much validity as history can claim.23

23 “Historiographic metafiction refutes the natural or common-sense methods of distinguishing between historical fact and fiction. It refuses the view that only history has a truth claim, both by questioning the ground of that claim in historiography and by asserting that both history and fiction are discourses, human constructs, signifying systems, and both derive their major claim to truth from that identity” (Hutcheon Poetics of Postmodernism 93).

We can attribute this “constructedness” to the fallible humanity of being an author: “fiction and biography/historiography have affinities which are based upon the narrative nature of both genres” (Middeke 3). To write is to construct is to fictionalise—at least to a certain extent.

More recently, critics like Cora Kaplan have wedded historiography and metafiction with studies of neo-Victorian biofiction.24 Kaplan argues that “So much has [life-writing] encroached on fiction that it has become a commonplace to say that biography has become the new novel” (Victoriana 37). Repurposing this concept for my thesis means that new insight can be gleaned from conflating Dickensian life-writing and Dickensian novels.

Charles Dickens identified with his characters to the extent they actually lived for him; thus, it is accepted that reality and fiction overlapped for the author. Malcolm Andrews argues that

Dickens’s characters were “more than fictional constructs. They had been partly infused with his own being: he had personally animated them, tried them for sound, rehearsed their gestures, become them at one point or another…” (87; emphasis original). Andrews’s focus is on Dickens’s reading tours, but the argument holds true for the reality of Dickens’s characters on the page as well. Indeed, this overlap is especially evident in Dickens’s life-writing novels, which provide miniature worlds for his characters. Here he crafts Little Dorrit’s biography, serves as editor for Mr. Pickwick and Oliver Twist, and installs David Copperfield as his deputy auto/biographer. According to Robert Sawyer, “Dickens firmly believed it was the duty of the artist to illuminate inherent truths of life which were invisible to the common man, so that the lines between reality and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity, are not only blurred, but almost inverted…” (50). Dickens, then, is ideally suited to the biofictional genre.

His entire world exists on a sliding scale of reality so acute it imbues Dickens with

24 Similarly, Kaplan later explains that “Whatever one’s ethical view of ‘authenticity’ as a gold standard for life writing, it is now an almost clichéd assumption that autobiography and memoir inevitably construct and invent their authors as quasi-fictional characters. Biography, although it may seek to modify and correct self- representation, takes the same liberties. The novelisation of biography represents only the next logical stage of that process” (Victoriana 65).

Lena Steveker further comments: “As the fictional elements, chronological disruptions and metabiographical reflections in Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990) show, literary biography has come to acknowledge postmodern theoretical insights into the biographer’s influence, the discursivity of subjectivity and the constructedness of life-writing” (69).

35 premonitions of postmodernity—premonitions including the biographilia which would reinvigorate his legacy (if not necessarily his reputation) two hundred years after his birth.

His Victorian readership would have similarly elided boundaries governing fact and fiction:

“If narratives seemed ‘real’ to Victorian artists and readers, it was partly because the gap between text and life hardly existed…novels were news and news might be fiction” (Patten

Boz 217). Terminology such as Dickens’s “life-writing novels” would not have seemed incompatible to them. Furthermore, as Kate Flint observes in an article for the British

Library, one of the nineteenth-century debates surrounded “whether or not readers could distinguish between the escapism afforded by fiction, and the realities of their own lives”

(np).25 This concern further accentuates the Victorian conflation of reality and fiction—which

Dickens invoked to the fullest.

In the Introduction to the definitive Clarendon edition of David Copperfield, editor

Nina Burgis writes that “The fictional framework of the Micawber household strengthened and transformed the telling of the ‘truth’ about [Dickens’s] own childish days; David’s feckless ‘family’ could be laughed at and enjoyed because they were not in fact his family or responsible for his plight” (xxxiv). By tweaking “truth” (in quotation marks) fiction affords some distance, beckoning Dickens to divulge events which might otherwise remain hidden.

In my reading, fiction allows Dickens to defer the anxiety about being the hero of his own life onto his life-writing novels, thus transforming them into spaces where he can experiment with what it means to write a successful life story. What emerges, however, is an oft-evinced reticence wherein the professed hero-protagonists of Dickens’s life-writing novels are split rather than fused as is typically expected. The protagonist is not always the hero/ine—and the hero/ine is not always the protagonist.

25 Flint, Kate. “Victorian Readers.” https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/victorian-readers. Web. Accessed 11th Feb. 2019. 36

Roland Barthes provocatively suggests that “Then perhaps the subject returns, not as illusion, but as fiction. A certain pleasure is derived from a way of imagining oneself as individual, of inventing a final, rarest fiction: the fictive identity” (The Pleasure of the Text,

62; emphasis original). Dickens lives vicariously through his characters; he forges this

“fictive identity” for himself by deploying the tenets of life-writing in his fiction. Dickens advocates for the merits of the misunderstood in Little Dorrit, simultaneously edits Mr.

Pickwick’s memoirs and steals the show from him, and flirts with the ramifications of David

Copperfield not being deemed the hero of his own history. These novels do contain elements from Dickens’s own life, but the author is protected through it all by the veneer of fiction.

Yes, fiction was very real for him, but a “fictive identity” still afforded some separation. Cora

Kaplan surmises that perhaps Barthes’s insistent separation of author and text has produced the opposite effect: the author’s “death” initiates an even more frantic search for him, which can, paradoxically, result in conflating author and character (Victoriana 70-71). The author, once buried, may insistently return in unexpected ways.

To be clear, I am not focusing on the similarities shared by Dickens and his characters; rather, I am interested in the ways in which Dickens’s own anxieties about legacy play out in his characters’ life histories. This anxiety is most evident in David Copperfield’s autobiography, which opens with the famous pledge to judge his heroism according to the pages of his life history (1). As many other critics have shown,26 there are remarkable

26 As early as several years after Dickens’s death, his biographer John Forster—whose biography of Dickens revealed the famous author’s autobiographical fragment to the world—cautioned against overly conflating Dickens and David Copperfield: “But, many as are the resemblances in Copperfield’s adventures to portions of those of Dickens, and often as reflections occur to David which no one intimate with Dickens could fail to recognize as but the reproduction of his, it would be the greatest mistake to imagine anything like a complete identity of the fictitious novelist with the real one…” (525).

Rosemarie Bodenheimer observes that “At worst, biographical criticism makes assured links between fictional characters and their real-life ‘models’ or interprets hidden parts of a writer’s life by assigning literal biographical value to certain passages, images, or characters in the novels. Dickens has perhaps received more than his fair share of such treatment” (“Writing” 49). Nonetheless, this critical approach persists.

37 similarities between Dickens and David, ranging from childhood abandonment to a career as an author. On the surface, David’s story reads like a self-made success story of (Samuel)

Smilesean proportions. But what has not been fully pursued is the lingering anxiety about

David actually achieving heroism within his own story. My reading of David Copperfield addresses this gap by suggesting that Agnes usurps the heroic title of David’s story. In

David’s case, the protagonist is not the outright hero(ine).

In the absence of a complete Dickensian autobiography, many critics have probed

Dickens’s protagonists for insight into their author’s life—scrutinising his leading ladies for clues about Dickens’s depth of feeling for his dead sister-in-law, for instance—thus utilising

Dickens’s fictional realm to further illuminate his reality. It is also critically accepted that

Dickens’s characters are not traditionally masculine or heroic,27 and it is widely acknowledged that Dickens was fixated on controlling his legacy. However, no one has yet examined these topics specifically within the context of Dickens’s life-writing novels—or in terms of the author severing the roles of hero and protagonist in these novels. Dickens was clearly interested in the life-writing genre, which was coming into its own during his era.

Julie F. Codell notes “the immense popularity of biographies in the nineteenth-century” (1) and fictional autobiographies were also en vogue at the time; Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is another famous example. By bridging forms of life-writing and the novel—to interrogate the intersection of fiction and legacy—my thesis topic intersects with several flourishing areas of critical inquiry, including neo-Victorian biofiction, Victorian afterlives, and narratology.

Richard J. Dunn provides an example of this repeated comparison, writing “Dickens’s secret story, embedded in the fictional David, was one of rags-to-riches, a chronicle of earnest effort and ever-expanding opportunity. The fictional autobiographer, David, declares that he has dropped the curtain on the stage of his earlier life (Chapter 12), and so had Dickens abandoned and then fictionally veiled…the actual past” (9).

27 Beth Herst goes so far as to query, “But do Dickens’s novels possess heroes at all? There are no Carlylean ‘Great Men’ among the young male protagonists who people their pages, nothing to suggest the transcendent qualities of the ‘Hero-soul’ to be worshipped” (1-2). 38

Elizabeth Langland reminds us of the narratological ties between textual and cultural identity, since “Building a national identity depends crucially upon narrative” (Telling Tales

111). Using Queen Victoria as her case study, Langland reads Queen Victoria as a text and assesses how the public representation of a private body contributes to the narration of national identity. Langland argues that “To the Victorians, language and its uses were as central in creating national identity as was bold and heroic action” (127). This approach informs my analysis of Dickens’s textual construction of heroism throughout his life-writing novels. Exploiting the narrative overlap between fact and fiction, Dickens tests the boundaries of heroism via his novels. He weaves a textual identity (life-writing, quite literally!) for himself through the fabric of narrative. Langland explains that “Ultimately, then, this narrative of nation and nationality has more in common with novelistic narratives than it might wish. Although it purports to rely on and be based on facts, it remains a fiction.

To the extent that it tells a story and marshals diverse figures as actors in that story, it works on connotative and suggestive levels” (111-112). Narratologically speaking, eminent

Victorians can themselves become biofictions—living embodiments springing from the hybrid of biography (or, for Eckart Voigts, biology, as outlined in Chapter 1) and the constructed fictions which have contributed to their cultural legacies. In a similar vein,

Grahame Smith maintains that “Dickens’s life is a textual construct, much of it created by the writer himself” (Cambridge Companion 2). I extend this argument to analyse how Dickens has subsequently lost creative control of his textual identity through recent neo-Victorian biofictional renderings of his life and characters.

As previously noted, Dickens chose to protect his legacy by burning letters.

Conversely, his fellow Victorians the Brownings took a completely different approach to preserving their legacy. Susan Thomas states that “Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett use the letter to establish and maintain their own versions of their relationship. Each writes

39 and rewrites these versions, encoding and decoding textual selves” (qtd. in Brindle 43).

Instead of taking a page from Dickens’s book and burning their personal writing, Barrett and

Browning codify their correspondence in case of future readers other than each other, thus manipulating epistolary exchange to construct the version of their romance—and their textual selves—selected to survive. Barrett and Browning actively shape their identity through letter- writing, thus securing their story for the future. Dickens, however, leaves nothing to chance interpretation by burning his personal letters received—and urging his recipients to return the favour.

Dickens adopted a similarly destructive approach towards diary-keeping, although he did more productively engage with the genre via the realm of fiction, where he co-created a farce entitled “Mr. Nightingale’s Diary: A Farce in One Act” with Mark Lemon. The

Christie’s website selling a rare edition of the play states that “Originally written by Mark

Lemon, the text was greatly altered by Dickens.” 28 Nonetheless, the 1877 edition of the play being sold by Christie’s only lists Dickens’s name on the play’s cover. This ambiguity encompassing Dickens’s editing (or was it actually authoring?) someone else’s work is reminiscent of the confusion surrounding his level of involvement with Joseph Grimaldi’s

Memoirs, which I examine in Chapter 2. David Amigomi proposes that, contrary to the typical aims of diary-keeping, this farce explores the darker aspects of the genre: “Far from providing a mode of self-discipline and self-help, the diary served as a corrosive psychological crutch, and sign of his [Mr. Nightingale’s] weakness of character” (Life

Writing and Victorian Culture 36). Perhaps, then—at least in Dickensian terms—self- discipline enforced through the written record is inimical to self-reliance in that it leaves hard

28 “Mr. Nightingale’s Diary: A Farce in One Act.” http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/dickens-charles-and- mark-lemon-Mr.-nightingales-5048721-details.aspx. Web. Accessed 14th October 2016.

40 copy evidence for others to critique. Dickens was of course exceedingly suspicious of written records and had an ongoing love/hate relationship with them.

The Brownings are merely one example of Victorians who eschewed Dickens’s habit of burning life-writing. In fact, in The Victorian Diary: Authorship and Emotional Labour

(2013) Anne-Marie Millim relates that, unlike Dickens, many Victorians kept diaries with the intention of having them published. Millim writes briefly of Dickens’s diary:

Charles Dickens’s (1812-1870) only extant diary, which stretches from 1838-1841, was only preserved coincidentally, as he burnt all his other diaristic writings. This tendency to cancel out personal existence reveals these writers’ awareness that diaries could be published posthumously and had the power to incriminate their defenceless author beyond redemption. For those who destroyed their diaries, the desire to preserve their privacy and integrity overpowered the wish to impress future generations of potential, and for the most part imagined readers. Claire Tomalin records that one other Dickensian diary escaped destruction: in 1867

Dickens’s diary disappeared during his visit to New York. Resurfacing in 1922, scholars have since probed the diary for evidence supporting Dickens’s affair with Ellen Ternan (The

Invisible Woman 167-168). In 1952, UCLA Professor Ada Nisbet revealed in Dickens and

Ellen Ternan, that this 1867 diary contained a code Dickens used to covertly correspond with

Ellen while they were separated during his second American Tour (Slater The Great Charles

Dickens Scandal 115; 128; 161). Viewed from the vantage point of a celebrity novelist with a mistress to hide, Dickens’s habit of burning diaries to preserve privacy is understandable.

Yet Dickens clearly has a desire to “impress future generations of…readers” albeit in a consciously self-constructed way that encompasses his narrative presence in his novels.

Historians and literary critics alike have linked different forms of writing with concerted efforts to preserve an identity for the future, and life-writing is the genre most often critically conflated with this goal. As Kym Brindle points out, “There is indeed a persistent idea in epistolary discourse that people are in some way embodied in their letters” (48). While this conclusion makes sense given the inherently personal nature of diary and letter writing, such

41 a focal point does not account for the compelling prospect that authors like Dickens may also explore the possibilities for preservation offered by their life-writing novels.

To reiterate, exploring Dickensian life-writing via his novels is a new venture. Other critics, such as Jean Ferguson Carr and Rosemarie Bodenheimer, have examined Dickensian life-writing, but they focus on his role in crafting John Forster’s biography of Dickens (Carr) and on Dickens’s letters (Bodenheimer). I interrogate this scholarship further in Chapter 1.

Instead, I am turning to Dickens’s life-writing novels to examine self-representation, the interplay of life and art, and Dickens’s notorious desire for narrative—and by default reputational—control. Grouping Dickens’s life-writing novels into a comprehensive unit highlights their author’s simultaneous fascination with and fear of the life-writing genre, whereby a perplexing phenomenon emerges: the hero and protagonist are repeatedly divided.

Little Dorrit fits the mould of Dickensian heroism, but she is perplexingly absent from much of her own biography. The “illustrious” Mr. Pickwick is continually upstaged by the seemingly lesser Sam Weller. And Agnes is far more heroic (in Dickensian terms) than protagonist David Copperfield is. Dickens’s legacy is of ongoing interest, both critically and commercially. His myriad appearances in biographies and novels and the enduring afterlives of his characters are examples of this continued cultural fascination. My research expands our understanding of Dickens’s anxieties by interrogating the hero/protagonist split in his life-writing novels.

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1 (The Continuum of Dickensian Biofiction):

My first chapter, entitled “The Continuum of Dickensian Biofiction,” serves as a bridge between this introductory discussion of Dickens’s fictional reality and my later analysis of the individual novels. It also expands the issues relating to Dickens’s anxieties

42 about legacy and his predilection for narrative control. In this chapter, I evaluate various aspects of the biofictional tradition and argue for the addition of Dickens’s life-writing novels to a continuum of literary life-writing I envision as being anchored by biofiction. I consider the role of key Dickensian biographies and select biofictional novels in shaping his legacy; in both instances, Dickens—the consummate controller—forfeits the ability to micromanage his reputation post-mortem as biographers and novelists assume the Dickensian life-writing mantle in his wake. Dickensian biographies and biofictional novels thus complement my central focus on Dickens’s own life-writing novels. To this end, I further situate Dickens’s fixation on controlling his image in conversation with the ongoing neo-Victorian fascination with legacy, reading Dickens as a site for this fascination. Employing a broad definition of both “Neo-Victorian” and Cora Kaplan’s “biographilia,” I make a case for biographies being considered Neo-Victorian biofictions, as each biographer constructs a specific version of

Dickens for future readership.

I also analyse how Dickens uses his life-writing novels as a site to rehearse life- writing narratives, thereby (broadly) engaging in biographilia by writing early biofictions. I do promote the conception of Dickens as a character in biographies chronicling his life, but this engagement is primarily to demonstrate the persistent overlap of life and art and reality and fiction (i.e. biofictional proclivities) surrounding Dickens’s anxieties about legacy. The primary focus of this thesis is examining how these anxieties manifest in Dickens’s life- writing novels. In essence, Kaplan’s assessment of biographilia privileges the “novelisation of biography” (Victoriana 65) while I privilege the life-writing aspects of the novel.

Chapter 2 (Memoir):

This chapter builds upon the preceding chapter’s evaluation of the critical commentary surrounding Dickensian life-writing to commence my analysis of Dickens’s life- writing novels. Much like the continuum of biofiction, Dickens’s engagement with the genre

43 of memoir exists on a sliding scale of fictionality. The Pickwick Papers anchors this chapter on Dickensian memoir. Here we see that even as Dickens overtly promotes Mr. Pickwick through repeated references to the “great” man’s strengths, he also covertly undermines his supposed hero by strategically placing Sam Weller as continually coming to the hero’s rescue. Mr. Pickwick—who is typically revered as the “illustrious” hero of his own Papers— is, upon closer inspection, repeatedly upstaged and even undermined by the lesser character

Sam Weller. I recognise that there are certain comic and picaresque elements at play here, but this example still fits the pattern of lesser-character-challenging-the-professed-protagonist found across Dickens’s life-writing novels. For Dickens, the protagonist—traditionally the presumed hero—is not necessarily proven the hero of the life-writing narrative.

Building upon Pickwick, this memoir chapter further fleshes out the tension between heroism and anxiety by linking it to the author/editor/narrator tensions also evinced in Oliver

Twist, Dickens’s travelogue American Notes, Joseph Grimaldi’s Memoirs (which Dickens allegedly edited yet more probably re-wrote) and John Forster’s biography of Dickens. Early in his career, Dickens grappled with what it meant to be an effective author writing a successful life story. This chapter differs from the others in that it departs from the pattern of focusing strictly on Dickens’s life-writing novels. However, juxtaposing “non-fiction” with fiction clarifies the overlap between genres and pinpoints Dickens’s biofictional proclivities.

Moreover, this chapter distinguishes memoir from autobiography, establishing memoir’s precedent to be written—or at least edited—by someone else. Genre-bending features heavily in this chapter, given Dickens’s authorial role in both Grimaldi’s Memoirs and Forster’s biography is more significant than he claimed. By hiding behind the façade of “editor” (in

Grimaldi) and behind Forster as his biographer, Dickens can maintain control without bearing the blame.

Methodologically, I enlist Kym Brindle’s work on the relational significance of omissions, concessions, and authenticity in fictional life-writing to analyse the tensions evident in this chapter. Dickens the author—under the guise of Boz the editor—manages (and also, at times, mangles) his subjects’ life histories. Life-writing thus flirts with fiction in the fractious discourse of competing and complementing narrative voices, as identity is edited

(and the self is fictionalised) in anticipation of readerly surveillance. Following traces of the self across the genres studied in this chapter provides a fuller picture of how identity is textually constructed. Thus, “trace” is both a verb and a noun, as it actively constructs identity and becomes the traceable construct itself.

Chapter 3 (Fictional Autobiography):

Following on from my examination of Dickensian memoir in Chapter 2, I next turn to autobiography, a genre quite similar to memoir, although autobiography always exhibits a first-person perspective and tends to follow a more structured format. David Copperfield,

Dickens’s aforementioned “favourite child,” is an archetype for the characteristic tension between heroism and anxiety displayed across Dickens’s life-writing novels. So foundational is this text, with David’s notorious anxiety surrounding whether or not he will ultimately be deemed the “hero of [his] own life,” that it has inspired my research as a whole. David

Copperfield is one of the most important sites of Dickensian life-writing rehearsal; here the author delves into a narrative so deeply painful and personal that the protective veneer of fiction is essential. This chapter on fictional autobiography lays the framework for Dickens’s fraught relationship with writing his own life, particularly given his own strong identifications with David Copperfield. Dickens’s surviving fragment of autobiography appears nearly verbatim in portions of the novel.

Stemming from Dickens’s “lost courage” at the hands of Maria Beadnell, David

Copperfield’s failure to claim heroic ownership of his own life story is the turning point for the dethroning of Dickensian protagonists explored throughout this thesis. Dickens told

Forster in 1855 that remembering his (at least perceived) abandonment by Maria Beadnell when writing this novel caused considerable discomfort, as did seeing her again in middle age: “No one can imagine in the most distant degree what pain the recollection gave me in

Copperfield. And, just as I can never open that book as I open any other book, I cannot see

[Maria’s] face (even at four-and-forty), or hear the voice, without going wandering away over the ashes of all that youth and hope in the wildest manner” (Forster 44-45). These memories had become ashes, both literally and figuratively. But at least Dickens could still commit the fictionalised version to paper—unlike his actual affair with Maria, which culminated in the destruction of Dickens’s early attempt at autobiography. Significantly, this novel marks the shift in tone from the more light-hearted early Dickens to the darker, more brooding late

Dickens. David Copperfield is the first Dickensian life-writing novel written after Dickens burned his own autobiographical fragment.

Many critics29 favour a psychoanalytic approach to Dickens’s novels, linking

Dickens’s struggles later in life to his childhood traumas of maternal abandonment and being sent to work at the blacking warehouse. Robert Sawyer, for example, argues that in David

Copperfield “the narrator literally writes his way out of the misfortune he has encountered and, by doing so, rescues the book’s plot and its protagonist. What stays with the reader is not the happy ending, however, but the abject misery and dejection both David and young

Charles must have felt during the trying days in the blacking warehouse” (51). While both the blacking warehouse and its associated perception of maternal abandonment certainly

29 See also Nicola Bradbury “Dickens’s Use of the Autobiographical Fragment” and Robert Lougy “Dickens and the Wolf Man: Childhood Memory and Fantasy in David Copperfield.”

46 influenced Dickens in profound ways, my reading of David Copperfield—and indeed

Dickens’s life-writing novels in general—assigns the most impact to Maria Beadnell’s rejection, which resulted in Dickens’s “lost courage” and subsequent burning of his autobiography. In this chapter, I argue that in David Copperfield, Agnes usurps David’s heroic title to become the “hero[ine] of [his] own life.”

Chapter 4 (Fictional Biography):

Having explored a selection of Dickensian novels demonstrating the tenets of autobiography and memoir in the two preceding chapters, Chapter 4 turns to another staple of the life-writing genre: biography. Dickens’s decision to write the biography of a fictional character further illuminates his biofictional proclivities, but the hero-protagonist split still prevails. David Copperfield and Mr. Pickwick are protagonists but not heroes, whereas Little

Dorrit is a hero/ine but not a protagonist. Even though she exhibits the characteristics of

Dickensian heroism, her repeated disappearance in her own life history means she is scarcely its protagonist (i.e. “chief character”) in the most literal sense of the term. Little Dorrit does not forfeit her hero-protagonist position to another character through some personal shortcoming—as David Copperfield and Mr. Pickwick do—but she also fails to fully claim it for herself.

In this novel, Little Dorrit and her male counterpart, Arthur Clennam (two nobodies, to use a choice term from the text) are repeatedly underestimated and marginalised by those around them. Their narrator does remind readers of their value: Little Dorrit’s presence is a positive influence over everyone she encounters, and Clennam strives to be a good man despite repeated difficulties. However, as already outlined, Little Dorrit consistently fades into the background of what is meant to be her biography, and Clennam ends up imprisoned.

Dickens nonetheless bestows authorial honours upon Clennam, and at crucial points in the novel, he is the one who relates Little Dorrit’s story. Ironically, however, Clennam’s

47 desire to shadow Little Dorrit “and know more of her story” (Dickens 68) culminates in overshadowing the ostensible biographical subject, as Clennam moves from main male protagonist to main protagonist overall. This temporary departure from the point of view held by Dickens—Little Dorrit’s self-professed biographer—also follows on from the author/editor/narrator tensions discussed in Chapter 2. In Chapter 4, I explore the multifaceted—and much critically debated—relationship between the author and narrator from the less critically-analysed platform of omniscient insight. Probing these narrative perspectives elicits echoes of the tensions between Dickens’s role/s of author/editor/narrator, revealing that his tenure as Little Dorrit’s biographer is filled with as much tension between heroism and anxiety as his turn as Mr. Pickwick’s memoirist.

Chapter 5 (Neo-Victorian Literary Legacy):

Chapters 2-4 have scoured Dickens’s life-writing novels for evidence of Dickens’s anxiety about failing to be the hero of one’s story. Chapter 5 addresses this anxiety about reputation from a modern vantage point, by examining how Neo-Victorian authors are reimagning Dickens’s legacy through current recreations of Dickens’s life and works. In keeping with Dickens’s desire that his written legacy survive as his sole memorial, this chapter examines two neo-Victorian biofictional novels which challenge Dickens’s image and authority. While historical biography and biofiction can certainly enact “retroactive repair of injustices to the subject” (Kaplan Victoriana 51) they can also just as retroactively tarnish the subject. One novel seeks to restore the reputation of Dickens’s maligned wife,

Catherine (at her husband’s expense) while the other novel usurps Dickens’s authorial voice in fleshing out Miss Havisham’s history. In both instances, biofiction—Dickens’s genre of choice—operates outside his control.

The first novel I discuss in this chapter is Gaynor Arnold’s 2008 biofiction, Girl in a

Blue Dress, which addresses Dickens’s mistreatment of his wife, Catherine, via fictionalised

48 versions of the Dickenses christened Alfred and Dorothea Gibson. I trace the significance of

Dorothea’s memories in her role as a narratorial detective seeking evidence to challenge

Alfred’s interpretation of their life together. Exploring the ontological slippage between history and story—as between life-writing and the novel—I argue that through its merging of memory and authorial agency, this fiction simultaneously effaces—and restores—the facts.

Once reconciled to her past, Dorothea can focus on her future, and the confidence she has discovered through productively remembering ultimately inspires her to work on Alfred’s as- yet unfinished final novel. A “footnote” (383) no longer, Dorothea thus transitions from confronting the story of her past to constructing the story of her future, as she appropriates

Alfred’s authorial voice to claim co-creatorship of an entirely new narrative. Memory—a critical component of legacy—is hereby challenged as Arnold revokes Dickens’s narrative control of Catherine Dickens’s history.

The second novel explored in this chapter is Ronald Frame’s 2012 novel Havisham, which is another example of Dickens’s loss of control after his death, as another author has appropriated Dickens’s authorial identity in weaving alternate possibilities for his iconic Miss

Havisham, Great Expectations’ notoriously macabre spinster. Miss Havisham is arguably one of the most recognisable characters in Victorian literature, and her spectral presence and all- consuming vendetta against the male species have themselves become legendary. Critics have debated whether Miss Havisham is ultimately redeemed at the end of Great Expectations; she does beg Pip’s forgiveness, but she dies before she can prove whether her contrition is real.

However, perhaps this is precisely Dickens’s point: a refusal to cleanly finalise Miss

Havisham’s story acknowledges the loss of control over one’s legacy post-mortem. Despite the Victorian penchant for happy endings—a preference which Dickens readily indulges in other novels—the lack of closure surrounding Miss Havisham’s story is a reminder that our histories are eventually subject to interpretation by others.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the interaction of diverse discursive voices, which he terms “heteroglossia” (from “Discourse in the Novel”) is methodologically significant to my exploration of Dorothea’s narrative detective work. A Bakhtinian approach is also useful in my analysis of how neo-Victorian adaptations defy Dickens’s attempts at controlling his legacy. Bakhtin argues that “The prose writer makes use of words that are already populated with the social intentions of others, and compels them to serve his own new intentions, to serve a second master” (1219; emphasis mine). Dorothea’s narrative detective work requires her to interrogate competing heteroglossic voices from her history. Additionally, she reclaims her voice by completing the novel death prevented her famous husband from finishing himself. In fine Bakhtinian form, Dorothea assumes control of words bearing Alfred’s signature; he may have invented the fictions of his life with Dorothea and his final novel, but it is she who (quite literally) has the last word. Ronald Frame undertakes a similar mission of authorial appropriation by fleshing out the backstory of Dickens’s creation Miss Havisham.

Dickens briefly sketches Miss Havisham’s history in Great Expectations, but Frame’s neo-

Victorian novel seizes Dickens’s words to become Bakhtin’s “second master” over one of

Dickens’s most iconic characters.

Conclusion

Kym Brindle asks: “What do we want from the Victorians—fact, ‘truth’, or a fading palimpsest on which to imprint our own ideas and fascinations?” (146). Brindle’s focus is on neo-Victorian novels, but this query nonetheless pertains to our fascination with Dickens.

Why is Dickens still so popular today; what is it about this particular author that has so captivated us? True, he was a literary genius, but this alone cannot account for our ongoing obsession with the Dickensian, especially since a great deal of the current interest involves

Dickens’s own life. Much of this fascination surely stems from the contradictions and

50 evolutions which keep us continually guessing. John Bowen and Robert L. Patten assign

“electrifying motion” (2) to Dickens’s astonishing ability to reinvent himself:

How many lives did he have? Let us count the ways. He had a life as a parliamentary reporter, a lawyer’s clerk, a journalist and reporter, an amateur actor, a lover, a husband, a father, a hearty and loyal friend, a fierce antagonist, an editor, a celebrity, a performer of his own works, a charity organizer, and many more. Throughout his life and writing, he reshaped his, and thus our, sense of what those lives consisted of and stood for… (2)

Clearly, there is something for everyone amongst Dickens’s variegated selves; there are multiple options upon which to “imprint our…fascinations” a lá Brindle. Even what was intended as “truth” in the form of Dickensian biography has become embedded within neo-

Victorian biofiction, and the divide between fact and fiction is often nearly indiscernible where Dickens is concerned—largely propelled by Dickens’s chameleon-like capacity.

The incongruities feed the fascination.30 Dickens called himself “The Inimitable” and clearly craved celebrity. Although this image has since been eroded, Claire Tomalin writes that during his lifetime, “Dickens wished to be, and was, generally worshipped—the word is

30 For Jay Clayton, Dickensian contradictions render their originator perpetually entertaining (even postmodern):

Now, if you are like me, you are about to shriek at the incongruity of naming maternity shops [“Great Expectations”], hair salons [”Great Hair-Spectations], and restaurants [”Baked Expectations”] after a phrase that denominates the inevitability of disappointment, of broken hearts, false hopes, and punctured reams…This kind of irony, I am arguing, characterizes Dickens’s presence in contemporary culture. Incongruity, contradiction, the juxtaposition of mismatched signifiers and ill-assorted values—these are the tokens by which Dickens travels today. And for this reason, if for no other, Dickens is perhaps the most “postmodern” Victorian writer. (152)

Charlotte Boyce and Elodie Rousselot clarify some predominant Dickensian contradictions:

[T]he signifier “Dickensian” is mutable and mobile, capable of supporting contradictory representations. If, on the one hand, it stands in the popular imagination for urban poverty, destitution and suffering, on the other, it is evocative of bountiful Christmases, idealised families and domestic harmony. The productive multivalence of the “Dickensian” helps to explain Dickens’s enduring cultural influence and appeal… (Boyce and Rousselot 3)

Other critics, such as Richard J. Dunn, describe Dickens himself as a man of opposing tendencies, noting the “mixture of mirth and melancholy, sunshine and shadow in Dickens’s personal life…” (89)

51 not too strong for a person who evoked comparison with Christ at the time of his death—as a man of unblemished character, the incarnation of broad Christian virtue and at the same time of domestic harmony and conviviality.” (The Invisible Woman 4). And yet, despite this desire for public praise, Dickens “disliked what he considered pretentious tributes to writers. He was an inveterate opponent of memorials” (Lettis 10). The man who “wished to be…worshipped” also shunned “pretentious tributes.” Adoration and humility were ever at war, yet these contradictions cultivate the allure of all things Dickensian. After all, how could a man so focused on helping the underprivileged treat his own family so disgracefully? What if the author who evokes “an ideal of perfect, blissful, quintessentially English, domesticity”

(Slater The Great Charles Dickens Scandal 191) conducted a longstanding affair with the much younger actress Ellen Ternan? And did they have a baby who died? Did Dickens in fact breathe his last in Ellen Ternan’s home instead of at Gad’s Hill as is traditionally claimed?

However, the very enigmatic mutability which preserves Dickens’s popularity also renders it easier for others to tinker with Dickens’s legacy. Exuding a multitude of characteristics offers more to engage with, thus inspiring others to repurpose “the Dickensian” generation after generation. The Victorians venerated him, the Modernists eschewed him, and now, we fall somewhere in between. Recognising both Dickens’s flaws and his talent, modern biofictional authors boldly presume to adapt Dickens’s person and his authorial voice to suit their own literary endeavours.

Furthermore, Charles Dickens was the consummate conflator of reality and fiction. As

T.S. Eliot once remarked, “Dickens’s characters are real because there is no one like them…”

(375). Perplexing, perhaps, until we realise that this same statement applies to Dickens himself. He lived more vividly because his life was infused with imagination. Through his committed melding of reality and fiction, Dickens wrote biofictions before the genre existed.

Although other authors also drew upon actual events for inspiration, Dickens is renowned for

52 his ability to escort elements from his reality across into his fiction—where, as I outline later in the thesis, he even experienced legal ramifications for not being covert enough. Likewise legendary is Dickens’s capacity for characterising his everyday life in fictional terms. In Girl in a Blue Dress, the Catherine Dickens character muses to a friend “‘He reinvented our lives, didn’t he?’” The reply: “‘You could say it was his most accomplished piece of fiction’”

(264). How fantastically ironic that—for an author so invested in biofiction and so committed to narrative control—after his death other authors have taken up the genre of biofiction to challenge the legacy that he created. And, much like the professed protagonists in Dickens’s life-writing novels, the ostensible hero is often undermined; the hero and protagonist are thus severed. This thesis interrogates the continuum of Dickensian biofiction to expose how

Dickens’s “lost courage” impacted his anxieties about authorship and legacy, which in turn anticipates Dickens’s eventual inability to micromanage his reputation post-mortem. My research thus contributes a new perspective to what constitutes an anxious Dickens, by calling into question the heroic nature of Dickens’s most famous protagonists—through whom he requested to be remembered.

Chapter 1: The Continuum of Dickensian Biofiction

Charles Dickens’s reality was comprised of various fictional elements; he was an author notoriously dismissive of the boundaries between fact and invention, reality and imagination. The famous R.W. Buss painting “Dickens’s Dream” (1875) depicts the author seated in his writing chair, surrounded by his beloved characters. Nina Auerbach aptly describes this painting as “Dickens dreaming the characters who give him life” (202). Not only did Dickens’s characters infuse his life with vitality, but they were also quite literally life-giving in that conjuring their existence constituted their author’s livelihood. Dickens is an author for whom biofiction means “life” fiction in the fullest possible sense.

In this chapter, therefore, I evaluate various aspects of the biofictional tradition and argue for the addition of Dickens’s life-writing novels to a continuum of literary life-writing anchored by biofiction. Michael Lackey distinguishes between “the acts of representing

(biography) and creating (fiction)” (22). Overall, both approaches require constructing, i.e. a concerted effort deciding what to include versus what to hide; subversive omissions contribute to the fictionalisation of a narrative. Here, I consider the role of key Dickensian biographies and select biofictional novels—especially the first Dickensian biofiction, entitled

This Side Idolatry (1928)—in shaping his legacy. Traditional biographical representations and biofictional creations (to reference Lackey, as above) thus complement my central focus on Dickens’s own life-writing novels. In both instances, Dickens—the consummate controller—forfeits the ability to micromanage his reputation as biographers and novelists assume the Dickensian life-writing mantle in his wake.

Dickens Writing Dickens (or not)

Dickens’s anxieties about his life-writing legacy have been the focus of two important articles. The first example, Jean Ferguson Carr’s “Dickens and Autobiography: The Wild

Beast and His Keeper” (1985) may be over thirty years old, but it continues to influence critical thinking about Dickens’s complex relationship with the life-writing genre—especially regarding Dickens’s reputation for narrative control. Carr focuses on Dickens’s letter writing, his (failed) attempt at keeping a diary, and Forster’s biography of the famous author (the latter comprising the bulk of her analysis). Carr writes that “Despite his distrust of recording methods and his fear of releasing too much of himself, Dickens had a pressing autobiographical urge” (452). This tension between revealing and concealing is akin to the twin tensions of heroism and anxiety analysed across this thesis. Carr’s focus differs from mine, however, in that she primarily examines Forster’s biography of Dickens. Nor does she specifically relate Dickens’s “autobiographical urge” to his novels, although she does describe the inherently intertwined nature of his reality and his fiction in that Dickens’s “life was dedicated to writing and living ‘fictions’…His regular habit was to transform whatever he saw or experienced into little dramas of fictions; indeed, this habit seemed to many of

Dickens’s contemporaries to be his trademark” (454; emphasis mine). Fiction was alive for

Dickens; it was therefore impossible for him to approach an autobiographical project from a purely factual position. My inclusion of Dickens’s life-writing novels to explore his deep- seated need to write his life allows for a broader appreciation of his fixation on controlling narratives. This inclusion also helps explain why his fiction was so real to him: he used it as a vehicle to rehearse life-writing narratives and explore biofiction before it was recognised as a genre.

Carr is primarily concerned with how Dickens’s desire for narrative control and his autobiographical anxieties manifest themselves in Forster’s biography of the eminent

Victorian author. Dickens enlisted his most faithful friend to write his life, thereby maintaining control (through the information supplied for future reference) while also deferring the responsibility to someone else. Carr deems Forster Dickens’s “surrogate

55 autobiographer” through whom Dickens could both “think about the project and avoid it”

(461). I argue that Dickens’s life-writing novels undertake a similar purpose: these novels allow him to explore the life-writing genre under the guise of fiction. His life-writing novels are forms of biofiction in that they meld biofiction’s twin entities of life-writing and mythmaking. Fiction was alive for Dickens, but it still afforded a certain camouflage, thereby enacting the simultaneous engagement and distancing strategies Carr applies to Forster’s role in writing Dickens’s life on his famous friend’s behalf.

Carr discusses how Dickens’s influence over his biography lingered post-mortem: first, through the letters left behind, which comprise over 75% of the biography (462), and second, via Forster’s appropriating Dickens’s own words without citing him (463). Even though Dickens sought to retain ongoing oversight of the biographical project, it is still puzzling that someone so fixated on narrative control would consign the momentous task of writing his life history to someone else. Carr cites Dickens’s admiration of Forster’s biography of Oliver Goldsmith (460) and his wise judgement in literary matters (466) as reasons for enlisting Forster’s biographical services. Still, there were no guarantees regarding how Forster would handle the project after Dickens’s death. This is where I primarily disagree with Carr when she argues that “Without ever writing his own life, and thus without ever having to commit himself to an explanation of himself, [Dickens] succeeds more than most in controlling how he is perceived and valued” (448). What Carr does not account for here is the counterintuitive nature of such a claim. I can appreciate that by stage-managing events—supplying Forster with the necessary materials and then bowing out—Dickens contrives, in a certain sense, to have his cake and eat it too. He thus carves out his legacy without having to actually answer for it. But in other areas of his life Dickens did not shy away from explaining himself, as when he published the now infamous “Public Statement” to ensure everyone knew his side of the story after he separated from his wife Catherine. Not

56 explaining oneself does not seem an ideal means of controlling one’s public perception and ultimate legacy. Rather, I am increasingly convinced that the main reason Dickens enlisted

Forster to write his life is because Dickens never could regain that “lost courage” which consigned his own autobiographical attempt to the flames. Thereafter, fiction and a

“surrogate autobiographer” were shields, behind which he could explore the life-writing genre from a safer distance.

Twenty years after Carr, Rosemarie Bodenheimer explores similar subject matter in her chapter “Dickens and the Writing of a Life” (Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens

Studies 2006). Both critics reference the same 6th June 1856 letter to Wilkie Collins where

Dickens paints himself as “a Wild Beast in a Caravan, describing himself in the keeper’s absence” (Pilgrim 8:132). Bodenheimer also recognises Dickens’s deep involvement in constructing his legacy via John Forster: “Of course no one contributed to the posthumous creation of ‘Dickens’ more fully than Charles Dickens himself. He primed his friend John

Forster with reams of brilliant letters and doled out carefully modulated reminiscences of his childhood” (49). Again, we see Forster’s defensive capacity emerge in his turn as Dickens’s life-writing proxy, wherein he “would continue to play the roles he had played throughout

Dickens’s life. He would protect him from himself; he would attempt to restrain Dickens’s excesses; he would interpose himself between Dickens and trouble…” (55). This description of Forster shadows Dickens’s own turn as Little Dorrit’s biographer, wherein he advocates for the merits of the marginalised. But unlike Little Dorrit, who perplexingly vanishes for large portions of her own life story, Dickens very much assumes centre stage in his.

Nonetheless, Bodenheimer, like Carr, imputes fear to Dickens’s relationship with life-writing, noting “Dickens’s fear of autobiography” (50) and how from the 1840s onward, “Dickens spoke of autobiography only in connection with his own death” (51). This connection renders

Dickens’s investment in the life-writing narratives of his characters—from whom he gleaned

57 so much life himself and through whom he instructs we should remember him—even more intriguing.

Bodenheimer analyses Forster’s biography of Dickens as part of the bio-critical tradition that emerged in the half-century following Dickens’s death in 1870. Most significantly, she connects Dickens’s autobiographical fragment, which first appeared in

Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens in 1872, to the troubled relationship with the past evidenced in Dickens’s letters. Arguing that Dickens transforms insults and setbacks into epistolary accounts casting himself as heroic, Bodenheimer remarks that “the fictionality of

Dickens’s self-creation remains the most elusive—and the most fascinating—thing about him” (54). By immersing his persona in an aura of fictionality, Dickens participated in the biofictional tradition before it officially existed.

Bodenheimer is likewise interested in Dickens’s legacy and in his autobiographical inclinations, but she does not ground her exploration in his life-writing novels like I do.

Rather, she divides Dickens’s legacy into a component Dickens managed and a component assumed by others “left to do the posthumous work of telling Dickens’s story” (54). In the first section, Bodenheimer draws upon Dickens’s complex relationship with writing his life, using the “self-division” (50) displayed in his letters and in Forster’s biography as primary examples. In the second section, she examines bio-critical representations of Dickens by

George Gissing, G. K. Chesterton, Hugh Kingsmill, and Edmund Wilson. Noting the certain influence of Forster on the late Victorians Gissing and Chesterton, Bodenheimer states that their “two studies do create very different images of ‘Dickens.’ Gissing’s Dickens is the creator and social analyst of the English lower middle class; Chesterton’s, a Romantic genius whose wildest moments of imagination touch both fact and divinity” (58-59). Conversely,

Kingsmill’s account presents a vastly different incarnation of Charles Dickens, which is most noteworthy for its “connection between Dickens’s failures as a man and the weaknesses of

58 his art” and for making Dickens’s personal life “fair game for discussion in print” (both quotes from 63). Forster’s protective tactics were now part of a bygone era. For

Bodenheimer, Wilson’s work on Dickens was instrumental in developing a helpful framework by which to evaluate Dickens bio-critically, thus engendering “fruitful critical dialogue between the life and the work” (65).

Bodenheimer’s research, like mine, stems from an interest in how Dickens’s complex approach to preserving himself via narrative has produced vastly different characterisations in the intervening years since his death. However, Bodenheimer surveys bio-critical incarnations of Dickens ending with the Modernists, whereas my interest encompasses the entire biographical tradition from Dickens’s time to ours—an expanse which allows for the burgeoning of Dickensian engagement over the past decade or two. I also emphasise the bio- fictionalisation of Dickens’s legacy through Dickensian biography, Dickens’s own life- writing novels, and neo-Victorian biofictional novels interacting with Dickens’s legacy.

Despite our differences, Bodenheimer’s succinct summarising of these bio-critical accounts of Dickens informs my framing of Dickensian biography as a biofictional endeavour impacting Dickens’s legacy, which I discuss in the next section. Biographers and critics clearly play an important role in conjuring varied incarnations of Dickens’s selves. Each author carefully selects a version of Dickens to promote, and this very process of selection contributes to the constructed—even fictional—nature of Dickens’s life history, thus influencing how we perceive “Dickens” (in quotation marks) today. Dickens encouraged such a concerted mingling of fact and fiction during his lifetime, and he has been so repeatedly reinterpreted since his death that it is now quite difficult to distinguish his life from his myth.

Biofiction embraces the ambiguity between the quotation marks, acknowledging the complementary aspects of co-mingling life and myth.

Others Writing Dickens Part 1: Dickensian Biography

In this section, I situate Dickens’s anxieties about legacy, which I have outlined in the

Introduction, in conversation with the ongoing neo-Victorian fascination with legacy in general, reading Dickens as a site for this fascination. Specifically, I trace the evolution of this allure through several significant Dickensian biographies, hereby examining how other key authors have taken up the biofictional project Dickens commenced. The varied biographical incarnations of Dickens’s life discussed in this section impact his legacy in important ways, as Dickens’s continued appearance in biography and biofiction alike keep him at the forefront of cultural memory—thus determining the intensity of his welcome there.

Claire Tomalin claims that “everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens” (Dickens

416) and this tendency is true of biographers as well as of the reading public. Michael

Benton, in a vivid analogy true to Dickens’s persistently entangled real and fictional realms, reminds us how “Dickens’s biographical ghost, like the spirits foretold by Jacob Marley, appears in different guises in the past, in the present and, no doubt, in biographies yet to come” (118). Ranging from biographers like Edgar Johnson who crafts a larger-than-life

Dickens to Peter Ackroyd who imagines alternate possibilities for the Victorian author,

Charles Dickens is cast as a character in each of the texts chronicling his life. The shifting medium of biography thus demonstrates that the conflation of life and art characteristic of

Dickens’s life is a tendency shared by biographers on the whole. Dickensian biographies share a desire to (re)discover the author by highlighting different aspects of his life and works; this selection in effect revokes Dickens’s notorious desire to control his own legacy.

The neo-Victorian genre, which “plays with the elision of narrative fiction and ‘real’ life…”

(Kaplan “Coda” 203) by “[k]nitting fiction from the yarns of biography” (Brindle 9) is remarkably well suited to a study of Dickensian biography given Dickens’s accepted conflation of reality and fiction.

In the inaugural issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, Marie-Luise Kohlke outlines “the editorial board’s decision to adopt the widest possible interpretation of ‘neo-Victorian’, so as to include the whole of the nineteenth century, its cultural discourses and products, and their abiding legacies…” (2). I amalgamate this broad definition of “Neo-Victorian” with Cora

Kaplan’s “biographilia” —by which she means a growing interest in the power of literary biography and biofictional novels in cultivating legacy—to make a case for Dickensian biographies being considered neo-Victorian. This merger allows me to interrogate how other biographers have taken up the project Dickens commenced, and to analyse how, despite his best efforts to the contrary, he lost control over his historical representation. The neo-

Victorian genre is notorious for its revisionist tendencies. In the oft-referenced words of Ann

Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, to be classed neo-Victorian necessitates “self-consciously engag[ing] with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the

Victorians” (4; emphasis original). Even biographies written closer to Dickens’s time than ours participate in this tradition given the biographer’s careful selection of what to include versus what to omit in shaping the legacy of Charles Dickens. From this perspective, all

Dickensian biographies—including John Forster’s iconic 1872 The Life of Charles Dickens— are arguably neo-Victorian to some extent, due to the premeditated interpretative tendencies inherent in conducting a biographical project. I say arguably since the “neo” in neo-Victorian typically necessitates a new, post-Victorian outlook. Nonetheless, even John Forster, writing in the Victorian era proper, reimagined (with assistance from the subject himself) how

Dickens is to be remembered. It was Forster who famously disclosed Dickens’s traumatic tenure at the blacking warehouse to the world, a revelation which has indelibly redefined

Dickens’s life and art. And, as outlined below, fact and fiction blur in Forster’s biography of

Dickens, wherein the biographer’s deliberations to protect the legacy of his famous friend take precedent over objective truth.

Therefore, applying Dana Shiller’s focus on historical fiction to Dickensian biography remains relevant. Shiller’s assertion that such offerings “take a revisionist approach to the past, borrowing from postmodern historiography to explore how present circumstances shape historical narrative” (540) is also applicable to Dickensian biography. Charting Dickens’s biographical incarnations across the 200-plus years since his death demonstrates how his legacy has followed the unique precedents set by the timeframe in which the biographer wrote. Postmodernism’s suspicion of absolute truth and its promotion of society’s influence in shaping reality are at play here. As Martin Middeke reminds us, “the biographer, like the historian, is likely to be mistrusted for his declaration of neutrality and the assertion of the objective nature of what he is recounting” (2). Dickens’s biographers have each contributed to shaping public perception of his legacy in specific ways. For example, Edgar Johnson’s idealised Dickens influenced subsequent biographers who similarly portrayed Dickens as a tragic, longsuffering hero and his wife (including most of her family) as a wretched hindrance to his genius. Johnson’s misrepresentations lingered for decades, until Michael Slater, Claire

Tomalin, and Lillian Nayder proffered alternate accounts seeking to correct the historical record. Their efforts to self-consciously redefine Dickens thus brand these biographies as neo-

Victorian.

From the first official biography—John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens— published two years after Dickens’s death, to Claire Tomalin’s 2011 Charles Dickens, each study reflects the interests of its time (such as particular trends in biography) and the biases of the biographer. Paul Ricoeur points out that certain biases are unavoidable when constructing

“narratives concerning personal identity or collective identity; that is, we cannot tell a story without eliminating or dropping some important event according to the kind of plot we intend to build” (9). For this reason, Forster idealises his subject, whereas, writing nearly 150 years after Forster, Tomalin’s biography harbours no such reserve. Dickens’s alleged mistress,

Ellen Ternan, even commands considerable attention. Of course, two decades previously,

Tomalin penned The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens

(1990), so her investment in Ternan’s story is well documented.

Rosemarie Bodenheimer names bio-critical accounts of Dickens’s life—specifically the “assumptions” made by the biographer/critic in presenting “the life and the work”—as integral in “map[ping] for our retrospective eyes an evolution in the meanings of the word

‘Dickens’ that continues to affect the emphases of present-day scholarship” (“Writing” 49).

Indeed, Forster’s assumptions in presenting Dickens continue to impact current approaches to

Dickens’s legacy. He was one of Dickens’s closest friends, and his chronicling of Dickens’s life history glosses over the dissolution of Dickens’s marriage and his alleged mistress.

Bodenheimer makes the valid point that, while Forster was criticised for his omissions, he exhibited “the tact necessary to protect the [surviving] members of Dickens’s broken family”

(“Writing” 55). Jane Smiley deems Forster’s biography “discreet” (6), while Michael Benton summaries how “in [this] portrait of the ‘Victorian Dickens’, the warts have been carefully air-brushed out” (121).” The Pilgrim editors also allow Forster grace in his “numerous small distortions of fact” since “paradoxically these distortions were in the interest of a larger, or ideal, truth” (1:xi). Such a stance recalls arguments about the status of the truth in fiction debate, promoted by David Lewis, among others, wherein fiction can advance truth by disseminating information in an accessible format, which subsequently piques readers’ investigative interest. Regardless, Forster’s manipulating events in pursuit of “truth” supports the view that all life-writing fictionalises the subject even as it acquiesces to the biographer’s agenda.

Cora Kaplan argues that when biography and fiction meld into biofiction, “the join will always show” (Victoriana 65). Charles Dickens, with his “living ‘fictions’” and the blurred boundaries between his life and his art should be an exception to this rule; he and

Forster conspired in writing a Dickensian biofiction before it was a genre as such. Contra

Kaplan, Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s bio-critical study entitled Knowing Dickens likewise challenges the assertion that the overlap between biography and fiction is forever evident—at least where Dickens is concerned. Bodenheimer delves into the difficulties inherent in

“negotiating between ‘the life’ and ‘the work,’ or what we might now call the lost ‘real’ and the textual imaginary. In effect, the distinction itself cannot hold. We cannot go back and forth between life and work because we do not have a life; everything we know is on a written page” (16). From our current vantage point, then, we cannot assess the living Dickens in conjunction with the written Dickens; only the latter remains. This is, of course, objectively true; however, Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens is intriguing in that this written version of Dickens was crafted by someone who did know the “real” Dickens. I discuss Forster’s (in)famous biography in more detail in Chapter 2, commenting in particular on the considerable authorial presence Dickens is allowed in this text. Forster’s biography might still present Dickens-on-a-page, but it is a Dickens textually embedded by the author’s best friend—who interpreted Dickens in light of the living, breathing, three-dimensional human he had actually encountered. Nonetheless, this point interests me more in terms of identifying Dickens’s experimentation with crafting successful life narratives rather than as a means of uncovering a wholly authentic Dickens.

“Victoriana” as famously characterised by Cora Kaplan is “the astonishing range of representations and reproductions for which the Victorian…is the common referent” (3). To this end, the evolution “of Victoriana over the years might better be seen as one sign of a sense of the historical imagination on the move, an indication that what we thought we knew as ‘history’ has become…a kind of conceptual nomad, not so much lost as permanently restless and unsettled” (3). Substitute “Dickensian biography” for “Victoriana” and the statement still works: variety abounds, and inventive historicity is certainly at play since the

64 concept of “history” as it pertains to recounting Dickens’s life is, like the man himself,

“permanently restless and unsettled.” Kaplan examines the role of literary biography— including authorial agency on the part of biographer and subject alike—in both commending and challenging great Victorian authors, Dickens included. She employs the term

“biographilia” which:

considers the high—and still rising—profile of Victorian literary biography in the last two decades…Conservatively viewed, this urge [for “biographilia”] can be seen as a wish to recapture the cultural and social optimism of the period, that time of high humanism in which the “man of letters” could be a hero, and individuals could be seen as having both cultural and ethical agency. (7-8) In particular, Kaplan stresses Thomas Carlyle’s foresight in “making writers into modern heroes. Their durability as exemplary figures if not model citizens has been extraordinary…”

(77). This contests Kaplan’s assertion some seven years later in the “Coda” to Neo-Victorian

Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations that “we need to think again about making narrative or the novel and especially their only too human authors, our moral and political guide” (203). Granted, the inspiration for Kaplan’s later warning seemingly stems from the eruption of bio-critical writing celebrating Dickens’s 2012 bicentenary, which

Kaplan critiques for often elevating Dickens to the point of near-divinity. Ironically, Kaplan also observes that an alternate function of the bicentenary celebrations is “cutting [Dickens] down to size” (“Coda” 194). Presumably she is (literally) referencing the proliferation of

Dickeansian memorabilia produced for the occasion—including the Dickens doll she mentions as an example. Delving deeper, cutting someone down to size is also metaphorically indicative of revoking his or her lofty status, which is precisely what other portions of the edited collection do to Dickens’s reputation.

Wordplay aside, contradiction seems an inherent part of conflating fiction and life- writing. Kaplan points out both “the overlap” and “the tension between biography and fiction” (Victoriana 65). They are “fraternal and a bit rivalrous” (78), subsequently yielding

65 to a further “rivalry between biographer and subject” (78). Despite this rivalry and contradiction, biography can also be viewed as “a persistent attempt to establish heroism”

(Cockshut 16). This attempt is both consecrated and challenged in the dominion of

Dickensian biography. Each biographer participates in the Neo-Victorian biofictional tradition in their “(re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision” (Heilmann and Llewellyn

4; emphasis original) of what constitutes Charles Dickens. Precisely how “Inimitable” is he?

As such, studying a selection of key Dickensian biographies demonstrates the evolution of his legacy—and how it has assumed mythic qualities—since his death in 1870 until now.

I also expand Kaplan’s biographilia to suggest that Dickens’s life-writing novels be added to the continuum anchored by literary biography and biofiction. Kaplan identifies literary biography (including both biographies of literary lives and a broader category which includes biofiction) as a “subfield” of literary history (Victoriana 42). We can therefore envision a continuum commencing with literary history, followed by literary biography,31 then biofiction, and finally, historical fiction concludes the continuum. I insert life-writing novels between biofiction and historical fiction. Biofictions and life-writing novels can also be categorised as historical fictions, but they both distinctively display life-writing principles, something which is not required of the more generic historical fictions. Further parsing the terminological differences, Marie-Luise Kohlke explains that:

Neo-Victorian biofiction may be defined as the mainly literary, dramatic, or filmic reimaginings of the lives of actual individuals who lived during the long nineteenth century, in which said individuals provide the sole or joint major textual foci and narrated/narrating subjects, rather than serving as mere supporting characters or appearing only in brief vignettes to add period colour and interest. (“Neo-Victorian Biofiction” 4)

31 Rosemarie Bodenheimer calls biographical criticism the “first cousin” of literary biography (Knowing Dickens 15). I am not drawing such a distinction for the purposes of my continuum of biofiction, since the focus here is on the fictional aspects encompassing the biographical genre. Moreover, while literary biography and biographical criticism may differ in their technical components (for example the former necessitates chronological order while the latter may be arranged according to theme) elements of criticism are inherent in both literary biography and even biofiction.

Herein lies the distinction between biofiction and historical fiction: Dickens fleetingly appears in James Buxton’s historical fiction Pity, but he is not the focus. Conversely, Dickens is a major player in Dan Simmons’s biofiction Drood. Historical fictions may also feature a cast of entirely invented characters set in a historic time period, whereas biofictions advance the story of a specific historic figure.

Life-writing novels are further linked to biofiction through their shared interest in the tenets of biography; however, life-writing novels are not necessarily as self-referential as biofictions, meaning that a biographical novel of Dickens would feature appearances by the eminent author, whereas life-writing novels by Dickens are fictions founded upon the tenets of life-writing. That is, life-writing novels are explicitly framed as the fictional character’s autobiography, biography, or memoir. Both types of novel share an interest in life-writing as a mode, but Dickens would appear as a character in a biofictional novel about his life, whereas a Dickensian life-writing novel is still overtly focused on the fictional character’s history. To some extent, the entire continuum can be classed as biofictional, when taking into account our postmodern suspicion of history on one end and our renewed willingness (in the post-New Criticism era) to re-integrate an author and text on the other. As Kate Mitchell acknowledges, “The distinction between history and fiction has long been a disputed and contentious one while also, paradoxically, appearing ‘commonsensical’” (14). Moreover, while accepting both the tenuous interconnectedness and debated distinctions between historical fact and invented fiction, it does matter whether a text is presented as more biographical or more fictional, because this informs how we process the information provided. Despite rigid academic shunning of the intentional fallacy, when it comes to life- writing, the author’s approach is central to shaping the subject’s legacy. Michael Lackey recognises the different aims of biographers versus biographical novelists by writing that

“while authors of traditional and fictional biographies seek to represent the life (or a

67 dimension of a life) of an actual historical figure as clearly and accurately as possible, biographical novelists use the biographical subject in order to project their own vision of life and the world” (23). Distinctions in genre do matter, but blurred boundaries persist, contributing to varying degrees of Dickensian biofictional incarnations across both biography and biographical novels. The reader is implicated as well: there is a tremendous difference, after all, between indolently accepting a biofictional account as an accurate representation of the subject’s life versus warily reading a traditional biography with the realisation that even biographers have an agenda.

With varying degrees of success, Dickens harnesses the power of fiction—or, as I discuss in Chapter 5, the ability of story to integrate with memory—to cement his life-writing legacy. To illustrate this point, I present Dickens’s great great great granddaughter, Lucinda

Dickens Hawksley, who wrote a bicentenary biography honouring her famous forbearer. Its prefatory material summarises the traditional take on Dickens’s legacy, particularly the mythic rags to riches quality it has assumed over the years:

Two centuries after he was born, Charles Dickens remains as famous as he was in his lifetime. His name is recognisable all over the world and his books have never been out of print. Dickens is remembered today as one of the most famous men in history, but he was born into an ignominious lower-class family and struggled through an impoverished childhood and the shame of his family being imprisoned.” (np)32 While all this information is strictly true, it reads like the opening to a fairy tale (or a

Dickensian novel!) particularly regarding the infamous “ignominious, impoverished, and imprisoned” trifecta Dickens legendarily overcame. Additionally, Dickens’s legacy has now come to encompass so much more. His self-made man success story is now increasingly

32 Edgar Johnson echoes this familiar summary, albeit in more dramatic language:

the career of Charles Dickens is one of the most glittering of nineteenth-century success stories. But it has darker and profounder depths than can be contained in any such pattern. Beneath the blare of applause there is the heartbreak of his father’s imprisonment, the terror of butcher and baker raising angry voices, of insufficient meals choked down with tears, of rooms pawned bare of household goods. Beneath the later fame there is the weeping of a child taken out of school and delivered to toil, all his early ambition of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed within his breast. (4) 68 countered by representations of his darker qualities: his narcissism, petulancy, and poor treatment of his wife. In recent years, he has played second fiddle in biographies about the two main women in his life: his wife Catherine Dickens and his (arguable) mistress Ellen

Ternan. Yet in his own right, Dickens has been the focal point of numerous biographies since his death in 1870. As referenced above, the first official biography is Forster’s The Life of

Charles Dickens (1872).

Several decades later, Dickens’s eldest daughter, Mamie, penned My Father as I

Recall Him (1896). This biography clearly casts Dickens in his best light. Mamie’s hero- worship of her father and editing of his letters in keeping with this heroic identity (as outlined in the Preface to this thesis) contributes to moulding him into a fictionalised form in her biography of him. Mamie enthuses about her father’s adoration of Christmas and his generosity of spirit, under which “the shyest child would brighten and become merry. No one was overlooked or forgotten by him; like the young Cratchits, he was ‘ubiquitous’” (17).

Mamie conflates Dickens with some of his most beloved characters, a move which contributes to the idea of Dickens as “Father Christmas” which so irritated his younger daughter Katey. For Mamie, her father’s “genius” and his deep affection for his characters is admirable. Unlike her brother Charley (quoted in Chapter 5 of this thesis) she did not feel secondary to Dickens’s fictional children. Somewhat strangely, Mamie refers to Dickens’s writing as “the art which he so dearly loved—his venerated mistress” (25) but this is offered with pride as a further sign of his dedication, rather than as something inspiring jealousy.

Mamie writes glowingly of her father’s talent: “His genius for character sketching needs no proof—his characters live to vouch for themselves, for their reality” (22). She puts a favourable spin on Dickens’s obsession with his characters: “That he was always in earnest, that he lived with his creations, that their joys and sorrows were his joys and sorrows, that at times his anguish, both of body and spirit, was poignant and heart-breaking, I know” (21).

Mamie goes on to describe how her father mourned for Little Nell even as he wrote her to her death (21), thus emphasising both Dickens’s compassion and his conflation of character and reality. Similarly sympathetic is how Mamie’s depiction of Dickens’s life conveniently sidesteps any mention of her father’s fraught relationships with her mother or Ellen Ternan.

Then again, the title My Father as I Recall Him does boldly privilege a biased recollection.

As I discussed in the Preface to this thesis, Mamie’s sister Katey took a decidedly different approach to remembering her famous father. Compiled from Katey Dickens’s memories of her father, Gladys Storey’s Dickens and Daughter (1939) balances reverence with reality. Katey no doubt loved Dickens, but she was also far more critical of his shortcomings. Edmund Wilson, who describes the discrepancy in the sisters’ competing versions of Dickens as “Scrooge bursting in on the Cratchits” (57) goes on to further fuse

Dickens with Scrooge by querying “Shall we ask what Scrooge would actually be like if we were to follow him beyond the frame of the story? Unquestionably he would relapse when the merriment was over—if not while it was still going on—into moroseness, vindictiveness, suspicion” (57). Following Dickens beyond the narrative frame exposes a far more rivalrous reality than the notoriously controlling author typically revealed. These depictions of Dickens as the living embodiment of his famous creations also exemplifies the degree to which life and art merge in the Dickensian realm.

While Wilson’s “Dickens: The Two Scrooges” (from The Wound and the Bow 1941) is far more literary criticism than biography—it originated as a lecture delivered to English students at the University of Chicago in 1939—the paper is worth mentioning here since it helped revive interest in Dickens’s legacy at a time when his popularity had waned. Michael

Slater describes Wilson’s work as an “epoch-making essay” (The Great Charles Dickens

Scandal 111), while The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens (2011), edited by Paul

Schlicke, deems it “unquestionably the most influential single study of Dickens of the 20th

70 century” (600-601). Wilson allows for the intensity of Dickens’s suffering—especially regarding the trauma of the blacking warehouse—but he refrains from excusing or idealising his subject the way Edgar Johnson would a decade later. Defending Dickens against detractors who feel “that he indulged himself excessively in self-pity” (5), Wilson points out that, although Dickens’s tenure in the blacking factory was not a long one (six months by

Wilson’s estimate), “during those months he was in a state of complete despair” (5). Wilson speculates that this despair would have particularly impacted Dickens due to his youth and sensitivity (6). Nonetheless, despite accounting for the hardship endured during his impressionable years, and acknowledging his tireless work as a social activist, Wilson still writes that Dickens “was capable of great hardness and cruelty” (56). Wilson’s Dickens is both (unreformed) Scrooge and champion of the oppressed, with perhaps more emphasis on the former.

Roughly ten years later, Dickens’s legacy solidly shifted from Scrooge territory with the publication of Edgar Johnson’s Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952), the first landmark biography published since John Forster’s Life in 1872. Johnson draws his version of Dickens along the lines of a Dickensian character. For instance, he equates young

Charles’s blacking house experience to John Dickens’s imprisonment for debt: “The hated and hopeless drudgery continued day after interminable day. Evidently his father’s release from prison meant no end of slavery for him” (43). And about Dickens’s early love of Maria

Beadnell, Johnson relates that the young beauty “had taken him into a delirious captivity that was to fill the coming months with ecstasy and anguish” (59). This “delirious captivity” is subsequently rendered synonymous with “the luminous mists of love” (59). Such grandiose imagery is designed to engage the reader’s sympathy; it also invokes the imagery of Great

Expectations’ concluding mists, when Pip and Estella reunite on the grounds of Satis House.

Johnson’s Dickens is not perfect; he is at times overly sensitive and even aggressive, but

Johnson is quick to defend his subject. Albeit “swift in resentment, Dickens melted readily to forgiveness” (213). Similarly, despite Dickens’s disgust over the American copyright disagreements, Johnson depicts the author heroically rising to the occasion: “Indignant though he might be about such grievances, however, the injustices from which Dickens suffered himself never absorbed more than a small part of his sympathies. Instead of narrowing his mood to gloomy self-pity, they only quickened his sensitivity to the harsher misfortunes of others and made him a spokesman for the unhappy everywhere” (451).

Dickens the Magnanimous, Johnson might say.

Overall, Dickens is presented in idealised terms, and even his shortcomings are, in most cases, readily justified. Dickens’s complaints about having so many children are framed in relatable terms: “Of course he loved his children, but what father of seven would not feel sometimes weighed down by these responsibilities…” (649). Furthermore, Dickens’s strange behaviour with other women, such as the time he dragged Eleanor Christian, (a female friend with whom he had been flirting) into the ocean and ruined her best dress, is glossed by

Johnson as mischievous “unrestrained diversions” (351) due to “tearing high spirits” (350).

Biographer Michael Slater interprets this event quite differently, noting Dickens’s “Quilpish” behaviour—referring, of course, to Dickens’s famous fictional villain from The Old Curiosity

Shop—and commenting that “Dickens did sometimes positively enjoy putting young women in bodily fear” (Dickens and Women 115). This reads less like hijinks and more like an unhealthy craving for control.

Foundational in influencing future biographers, Johnson perpetuated many of the myths Dickens himself minted, especially those surrounding the supposed strain his wife,

Catherine, exerted upon him. It wasn’t until more recent biographers such as Michael Slater,

Claire Tomalin, and Lillian Nayder challenged Johnson’s supposed facts that alternate perspectives emerged. Johnson describes Catherine as “Poor, jealous, plaintive, amenable

Kate” (644) and remarks that “In scores of ways she rasped [Dickens] beyond bearing…Daily contact with her clumsiness, lassitude, and inefficiency set his teeth on edge”

(905). Johnson does acknowledge that Dickens’s claims that Catherine and the children bore little affection for one another “may possibly” have “another side” (907; emphasis mine). He also admits that Dickens possessed “a masterful and domineering temperament” (907) but then hastens to question the credibility of alternate accounts that absolve Catherine Dickens of primary blame for the failure of her marriage and breakdown of her household. While admitting that Dickens was not “altogether stainless” (925), a concession proffered begrudgingly at best, Johnson’s repeated references to Catherine’s failures read like an excuse for Dickens’s own shortcomings. Even Dickens’s subsequent relationship with Ellen

Ternan is positioned as an (understandable) response to his disappointment in marriage: “All his heart yearned for loyalty, devotion, and ideal love. The domestic serenity and romance he had not found with Catherine…was the very essence of his need. His was no Bohemian flouting of moral standards, but an irresistible compulsion” (1005). Johnson’s Dickens is a wounded soul whose passions stem from traumas inflicted upon him—the blacking factory, a miserable marriage, and extended family continually draining his resources combined to excuse his less than desirable behaviours.

Thirty years later, Michael Slater’s Dickens and Women (1983) contests Edgar

Johnson’s idealised (biographical) version of Dickens. Slater certainly still evinces sympathy for the eminent Victorian author, but Slater’s Dickens is less tragic hero and more troubled genius. Slater describes Dickens as “a dominating character” (59) who was “a supreme dramatizer of his own past, adept at organizing its incidents into a coherent plot” (113). For

Slater, this capacity to formulate a convincing narrative helps explain why Dickens claimed his marriage began to breakdown in the late 1830s, even though letters to his wife continued to demonstrate marked affection well into the 1850s (138). Slater questions Johnson’s

73 complete deference to Dickens’s perspective in criticising Catherine (114) and argues that

“The legend of Catherine’s domestic and general incompetence also seems based on distorted interpretations of certain letters and other documents” (127). As an example of how mangled

Dickens’s (and subsequently Johnson’s perspectives had become) Slater cites alternate accounts—ranging from the New York press to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—which cast

Catherine as “a great credit to Dickens during his American tour” (118). And, despite how

Dickens “delighted in adopting an archly flirtatious attitude towards congenial girls and women of his acquaintance” (122) his wife, on the whole, “seems to have been remarkably free of [jealousy]” (142). These portrayals of Dickens and his wife contrast sharply with

Johnson’s account, which largely echoes Dickens’s own claims. Nonetheless, the legend of

Catherine’s ineptitude persisted, even after Slater’s corrective account. In Fred Kaplan’s

Dickens: A Biography (Morrow 1988), Kaplan references Hard Times (1854) to claim that

Dickens’s “view of Catherine’s incompetence, clumsiness, withdrawal from responsibility, and unsuitability as his wife appears in his depiction of Stephen Blackpool’s alcoholic wife, from whom he is separated” (309-310). Propelled by Johnson’s 1952 account of Dickens’s life, the Victorian author’s mythologising capacity stubbornly lingered.

Lillian Nayder therefore adopts an even more straightforward approach (than Slater) to critiquing Charles and defending Catherine, in her biography of the famously forsaken wife entitled The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (2011). Nayder opens by arguing that the popular conception of Catherine Dickens as “a helpmeet gone bad” who was

“justifiably eclipsed [by other women], the story goes, her own incompetence to blame” is

“largely the creation of Charles Dickens, and a self-serving fiction at best” (1). Deeming this false account Dickens’s “revisionist history of his marriage” (206), Nayder—like Slater— pinpoints Dickens’s narrative abilities as key in fashioning the misconceptions of Catherine which have “proved nearly as powerful and timeless as the tales of Scrooge, Oliver Twist,

74 and Little Nell” (1). For Nayder, Dickens was a “micromanager” (66) with “an uncanny ability to make biographers speak for him from beyond the grave” (2). One of the main biographers Nayder cites is, unsurprisingly, Edgar Johnson, who adopted the skewed perspectives Dickens employed to salvage his own reputation after his family disintegrated in the late 1850s (11). Nayder’s description of Dickens acknowledges his genius but is more direct even than Slater in pinpointing Dickens’s flaws. Specifically, she lists “Dickens’s willingness to put his work before his family; his refusal to compromise; his tremendous drive to succeed; and, in particular, his ability to represent and justify the things he enjoyed doing as acts of self-sacrifice that benefited others” (59) as key elements which would ultimately harm his family. Of course, Nayder’s aim is to vindicate Catherine, so it makes sense she would adopt a more aggressive position towards Dickens. As such, drawing upon a variety of sources—including correspondence Catherine conducted with a range of individuals, bank records, and evidence that Catherine positively influenced Dickens’s writing, even occasionally serving as his amanuensis—Nayder demonstrates that there is far more vitality to Mrs. Charles Dickens than she is typically allowed.33 In so doing, Nayder also highlights the darker characteristics that Dickensian biographers often overlook.

Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990) is unique for the fictional sections interspersed amongst the more traditionally biographical chapters, wherein Ackroyd imagines encounters with Dickens.34 Reminiscent of Dickens’s mingling of fact and fiction, these sections exploit

33 Citing bank records, Lillian Nayder demonstrates that Catherine in fact continued to take precedence over her sister (at least in terms of financial allocations for the household) until 1857 (198). Furthermore, Nayder insists that Dickens assumed more domestic responsibility than the typical Victorian husband “not because Catherine was an unwilling, uninterested, or incapable housekeeper but because he was a micromanager who wanted to control the details of their lives” (66). The same series of events can inspire vastly different interpretations.

34 Nearly twenty years later, Ackroyd penned the Introduction to Paul Schlicke’s Dickens…off the record, an imaginary “Q&A” session with the author. Schlicke’s book reverses Ackroyd’s biography, in that Schlicke’s biographical section (“His Life in Short”) comprises roughly a tenth of the text, while the imaginary interview with Dickens is the focus. 75 the biofictional overlap inherent in the biographical genre. In one example, Ackroyd describes meeting Dickens in a dream (1059-1060), and in another, he positions Dickens in conversation with other iconic authors, including Oscar Wilde and T.S. Eliot (427-432).

Ackroyd describes this authorial interaction as “A true conversation between imagined selves” (427). Truth and imagination are not mutually exclusive. Perplexingly, however, during a section wherein he interviews himself about the biography, Ackroyd claims that

“The only real connection between the two [biographies and novels], as far as I am concerned, is in the need to make the narrative coherent” (896). The biographer thus elides his own fictionalising of Dickens in his unconventional biographical format. Further complicating matters is the fact that Ackroyd is also a novelist. On the biofictional continuum

I have been discussing, Ackroyd’s offering would sit at the furthest end of biography section, spilling into the biographical novel terrain. This text capitalises on Dickens’s penchant for uniting life and art, as Ackroyd imagines alternate possibilities for a life so bursting with energy that a more standard biographical rendering simply will not suffice.

Ackroyd’s novelistic inclinations arguably account for his atypical assertion that the relationship between Dickens and Ellen Ternan was platonic, wherein Dickens transformed

Ellen Ternan into the living equivalent of a fictional fairy tale princess: “In fact on more than one occasion [Dickens] obliquely describes Ellen as a ‘princess’ out of the story-books. Yet how strange it is that she seems already to have become less a living human being than a creature from his imaginary world and a figment of his heart’s desires” (799). The biographer idealises his subject by emphasising Dickens’s fictional impulses, which again foregrounds the repeated life and art conflation—particularly since Ellen was a professional actress.

Ackroyd further accentuates Dickens’s intrinsic fictionality in his description of Dickens’s birth. First, Ackroyd debunks the popular claim—which is even supported by the Charles

Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth—that Dickens’s mother, Elizabeth, attended a

76 ball hours before delivering her son. According to Ackroyd, no evidence exists for this anecdote, “and it is likely that this is one of the many apocryphal stories which sprung up around the birth and development of the great writer” (1). Myth so encircles Dickens that it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. And, despite his affirmation that biography and the novel have very little in common, Ackroyd perpetuates their overlap by linking Dickens’s birth with those of his characters, naming over twenty-five famous Dickensian creations who were also “born on this February day…but not dying with him, living on for ever” (1-2).

Ackroyd also recognises “that Dickens saw reality as a reflection of his own fiction” (895; emphasis original). Dickens’s worldview was dominated by the fictional realms he engendered, and the vast majority of Ackroyd’s biography—which was written by a novelist about a novelist, after all—attests to the similarities of novels and biography, despite

Ackroyd’s avowals otherwise. Indeed, Ackroyd’s study, in its conflation of biographical and fictional narrative strategies, is the most biofictional example of Dickensian biography to- date.

Cora Kaplan likewise recognises Ackroyd’s contradictory biographical approach, albeit from a different vantage point. Kaplan maintains that Ackroyd is reticent to probe

Dickens’s darker characteristics, whereby “the biography appears filiopietistic and defensive rather than exploratory” (Victoriana 56). Yet, at the same time, “Peter Ackroyd’s monumental and gripping Dickens is an example of the danger for the biographer of an over- idealising identification that occasionally tips into its opposite, revealing the biographer’s envy and competitiveness” (Kaplan Victoriana 50). Ackroyd is both defensive of Dickens and envious of him. Kaplan reads this tendency as “oedipal” (Victoriana 61), and argues that

Ackroyd’s biography is as much about Ackroyd as it is about Dickens: “it is [Ackroyd’s] recall and invention that is operative; he can become at once the eager young acolyte and the orchestrator of Dickens’s life” (Victoriana 58). In a startling manoeuvre, Ackroyd mimics

Dickens’s own tendencies in his life-writing novels, wherein writing the narrative of someone else’s life becomes a vehicle for exploring one’s own anxieties about legacy. Other scholars, such as Juliette Atkinson, have also discussed the ways in which biography can reflect the biographer as well as the subject. I explore this concept further in Chapter 4.

Claire Tomalin has penned two biographies concerning Dickens. The first primarily concerns Ellen “Nelly” Ternan and is entitled The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly

Ternan and Charles Dickens (1990). Here Tomalin contradicts Peter Ackroyd’s assertions that Dickens’s relationship with Ellen Ternan was platonic. Michael Slater’s chapter summarising Dickensian biography in the edited collection Charles Dickens in Context deems Tomalin’s biography of Ternan “meticulously researched and deftly written” (24).

Slater writes, “Claire Tomalin concluded that they [Dickens and Ternan] had indeed been lovers. In the same year [1990] Peter Ackroyd, surveying the same evidence in his Dickens, concluded that they had not been…” (24; emphasis original). Such stark opposition upholds the point that each biographer conjures a distinctive Dickensian persona by choosing what events to relate and how to frame them. Moreover, this incongruity—while superficially startling—is unsurprising in the sense that Dickens has long been a man of contradictions. In her biography of Dickens, entitled Charles Dickens: A Life (2011), Tomalin tells us that the famous author “was passionately interested in prisons and in asylums, the places where society’s rejects are kept” (xlvi). And yet, he rejected his wife. To justify himself when his marriage disintegrated, and to protect his legacy, Dickens once again took to biofiction. He crafted a narrative that merged elements from life and elements of fancy “To rewrite the history of their relations from the start, to claim that the marriage had always been unhappy, to insist on the acquiescence of his children and friends in the new version of history, and indeed to enrol his sister-in-law as his chief ally against her own sister” (Tomalin The

Invisible Woman 108). Already accustomed to weaving the life histories of fictional

78 characters to suit his agendas, stretching the web of fiction to accommodate his own life history did not require much effort.

Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life offers an overall balanced presentation of Dickens, acknowledging him as both a “phenomenon” and a deeply troubled, flawed human. An example of this balance is Tomalin’s description of Dickens’s care for his sister Fanny, when she was dying of tuberculosis. Dickens did his best to comfort her, but, lacking patience, his helplessness turned into a desire for his sister’s death, wherein he confessed to “Macready he almost wished the end would come, ‘she lies so wasted and worn’” (214). Tomalin’s perspective is that Dickens, for whom “Patience, so necessary in caring for the sick, was not one of his virtues” (214) desired to end his sister’s suffering since he could do nothing to alleviate her pain. Adding to this gracious interpretation is the possibility that Dickens’s reaction also illustrates his obsession with control. In this reading, Dickens’s death wish for

Fanny is a darker manifestation of his need to orchestrate: if he cannot write Fanny a happy ending, then it is better to write her off entirely. In a nod to Dickens’s love of theatre,

Tomalin incorporates the primary players in Dickens’s life into a “Cast List” at the start of the biography—a formatting choice which further attests to the fusing of fact and fiction where Dickens’s life history is concerned.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist (2011) is acutely aware of the overlap between Dickens’s real and fictional realms. As such, the biography presents Dickens as a fictionalised form of himself, to the point where Douglas-

Fairhurst, like Claire Tomalin, salutes Dickens’s love of the theatre by closing the biography

“with a moment frozen in time, like one of those Victorian theatrical tableaux…” (335). The postscript then “signs off”35 with Douglas-Fairhurst pondering how different English

35 The biography’s final section is entitled “Postscript: Signing Off,” perhaps a playful nod to how “Dickens hated goodbyes” (329). 79 literature would be had Dickens died prematurely, leaving “a Dickens-shaped gap in literary history, which would be felt whenever someone opened the first half of Nicholas Nickleby and realized that the author had fallen through the page like a trapdoor” (336). This scene whisks Dickens into the dominion of fiction as it conjures the image of Alice falling down the rabbit hole, a thread Douglas-Fairhurst would explore more fully four years later in The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland (2015).

Elsewhere in the biography, Douglas-Fairhurst further conflates Dickens’s everyday life and his novels. For the biographer, Dickens’s distaste for saying goodbye—and his preference for scheduling the next meeting before parting ways—suggests that the author was

“trying to give his life the same serialized form as his fiction” (329). Perhaps if Dickens could plan his next meeting, just as he planned the next instalment of his novel, he could keep uncertainty at bay. Dickens’s fixation on control appears yet again. But, as always, this need for control was fuelled by anxiety, for “Dickens was keenly aware of his characters as creatures who needed to be kept alive by the flow of ink from day to day, and whose identities were consequently no more fixed than his own” (331). Here Dickens’s pen provides the life blood for author and characters alike. And when discussing Dickens’s treatment (in his autobiographical fragment) of his traumatic tenure at Warren’s Blacking Factory,

Douglas-Fairhurst writes that “As in many autobiographies, the real struggle seems to be between his reliving the past and relieving himself of it…. By this stage he had already said it in his novels, which replay the story so often that he sometimes appears to be struggling to prevent them from turning into a huge serialized autobiography” (35). What Cora Kaplan calls “the relentless imbrication” (“Coda” 198) between Dickens’s writing and his life history is apparent throughout Douglas-Fairhurst’s biography. The blurred boundaries between

Dickens writing his characters’ lives, Dickens’s life spilling over into these fictional

80 renderings, and these characters in turn infusing vibrancy into Dickens’s everyday reality, contribute to the biofictional tone of Douglas-Fairhurst’s biography.

Another striking aspect of this biography is how it handles the persistent contradictions comprising Dickens’s character. These contradictions are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2, where I explore the tension Douglas-Fairhurst describes between Dickens and his alter ego Boz, tensions which point to underlying authorial uncertainties. Indeed, fluctuations between being drunk with authorial power and feeling helpless to control his characters is an important contradiction Douglas-Fairhurst highlights. At times, Dickens gave himself over to “a theme that would gain unstoppable momentum in the years after his marriage: his frustration that real people were so much harder to control than his characters; his anxiety that life seemed so unwilling to follow the ‘happy ever after’ pattern of fiction”

(211). Dickens craves authorial power, where he dictates the ending. Conversely, however, he also experienced frustration when his characters thwarted their author’s grand designs: “‘I have often and often heard him complain,’ his son Charles recalled, ‘that he could not get the people of his imagination to do what he wanted, and that they would insist on working out their histories in their way and not his’” (226; emphasis original). Frustration over loss of control haunted Dickens’s real and fictional realms alike.

Dickens’s narrative authority was further challenged after his death, when other authors—biographers and novelists alike—took up his biofictional project to appropriate both his person and his characters for their own authorial purposes. “He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens” (Tomalin Dickens 416). My purpose in tracing the evolution of Dickens’s legacy across a range of key Dickensian biographies is to demonstrate this very principle: each biographer has his or her own conception of Dickens, and this specific modification imparts a neo-Victorian revisionist sheen to the biographies. For Mamie Dickens, her father was a hero; for Edgar Johnson,

Dickens was a triumphant sufferer; for Douglas-Fairhurst, Dickens was defined by his uncertainty. Dickens is rendered a character in each of these biographies, and the life-writing narratives and early biofictional accounts he crafted in life collide with other authors’ interpretations after death. Cora Kaplan allows that biographers “provide a stake in the futurity of fiction and authorship—and even heroism—in the new millennium” (Victoriana

78). Biographical and biofictional renderings also prove “the site of anxiety about the futurity of authorship” (Victoriana 71) since, in Kaplan’s view, better to be embalmed in biofiction where one can be “ritually resuscitated, murdered, mourned and praised” (Victoriana 79) than to be forgotten entirely. For my part, I remain unconvinced that Dickens would concur; his record of burning life-writing indicates that, for him at least, being blotted out is perhaps preferable to enduring the post-mortem horrors of prying eyes.36 Dickens’s careful management of his life-writing narratives suggests that—although they both formed vital aspects of his identity—he ultimately craved control more than celebrity. Moreover, appearing in biofictional novels as himself surely connects to Dickens’s stipulation (in his will) not to be posthumously made “the subject of any…testimonial whatever” (Forster 827; emphasis mine). As I explore in Chapter 5, life-writing can afford an assertive voice, but it also invites vulnerability since interpretation is notoriously difficult to control. Turning to fiction to rehearse life-writing narratives afforded a medium where Dickens could infuse himself into his creations while still concealing what he wished to keep secret. Eventually, however, he lost control, and future biographers and authors have not always been so covert with their bio/fictional projects.

36 Kaplan does concede that “Dickens would no doubt be horrified to find himself so fully remembered in Sarah Water’s [sic] lesbian Victoriana or Carey’s pastiche…” (Victoriana 161-162). 82

Life-writing Novels and Biographilia

I have been discussing the interplay between fiction and life-writing, especially as it pertains to Dickens’s own tendency to conflate his real and fictional realms. I have also plotted the incarnations of this interplay on a biofictional continuum, building upon Kaplan’s vision of literary biography bleeding into biofiction. As previously mentioned, I submit an addition to this continuum: life-writing novels, which purport to be more fictional than either literary biography or biofiction yet still retain formal characteristics of the life-writing genre.

Dickens’s life-writing novels exploit Kaplan's rivalrous tensions outlined at the start of this chapter, which we also see play out in biographies of Dickens. The professed protagonist is often covertly dethroned, while Dickens as author is apt to steal the show from the characters whose lives he is meant to be chronicling.37 I therefore expand Kaplan’s “biographilia”

(which references the expanding influence of literary biography and biofiction in cultivating legacy) to encompass Dickens’s life-writing novels. Kaplan allows that the constructed nature of life-writing renders it “quasi-fictional.” She also identifies the “liberties” taken with regard to “self representation” wherein “[t]he novelisation of biography represents only the next logical stage of that process” (Victoriana 65). Her discussion centres on modern biofiction here, but it also supports my approach, in that I am turning to Dickens’s life-writing novels to interrogate self-representation and the construction of heroic identity. Dickens participates in the biofictional tradition by folding elements from his life history into his fiction. My analysis for the remainder of this thesis adopts a different slant: instead of focusing on the fictionalisation of the biographical subject, I examine the biographical elements of the fictional subject. Or, to phrase it slightly differently, Kaplan’s reading privileges the

“novelisation of biography” while I privilege the life-writing aspects of the novel.

37 This concept is especially evident in The Pickwick Papers and Little Dorrit, and is discussed further in Chapters 2 and 4 (respectively). 83

Others Writing Dickens Part 2: Biofiction and Dickens’s (Sometimes Heroic) Legacy

This section expands the tradition of Dickensian biography to include accounts of his life which are more obviously (bio)fictional. It is the next stop on the continuum which commences with literary biography, then proceeds to the biographical novel (otherwise known as biofiction), and then, I propose, continues to Dickens’s life-writing novels. The earliest Dickensian biofiction (although it was not named such at the time) generated quite a sensation when it appeared in 1928.38 Entitled This Side Idolatry, it was written by C. E.

Bechhofer Roberts under the pseudonym “Ephesian.” The Daily Mail’s39 tagline queried,

“Was Dickens a Hypocrite?” and predicted that the book would “rouse strong resentment among lovers of Dickens.” This prediction proved true, thanks to the novel’s portrayal of

Dickens as a callous, egoistical philanderer. The newspaper article goes on to state that despite being a work of fiction, the novel “does not stray very far from the field of biography.” Roberts was foremost a biographer, not a novelist, and Michael Slater records that Roberts’s project took a more novelistic slant due to resistance from the surviving

Dickens family, who withheld the permission required to use Dickens’s unpublished letters

(The Great Charles Dickens Scandal 57). Regardless of the reasoning, the book certainly combines biographical facts with a healthy measure of invention.

Indeed, since this early example, biofiction has continued to reimagine Dickens’s reputation. Later in this thesis, I discuss Dickens’s appearance as a character in Gaynor

Arnold’s neo-Victorian biofictional novel Girl in a Blue Dress. Narrated from the vantage point of Dickens’s estranged wife, the novel calls into question Dickens’s inimitability, both as an author and as a family man. The purpose of this section, however, is to examine biofiction’s critical reception as a means of identifying the genre’s impact upon neo-Victorian

38 Michael Lackey identifies the 1930s as the birth of the biofictional genre (1).

39 The Daily Mail 8th September 1928. 84 and Dickensian scholarship. To this end, I evaluate two key themes—regarding Victorian afterlives, and the tension between fact and fiction in biofiction—from Nadine Boehm-

Schnitker’s and Susanne Gruss’s edited collection Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture:

Immersions and Revisitations (2014). This analysis emphasises the critical field encompassing neo-Victorian biofictional criticism, especially as it concerns Dickens.

First, this edited collection engages with the tension engendered by current engagement with Dickens’s afterlives, wherein Dickens’s popularity continues to flourish, even in the face of recent narratives privileging his harsher side—for example, Nayder’s biography and Arnold’s biofiction, both about Mrs. Dickens’s suffering inflicted by her famous husband. Exemplifying this conflict between Dickens as a figure attracting both respect and disdain, Cora Kaplan notes “Dickens’s celebrity status as the great Victorian writer” (“Coda” 198; emphasis original) while Lena Steveker discusses neo-Victorian biofictional authors who “refuse to portray their literary protagonists as the ‘great’ Victorian authors who have been inscribed into British cultural memory” (76). Some of this tension stems from the differing approaches of biographers and biofictional novelists, the latter taking more creative license with (re)imagining Dickens’s life and legacy. Regardless,

Victorian literary heroes are no longer unflinchingly lauded; in fact, the neo-Victorian genre often goes in the opposite direction, wherein our former heroes are intentionally de-throned.

Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss argue that “Questioning the essentialisation of author figures as authoritative voices from the past as well as of past literary value is part and parcel of many contemporary re-engagements with the nineteenth century” (Introduction 10). Contradictions are often the crux of neo-Victorian discourses.

Kaplan further assesses Dickens’s conception as a literary hero, whose current cultural and critical popularity follows a downturn in the 1960s (195). According to Kaplan, a certain tendency to “ennoble” Victorian authors exists because there is now enough distance

85 to afford them an idealised hue. Moreover, many modern readers cling to “a yearning for something (and/or someone) to admire” (195). Regarding Dickens, this has often resulted in a critical vantage point wherein he “can never be seen to fail or be wrong or even to come in on a level field with other writers but must always get better and better, more and more prescient the more we look at him” (199).40 This is Dickens at his most lofty. Kaplan suggests that

Dickens’s “everywhereness” has engendered “a resistance to criticising him at all” (198).

Interestingly, my own observations of Dickens’s portrayal in his former home—now the

Dickens House Museum on Doughty Street in London—reveals a willingness to challenge the family-friendly portrayal of its most famous former occupant. Dickens’s rosy legacy is certainly preserved through Oliver Twist tea towels and postcards featuring “Dickens’s

Dream,” the celebrated painting by R.W. Buss which displays Dickens surrounded by his characters. But the Museum does not avoid presenting his less flattering side as well: Michael

Slater’s book, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal, which charts the evolution of the commotion surrounding Dickens’s relationship with the much-younger Ellen Ternan, is prominently displayed. And in Chapter 5, I discuss the “Discovering Catherine” exhibition

(held at the Museum), which confronts Dickens’s (mis)conceptions of his wife.

Steveker likewise acknowledges the tension between celebrating and contesting revered Victorians; her discussion thus complements Kaplan’s commentary on Dickens’s recent return to favour. Steveker opens by tracing “biography’s [and indeed, life-writing in general] return to critical favour” (68) in the past twenty years: “The strong contemporary interest in Victorian individuals can be linked to the impact which the genre of biography has made on the book market in the last two decades” (68). Specifically, Steveker pinpoints

40 Kaplan clarifies that while biographers and critics must retain some affection and compassion for those they analyse, there remains “an important difference between sympathetic analysis which is productive and creative and a kind of identification—professional in this case as well or as much as psychological—with one’s subject” (198). As discussed earlier, in her 2007 book Victoriana, Kaplan offers a lengthy engagement with Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens as an example of this intense identification with a biographical subject.

Stephen Greenblatt’s 2004 Shakespearean biography Will in the World: How Shakespeare

Became Shakespeare as a “watershed” moment which “left no doubt that the time in which theoretically informed literary studies and life-writing were per se mutually exclusive was over once and for all” (68). The bicentenary celebrations of the perpetually paired Charleses41

(Darwin and Dickens, that is) in 2009 and 2012 (respectively) have helped drive this renewed interest, as has a “turn towards an epoch that has often been presented, both in its own time and today, as an age of confident humanism and individual self-respect” (69). Of course, as I noted in my Introduction, this confident Victorian individuality was complicated by an underlying anxiety about where the individual fit in an era of extreme change.

Steveker’s chosen biographical novels are Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008) and

Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (2009). Charles Dickens is the subject of the former, and the latter focuses on Alfred Tennyson. These biofictions “focus on moments of crisis in these men’s lives” rather than “celebrating Dickens and Tennyson as heroic men of letters and ‘great’ authors…In doing so, they present their readers with ‘alternative’ biographical stories of two men, each of whom has entered British cultural memory as one of the most successful authors of his age” (70). These “alternative” representations are not entirely unsympathetic; the Dickens character is still lauded as a celebrity author, but this praise is tempered by a darker side. Dickens’s reputation as an author “who celebrates Victorian middle-class domesticity” (73) is disrupted by Flanagan’s portrayal of the Dickens family’s crises. Competing identities envelop this eminent Victorian in fiction just as they did in life.

For Steveker, Dickens’s turn as a fictional character in Flanagan’s novel reveals the lack of

“control over his own life. ‘Greatness’ and ‘genius’ are exposed as exterior ascriptions serving as blankets to cover up the emptiness of the (fictionalised) individual’s life and his disorientation in society” (76). The tension between Dickensian heroism and anxiety—which

41 Kaplan christens them the “paired avatars of literature and science” (“Coda” 194). 87

I analyse across Dickens’s life-writing novels—resurfaces in modern biofictional representations of Dickens. I elaborate upon Steveker’s discussion of binaries, such as

Flanagan’s rendering of Dickens’s internal and external conflict, or the ways in which neo-

Victorian biofictions “serve both to undermine and to complement” (75), in my analysis of

Dickensian tensions and paradoxes. For example, in the next three chapters, I analyse

Dickens’s capacity for creating a binary from a typically fused entity: the hero-protagonist.

Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss point out that “Neo-Victorian texts as cultural doppelgangers of the Victorian Age both mimic and challenge the discourses of the nineteenth century” (1-2; emphasis original). This mandates a focus on the “repetitions and reiterations of that which is considered Victorian…” (4). As such, the portion of this edited collection which most interests me is Part II: “Resurrecting Cultural Icons: Spectral Returns,” which highlights our recent fixation on the author as an individual worthy of intrigue:

the idea of repetition and revisitation in differentiated discussions of the figure of the (Victorian) author: [the chapters] focus on characters who brazenly defy Roland Barthes’s by now stereotypical postmodern axiom of the “death of the author” and necessitate a renewed investigation of contemporary author functions in the context of what Kaplan has termed “biographilia.” (“Introduction” 10)

My own research converses with this collection in that I am likewise interested in how neo-

Victorian biofiction both complements and challenges Charles Dickens’s current legacy, with its persistent marriage of fact and fiction. I also use this collection as a point of divergence, wherein I adopt a broader definition of biofiction, particularly as it pertains to Dickens, whose biographical and fictional tendencies insistently intertwined. Specifically, I suggest that Dickens’s life-writing novels—themselves such a blend of biography and fiction—be added to the continuum of biofiction.

The second key theme foregrounded by this edited collection is the tension between fact and fiction in biofiction. Eckart Voigts explains that he adopts the hyphenated version of the term “bio-fiction” because “I take the abbreviation ‘bio’ to refer both to biographies and

88 biological science. My chapter looks at the way in which neo-Victorian bio-fiction reviews

Victorian science and scientists” (79). Thus, while Voigt’s subject matter is scientific, and my subject matter is strictly literary, we still share an interest in the curious relationship between fact and fiction. According to Voigts, biofiction enhances this mystery:

What emerges [in neo-Victorian texts] is a blurry, fuzzy text, composed of both pastness and presentness—and in the case of Victorian bio-fiction also composed of fact and fiction. This epistemological conundrum—how to tell the past from the present and the fact from the fiction—has haunted criticism of neo-Victorian biofiction. Neither in neo-Victorian fiction nor in neo-Victorian biography will we find a “real” Darwin: theoretically any division between fact and fiction is untenable. (81)

While Voigts is correct that the bio/fictional subject’s identity is notoriously slippery, unearthing the “real” Darwin—or Dickens, in my case—is really beside the point; rather, the aim is to first acknowledge that all life-writing is a construction with inherent biases and agendas. Moreover, as with Darwin, any attempt to locate a “real” Dickens is even more fraught than usual given the extensive mythologising encompassing his legacy. As Linda

Hutcheon famously queried, “The question is: how can we know that past today—and what can we know of it?” (Poetics of Postmodernism 92; emphasis original) Thereafter, the primary critical determination is where on the sliding continuum of biofiction to place a given text, since its level of (professed) fictionality influences Dickens’s legacy. Dickensian biofiction encompasses more than merely biographical novels.

Steveker likewise complicates confident Victorian individuality in her discussion of two neo-Victorian biofictional novels which challenge the reverence often obscuring eminent

Victorian authors. Even though we cannot completely capture what Dickens was actually like—the “real” Dickens, to return to Voigts’s point above—this does not preclude the value of engaging with known elements of his life. Steveker points out the influence of neo-realism on neo-Victorian biofiction, wherein “it acknowledges the unattainability of the past subject whilst claiming that life and identity—both in the nineteenth century and, by implication, today—are indeed meaningful” (70). For neo-realism, a piecemeal version of a life is still

89 revealing (76). We must take care, however, to recognise that stories composed of scraps are more likely to engender myth; this is not necessarily a negative, but simply something that must be acknowledged in order to respect reputation.

Perhaps surprisingly, Steveker is seemingly irked by Flanagan’s Author’s Note to

Wanting—which cautions the reader not to approach this biofictional novel as “history.” She sees Flanagan’s instructions not as a warning but as a self-aggrandising manoeuvre:

“presiding over his own text and its semantic potential” produces “a figure of privileged textual authority” who “position[s] himself as the supreme ruler of what he has written” (77).

Using terms like “stylises” and “fashions” conjures images of a stilted, self-important author rather than one who is simply taking responsibility for his contribution to cultural memory.

Returning to Voigts, who claims that in a fictional biography, “ultimately the line between fact and fiction is determined by the reader and the relative intensity and function of the individual reading process. In fictionalising biography, the present inserts itself into the past…” (90) we are reminded how present agendas shape neo-Victorian engagement with

Victorian personalities. Even without empowering the reader to the extent that Voigts does, it still seems wise to clarify the liberties taken with the historical record. Thus, an admonitory

Author’s Note is more about the author reminding readers of the potential risks to the subject’s reputation; the focus is accountability rather than authority. Paratextual insistence aside, the myriad reconstructions and incarnations of Dickens’s person—and persona— contribute to mythologising the man and further projecting him into the fictional realm consigned to his characters.

My exploration of Dickens’s life-writing novels invokes Voigt’s claim about the nearly indiscernible fusion of fact and fiction, but I locate “life” not in biology but in story: by side-stepping the search for a wholly authentic Dickens, and instead considering how the eminent author embalmed himself in his life-writing novels—where he wrestled with how to

90 construct a successful narrative life—Dickens’s own biofictional proclivities are revealed.

The words from Dickens’s will reverberate: “I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country on my published works…” (Forster 827; emphasis mine). Dickens’s devotion to his characters’ histories in turn imbued him with life even as he poured his past into their present; an investment in their narratives was also an investment in his own future legacy. Of course, the insurance value of this approach—in terms of safeguarding his legacy against subsequent tampering—has since been negated, for Dickens and his characters are repeatedly reimagined by other authors.

Voigts adds that “One might read a fictional biography for the facts and a factual biography for the fiction. It is critical consensus that any biography is the construct of an author, whether fictional or factual: the sources are unreliable, memory is fallible” (81). I agree that this is certainly true; however, as mentioned previously, it also matters how something is presented. Despite accepting the elements of constructed fictionality encompassing all narratives—to one extent or another—readerly approaches and expectations are still altered depending upon whether a text is marketed as biography (supposedly fact) or novels (supposedly fiction). By focusing my argument upon Dickens’s life-writing novels, I exploit the elision between genres to demonstrate Dickens’s anxieties about authorship and legacy, which he viewed narratively.

I further participate in this conversation about challenges to Dickens’s legacy later in this thesis. My chapter on (Dickensian) neo-Victorian novelistic renderings analyses an alternative account of Dickens’s life as imagined in Gaynor Arnold’s 2008 neo-Victorian novel Girl in a Blue Dress. I engage with the issue of narrative control—and Dickens’s loss of control at that—from a different perspective. My focus is on the power an author wields in shaping both truth and legacy, but, like Arnold, I privilege Catherine Dickens’s role in contesting the history her husband assigned her. I then take the next step to include an

91 examination of the neo-Victorian afterlife of Dickens’s infamous Miss Havisham, which relates to my exploration of Dickens’s narrative control wherein someone else appropriates his authorial voice. As I explore further in Chapter 5, adaptation of his work was also an issue

Dickens faced during his lifetime. Since his death, however, Dickensian adaptation has gained further momentum—and the author can no longer register complaints about his loss of narrative authority. Steveker studies instances where Dickens himself appears as a character in the novel. This of course makes sense given her emphasis on “resurrecting the idea of the author” (76). But it is also limiting in relation to Dickens, whose characters are so tied to his authorial identity. My examination of Dickensian biography and biographical novels in conjunction with Dickens’s life-writing novels expands critical conceptions of biofiction. I juxtapose Dickens-the-man fictionalised by self-conscious biographical editing against

Dickens-the-man fictionalised in a novelistic rendering of his life. Most significantly,

Dickens’s life-writing novels engage Dickens’s characters to illuminate their author’s experimentation with crafting a successful life story, and, by basing his fiction upon the tenets of life-writing, Dickens himself participates in the biofictional arena before it was christened such.

Kaplan concludes with a list of specificities to guide future evaluations of authorial heroes: “How we regard past ‘genius’—who we construct as heroes and why, what stature and what agency we give to literature (and criticism) past and present—these are the questions we need, as good academics and ordinary citizens of the world, to keep asking of ourselves and our work and our objects of study... “(202). I contribute to this critical arena by analysing how Dickens’s own insecurities about writing his life—especially his “lost courage”—are rehearsed in his life-writing novels, which I offer as (broad) examples of

Dickensian biofiction. Dickens’s tendency to undermine his professed protagonists—even as

92 he fiendishly protects his own heroic legacy—juxtaposes nicely with our current tendency is to simultaneously idolise Dickens and to challenge his legacy through biofictional renderings.

Conclusion

In 2007, Rosemarie Bodenheimer published her own bio-critical study of Dickens entitled Knowing Dickens. Here she concedes that “Dickens is, of course, a bit of a Tough

Subject. Were he among us now, many would call him a narcissist and a control freak” (16).

Shortly thereafter, she puts it in slightly more diplomatic terms as an “extreme propensity for managerial control” (17). Stated bluntly, Dickens was a micromanager extraordinaire.

Nonetheless, despite his best efforts to continue exerting control after his death (in part by mandating that his legacy be viewed through his fiction) even The Inimitable’s power has proven limited. This chapter has traced the critical precedent for others to write Dickens’s life in the intervening years since his death. Engaging with the critical voices influencing reception of Dickensian biofiction demonstrates how Dickens’s legacy has evolved over the years, waxing and waning alongside interest in the biographical subject. The next chapter commences my analysis of the tension between heroism and anxiety in Dickens’s own life- writing novels. If, as A. O. J. Cockshut claims, “hero-worship is a normal attribute of nineteenth-century biographers” (42) then why does Dickens often stray from this tradition when portraying the subjects of his life-writing novels? My aim is to provide new insight into our current fascination with Dickens’s biofictional legacy, by investigating the curious undermining of Dickens’s ostensible hero-protagonists—who, perplexingly, often fail to claim centre stage in their own life histories.

Chapter 2: Memoir Wherein Dickens edits memoirs and has his own memoir edited, with varying degrees of success Much like the continuum of biofiction I have been discussing, Dickens’s engagement with the genre of memoir exists on a sliding scale of fictionality. This chapter explores a sampling of (broadly categorized) Dickensian memoirs, commencing with John Forster’s biography entitled The Life of Charles Dickens, which exposes Dickens’s covert orchestration of his life history via Forster. A similarly surreptitious conflict between Dickens’s roles of editor or author appears in The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, which Dickens claimed to have merely edited but evidence suggests he more likely rewrote. In both The Life of Charles

Dickens and The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, Dickens was more actively involved than he claimed; an editorial façade thus overshadows both texts, initiating a precedent of Dickens desiring editorial control sans authorial culpability. I next discuss Dickens’s travelogue

American Notes as an example of Dickensian biofiction, due to Dickens’s positioning himself as a quasi-fictional character in the text. Concluding this chapter are two Dickensian life- writing novels: Oliver Twist, and, more importantly, The Pickwick Papers. The latter comprises the bulk of my analysis of the tension between Dickensian heroism and anxiety, underpinned by Dickens’s editorial involvement in Mr. Pickwick’s fictional memoirs. Such a selection of memoirs, some more obviously fictional than others, also exposes Dickens’s vacillation between revealing and concealing. His authorial versus editorial involvement in these texts is indicative of both his principal desire for narrative control and his anxieties about authorship, which manifest in a series of tensions, including the aforementioned fiction/nonfiction, revealing/concealing, heroism/anxiety, and author/editor/narrator. I enlist

Kym Brindle’s work on the links between concessions, omissions, and authenticity in fictional life-writing to methodologically parse the complexities interwoven amongst these tensions.

Memoir: Clarifying the Genre, and the Legacy Issue

In his landmark book Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960), Roy Pascal writes that “no clean line can be drawn” (5) between autobiography and memoir. However, “there is a general difference in the direction of the author’s attention. In the autobiography proper, attention is focused on the self, in the memoir or reminiscence on others” (5). To further clarify the term “memoir” I turn to Ben Yagoda, who explains in his author’s note to

Memoir: a History (2009) that:

In this book I use the words “memoir” and “autobiography” –and, on occasion, “memoirs”—to mean more or less the same thing: a book understood by its author, its publisher, and its readers to be a factual account of the author’s life. (The one clear difference is that while “autobiography” or “memoirs” usually cover the full span of that life, “memoir” has been used by books that cover the entirety or some portion of it). (1)

While Yagoda uses “memoir” and “autobiography” interchangeably, he explains elsewhere in the text that the term’s distinctions have, at times, been further debated, with more truth or more fabrication periodically being assigned to one term or the other. Both autobiography and memoir invite boundary blurring, and Kaplan confirms that they “are well known for their experimentation with form…” (Victoriana: 39). There is also a precedent for a memoir to be written by someone else, wherein, as Richard Coe explains, the writer’s presence as a character in the memoir is typically not the centre of attention (14). This point further distinguishes memoir (from autobiography) in that an autobiography is traditionally authored by the subject, while this is not necessarily the case with memoir. In G. Thomas Couser’s

Memoir: An Introduction (2012), Couser notes that the genre “appears to be open to anybody, i.e., ‘nobody’” (5). Couser’s commentary specifically relates to the modern surge in memoir’s popularity, which is the current “term of choice” (3). All in all, genre-bending is a defining feature of the memoir, which skirts the designations between autobiography and biography.

In Dickens’s Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, and The Memoirs of Joseph

Grimaldi, narrative uncertainty accentuates memoir’s malleability, as each text exhibits its own uniquely troubling characteristics. Oliver (and his creator) meander, Pickwick (and

Dickens) require Sam Weller to vault them to glory, and Grimaldi’s memoirs are a source of conflict for the Victorian clown and his “editor.” Moreover, despite Dickens’s overarching success, the season he engaged with this overlapping flurry of writing—he was simultaneously conjuring Pickwick and Oliver, and Grimaldi followed shortly thereafter— was also one when “he was starting to think of writing as an imprisoning set of routines”

(Douglas-Fairhurst 293). Success and imprisonment went hand in hand, and the pressure to perform overshadowed Dickens’s achievement.

For the purpose of this chapter, I use the term memoir to denote a collection of stories primarily about the text’s protagonist, wherein some of the stories are provided by the protagonist himself and some are supplemented by other characters and/or the editor. Some of the memoirs discussed in this chapter are more overtly non-fictional—including American

Notes, Joseph Grimaldi’s Memoirs, and The Life of Charles Dickens—while others are specifically cast as fictional, like the novels Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers. Such a selection is designed to showcase the sliding fictionality inherent in the life-writing genre, and memoir is particularly well-suited to this demonstration given its fluid boundaries.

Dickens draws himself along fictional lines in American Notes, while he handles the character Oliver Twist’s memoirs as seriously as those of the (once) living Joseph Grimaldi. I also acknowledge that in establishing the formal parameters of memoir I am discussing a genre which—despite acceptance that the subject is somewhat fictionalised through selective recollection—is still theoretically non-fictional. However, memoir’s natural fluidity, such as its capacity to be composed by someone other than the subject, are well suited to boundary bending. Moreover, as I have been stressing, Dickens’s overlapping approach to fiction and

96 non-fiction—hinging, after all, upon his own request that we remember the living man in conjunction with his imagined characters—enacts some conflation of genres.

The Victorians were fascinated by the imaginative variations memoir afforded.

Family histories could be professionally edited then publicly marketed as memoirs (Patten

Boz 216). Victorian authors also experimented with the edited memoir format in their novels—this approach was particularly well suited to the concealed evidence and conflicting reports fundamental to sensation fiction. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) divides its narrative perspectives between characters, with Walter Hartright serving as the primary narrator and editor. Walter organises the other characters’ narrative contributions, ranging from Marian Holcombe’s diary extracts to witness statements and letters from lesser characters. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is similarly split in its narrative advancement, relying heavily upon journal extracts from Jonathan Harker, Dr. Seward, Mina Murray

Harker, and Lucy Westenra to drive the plot. Other written evidence such as newspaper excerpts and telegrams supplement material supplied by the main characters. Anne Bronte’s

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) is narrated (via letter) by Gilbert Markham. Within these letters, Gilbert transcribes—and thus also edits—his wife Helen’s journal, written years earlier. All three books position the editor as an obvious character: Walter Hartright in The

Woman in White, Mina Murray Harker in Dracula, and Gilbert Markham in The Tenant of

Wildfell Hall.

Conversely, in keeping with Dickens’s ability to elide distinctions, editors of the

Dickensian memoirs discussed in this chapter are not so forthcoming as to be either a clearly- defined character or completely invisible. Dickens himself hides behind both his pseudonym

“Boz” and his friend Forster. The Pickwick Papers’ editor flirts with the boundary between being inside and outside the text: Boz the editor is both the external author of the text and an internal character compiling the Pickwickians’ life-writing. Therefore, this chapter explores

97 how the very murkiness surrounding both heroic identity and the identity of the Dickensian memoir’s author/editor highlights Dickens’s tension between heroism and anxiety, which ultimately feeds his fixation on legacy.

The uncertainty surrounding who will emerge as the hero of his own memoir (to paraphrase David Copperfield) emerges in Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, and The

Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. Oliver Twist—both the character and the text—meander, and must vie with lesser character Nancy in terms of star power. Samuel Pickwick is generally thought of in most excellent terms, but further investigation reveals shadows surrounding his heroic renderings. One shadow is the suggestion that Sam Weller is actually the hero of

Pickwick’s Papers. The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi—which relate the history of the real- life Victorian clown—were “edited” by Dickens around the same time he was creating the memoirs of Mr. Pickwick and Oliver Twist. Grimaldi’s memoirs expose Dickens’s early anxieties over his authorial identity as he assumes an editorial disguise. Even Dickens’s own biography, written by his good friend John Forster, illustrates what Douglas-Fairhurst refers to as Forster’s “own billing as chief supporting actor, or even co-star, in the story of

Dickens’s life” (145). Forster certainly does credit himself with playing a vital role in supporting and encouraging Dickens’s genius. Yet paradoxically, despite his self-promotion,

Forster often defers to Dickens’s perspective. In fact, Dickens’s own letters comprise a sizable portion of the voluminous text, suggesting that Forster is serving as the editor of a collection of Dickensian letters (or a memoir!) rather than behaving like a biographer offering his own opinion on the subject’s life. While not the focus of this chapter, I will briefly examine this tension between Dickens’s voice and Forster’s presence in The Life of Charles

Dickens as an example of how Dickens’s life-writing anxieties manifest in biofictional renderings of his life. Moreover, this text is the only one (analysed in this chapter) which was published after Dickens burned his autobiographical fragment. The other examples served as

98 practice for penning successful life narratives before Dickens’s autobiographical courage abandoned him—but while he was still grappling with anxieties over his authorial identity.

The Life of Charles Dickens, or, A Tale of Two Authors, Editors, and Narrators

Forster’s biography of Dickens is integral to this chapter for two reasons: first, it relates to the theme of a secondary character usurping the protagonist’s place as hero of the memoir, and second, it contributes to the examination of Dickens’s reticence to claim authorial responsibility for memoirs, deferring instead to an “editor.” In the case of Dickens’s fictional memoirs, Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers, he accomplishes this end through the creation of an editorial persona. In Dickens’s own memoirs, The Life of Charles Dickens,

(this term does appear in the text itself) there is tension between Forster exalting his own self- importance and deferring to Dickens’s perspective, and in Dickens covertly writing an autobiography without actually claiming it as such. Technically, The Life of Charles Dickens is classed as a biography, since the text is framed by Forster, who is listed as its author. But the tension between roles reminds us that the boundaries between author, editor, and narrator—much like the boundaries between fact and fiction, and Dickens’s life and art—blur in this text, giving The Life of Charles Dickens a biofictional gloss.

Jean Ferguson Carr—whose work on this topic I analysed in Chapter 1—succinctly summarises the autobiographical issue: “Dickens’s awareness of the difficulties involved in such first-person accounts must have made the indirect approach of having Forster as the formal narrator of the life seem a viable solution, a way of mitigating, if only by disguise, the problem of Dickens’s own role in his life history” (466). This concept of Forster as the

“formal narrator” contradicts Forster’s own assertion that “I studied nothing so hard as to suppress my own personality” (773) since “The purpose here was to make Dickens the sole central figure in the scenes revived, narrator as well as principal actor…” (772). More accurately, then, The Life of Charles Dickens is a Dickensian memoir featuring two authors,

99 two editors, and two narrators. Two author-narrators in that both Dickens and Forster creatively generate original text and speak in the first person—Dickens via his letters and

Forster in his biographical elaborations. Two editors, in that Dickens (covertly editing his identity) “primed his friend John Forster with reams of brilliant letters and doled out carefully modulated reminiscences of his childhood” (Bodenheimer “Writing” 49). Nonetheless,

Forster—exercising his editorial privilege—did not always acquiesce to Dickens’s perspective. For example, he prints a previously unpublished letter (Patten Boz 182) it was formerly “thought best to suppress” (Forster 75). The letter in question is one Dickens wrote defending himself against the criticism that his limited exposure to Grimaldi compromised his ability to edit the man’s memoirs.42

This interplay between roles expands Foucault’s “author-function” by enlisting an editorial “second self” to illuminate Dickens’s authorial insecurities. Foucault admits that the

“author-function” is “sufficiently complex” (1635).43 Such complexity allows room to propose new possibilities, since references to the “far from immutable” (1636) nature of the author-function pepper Foucault’s search for “What is an Author?” Indeed, “Writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind”

(1623). For Foucault, the similarities between an author and his or her authorial “second self” are “never fixed” and as such experience “considerable alteration within the course of a single book” (1631). The connection between author and text is similarly tenuous, with

Foucault even terming it an “enigmatic link” (1634). Therefore, invoking Foucault’s “new”44 query “Where does [discourse] come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?” (1636;

42 Pilgrim I:382-82.

43 Naomi Rebecca Brenner identifies “the complex construction of the composite ‘selves’ of the author” as “a relatively under-theorized area of Foucault’s ‘author function’” (29).

44 This is one of the questions Foucault envisions as eventually replacing “tiresome repetitions” such as “Who is the real author?” (1636) 100 emphasis mine) to emphasize an editor’s control versus an author’s creativity, I follow

Foucault’s imperative to “disclose other characteristics of the ‘author-function’” (1631). To this end, an author is defined as the creative force propelling the narrative; an author conjures the characters, imagines the scenes, and is ultimately responsible for actually writing the text.

An editor assists the author by refining the writing, keeping the narrative on course, and correcting mistakes. An editor thus has more control but (paradoxically) less accountability since the editorial role is limited to shaping rather than producing. A narrator is the authorial persona who relates the story. I discuss the tension between Dickens’s roles as author versus editor, and its relation to Foucault’s “author function” in more detail later in this chapter.

The Life of Charles Dickens becomes the site of strange fluctuation between Douglas-

Fairhurst’s point about Forster’s self-importance in the text, Forster’s insistence that Dickens is the protagonist—literally the chief character—and Dickens’s desire to hide behind

Forster’s editorial status while still managing the memoir’s material. This memoir thus demonstrates Dickens’s vacillation between revealing and concealing. Maria Chialant argues that “Forster’s book, being so shaped by Dickens’s careful providing of information to his friend and biographer, could almost be seen as an autobiography” (Dickens and the Imagined

Child 77). This claim overstates things slightly—the text has enough of Forster’s influence to prevent it from being solely Dickens’s domain. Nonetheless, Dickens’s orchestration is again asserted.

I am building to my analysis of The Pickwick Papers, which discusses the possibility that an editor—in disguise, since he is in fact an author and possibly also a character— undermines the protagonist despite assertions otherwise. Even though Dickens’s letters comprise over 75% of his own biography (Carr 462), Forster does exalt his own significance by claiming that “There was nothing written by him after this date [Oliver Twist] which I did not see before the world did, either in manuscript or proofs; and in connection with the latter I

101 shortly began to give him the help which he publicly mentioned twenty years later in dedicating his collected writings to me” (65). Again, as outlined in the previous chapter,

Forster’s looming presence in a text entitled The Life of Charles Dickens has been discussed for decades; my objective here is not to expand upon this conversation as such, but rather to connect it to the Dickensian tensions between author/editor/narrator, revealing/concealing, and heroism/anxiety explored in this thesis. I will shortly chronicle the pattern of secondary character challenging the purported hero in Dickens’s life-writing novels, and it is intriguing that this same pattern appears in Dickens’s own life-writing legacy: yet another reminder of the (biofictional) interplay between Dickensian life and art.

Boz: An Identity Abandoned

Dickens’s shifting relationship to his pen name “Boz” exemplifies both his similarly fraught approach to life-writing narratives and his vacillation between authorial versus editorial roles. When Dickens rose to authorial prominence in the 1830s, it was common to publish under an assumed name—or even anonymously. Therefore, Dickens’s relationship to his pseudonym is intriguing not because he employed one, but rather because he struggled with relating to his alter ego. Foucault’s authorial “‘second self’ whose similarity to the author is never fixed and undergoes considerable alteration within the course of a single book” (1631) is certainly applicable to Boz: he could be either author or editor, (or even both), sometimes Boz replaced Dickens, and sometimes Boz appeared alongside him. The

Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens charts this complicated history:

In fact, “Boz” and “Charles Dickens” coexisted for a few years. Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby in parts were described on their title-pages as being “Edited by ‘Boz.’” But published in volume form, they were “by Charles Dickens”—hence Pickwick is the first book (1837) to carry his name on the cover. Oliver Twist in its first edition was “By ‘Boz’”—it had appeared serially in Bentley’s Miscellany, which was “edited by ‘Boz’”—but the advertisements at the back announced “New Works of entertainment edited by Charles Dickens, Esq., (Boz.).” The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (1837) were edited by “Boz”...American Notes (1842) was “by Charles Dickens,” but in the same year, on the monthly wrappers and with its still original

102

elaborate title, Martin Chuzzlewit was still “Edited by ‘Boz’”—but one page in, on the title-page, it was “by Charles Dickens.” (52-53) Clearly, there existed a complex relationship between Dickens and Boz and their overlapping

(even competing) authorial versus editorial functions. Entire books have been written on these intricate interactions, including Robert L. Patten’s 2012 contribution entitled Charles

Dickens and “Boz”: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author. Here Patten summarises how convoluted this topic is: “That Dickens has been deploying Boz instead of his ‘real name,’ and that in some cases he didn’t want that nickname to be associated with himself or his works, further complicates our already complicated sense of what he wanted Boz to stand for” (152). My purpose here is not so much to interrogate the significance behind the marketed name and function (what appears on the title page, for instance) as to look at the way Dickens positions himself in the text itself. In The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi he stresses that there has been no “book-making.” Thus, in keeping with the “Edited by ‘Boz’” which appears on the memoir’s title page, Dickens positions himself as editor—most definitely not author—in the text proper. Dickens again utilises “the mask of ‘Boz’”

(Wormald xiii) when he textually positions himself as the The Pickwick Papers’ editor; however, he does occasionally refer to himself as author in the paratextual material. I explore these implications at the end of this chapter.

We can certainly read Boz as another Dickensian diversion: “Dickens may have started out concealing his real name to protect against failure. If his fiction did not succeed, no one would know that the failed writer ‘Boz’ had any connection to the young journalist and Parliamentary reporter Charles Dickens” (Patten 38). This tactic is also visible in the

1850 Preface to Sketches by Boz, where Dickens acknowledges the “imperfections (a good many)” contained therein: “I am conscious of their often being extremely crude and ill- considered, and bearing obvious marks of haste and inexperience…” (np). However, he stresses that they were written in his youth before he had honed his skills as an author. While

103 this “haste” could contribute to the inconsistencies in the text—and Dickens’s recourse to an editorial façade—such apologies also point to Dickens’s ongoing anxieties over his authorial efforts.

Dickens did not reveal the story of how Boz came to be his pseudonym until 1847, when he was working to “foreground his real name [over Boz], which he wanted to stand as the name of the author of more varied serious, and masterful fictions than the mainly improvised early writings” (Patten 39). Intriguingly, Dickens ceased using Boz around this same time—a vanishing which also coincides with the period when Dickens was struggling to write his own life. The Oxford Companion positions this shift positively, in light of

Dickens claiming his “own identity, one that indicated more of the serious reformer than the comic ‘Boz’ would allow” (53). Patten similarly states that “the brand Boz…was being phased out” to make way for Dickens himself (326). However, we can also attribute Boz’s sacrifice as another casualty of the “lost courage”; a death, not of the author per se, but of the authorial alter ego. “Boz” was, after all, abandoned during the same season as Dickens’s autobiography. Douglas-Fairhurst references the angst Dickens experienced over his “twin identities” (333), as he had to decide whether to privilege Dickens or Boz. Still, this

“uncertainty over his name was far less significant than the other doubts and self-divisions that continued to haunt him” (Douglas-Fairhurst 333). While it is true that Dickens did experience greater afflictions—including the loss of his autobiographical courage—his tumultuous relationship with Boz is symptomatic of Dickens’s overarching authorial anxieties.

The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi: Another Editorial Façade

Around the same time Dickens was constructing the memoirs of fictional Samuel

Pickwick and Oliver Twist, he was also working on the memoirs of real-life English

104 entertainer Joseph Grimaldi. All three (Pickwick, Twist, and Grimaldi) became living constructs for Dickens, and John Forster chronicles their reality:

His new story [Oliver Twist] was now beginning largely to share attention with his Pickwick Papers, and it was delightful to see how real all its people became to him. What I had most, indeed, to notice in him, at the very outset of his career was his indifference to any praise of his performances on the mere literary side, compared with the higher recognition of them as bits of actual life, with the meaning and purpose on their part, and the responsibility on his, of realities rather than creatures of fancy. (64)

Oliver Twist and Mr. Pickwick lived for Dickens, and he felt “responsibility” to render them as realistically as possible. With this level of commitment to fictional beings, the living

Joseph Grimaldi merited comparable attention. Dickens leaves little doubt here over who the intended hero of Grimaldi’s Memoirs is; in the process, however, he finds himself the object of scrutiny. Despite Dickens’s editorial determination to present his subject in the best light possible—Grimaldi’s “kind nature” (197), generosity (178, 240; 246; 248; 295), and tenacity

(329) are especially stressed45—critical reviews of Dickens’s efforts with Grimaldi’s memoirs are mixed. Jean Ferguson Carr judges it “one of the few outright failures of his writing career” (449) while Jonathan Buckmaster concurs with the Victorian critics who felt that “Dickens largely succeeded in focusing his narrative on the sentimental side of

Grimaldi’s character” (9). Critical tension thus emerges over Dickens’s heroic representation of the famous Victorian clown.

The extent to which Dickens modified Grimaldi’s memoirs has been similarly debated, with some accounts claiming Dickens merely edited Grimaldi’s work and others arguing that Dickens actually rewrote the memoirs to relate Grimaldi’s story the way Dickens deemed appropriate, as that of “a man of the kindest heart” (Memoirs 255). Buckmaster is in the latter camp, and he compellingly compares Dickens’s portrayal of the real-life Grimaldi

45 For instance, Grimaldi’s strength of character is evinced by not incriminating a young man who robbed him. This kindness and wisdom is rewarded, for the text reveals that this same young man made good on his “promises of reformation” (249) and ended up “bearing the reputation of an honest man” (249). 105 to another of Dickens’s constructs: the fictional Samuel Pickwick (1). Dickens himself staunchly insisted that his role in Grimaldi’s memoirs was solely editorial. Forster corroborates this stance, writing that “Except the preface, [Dickens] did not write a line of this biography, such modifications or additions as he made having been dictated by him to his father…” (Forster 74). In a peculiar play on words, Forster adopts the most literal use of “did not write” by retreating behind the shield of amanuensis. Dickens’s involvement in the memoirs was couched as purely editorial from the start. Even the contractual arrangement

Dickens signed with (publisher) Richard Bentley stipulated that Grimaldi’s memoirs “should be publicized as ‘Edited by Boz’ but should not in any manner ‘state either by himself or his

Agents that the said work is written by the said Charles Dickens or that he is that Author thereof such being contrary to the fact’” (Patten Boz 179). It is therefore possible to read

Dickens’s stressing of his editorial role as being due to contractual obligations, but it is also possible—more likely even—that he initiated the editorial stance at the outset. Dickens was no stranger to conflict with his publishers, and he notoriously disliked being told what to do, particularly when pertaining to his work.

Patten cautions that “One must not make too much of this cobbled-together project and its aftermath, but it does illustrate once again how fluctuating, uncertain, indefinite, and inconsistent Dickens and his publishers were about using, introducing, or suppressing the editorial ‘Boz’ and the authorial Dickens, and how ambiguous his status was as editor, author, and copyright sharer” (182). Patten also references these shifting roles as “this muddle” (182), a designation which demonstrates how even the author of a critical study focusing on the relationship between Dickens and Boz cannot fully unravel its inherent complexities. Regardless of whose idea the editorial front was at the outset, Dickens still employs it as a cover which allows him to construct Grimaldi’s memoirs in the manner he chooses. The guise of editor protects both the anxious young author and the headstrong

106 author who desires to do as he pleases behind the scenes. Expanding Foucault’s “author- function,” to include an editorial “second self” highlights Foucault’s emphasis on narrative control as a fundamental concern in dispersing discourse. When an author adopts an editorial persona to assume both control and coverage, attention is diverted from what Foucault calls the “tiresome” search for “Who is the real author?” (1636). The focus is more on why the author assumes an editorial mask; his identity is known, yet denied. What underlying issues does this illuminate? In Dickens’s case, it is his anxieties about authorship: stemming first from his early insecurities about accountability in composing a successful life story, and later, from his failure to successfully write his own life.

In the Introductory Chapter of Grimaldi’s Memoirs, Dickens provides a brief history of the memoirs and how he has come to edit them: “The present Editor of these Memoirs has felt it necessary to say thus much in explanation of their origin, in order to establish beyond doubt the unquestionable authenticity of the memoirs they contain” (viii). This stance (and even wording) is eerily similar to the claims Dickens makes as “editor” of Mr. Pickwick’s memoir, wherein he constructs a case for the Papers’ authenticity by reinforcing how

“carefully preserved” Mr. Pickwick’s life-writing has been (Penguin 756). In relation to work on the Grimaldi text, while Dickens admits to “altering its form throughout, and making such other alterations as he [Dickens refers to himself in the third person throughout the

Introduction to Grimaldi’s Memoirs] conceived would improve the narration of the facts, without any departure from the facts themselves. He has merely to add, that there has been no book-making in this case. He has not swelled the quantity of matter, but materially abridged it” (Memoirs ix; emphasis original). Regardless of whether the title page listed Boz or

Dickens as author or editor (it was Boz as editor, for the record) Dickens stresses in the text itself that he has abstained from “book-making,” thus distancing himself from authorial accountability. Moreover, it was not unusual for Dickens to reference himself in the third

107 person. Jenny Hartley interprets this as a protective tendency: “Dickens had, moreover, long cultivated a hedge for himself in his letters, through his recourse to the third-person persona”

(Letters xii). This hedge of protection is also applicable to the author/editor debate in

Grimaldi’s memoirs; the third person is, like an editor, further removed from accountability.

Dickens’s description (above) of his “alterations” indicates that in his mind, as long as he has not strayed from “facts” into “book-making,” then his role remains editorial rather than authorial.

Nonetheless, the slippage between roles remains, and the distinction between author or editor hinges upon precisely how much creative license Dickens took with his changes.

For despite his assertions against authorial liberties, “Readers will notice, as the first reviewers did, the Dickensian touches in the narrative” (Findlater 300). For instance, the pledge that “how far his expectations were borne out by subsequent occurrences, the next chapter will show” (Memoirs 130) foreshadows Dickensian protagonists Pip (with his own expectations) and David Copperfield (with his enigmatic pledge that his pages must show his heroism), who were still decades away from conception. These “Dickensian touches” were also evident in Dickens’s other projects. Biographer Edgar Johnson notes that Dickens’s role as editor for Household Words often overlapped into authorship:

He read, rejected, accepted, rewrote. Though none of the articles were signed, the signature of his style was so obvious that readers often imagined the entire magazine to be written by Dickens. (Sometimes, in fact, they were not far from the truth—John Hollingshead says that in 1854 Dickens read nine hundred unsolicited contributions and used eleven after entirely rewriting them.) (712)

The fact that Dickens did not return to Grimaldi’s original text lends further credence to the position that he was more author composing original material than editor merely refining material already available. Specifically, Findlater states, “It seems that neither Dickens nor

Whitehead [Dickens’s friend who supplied notes to the 1846 and 1853 editions of Grimaldi’s memoirs] ever referred to the original Grimaldi manuscript…but merely worked on Wilks’s

108 truncated and rewritten version” (301). At first glance, this decision is quite strange, given

Dickens was initially reticent to accept the editorial job, dismissing Wilks’s version of the

Memoirs to his publisher as “very badly done, and is so redolent of twaddle that I fear I cannot take it up on any conditions to which you would be disposed to accede” (qtd. in

Findlater 299-300). However, if we accept that Dickens is more author than editor, then his initially perplexing decision to work from Wilks’s version instead of returning to the original makes sense: Dickens would be less likely to avail himself of all the available material if he intended to rewrite Grimaldi’s memoirs regardless. Significantly, this stage of his career also saw Dickens positioning himself as “editor” of the fictional memoirs of Oliver Twist and Mr.

Pickwick—when of course he actually authored them into existence. And, as explored elsewhere in this thesis, even mere editing can stray into the realm of fiction through selective representation.

Grimaldi is further (bio)fictionalised as various versions of his life story mythically converge—much like the competing accounts of Dickens’s own life story. Findlater further reports that Wilks extensively revised Grimaldi’s autobiographical notes and “interpolated anecdotes ‘gleaned’ from the Clown’s conversation, without being able to verify them

[Grimaldi passed away during Wilks’s editing process] and without indicating what Grimaldi wrote and what Wilks remembered” (299). Dickens chose to work from a version of the

Memoirs already steeply subjected to construction by another hand, hereby mythologising

Grimaldi by heaping his own authorial perspectives atop a second-hand account. Overall,

Dickens’s interaction with Grimaldi’s memoirs demonstrates that he approached chronicling the life histories of fictional characters and living beings in a similar fashion; he assigned equal gravity to compiling the life-writing of both groups. Although in an ironic twist,

Dickens commits to crafting his fictional creations in a realistic manner, whereas his living subject is increasingly fictionalised. The Dickensian slippage between fact and fiction

109 emerges yet again. Leigh Woods acknowledges Dickens’s fictionalisation of Grimaldi from a different perspective:

The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi testifies, finally, to a great writer's ability to encapsulate emblems of experience into his work. Ordinarily, we think of this as a fiction-writer's prerogative, rather than a biographer's. To the extent, however, that Dickens shaped Grimaldi's experience according to the dictates of his own imagination and of prevailing assumptions of what happened to actors when they acted, he was writing a kind of fiction. (150)

Adding to Woods’s assertion, the fact that Dickens was working from an already-edited account of Grimaldi’s life rather than returning to Grimaldi’s original version supports the argument that Grimaldi becomes a fictional caricature of himself.

Another key question in the Dickens/Grimaldi debate centres on why Dickens became so absorbed in Grimaldi’s legacy. Dickens’s fascination with the stage has been well documented by biographers and critics alike, but this alone does not fully explain his efforts on Grimaldi’s behalf. After all, Dickens initially declined the editorial post, but once accepted he wholeheartedly committed to his endeavour. Dickens was of course paid for his work on

Grimaldi’s Memoirs, but his investment extends beyond mere monetary gain. Richard Findlater queries, “Among all the funny men of the past, why should Joseph Grimaldi be singled out for immortality?” (13) He subsequently attempts to answer his own question: “So perhaps that record [meaning Grimaldi’s Memoirs] of extreme suffering is one reason for the mummification of his name; although it is scarcely an adequate memorial (it seems probable that he heavily over-dramatized his role as a sacrificial victim) and there are sounder reasons for remembering him—and his rewritten memories” (13). One of these “sounder reasons” is that Grimaldi was a “great artist” (16) and another is that the Memoirs, “although commonly cold-shouldered by Dickensians…claims its own small, secure niche in the development of a great writer” (16). Dickens’s own legacy is bound up with his work on Grimaldi’s.

Dickens contributes his own perspective to the deliberation: in a letter to one of

Grimaldi’s former doctors, Dickens writes that “I am very happy to find that I had not formed

110 a wrong estimate of the poor fellow’s character, I have merely been editing another account, and telling some of the stories in my own way, but I was much struck by the many traits of kindheartedness scattered through the book, and have given it that colouring throughout”

(Findlater 300). Dickens was taken by Grimaldi’s kindness, and he (arguably) desired to champion someone he viewed as likewise misunderstood. It is also worth noting that Dickens here reinforces his claims not to be “book-making” but rather editing, although the reference to slight alterations in the Introduction and “telling some of the stories in my own way” here hint at otherwise unacknowledged authorial liberties. The claim of Dickens as editor rather than author returns; here we glimpse Dickens’s insistence on merely editing as linked to insecurity on his part. His fame was still in formulation, after all—at this stage Dickens was scarcely past his days writing newspaper articles and court reports—and an “editor” is not as accountable as an author when it comes to evaluating a text. Dickens’s insecurity is demonstrated in the anxious insistence over his authorial—or lack thereof—role in constructing Grimaldi’s legacy. “Author” was still a designation too authoritative to fully embrace.

American Notes: An Alternate form of Dickensian Life-Writing

While outside the primary scope of this project, which focuses on Dickens’s novels based upon the tenets of life-writing, Dickens’s travelogue46 American Notes merits a mention here because it provides valuable insight into the blurred biofictional boundaries which enveloped him. American Notes is a fitting segue from the more ostensibly non- fictional memoirs I have been discussing to the more overtly fictional life-writing novels. As

46 Dickens also wrote another travelogue, Pictures from Italy, in 1846 (four years after American Notes). However, he does not insert himself into this text in the same qasi-fictional manner seen in American Notes. This distinction is perhaps due to the different approach in Pictures from Italy, which “is a series of faint reflections—mere shadows in the water—of places to which the imaginations of most people are attracted in a greater or less degree…” (302). These Pictures from Italy are literally sketches; brief vignettes of scenes from Dickens’s time living abroad. When he does mention himself, it is often in the context of a group, as in “we” did this or saw that. 111

I mentioned at the start of this chapter, genre-bending is a defining feature of the memoir, and here we see Dickens eliding the divisions between fact and fiction by casting himself as a quasi-fictional character in a (technically) non-fictional genre. Following on from The Life of

Charles Dickens and The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, which enhance our understanding of the tensions between Dickens’s roles of author/editor, American Notes accentuates other

Dickensian tensions—primarily the interplay between fact and fiction and Dickens’s vacillation between revealing and concealing.

I have previously established the precedent for how life-writing erodes the distinctions between fact and fiction by acknowledging the fictional elements which emerge as the subject’s identity is edited. In biographies, this manifests in the personal agendas at play as the biographer chooses how to frame his or her subject. Similarly, authors of first- person narratives—such as autobiographers, letter writers, and even diarists—shape themselves in anticipation (or dread) of potential readers. Adrienne Shiffman asserts that such edited identity melds fact and fiction through key omissions (95). I juxtapose this emphasis on audience expectations influencing an author’s life-writing inclusions and exclusions (i.e. a concern with personal narrative visibility) with Dickens’s novelistic “preoccupation with seeing and being seen” (Bradbury “Fragment” 25). This mission to control narrative knowledge across genres is manifested in Dickens’s selectively burning his diaries, letters, and autobiography. However, as previously identified, despite this self-conscious fixation on constructing and controlling his legacy, Dickens never completed an autobiographical account as-such. I address this gap by reading Dickens’s travelogue American Notes—which chronicles his American tour in 1842—through the life-writing lens of memoir.

Scholarship has traditionally positioned American Notes as an example of travel writing wherein Dickens studiously yet humorously comments upon the American (and briefly Canadian) way of life in a manner that accentuates both the tensions and the

112 commonalities between the Old World and the New. Indeed, the text generated considerable controversy in the United States following Dickens’s critique of its copyright practices and slavery. Amanda Claybaugh outlines the tensions characteristic of many nineteenth-century travelogues which “established an array of still familiar oppositions: American openness and

British reserve, American energy and British leisure, American merchants and British gentlemen. But in describing the differences between the United States and Great Britain, they also threw into relief the many connections that continued to exist between the two nations” (439). In particular, Dickens’s comparative assessments of the British and American prison systems and his commentary on the injustices of (Southern) American slavery have garnered great critical interest. However, while noteworthy, this predominant critical vantage point—along with discussions of Dickens and international copyright and the smattering of articles focusing on one aspect of his travels, such as his presentation of New York—does not fully account for the possibility that Dickens adopts a biofictional position in American Notes to rehearse life-writing prior to his foray into actual autobiographical writing later in the decade. Jean Ferguson Carr argues that Dickens fictionalised himself in his letters in order to remain memorable: “Dickens carries to extremes the effort to control his biography from beyond the grave. In letters, he develops himself as if he were one of his characters, creating scenes his readers will be sure to recall and want to preserve intact” (459-460). How ironic, then, that he also went on to burn letters as part of his quest for narrative control. Reading

American Notes as an early Dickensian biofiction reveals that the travelogue survives as a memoir cementing Dickens’s legacy as an adventurer abroad, who can rise to any occasion, and whose observations are worth heeding.

Ian Jack argues that “The memoir's ambition is to be interesting in itself, as a novel might be, about intimate, personal experience. It often aspires to be thought of as ‘literary’, and for that reason borrows many of literature's tricks—the tricks of the novel, of fiction—

113 because it wants to do more than record the past; it wants to re-create it” (np). In American

Notes, Dickens adopts this trick of fiction to re-create his overseas experiences and observations in a way that his readers can readily navigate: by drawing himself along the same fictive lines as the characters already known to his audience through his novels. Enter

Dickens the dynamic, tongue-in-cheek, quasi-fictional adventurer-turned-memoirist. Dickens navigates British and American cultural borders and boundaries to transform his text’s opening statement “I shall never forget” (1) into a mandate for readers to likewise remember his role as Dickens the (Dynamic and Biofictional) Adventurer Abroad.

From the outset, Dickens infuses his narrative with elements familiar in his fiction.

For example, even his sea sickness is presented as larger than life: “Not sea-sick, be it understood, in the ordinary acceptation of the term: I wish I had been: but in a form which I have never seen heard or described...” (15). Indeed, it taxes Dickens’s mental fortitude to the extent he confesses that “Nothing would have surprised me….If Neptune himself had walked in, with a toasted shark upon his trident, I should have looked upon the event as one of the very commonest every-day occurrences” (15). Dickens’s penchant for merging the everyday and the fantastic is a hallmark of his fiction, and his quirky characters are often memorable for their author’s exaggeration of an otherwise common feature, such as John Wemmick’s wooden face and hewn expressions in Great Expectations or Jerry Cruncher’s obsession with rust in A Tale of Two Cities. In American Notes, Dickens often appears in similar fashion, as he renders himself a quasi-fictional character through portraying his adventures overseas. For example, Dickens’s depiction of himself shares several key similarities with his presentation of the protagonist in Oliver Twist. At the time of Dickens’s American adventure, Oliver’s history would still have been fresh on his mind, having been completed merely four years before.

A key link between the Dickensian and Twistian memoirs is the nickname Dickens bestows upon himself during the voyage from England to America. While attempting to

114 minister to fellow sea sick passengers with hot brandy and water, Dickens christens himself the “disconcerted dodger” (19). “Dodger” is of course reminiscent of the dodger from Oliver

Twist, although that dodger was “artful” rather than “disconcerted.” Likewise, Dickens’s description of himself could easily hail from the pages of Oliver’s adventures: “it is necessary to recognize, in this disconcerted dodger, an individual very pale from sea-sickness, who had shaved his beard and brushed his hair last at Liverpool: and whose only articles of dress

(linen not included) were a pair of dreadnought trousers; a blue jacket, formerly admired upon the Thames at Richmond; no stockings; and one slipper” (19). Through this specific description, Dickens constructs himself as an endearing—if understandably dishevelled— servant putting other passengers first. Despite his own discomfort, Dickens the Disconcerted

Dodger still heroically helps others. Heroism then, is less about perfection and more about rising to the occasion. Ultimately, “Dodger” proves a fitting moniker on land as well as at sea, since Dickens repeatedly outlines his disgust at the American habit of spitting tobacco.

On one occasion, Dickens could not dodge quickly enough and ended up with expectorated tobacco on his very person (which would be a disconcerting result indeed.)

As if to counter his harsh observations about Americans spitting tobacco, Dickens incorporates a dash of self-deprecating humour through recording a fellow sojourner’s apprehension about traveling with a famous writer. The sojourner exclaims, “‘Boz keeps himself very close…I suppose that Boz will be writing a book by-and-by, and putting all our names in it!’ at which imaginary consequence of being on board a boat with Boz, he groaned, and became silent” (232). Dickens—here identified by his early pseudonym Boz—apparently received this complaint with his characteristic flair for recognizing the humour in nearly any circumstance, and promptly included it in his notes. By so doing, Dickens—like a wily genie granting a fear instead of a wish—actualizes the passenger’s “imaginary consequence” by incorporating his words in the narrative, albeit anonymously. Incidentally, Boz doubled both

115 as Dickens’s fictional pseudonym and the middle name for Charles and Catherine’s eldest son, Charles Culliford Boz Dickens. For Dickens, fiction encroached upon reality, and vice versa, and in American Notes—read through the lens of memoir—they converge.

When reading American Notes through this biofictional lens, it makes sense that

Dickens—an author acutely aware of audience expectations—and already accustomed to wedding fiction and life writing through his work on Joseph Grimalid’s memoirs, would depict himself as a character from one of his novels as he carefully selects what events and perceptions to include and exclude alike. After all, Dickens did construct Grimaldi in a manner akin to his “dear friend Pickwick” (Letters 102). Forster records an ultimately unpublished excerpt from American Notes wherein Dickens expresses concern with how

America will respond to his presentation of her: “I can scarcely be supposed to be ignorant of the hazard I run in writing of America at all. I know perfectly well that there is, in that country…a numerous class of persons so tenderly and delicately constituted, that they cannot bear the truth in any form” (Forster 256). Clearly, audience expectations and subsequent reception influence Dickens’s writing and encourage him to present himself in American

Notes as equal parts serious observer and dynamic—even at times playful—adventurer, the sum total of which is a quasi-fictional character not to be blamed overly much for any misconceptions. Moreover, by melding fact and fiction, and through drawing comparisons between his own escapades and those of his already popular Twistian and Pickwickian counterparts, Dickens seeks to likewise favourably solidify American Notes in the memory of his public.

This fascination with the significance of storytelling in preserving cultural memory is evident in Dickens’s delight at experiencing actual locations immortalized in fiction by his friend, the famous American author Washington Irving: “The country through which the road meandered was rich and beautiful; the weather very fine; and for many miles the Kaatskill

116

Mountains, where Rip Van Winkle and the ghastly Dutchmen played at ninepins one memorable gusty afternoon, towered in the blue distance like stately clouds” (249). Dickens later mentions Sleepy Hollow and the Tappaan Zee—both of which figure in Irving lore—as places “not easily to grow old, or fade beneath the dust of Time” (255). Read alongside

Dickens’s need to endure, to be favourably remembered, and ultimately to live on through his writing, this fascination with permanence is appropriate. To this end, Dickens once consoled

Hans Christian Andersen, after Andersen received a poor review, by urging his fellow author to “‘Never allow yourself to be upset by the papers,’…‘they are forgotten in a week, and your book stands and lives’” (Ackroyd 779-780). In many ways, fiction for Dickens was more stable than reality, as it provided enduring protection against easy dismissal. Although, as I discuss later, written records can also be misconstrued—or the authorial voice appropriated— thus impacting narrative legacy.

Peter Ackroyd argues that “Dickens’s American journey had also been a journey towards himself” (371). For the purposes of biofiction, we see his casting of himself as a character in this life adventure as drawing upon elements of both life-writing and fiction.

Dickens is part himself, and part a caricature from his pen. He ostensibly participates in the non-fiction genre by recording actual events, but the deeply fictional gloss reminds readers that this is no ordinary travelogue; this is the memoir of a great author for whom fact and fiction inevitably converge. Looking ahead half a decade to Dickens’s subsequent attempt at autobiography later in the 1840s, we can read American Notes as life-writing practice.

Through carefully casting himself as a quasi-fictional character in American Notes, his memoir in turn offers a memorialisation of Dickens as the Dynamic Adventurer Abroad— with a brief turn as the Disconcerted Dodger added for good measure. This enduring self- fictionalisation allows Dickens both protection and freedom by affording distance from himself as life-writing subject. He can therefore continue his adventures ministering to fellow

117 passengers, cheekily recording their observations, and reminding readers of his concern and good humour (and the similarities he shares with their beloved characters from his novels) long after any initial negative reception faded. Here he is also far more carefree and self- deprecating; the Disconcerted Dodger had not yet lost his autobiographical courage. Indeed, after burning his attempt at autobiography, Dickens returned to fiction to tell his life story under the guise of David Copperfield. David’s adventures are far more angst-ridden than those of the Disconcerted Dodger. But in both cases, the Dickensian creation (heeding their author’s advice to Andersen about books) “stands and lives [on].”

Oliver Twist’s Memoir of Uncertainty

I have thus far traced Dickens’s hesitation between revealing and concealing as evinced first by the anxious confusion between his roles of author versus editor in The Life of

Charles Dickens and The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, and second via his turn as a quasi- fictional character in American Notes. I now turn to Dickens’s life-writing novels to examine how these tensions play out in more overtly fictional settings. As outlined in the preceding chapter, I extend Cora Kaplan’s “biographilia,” by which she means a growing interest in the power of literary biography and biofictional novels in cultivating legacy, to encompass

Dickens’s life-writing novels. Here he further blurs biofictional boundaries by crafting the fictional worlds of the characters who lived for him, and who in turn infused their creator with vitality. Dickens’s anxieties about being the hero of one’s own life further proliferate in this domain. While the remainder of this chapter focuses on The Pickwick Papers, I will first briefly discuss Oliver Twist—another overtly fictionalised memoir “edited” by Dickens—to introduce the pattern of the hero-protagonist split in Dickens’s life-writing novels.

While the novel can be seen to operate within a variety of other genres, producing, as

Claire Wood points out in an article for the British Library, a variegated narrative in which

“Realism is juxtaposed with melodrama, caricature and gothic elements. Comic scenes and

118 grotesques sit alongside biting political and social commentary” (np).47 Such a “patchwork of genres” (as Wood’s title to the article terms the text), is therefore open to a life-writing interpretation. Even the novel’s subtitle, “The Parish Boy’s Progress,” can be read as alluding to an historic ordering of life events (i.e. a memoir.) Moreover, from Oliver Twist’s introductory page, the narrator explicitly identifies the narrative as Oliver’s “memoirs” (1).

The novel commences with an account of Oliver’s near death as an infant, “in which case it is somewhat more than probable that these memoirs would never have appeared; or, if they had, that being comprised within a couple of pages, they would have possessed the inestimable merit of being the most concise and faithful specimen of biography, extant in the literature of any age or country” (1). From the outset, Dickens overtly situates Oliver’s story within the life-writing genre, and throughout the text, chapter headings continually remind readers that they are encountering Oliver’s “history.” For example, the heading to Chapter XXIV advises that it “Treats of a very poor Subject. But it is a short one; and may be found of Importance in this History” (1). Similarly, the heading to Chapter XXVI promises readers an account “In which, a mysterious Character appears upon the scene; and many things, inseparable from this History, are done and performed” (1). Oliver Twist is thus framed using specific life- writing motifs, but again, Dickens was creating Oliver’s “memoirs” while simultaneously collating Pickwick’s Papers and editing/authoring Grimaldi’s Memoirs. Dickens was clearly invested in the memoir genre at this stage of his career.

In the Preface to the third edition (1841) of Oliver Twist, Dickens outlines his objective in setting Oliver’s harrowing adventures alongside seedy characters including thieves and a prostitute: “I wished to shew, in little Oliver, the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance, and triumphing at last…” (liii). Ever mindful of his

47 Wood, Claire. “Oliver Twist: a patchwork of genres.” https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and- victorians/articles/oliver-twist-a-patchwork-of-genres. Web. Accessed 17th Feb. 2019. 119 audience, Dickens further explains that he felt the need to justify his choices to readers who objected to its questionable morality when Oliver’s tale initially appeared in serial form.48 In the condemnation of his writing, Dickens felt himself condemned—even though this is ostensibly Oliver’s story. The Preface thus points to Dickens’s deep investment in his role in relating Oliver’s life, which is in turn establishing Dickens’s own narrative identity. John

Forster shares a snippet of Dickens’s written gratitude over Forster’s praise for Oliver Twist:

“How can I thank you? Can I do better than by saying that the sense of poor Oliver’s reality, which I know you have had from the first, has been the highest of all praise to me?” (Forster

64). Dickens’s elation is significant in that he deems Forster’s acknowledgement of Oliver’s reality highest praise to himself. Oliver’s memoirs thus exist to attain accolades for Dickens’s own benefit.

In addition to Dickens himself, Oliver faces another contender for designation of his memoir’s hero/ine: Nancy. Notwithstanding her position as a prostitute—hence not a typical

Victorian heroine—critics such as Burton M. Wheeler and H.M. Daleski see Nancy as superseding ostensible protagonist Oliver. Wheeler suggests that Nancy “replac[es] Oliver as the central focus of the work” (41) and that “In turning to Nancy, Dickens apparently lost all interest in plausibly developing Oliver.” However, if this novel is as “powerfully autobiographical” (95) as Dickensian biographer Fred Kaplan suggests, and we assume49 that

Dickens would have identified with the struggling child character, why usurp himself?

Moreover, Nancy is prematurely murdered, inspiring Robert Sawyer to conclude that

“Dickens’s redemption narratives are continually being deconstructed” (52). Even if we do read Nancy as outshining Oliver, she does not live long enough to enjoy it. Uncertainty is a

48 Forster references “the attacks directed against the subject of the book” (84) as Dickens’s Victorian audience objected to the text’s engagement with criminals.

49 Kaplan points out that Dickens’s “own experience had made the child figure central to his imagination, the sensitive youth whose sense of his worth is assaulted by a hostile world from infancy onward” (95).

120 constant theme of the novel. According to Dickens’s daughter Mamie, her father “writes on one occasion, ‘I am sitting at home, patiently waiting for Oliver Twist, who has not yet arrived.’ And, indeed, ‘Oliver’ gave him considerable trouble, in the course of his adventures, by his disinclination to be put upon paper easily” (25). This snippet is intriguing for two reasons: first it reminds us how alive Dickens’s characters were for him; and second, it reiterates Dickens’s investment (here manifested in angst) in Oliver’s memoirs. Scholars have chronicled how in the early stages of writing, Dickens was uncertain whether Oliver’s story would wrap up quickly or turn into a full-length novel. One of these scholars, Robert

Douglas-Fairhurst, also pinpoints the ambiguity in Oliver Twist, where “detour[s]” and

“dangled” possibilities haunt the plot: “It is a world in which every action is surrounded by a cluster of ghostly alternatives, signalled by an insistent counterfactual grammar of ‘could have,’ ‘would have,’ and ‘might have’” (277).50 Uncertainty heralds the tension between anxiety and heroism wherein the memoir’s heroic title could be claimed by more than one character and the presumed hero’s rightful place might be appropriated by another. Dickens’s early rehearsals of what it meant to write a successful life story were riddled with conflict and doubt. For better or for worse, he was fully invested in Oliver’s memoirs; their legacies were bound up together.

Pickwickian Narration, or, The Pickwick Papers as Mr. Pickwick’s Authentic Memoir

Following traces of the self across the variations of memoir studied in this chapter provides a fuller picture of how a life-writing persona is textually constructed. Thus, “trace” is both a verb and a noun, as it actively constructs identity and becomes the traceable construct itself. Gerard Genette links a “narrating instance” (214) and “the traces it has left—

50 Pip is similarly plagued by grammatical indecision in Great Expectations, when anxieties morph into “a vast shadowy verb which I had to conjugate. Imperative mood, present tense: Do not thou go home, let him not go home, let us not go home, do not ye or you go home, let not them go home. Then, potentially: I may not and I cannot go home; and I might not, could not, would not, and should not go home…” (336). 121 the traces it is considered to have left—in the narrative discourse it is considered to have produced.” (214). An example provided is that an “author-narrator” (i.e. the one telling the story) actually “‘knows’” the people and places described, but the author merely envisions them (214). The fictional world is more alive to the narrator then, even though he or she only exists textually, as the product of the author’s imagination. This layered knowledge is evident in The Pickwick Papers, which was authored by Dickens, but ostensibly edited by Boz—who exists both as the external author/editor and as an internal character compiling documents to create Mr. Pickwick’s memoir (which is often narrated by the Pickwickians). Patten relates

Dickens’s overlapping roles here: “The fiction that the papers exist (Dickens must first write them) and that he must then arrange them attractively (i.e., edit them) may be what Dickens had in mind telling [his wife] Catherine that he was being hired to ‘write and edit…entirely by myself’” (Boz 90).

Indeed, The Pickwick Papers is the most extreme version of how the series of tensions

I have been exploring manifest in an edited memoir. In building to this example, I first discussed Dickens’s conflicting roles in his own memoir/biography, where his alternations between authorial, editorial, and narratorial roles point to underlying anxieties about authorship and legacy. Next, I extended this analysis to The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi; here Dickens again resorts to an editorial shield, but this time, he claims to be mere editor of this text, when evidence indicates he was far more creatively involved. American Notes illuminated another Dickensian tension, wherein Dickens portrays himself as a quasi-fictional character in a non-fictional genre. Elements from Oliver Twist, Joseph Grimaldi’s memoirs, and Pickwick’s Papers converge in American Notes, demonstrating how life and art are forever entangled in Dickens’s narrative legacy. Moving from the technically non-fictional

American Notes to the technically fictional Oliver Twist clarifies how easily Dickens—

122 exploiting biofiction’s fluidity—moved between genres. This final section explores how these tensions are magnified in The Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s first life-writing novel.

According to Mamie Dickens, “The sudden, almost instantaneous, popularity of

‘Pickwick’ was known to the world long before it was realized by its anxious young author”

(26). Mamie ordinarily portrays her father as heroically confident, but here she reveals his early authorial anxieties—anxieties which (arguably) manifest in perplexing tensions between fiction/nonfiction, revealing/concealing, heroism/anxiety, and author/editor/narrator. in The Pickwick Papers. This insecurity is deepened by the terminological struggle evinced in later proofs of the novel’s 1847 Preface, which reveal “that [Dickens] contemplated changing

‘novelists’ to ‘writers,’ although in the end he stuck with ‘novelists.’ It was a little hover of uncertainty that indicated much larger doubts over where to place himself in the history of fiction” (Douglas-Fairhurst 220). Significantly, this Preface was penned around the same time Dickens was wrestling with writing his own autobiography.

The Pickwick Papers evolved from a project wherein Dickens was initially hired to

“‘edit’ these papers, or in fact to compose 8,000 words a month to connect [Robert]

Seymour’s illustrations…Nevertheless, he responded to the commission with the energetic versatility for which he was already well known, and immediately set about making the papers his own” (Wormald xii). In a reversal of narrative control soon to become a

Dickensian hallmark, the project’s focus quickly shifted from Dickens’s task of writing for the illustrations, to Seymour (and soon other illustrators R. W. Buss and Hablot Knight

Browne aka “Phiz”) instead illustrating for the writing. Seymour initially “made Mr.

Pickwick a thin caricature of a scientist, until the young writer brusquely told him to fatten him up” (Wormald xvii). Dickens—as an author masquerading as an editor—utilises “the mask of ‘Boz’” (Wormald xiii) to enjoy both creative, authorial input and editorial control.

Elliot Engel points out that “early reviewers often referred to ‘Boz’ as the ‘arranger’ of the

123 contents rather than as the author” (xi) And, according to Edward Costigan, “behind the scenes [of the Papers] there is a stage-manager at work” (119). Dickens himself substantiates this stance, referencing “Mr. Pickwick’s Stage-Manager” in a separate address to readers around the Papers’ halfway point (Penguin 758). A stage-manager, like an editor (or an

“arranger”) exerts control behind the scenes; in this case, as we shall soon see, by ostensibly promoting Mr. Pickwick’s heroism while simultaneously undermining it.

In terms of its impact on his own legacy, evidence indicates that Dickens experienced mixed feelings regarding the Papers. Mark Wormald, editor of the Penguin Pickwick Papers, hints that Dickens may have grown ashamed of Pickwick, since “Authors often tire of an early success, especially when it carries on eclipsing their later work; and the phenomenon of

Pickwick bewildered and even embarrassed a novelist who had grown into seriousness and sophistication” (xv). Even the evolving Prefaces reflect Dickens’s disenchantment: Wormald points out that the 1837 Preface included a humble list of errata, but by 1867 the Preface exhibited a much more defensive tone as Dickens responded to the infamous Seymour plagiarism charges (xv).51 At the time of its initial publication, however, Dickens was clearly enamoured of Mr. Pickwick’s Papers. In November 1836 Dickens wrote to Pickwick’s publishers, Chapman & Hall, expressing pride in his latest creation: “If I were to live a hundred years, and write three novels in each, I should never be so proud of any of them, as I am of Pickwick…I must own I do hope, that long after my hand is withered as the pens it held, Pickwick will be found on many a dusty shelf with many a better work” (Letters 30).

Dickens certainly enjoyed the early glow of success (once it arrived, that is, since Pickwick took some time to gain popularity) despite hints of later misgivings. He laboured diligently

51 Robert Seymour was the novel’s original illustrator, and rumour suggests that Dickens exercised considerable creative license with incorporating Seymour’s original ideas into his text (without crediting the appropriate source). Whether or not this actually happened is debated to this day; the grisly fact that Seymour committed suicide while working on The Pickwick Papers has almost certainly cemented the story as one of enduring popular interest. 124 for this reward, sacrificing time with family and friends, and even writing to J.P. Collier in

January 1837 that “I am chained to Mr. Pickwick just now, and cannot get away…” (Pilgrim

I: 220). John Forster claims that “The book itself [The Pickwick Papers], in teaching him what his power was, had made him more conscious of what would be expected from its use; and this never afterwards quitted him” (64). So which is it? Pride or shame, heroism or anxiety—or both? These conflicting emotions of pride and shame relate to the tension between heroism and anxiety in the Papers. The “editor” himself is torn between viewing the text as revolving around “that hero” who infused him with “power” and an immature creation which brought later anxiety and shame.

Further complicating this conflict is Mr. Pickwick’s status in the text itself; he becomes the exemplar of Dickensian life-writing novels’ hero-protagonists whose heroic status is challenged by another, seemingly lesser character. Who ultimately emerges as the star of Mr. Pickwick’s memoir—will it be the protagonist and ostensible hero—or his servant, Sam Weller? Recognising that there are certain comedic, picaresque, and even

“mock-heroic” (Wormald xi) elements at play here, it is important to stress that this dethroning-the-protagonist precedent is not limited to Mr. Pickwick. As other critics, including Angus Easson, have pointed out, the servant upstaging the master dynamic is also evident in Don Quixote.52 Nonetheless, Pickwickian playfulness notwithstanding, The

Pickwick Papers’s hero-protagonist split forms part of a larger picture of anxiety that emerges across the selection of texts studied in this thesis.

I delve into the tradition of literary heroism (broadly) and Dickensian heroism

(specifically) in the next chapter. Essentially, I define the crux of these heroic labels as consistent rising to the occasion and claiming ownership of one’s own life history. However,

52 See “Don Pickwick: Dickens and the Transformations of Cervantes.” Rereading Victorian Fiction, edited by Alice Jenkins and Juliet John, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2002, pp. 173-88 for further reading on the connections between Pickwick and Don Quixote.

125 as we shall see, Mr. Pickwick is severely compromised in this arena. Other shadows surround what is generally accepted as light-hearted Dickensian fare. Patten points out that “there is a lot of rage and killing circulating through this book. Much of the violence occurs within families and close-knit communities….” (121). Patten suggests that Dickens is here:

reinscribing his tortured feelings about his own family, their follies about money, their sacrifice of him to their improvidence and distractions. Psychically he arranges a space, more easily accomplished after Seymour’s death [when Dickens assumed more creative control of the Papers], in which to express these emotions. He occludes his own name and agency, substituting ‘Boz’ for the patronymic Dickens and ‘Editor’ for Author. These strategies enable Dickens to disclaim ownership of the incidents while retaining credit for their being “brought to light.” (121) Dickens’s authorial versus editorial involvement in the Papers is likewise essential to my analysis; however, where Patten assigns this slippage between roles to Dickens’s latent anger at his family, I contextualise it in terms of Dickens’s initiating the pattern of splitting the hero and protagonist in his life-writing novels. Mr. Pickwick’s role in constructing his own memoir is also important to my investigation.

Early advertisements for The Pickwick Papers market it as being “edited by ‘Boz’”

(Penguin 755), and in “Addresses to the Reader, 1836-7” Dickens creates a case for authenticity (much as he did with Grimaldi’s Memoirs) by explaining that:

The Pickwick Travels, the Pickwick Diary, the Pickwick Correspondence—in short, the whole of the Pickwick Papers, were carefully preserved, and duly registered by the secretary, from time to time, in the voluminous Transactions of the Pickwick Club. These transactions have been purchased from the patriotic secretary, at an immense expense, and placed in the hands of ‘Boz’…a gentleman whom the publishers consider highly qualified for the task of arranging these important documents, and placing them before the public in an attractive form. (Penguin 756)

Halfway through his intended twenty numbers, Dickens again addresses the readers, tantalising them with what “fresh adventures” could be in store: “The Author merely hints that he has strong reason to believe that a great variety of other documents still lie hidden in the repository from which these were taken, and that they may one day see the light”

(Penguin 758). Dickens primarily positions himself as editor, but here, he instead identifies

126 himself as author—this is a considerably different role in terms of character construction. Of course, we know that Dickens is in fact conducting both authorial and editorial roles, but by allowing the editorial mask to momentarily slip, he reverses Patten’s observation that

“Dickens the writer is suppressed by Boz the editor” (91). The writer (or author) here reveals himself, paradoxically through paratextual material intended to promote the Papers’ authenticity.53

During serialisation, The Pickwick Papers remained officially “edited by Boz”; it was only after “the last number had been issued, and the work was published in its final shape,

[that] the pseudonym of ‘Boz’ was discarded, and the real name of the writer placed on the title page” (Fitzgerald 57). However, regardless of the paratextual slippage between edited by

Boz and authored by Dickens, the key consideration is how ardently Dickens stresses his editorial role in the text itself. He goes to great lengths to deny authorial involvement in The

Pickwick Papers proper:

Many authors entertain, not only a foolish, but a really dishonest objection, to acknowledge the sources from whence they derive much valuable information. We have no such feeling. We are merely endeavouring to discharge in an upright manner, the responsible duties of our editorial functions; and whatever ambition we might have felt under other circumstances, to lay claim to the authorship of these adventures, a regard for truth forbids us to do more, than claim the merit of their judicious arrangement, and impartial narration. (41)

In an ironic tirade, Dickens—or rather “Boz”—reveals a certain temptation to feign authorship, citing “a regard for truth” as the reason for clinging to the less lofty role of editor.

Kym Brindle invokes Bakhtinian heteroglossic theories to highlight the significance of gaps in epistolary communication within neo-Victorian fiction, “which locate the author’s voice in reservations, concessions, and loopholes identifiable in the narrator’s voice” (34). Although

The Pickwick Papers are Victorian rather than neo-Victorian, the litmus test holds: Boz’s true

53 Dickens printed “four addresses to readers” (Penguin 755) which served as progress reports and also helped frame the reception of the work. 127 involvement hinges upon the discrepancies between his relentless claims of impartiality and authenticity and his definitive presence in the text. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, an author assumes more responsibility for creating, while an editor—despite having more control over the overarching shape of the story by retaining final authority in what remains— is less creatively liable. This “reservation” in assuming the authorial mantle is also reminiscent of Dickens’s work on Grimaldi’s memoirs, where he similarly insisted mere editorial involvement. The “impartial narration” claim is similarly dubious, as I flesh out later in this chapter by examining the tension between whether Mr. Pickwick or Sam Weller can claim hero-ship of the Papers. Nonetheless, Dickens does strive to fulfil this pledge (of

“impartial narration”) by stressing the role that the Pickwickians—and in particular Mr.

Pickwick—play in the collaboration of the Papers.

Mr. Pickwick describes himself as “‘An observer of human nature’” (11), and the narrator corroborates that “Mr. Pickwick had leisure to observe the appearance, and speculate upon the characters and pursuits, of the persons by whom he was surrounded—a habit in which he in common with many other great men delighted to indulge” (61). This power of observation is explicitly referenced throughout the text. For example, the editor mentions “a careful perusal of Mr. Pickwick’s notes” (14), and states that “It would afford us the highest gratification to be enabled to record Mr. Pickwick’s opinion of the foregoing anecdote” (38).

Likewise, a later scene shows Mr. Pickwick “making entries in his journal” (454). Most significantly of all, we learn that after dissolving the Pickwick Club, Mr. Pickwick often spends “his leisure hours in arranging the memoranda which he afterwards presented to the secretary of the once famous club” (718). Mr. Pickwick, then, retains final control over organising the Pickwickians’ adventures—in which he is the primary player—into a collection of adventures that becomes his memoir. In another link to Grimaldi’s Memoirs, where Dickens chose not to return to the original text, Boz edits documents already edited by

128

Pickwick. The editor further reveals that “We are bound, on the authority of Mr. Pickwick, to state…” (228). Despite the contributions of others (for instance Mr. Snodgrass’s notebook is mentioned on several occasions), the Papers are ultimately plotted according to Mr.

Pickwick. Jacqueline Simpson observes that “The Pickwick Papers is, notoriously, an unplanned book, written at high pressure and full of improvisations, inset tales, and anecdotes, many of which Dickens represents as having been told to Mr. Pickwick by other characters in the book” (462). Again, the Papers are filtered through Mr. Pickwick’s perspective; this narrative control renders Sam Weller’s arguable appropriating of the heroic spot all the more intriguing.

I propose that Dickens’s editorial efforts in preparing the memoir for publication assist with this appropriation. Stan S. Rubin suggests that “The editorial ‘we’ does more than remind us that this is the early Dickens, drawing heavily on his career as a reporter; it establishes, as well, a very definite relationship between the narrative voice, the characters it describes, and the ‘public’ to whom these descriptions are addressed” (195). I expand upon

Rubin’s linking of narrative voice, characters, and audience to explore how Dickens’s arguable identification with Sam Weller allows the secondary character to steal the show.

In the opening to the Papers, we learn that Pickwick’s initial story: “is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers [i.e. Dickens as Boz] feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted” (1). The editor also credits “the secretary, to whose notes we are indebted for the following account…” (2), and concludes the first chapter by confessing that “We have no official statement of the facts, which the reader will find recorded in the next chapter, but they have been carefully collated from letters and other MS. authorities, so unquestionably genuine, as

129 to justify their narration in a connected form” (6). Narratively, the Papers’ information is fractured. Foucault pays “particular attention to those things registered in the interstices of the text, its gaps and absences. We return to those empty spaces that have been masked by omission or concealed in a false and misleading plenitude” (1634). If we, like Foucault, interrogate gaps and what is concealed, then The Pickwick Papers’ editor’s adamance about authenticity raises questions over what he has to hide. The gaps between the editor’s overt praise versus covert undermining of Mr. Pickwick indicate latent authorial anxieties, guilt, and ultimately a protagonist who is upstaged in his own life history. Brindle likewise queries,

“Might ideas of authenticity lie therefore in elisions and deletions that actively suggest secrecy?” (60). Omissions, then, can be spaces of productive absence. In The Pickwick

Papers, the editorial insistence on the narrative’s authenticity—despite its cobbled together nature—creates caveats by deflecting responsibility onto the documents themselves.

Throughout the text, there are repeated references to how genuine the documents are, including editorial references to “our usual scrupulous adherence to fact” (314) and how “we have faithfully recounted the behaviour…” (283). When Mr. Pickwick agrees (against his better judgement) to wear fancy dress to the ball, the editor states that “a more striking illustration of his amiable character could hardly have been conceived, even if the events recorded in these pages had been wholly imaginary” (180; emphasis mine). This is another aside which audaciously hints at Dickens’s enjoyment of his masquerade as editor. Similarly, the editor later addresses “readers of this authentic narrative” (401; emphasis mine). Dickens is clearly concerned that the text be presented as genuine, in keeping with the memoir of an actual individual. Again, he adopted a similar position with his work on (the once living)

Joseph Grimaldi’s Memoirs.

Another example of Dickens’s editorial commitment to authenticity involves a discrepancy over a specific location in “the voluminous papers of the Pickwick club” (142).

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Ultimately, the inconsistency is assigned to Mr. Pickwick’s desire to protect the true location from embarrassment (rather than stemming from an error on his part). Because of course,

“Knowing the deep reliance to be placed on every note and statement of Mr. Pickwick’s, and not presuming to set up our recollection against the recorded declarations of that great man…” (143) is the editor’s professed aim. Mr. Pickwick is given the benefit of the doubt and the accuracy of his perspective is hereby preserved. Even so, one strange aspect of narration in the Papers is that, despite the acknowledgement that this collection has been compiled from a variety of manuscripts, we still have omniscient access into the

Pickwickians’ thoughts. I interpret this as due to the Pickwickians indicating their thoughts and feelings in their notes. Dickens’s editor does, after all, reference Mr. Pickwick’s diary, which is a prime medium for recording personal perspectives. This reflection further highlights the interplay between authenticity and authorial ownership in the text, which is integral to this thesis’s overall exploration of Dickens’s fascination with the tension between heroism and anxiety in his life-writing novels.

Pickwick’s Papers and the Case of the Second Samuel

Samuel Pickwick has long been heralded as the hero of the Papers bearing his name.

In a letter to Forster, Dickens writes that “I have been long engaged to the Pickwick publishers to a dinner in honour of that hero which comes off tomorrow” (Forster 60-61).

Pickwick is hereby credited with the title of hero even in his author’s reality (i.e. outside the novel’s pages). Forster likewise refers to Pickwick as heroic when mentioning how the fifteenth number of Pickwick “was the famous one in which the hero finds himself in the

Fleet; and another of [Dickens’s] letters will show what enjoyment the writing of it had given to himself” (Forster 65). While Samuel Pickwick is certainly marketed as The Pickwick

Papers’ ostensible hero, I make a case for considering Sam Weller at least co-hero of the

Papers; in fact, on numerous occasions Sam rises to the occasion above Pickwick himself.

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The rest of this chapter explores how the second Samuel—Sam Weller—can arguably be deemed the true hero of Samuel Pickwick’s memoir. Mr. Pickwick remains the protagonist, literally the main character, but the hero and the protagonist are still split.

In addition to Sam Weller’s efforts on behalf of Mr. Pickwick, he also invaluably assists Dickens, for despite Pickwick’s phenomenal (overall) success, there were still tense moments when “Pickwick appeared close to collapse” as critics and sales both struggled in the “third number” and Edward Bulwer (Lytton) described Dickens “‘groping his way,’ working out his meaning as he went along” (Douglas-Fairhurst 199). Further clouding the

Papers was Pickwickian illustrator Robert Seymour’s suicide. Still, Dickens also enjoyed great bursts of confidence while engaged with Pickwick: “He had as yet done nothing so remarkable, in blending humour with tragedy, as his picture of what the poor side of a debtors’ prison was in the days of which we have seen that he had himself had bitter experience...” (Forster 65). In keeping with the interchange between struggle and success,

Mark Wormald—editor of the Penguin Pickwick Papers—terms it a “singularly messy masterpiece” (xv) and Dickensian biographer Douglas-Fairhurst relates that during the season of writing Pickwick, “Dickens was still trying to find a suitable balance between self- confidence and self-doubt” (164). Dickens’s trademark tension between anxiety and heroism is again affirmed: Pickwick is simultaneously a “messy” creation by an author filled with

“self-doubt” and a “masterpiece” penned by a “self-confiden[t]” author boldly rising to the occasion to claim ownership of his narrative. Dickens’s early excitement and pride over

Pickwick bled into later misgivings, and even his early enthusiasm was often tinged with fear, with critics noting Pickwick’s low point, wherein the Pickwickians’ silly antics—albeit charming—were unable to continue solely propelling the story (Wormald xv).

Likewise, critics have previously commented on Mr. Pickwick’s specific shortcomings. Stan S. Rubin points out how Pickwick is rendered “the object of the crowd's

132 ridicule” (191) and the “unwilling buffoon” (192), and according to Philip Rogers: “In the early chapters Pickwick is presented as the type of the bumbling enthusiast; his naivete is the butt of Dickens' satire” (23). Enter Sam Weller, Pickwick’s faithful companion who

“simultaneously rescued Mr. Pickwick and the novel” (Bowen Other Dickens 64) as he saves both the novel’s hero-protagonist and author/editor from ruin. Douglas-Fairhurst deems

Weller “the star of the show” (199) whose introduction “in the fourth number of Pickwick has often been seen as the tipping point of Dickens’s career” (199). Similarly, Nicola Bradbury notes that “Pickwick achieved phenomenal popularity, with monthly sales rising from 400 to

40,000 once Sam Weller entered the story…” (Cambridge Companion 152) while Wormald credits Weller with “enabling Pickwick’s transformation from a mere passive man of parts to a man capable of acting on his own benevolence” (xxiv). I specifically link Wormald’s observation with Dickens’s own statement in the 1847 Preface to The Pickwick Papers that

“It has been observed of Mr. Pickwick, that there is a decided change in his character, as these pages proceed, and that he becomes more good and more sensible” (Penguin 761).

Dickens does not overtly credit Sam Weller here, but the suggestion nonetheless remains.

While scholarly attention has thus traditionally acknowledged both Mr. Pickwick’s shortcomings and Sam Weller’s significance, criticism has not yet taken the next step to consider whether Sam Weller in fact usurps Pickwick as hero of the Papers. Philip Rogers, quoted above, is a classic example. Despite his description of Pickwick as a “bumbling enthusiast” he subsequently claims that “as Dickens exposes Pickwick to ever darker scenes, he comes to see his hero as the redeeming center of innocence in an evil world, and the satire of naivete yields to the celebration of Pickwick's innocence” (23). Rogers thus perseveres with the concept of heroic redemption in relation to Mr. Pickwick, solely crediting him with his positive evolution throughout the text. Conversely, I suggest that this positive evolution is explicitly due to Sam Weller’s influence. James R. Kincaid does credit Sam with positively

133 educating Mr. Pickwick, but despite this positive acknowledgement, Kincaid persists with the view of Sam’s ultimate inferiority, assigning him the role of “Fool” to Pickwick’s King Lear

(129). Thus, I extend Kincaid’s analysis to actually propel Sam Weller beyond mere

Pickwickian educator to hero of the novel. In so doing, the theme of lesser character challenging the protagonist’s claim to primary hero-ship is initiated, as the servant outshines the master in everything from a legal case to actual life-saving, when Mr. Pickwick falls into an icy lake.

Wormald also forges compelling links between Sam Weller and Dickens himself, with the shared boot blacking connection, storytelling ability, and a father in financial difficulty (xxii). Indeed, “Less than a chapter after making Sam’s acquaintance, we begin to experience the world through Sam’s eyes” (Wormald xxiii). Wormald pinpoints Sam

Weller’s protective power, and how, “Like the young Charles Dickens, Sam helps Pickwick to move about the country and helps to move Pickwick’s readers…” (xxv). The concept of

Dickens identifying with Weller—the secondary character who arguably upstages the ostensible protagonist—certainly heightens the tension surrounding which Samuel is ultimately the hero of Pickwick’s Papers. J. Hillis Miller points out that Dickens (as narrator) defines his role in the Papers as purely editorial: “And even when this pretense is dropped or forgotten, the narrator keeps his stance of objectivity” (World 2). Such a conception of objectivity is very much at odds with the idea of Dickens conflating his identity with Sam

Weller and stealing the show. Moreover, the narrator’s praise for Mr. Pickwick seems forced and overdone at times—which could be glossed as guilt for this very usurpation. Sam enquires of Pickwick: “‘what the devil do you want with me, as the man said ven he seed the ghost?’” (115). Regardless of the extent of Dickens’s investment in Sam Weller, the author seemingly sees the ghost of himself in these two Samuels—the overt and covert heroes of

The Pickwick Papers.

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The “illustrious” Mr. Pickwick?

Throughout the text, readers are regaled with Mr. Pickwick’s heroic qualities.

Pickwick is “eloquent” and overall extraordinary (3); he is a “truly great man” (107) possessing a “noble breast” (40) whose “countenance glowed with an expression of universal philanthropy” (15). Moreover, “Mr. Pickwick was the very personation of kindness and humanity…” (57), who is of course “no sluggard; and he sprang like an ardent warrior from his tent—bedstead” (75). Critical commentary has likewise tended to extol Mr. Pickwick’s virtues, sometimes at the expense of Sam Weller. According to John Bruns, “Sam Weller leads Mr. Pickwick on a journey from innocence to experience. The latter fellow is the great, benevolent patriarch who surrounds himself with the filial affections of his company:

Snodgrass, Winkle, Tupman. The former is the ever-loyal servant, inferior in class and manners to his master” (38). Bruns’s choice of adjectives—“great” and “benevolent” for Mr.

Pickwick and “inferior” for Sam Weller—makes sense on the surface. After all, Mr. Pickwick is repeatedly referred to in glowing terms throughout the text, and Sam is inferior to Mr.

Pickwick in station; Sam is the servant and Mr. Pickwick is “the illustrious man whose name forms the leading feature of the title of this work…” (141). Given this laudatory billing, how could Mr. Pickwick’s heroism possibly be questioned? And yet, question it we must, for such disparate portrayals of these two leading characters cannot account for Sam’s repeated upstaging of Mr. Pickwick throughout the text. First, it is striking how often Mr. Pickwick’s speeches are interrupted and/or unappreciated, while Sam’s speeches are typically welcomed enthusiastically. Second, Mr. Pickwick possesses the remarkable ability to conjure debacles which often require Sam Weller’s rescue. Third, the glowing adjectives surrounding “the immortal name of Pickwick” (136) often feel overdone, as if stemming from a sense of insecurity necessitating repeated reminders as to Mr. Pickwick’s true character. If we accept that Dickens identifies with Sam Weller, then this over-adulation of Mr. Pickwick can be read

135 as a sign of Dickens’s own guilt and insecurity over hijacking the hero’s memoir.

Unfortunately, this adoring repetition also has the reverse effect of disconnecting readers from Mr. Pickwick through repetitive, irritating appraisal. I will consider each of the three aforementioned aspects individually, both to challenge the traditionally accepted position of

Mr. Pickwick’s irrevocable heroism, and also to examine Sam Weller’s role in repeatedly saving—and thus ironically often outshining—The Pickwick Papers’ protagonist and ostensible hero.

The “imperturbable” and overall “original” Sam Weller

While not “illustrious” like Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller nonetheless possesses steelier qualities than his master. For example, he is “imperturbable” (114). This unflappable characteristic proves invaluable as he is repeatedly called upon to rescue Mr. Pickwick from debacles of the professed hero’s own making, including drunken escapades and falling into an icy lake. Similarly, when Sam officially becomes Mr. Pickwick’s manservant, his references are overall “so very blameless, that Mr. Pickwick felt fully justified in closing the engagement that very evening” (142). This decision proves wise, and as time passes Mr.

Pickwick comes to describe Sam as “‘Not exactly a friend...he is my servant, but I allow him to take a good many liberties; for, between ourselves, I flatter myself he is an original, and I am rather proud of him’” (269). Nonetheless, despite this professed pride, Mr. Pickwick alternates between utter dependence upon Sam and utter disdain for him. On the one hand, he repeatedly dismisses Sam with cursory statements such as “‘[p]ray hold your tongue’” (607) yet just as often Mr. Pickwick turns to his servant for advice or for rescue. In addition to the numerous instances where Sam saves his master, Mr. Pickwick also calls upon Sam to search for Mr. Winkle after their friend disappears in Bath; he nominates Sam for the search since his servant is “‘a capital fellow; an invaluable fellow’” (475). Mr. Pickwick perceives Sam as

136 both irritating and invaluable as he alternates between commanding him to silence and entrusting him with vital missions.

A prime example of this tendency occurs when Mr. Pickwick’s fellow Pickwickians

Snodgrass, Winkle, and Tupman are all subpoenaed as witnesses in their leader’s trial (for supposedly breaking his never-made pledge to wed Mrs. Bardell). However, it is Sam’s subpoena that instils the most confidence in Mr. Pickwick and his lawyer: “‘I don’t think many counsel could get a great deal out of him’” Mr. Perker, the lawyer, observes. “‘I don’t think they could,’ said Mr. Pickwick; smiling, despite his vexation, at the idea of Sam’s appearing as a witness” (383). In this instance, Mr. Pickwick is happy to have Sam speak on his behalf; fortunately, Sam fulfils his master’s expectations and proves triumphant at the trial, refusing to provide any helpful information to the prosecution while simultaneously entertaining the audience (435). Sam is similarly useful in the lead-up to the trial, as Mr.

Pickwick becomes increasingly agitated and bombards his attorney with purposeless notes enquiring how things are progressing. Steadfast Sam remains Mr. Pickwick’s rock throughout this ordeal, and “with a due allowance for the frailties of human nature, obeyed all his master’s behests with that imperturbable good humour and unruffable composure, which formed one of his most striking and amiable characteristics” (402). Sam is consistently portrayed as calm compared to Mr. Pickwick’s agitation. Playing cards at a party produces anxiety in Mr. Pickwick (452), whereas even testifying in Mr. Pickwick’s trial cannot daunt

Sam Weller. The editor references Sam’s “usual composure of countenance” (572), and this characteristic is certainly demonstrated throughout the text as Sam triumphs in everything from testifying at Mr. Pickwick’s trial to arguably saving his master’s life after Mr.

Pickwick’s accident on an icy lake.

Another of Sam’s talents is his astonishing grasp of London’s intricacies, wherein he provides Mr. Pickwick with incredibly detailed directions regarding where to obtain the

137 latter’s desired hot brandy and water. We are told that “Mr. Pickwick observed his valet’s directions implicitly” (243). Once again, Mr. Pickwick vacillates between trusting Sam

“implicitly” and monitoring his input. During crucial moments such as meeting with Ipswich magistrate Mr. Nupkins or one of the many encounters with their nemesis Jingle, Mr.

Pickwick instructs Sam to be quiet (607) or to “‘stay here’” (318). There is clearly tension between Mr. Pickwick’s valuing and demeaning Sam’s significance, which reflects Dickens’s characteristic tension between heroism and anxiety in his texts exploring elements of life writing. Mr. Pickwick, as protagonist, is meant to be the hero—the Papers serve as his memoir—and Dickens seems reluctant to completely dethrone the Pickwickian leader. But even as he overtly promotes Mr. Pickwick through repeated references to the “great” man’s strengths, he also covertly undermines his hero by strategically positioning Sam as continually coming to the hero’s rescue.

Mr. Pickwick’s Speeches: Enlightening or Irritating?

The Papers reveal that “It has been conjectured that Mr. Pickwick was on the point of delivering some remarks which would have enlightened the world, if not the Thames, when he was thus interrupted…” (38). This scene near the start of the text sets the precedent for

Mr. Pickwick’s speeches being devalued via interruption or sheer unappreciation. The editor slyly infuses humour and makes a little fun of Mr. Pickwick through these grandiose

“conjecture[s]” whose sources cannot ultimately be confirmed. The world is made to suffer, then, since Mr. Pickwick was interrupted, so his groundbreaking effusions cannot subsequently be judged. Similarly, we later learn that Mr. Pickwick “had evidently been inculcating some high moral lesson, for his left hand was beneath his coat tail, and his right extended in air, as was his wont when delivering himself of an impressive address” (316).

The word “evidently” is akin to the previously mentioned “conjecture[s]” since both attest to the ambiguity of validation.

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Also ambiguous is the narrator’s use of “eloquent” when describing Mr. Pickwick’s speeches. For example, Mr. Pickwick is working himself into a monologue about how the

Pickwickians possess the disconcerting ability to bring trouble wherever they go. The narrator observes that “Mr. Pickwick would in all probability have gone on for some time, had not the entrance of Sam, with a letter, caused him to break off in his eloquent discourse”

(220). If this was an isolated incident, we could safely accept “eloquent” at face value; however, the word emerges yet again in a decidedly ironic context. After Mr. Pickwick admonishes Sam not to volunteer his stories—here again we witness the master’s tendency to shame his servant—Mr. Pickwick has commanded centre stage himself, only to drunkenly stumble into a wheelbarrow wherein “he began to forget how to articulate any words at all; and finally, after rising to his legs to address the company in an eloquent speech, he fell into the barrow, and fast asleep, simultaneously” (232). This reinforces the idea of “eloquent” being used ironically, since surely drunken speeches can never be truly eloquent (to the hearers, at least). Mr. Pickwick’s sober speeches are similarly defective, for we learn that

“Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle listened with gloomy respect to the torrent of eloquence which their leader poured forth” (302) from atop the sedan chair bound for the Ipswich magistrate’s office. Not only is the “respect” specifically qualified as “gloomy,” but the third

Pickwickian, Mr. Tupman, (unsuccessfully) attempts to halt Mr. Pickwick’s address (302).

Eloquence is clearly relative. Consequently, when Mr. Winkle professes his love to Arabella

Allen “with an eloquence worthy even of Mr. Pickwick himself” (499) we cannot help but cringe. And when Mr. Pickwick defends himself to Sergeant Snubbin regarding the legal suit

Mrs Bardell brings against him, we are informed of its impotence: “Long before the close of this address, which we are bound to say was of a very prosy character for Mr. Pickwick, the

Sergeant had relapsed into a state of abstraction” (386). Upon being recalled to the moment, the Sergeant’s first words in response to Mr. Pickwick’s speech are uttered “rather

139 snappishly” (387). Sergeant Snubbin at last assigns his assistant the task of recording Mr.

Pickwick’s remaining words, and “With this hint that he had been interrupted quite long enough” Sergeant Snubbin resumes his previous activities (388). Clearly there is not enough eloquence to engage the Sergeant.

In contrast, Sam’s speeches are far more effective. Sam’s storytelling prowess wins friends wherever he goes, and while in Ipswich Sam’s “easy manner and conversational powers had such irresistible influence with his new friends, that before the dinner was half over, they were on a footing of perfect intimacy, and in possession of a full account of the delinquency of Job Trotter” (314). Later in the text, Sam’s speech at a footman’s soiree in

Bath is “vociferously applauded” (473). Others appreciate Sam’s speeches, which are more savoury than soap box, a lá Mr. Pickwick. And despite finding himself outdone by Sam’s speeches, Mr. Pickwick eventually comes to respect them. Early in the text, Mr. Pickwick instructs Sam to “‘Have the goodness to reserve your anecdotes, ‘till they are called for’”

(231). But as the novel progresses he comes to respect Sam’s skill as a storyteller. Sam also peppers his speech with historical and literary references to “King Richard the Third” (304),

“Guy Fawkes” (499), “sixpenny books” (545), and he even recites poetry on occasion. Such educated examples again allude to the possibility of Dickens’s identification with the gregarious Sam Weller. Sam’s mannerisms may say servant, but his knowledge shouts master. Sam has a history of stealing the show—much like Dickens himself, one cannot help but observe, whose ability to appropriate the narratives of those around him is documented across this thesis.

Sam certainly steals the show in Ipswich, where court clerk Mr. Jinks listens to Sam’s tirade in the Ipswich magistrate’s house “with unspeakable awe” (304). During their session before the magistrate—named Mr. Nupkins—Mr. Pickwick bids Sam to “‘be quiet’” (306), but merely one page later it is Sam who saves Mr. Pickwick from continuing a speech “very

140 little to his own advantage, or the magistrate’s satisfaction” by involving Mr. Pickwick in a separate conversation (307). Sam’s distraction proves doubly heroic in that it saves Mr.

Pickwick from persevering with an undesirable speech, and the information Sam provides ultimately leads to their fines for the altercation with Peter Magnus being lifted. Significantly,

Mr. Pickwick’s approach in revealing the key information (that Sam suspects Jingle of romancing the magistrate’s daughter) is split between praising Sam and silencing him. Mr.

Pickwick does credit Sam with harbouring the suspicion, but he also silences Sam’s voice in actually relating the information so that Mr. Pickwick can “‘render [himself] intelligible’”

(309). Sam hereby makes a valuable connection that absolves the Pickwickians from the ill- effects of the dispute between Mr. Pickwick and Peter Magnus. The magistrate, Mr. Nupkins,

“with his peculiar sagacity, had discovered [Sam Weller] in half an hour to be one of the finest fellows alive…” (312). This example of Sam—the servant—rescuing Mr. Pickwick— the master—thus sets the precedent for the following section which explores Mr. Pickwick’s propensity for debacle and Sam’s steadfastness in saving him.

Mr. Pickwick’s Propensity for Debacle, or Sam Weller Steals the Show

An encounter with characters who eventuate into the protagonist’s archrivals exemplifies Mr. Pickwick’s debacle-prone nature and Sam Weller’s capacity for claiming centre stage. Sam has the sagacity to give Job Trotter a fake name; he distrusts Trotter despite

Mr. Pickwick’s assertion that Trotter is “‘an honest fellow’” (194). Mr. Pickwick even goes so far as to reprimand Sam for his criticism of Trotter: “‘I am sorry to find that you have so little respect for this young man’s feelings’” (194) and telling him to “‘Hold your tongue’”

(196). However, Sam’s intuition is ultimately proven correct, and after a debacle wherein Mr.

Pickwick awakens—and subsequently alarms—the ladies in a very proper boarding school,

Mr. Pickwick must admit that his nemesis Jingle orchestrated Job Trotter’s story (which enticed Mr. Pickwick to the school) as a prank. Sam helps enact Mr. Pickwick’s release from

141 the closet where the ladies locked him. Even Sam’s mere existence assists Mr. Pickwick, for, as Miss Tomkins remarks, Mr. Pickwick “‘must be respectable—he keeps a man-servant’”

(202). Later, Sam heroically shoulders the blame for the debacle, declining to even mention his initial reticence at believing Trotter’s tale (244). And later still, when Job Trotter returns, it is Sam who formulates a plan of attack (287). Sam’s shrewdness bookends this interaction with Jingle’s machinations, and his loyalty extends to nobly covering his master’s failed attempt at heroism in the ladies’ boarding school.

In another adventure—this one involving a hunting expedition—Mr. Pickwick gets drunk and falls asleep in a wheel barrow, while his friends amuse themselves elsewhere. The property’s owner, Captain Boldwig, is less than amused, particularly when Mr. Pickwick drunkenly introduces himself as “‘Cold punch’” (233). Boldwig deems Mr. Pickwick “‘a drunken plebeian’” (233) and promptly dispatches him to the animal pound. The “hero” once again requires Sam’s rescue. When Mr. Pickwick awakes, his initial request is for Sam: he calls Sam by name then queries, “‘Where’s my servant? Where are my friends?’” (234). Mr.

Pickwick looks first to his faithful servant, and second to his fellow Pickwickians. Sam and the Pickwickians combine forces to save Mr. Pickwick, with Sam bravely battling the town- beadle. To his credit, Mr. Pickwick sees the humour in this debacle, and they celebrate their escape at a local tavern, which includes “a magnum of extra strength, for Mr. Samuel Weller”

(235). Mr. Pickwick may superficially possess the more heroic qualities of wealth, influence, and benevolence, but none of these attributes can save him from his propensity for debacle.

While heroism does not demand perfection, it does mandate a certain measure of confident rising to the occasion—which we repeatedly witness in Sam, not in Mr. Pickwick.

Even Mr. Pickwick’s attempt to join an ice skating party requires Sam’s rescue. Mr.

Pickwick manages to fall through the ice, thus necessitating Sam’s whisking him to warmth

“at the rate of six good English miles an hour” (373). If not for Sam’s heroic level-

142 headedness and agility, the Papers might well have concluded prematurely with the death of the Pickwickian leader.54 Similarly, Sam’s determination to protect Mr. Pickwick even extends to voluntary imprisonment, when he faithfully follows his master to the Fleet debtors’ prison. Mr. Pickwick is incarcerated there for refusing to pay the fees associated with his preposterous trial, brought about by Mrs. Bardell. Mr. Pickwick valiantly declines

Sam’s requests to remain in prison with him, so Sam outmanoeuvres him by concocting a scheme wherein he ends up in debt to his father thus necessitating his own stay in prison alongside Mr. Pickwick. The servant herein upstages the master. Mr. Pickwick might be brave in rejecting Sam’s offer to stay with him, but Sam is even braver as he cunningly—and selflessly—orchestrates his own incarceration. Once again, it is Sam, rather than Mr.

Pickwick, consistently doing the right thing. Dickens himself as American Notes’s

“Disconcerted Dodger” is dishevelled to the point of being comedic, but he still valiantly perseveres in ministering to his fellow sea-sick passengers.

Sam also upstages Mr. Pickwick when the latter attempts to break up a fight between

Mr. Pott and Mr. Slurk; unfortunately, he is caught in the midst of the brawl and “Mr.

Pickwick would unquestionably have suffered severely from his humane interference, if Mr.

Weller, attracted by his master’s cries, had not rushed in… [and] effectually stopped the conflict…” (652). Mr. Pickwick aspired to heroism with his “humane interference,” but his best intentions reap dire results. Fortunately, Sam once again heroically saves both the day and Mr. Pickwick. Even the end of the Papers sees Sam Weller outmanoeuvring Mr.

Pickwick, when the elderly gentleman expresses his desire to help Sam wed his sweetheart

Mary. Sam stubbornly chooses his master over his would-be wife and remains Mr.

Pickwick’s unmarried servant until he can assure himself that Mr. Pickwick is happily

54 Acknowledging that Dickens as author is still ultimately in control of the narrative, it is nonetheless still probable that the Pickwickians would not have continued adventuring without the text’s titled character. 143 adjusted to his post-rambles life. Such selflessness hearkens back to the definitive pattern of

Sam outshining that “illustrious man” which I have traced across the text.

Mr. Pickwick’s (Im)perfection: the Tension Between Heroism and Anxiety

The Papers are peppered with repeated references to “Mr. Pickwick’s greatness”

(136). Examples include “that truly great man” (107), “[t]hat illustrious man” (121), “the heroic man” (179), and “that colossal-minded man” (150). He possesses “good humour”

(444), a “well-regulated mind” (188), and commendable “foresight and sagacity” (144). The editor describes Mr. Pickwick as having “his countenance lighted up with smiles, which the heart of no man, woman, or child, could resist” (716); for indeed, “who could ever gaze on

Mr. Pickwick’s beaming face without experiencing the sensation [of pleasure]?” (121). With such an emphasis placed upon “the comfort and advantage of Mr. Pickwick’s society” (159), it initially seems impossible to question Mr. Pickwick’s claim to heroic ownership of the story in which he is protagonist. The Papers chronicle his adventures and bear his name after all.

However, closer investigation reveals that the aforementioned repeated references to

Mr. Pickwick’s greatness eventually feel forced, overdone, and at odds with his vanity, ignorance, and temper. How is it, after all, that a man who cannot even summon a “sneer” when speaking to Mrs. Bardell’s sinister lawyers, Dodson and Fogg (673), can nonetheless condescend to call his friend and fellow Pickwickian Mr. Winkle “‘Wretch!’” (77) and

“‘humbug’” (369)? When Mr. Winkle disappears from Bath, Mr. Pickwick instructs Sam to search for Mr. Winkle and to impart the following message: “‘I am highly excited, highly displeased, and naturally indignant at the very extraordinary course he has through proper to pursue’” (475). Despite his inability to sneer at the opposing attorneys, Mr. Pickwick clearly has little difficulty in expressing his displeasure where his friend is concerned. During a disagreement with Doctor Payne, “Rising rage and extreme bewilderment had swelled the

144 noble breast of Mr. Pickwick” (40), and later, his wrath is even described as “majestic” (120) as he encounters Jingle. Mr. Pickwick does successfully control his rage at Jingle—in keeping with the status of “all truly great men” (120)—but in actuality, Sam is responsible for calming Mr. Pickwick. Mr. Pickwick is not actually as “illustrious” as the perpetual praising of his character might lead us to believe. Another weakness is his vanity, wherein we learn that “Mr. Pickwick caused a portrait of himself to be painted, and hung up in the club-room— which portrait, by the by, he did not wish to have destroyed when he grew a few years older”

(136; emphasis original). Moreover, upon realising the wisdom of his plan to chaperone Mr.

Winkle’s interview with love interest Arabella Allen, “Mr. Pickwick’s eyes lightened with honest exultation at his own foresight” (496). Humility is not among Mr. Pickwick’s avowed virtues.

A particularly significant incongruity occurs when Mr. Pickwick experiences the misfortune of encountering the (blank) shots of a practicing militia. In this instance, “Mr.

Pickwick displayed that perfect coolness and self-possession, which are the indispensable accompaniments of a great mind” (44). Mr. Pickwick’s “lip might quiver, and his cheek might blanch, but no expression of fear or concern escaped the lips of that immortal man”

(44). Unfortunately, once the firing transitions to a bayonet charge, Mr. Pickwick’s “perfect coolness and self-possession” give way to sheer terror, and Mr. Pickwick flees in extreme

“awkwardness” (45). The editor’s narratorial tone abruptly shifts from deeming Mr. Pickwick

“immortal” (44) to conceding that “Man is but mortal” (45) merely one page later. Revisiting

Brindle’s earlier point about “locat[ing] the author’s voice in reservations, concessions, and loopholes identifiable in the narrator’s voice” (34), what seems like a minor contradiction can also be interpreted as a loophole, hinting that Mr. Pickwick’s “immortal” status is only one of many façades in a text where—despite the editorial assertions of authenticity—nothing

145 should be accepted at face value. Tensions between the identity of both hero/protagonist and author/editor again flicker across the memoir’s pages.

At Mr. Pickwick’s trial, we learn—generically—that Sergeant Snubbin’s defence of

Mr. Pickwick employs “the highest possible eulogiums on the conduct and character of Mr.

Pickwick” (437) yet strangely the editor pointedly refrains from including these praises, since

“inasmuch as our readers are far better able to form a correct estimate of that gentleman’s merits and deserts, than Sergeant Snubbin could possibly be, we do not feel called upon to enter at any length into the learned gentleman’s observations” (437). After the extensive editorial praise, this uncharacteristic restraint seems strange. Similarly perplexing is his friends’ collective reaction to Mr. Pickwick’s refusal to pay the fees mandated at the conclusion of his trial against Mrs. Bardell—even if he is ultimately sent to debtor’s prison.

We are told that Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass are “much affected by their friend’s heroism” (440). However, “heroism” here could likewise be termed “stubbornness” and, when combined with Mr. Pickwick’s repeated inability to rise to the occasion, hardly seems deserving of heroic status.

Returning to Wormald’s point that Sam Weller shares similarities with Charles

Dickens himself, I enlarge Wormald’s observation to suggest that Dickens overemphasises

Mr. Pickwick’s heroism due to anxiety over stealing the show from the Papers’ professed hero, as outlined in the preceding sections. The editor’s perpetual painting of Mr. Pickwick in the most glowing terms contrasts sharply with the buffoonery and silly speeches which transpire throughout the memoir. Perhaps ironically, Mr. Pickwick’s most genuine and effective speech takes place as he dissolves the Pickwick Club, wherein he includes a token mention to legacy, hoping he will be “followed in death by [his friends’] affectionate remembrance” (714). Despite this hope, the Papers conclude with more of an emphasis on

Sam than on his master. In the final paragraph, we learn that Mr. Pickwick is “idolise[d]”

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(719) by his neighbourhood; however, the focus then shifts to “the faithful Sam, between whom and his master there exists a steady and reciprocal attachment, which nothing but death will sever” (719). Mr. Pickwick may claim the final speech, but it is Sam—and ultimately even Dickens himself —who steals the last sentence.

Conclusion

Dickens fuses his legacy to the legacies of his characters; in his hands, the living

Grimaldi becomes a character alongside Dickens’s fictional conjurings Oliver Twist and

Samuel Pickwick. Even Dickens himself joins their ranks as the “Disconcerted Dodger” in

American Notes. I have also traced the slippage between Dickens’s roles as author/editor/narrator from the more ostensibly non-fictional in The Life of Charles Dickens, and The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, through to more obviously fictional Oliver Twist and

The Pickwick Papers. Dickens’s turn as an “editor” (who is actually also an author) of memoirs for Oliver Twist, Mr. Pickwick, and Joseph Grimaldi demonstrate his discomfort with fully assuming the authorial mantle. While he does gain confidence in this area, his later deferral of his own biographical honours to another author/editor—his friend John Forster— marks a continued insecurity with claiming authorial responsibility for his own life. In these memoirs, a precedent is set wherein Dickens desires editorial control (and coverage) without the authorial accountability. Through such terminological manoeuvrings—specifically insisting that he is an editor or hiding behind another editor—Dickens manages to dodge outright liability. Memoir’s fluid boundaries—much like those of biofiction—bend both terms and genres. Life-writing anxieties linger, however: early in his career he doubted his abilities, and later, his career was stained by the Maria Beadnell-inspired “lost courage.”

The uncertainty surrounding each memoir accentuates the genre’s malleability, and

David Copperfield’s haunting query resonates throughout the memoirs at hand: who is ultimately proven the hero? Joseph Grimaldi’s life history is the site of a longstanding debate

147 regarding credibility, Oliver Twist’s memoir is rife with uncertainty, and Mr. Pickwick must contend with Sam Weller’s star power. While Dickens seems reticent to claim full authorial responsibility for these memoirs, his presence persists in surreptitiously vying for centre stage: is Sam Weller the shadow of Dickens, set to steal the show from the purported hero

Mr. Pickwick? The Pickwick Papers is the site of strange tension between Dickens’s editorial insistence on the authenticity of Mr. Pickwick’s influence on his memoir and the repeated usurping of the spotlight by the servant Sam Weller. The characteristic Dickensian tension between heroism and anxiety appears in Dickens’s struggle over navigating his authorial versus editorial roles. He repeatedly relinquishes control to the memoirs’ subjects only to take it back again. Mr. Pickwick is the authority for the Papers—except when his credibility is questioned. And there was no “book-making” in Grimaldi’s Memoirs—unless one considers how far Dickens strayed from the original manuscript. Reading between the lines of these texts affords a more robust understanding of the complex tensions integral to the Dickensian memoir. Here emerges the perplexing pattern, primarily evinced in Mr.

Pickwick’s Papers and soon to be exacerbated after Dickens fails at writing his own life, of the hero-protagonist split in Dickens’s life-writing novels.

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Chapter 3: (Fictional) Autobiography Wherein we are introduced to Dickens’s fictional autobiography and “favourite child” David Copperfield, and David’s search for heroism is subsequently compromised Who is, after all, the “hero of [David Copperfield’s] life” (1)? Critics have long debated this question, with perspectives ranging from unconditionally accepting that David is, of course, the hero of his own life, to suggestions that his life does not have a hero at all.

The novel opens with the arresting declaration that “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show”

(1). Richard J. Dunn ascribes “self-respect and self-satisfaction” (11) to this famous introductory statement: “We can take David’s first words as the fictional autobiographer’s teasing assurance that he knows what he is looking for and will find in his story” (11).

Conversely, Bert G. Hornback reads David’s statement as uncertain, in that “I expect to be the hero of my life—automatically. But in his abstracted state as an imaginer and a voice,

David begins by questioning this” (16-17). George Gissing goes one step further than

Hornback by asserting that “Decidedly [David] is not ‘the hero of his own story’” (101; emphasis original). Even critics who accept David as the hero debate precisely where to position him on the heroic spectrum. Gwendolyn B. Needham deems David “a very human hero” (106) who is flawed but still admirable, while Beth Herst highlights David’s insecurities, arguing that his “opening doubts as to the identity of the ‘hero of my life’ reflect something graver even than the social malaise or class anxiety to which they are generally attributed. They are, in fact, the residue of a fundamental uncertainty of role, of identity, and of self which first emerges here as the hallmark of the Dickens hero” (46). Anxiety is hereby imputed to Dickens’s “favourite child,”55 although Herst’s primary concern is not anxiety per se, but rather marking the tension between “alienation” and “home” (both literal and

55 In the 1867 Preface to David Copperfield Dickens confesses that “like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD” (Clarendon Dickens 752).

149 figurative) experienced by Dickens’s heroes. William J. Palmer assigns an underlying

Dickensian agenda to David’s opening statement, wherein “the subtext is Dickens’s own attempt to justify the writer’s art as equally heroic” (76). The need for justification—for both

Dickens and his protagonist, who is also an author by profession—is established at the outset.

Such an appeal invites scrutiny of “these pages” (i.e. David’s written history) which requires us to read between the lines to evaluate success. My analysis interrogates the tension between these lines wherein the text simultaneously praises and questions David’s heroism.

In Chapter 2, I situated Dickens’s anxieties about legacy alongside his early uncertainties about his authorial identity, tracing the slippage between Dickens’s roles as author, editor, and sometimes narrator. This current chapter—largely through analysing

David’s enigmatic opening statement—is foundational in my exploration of the hero- protagonist split in Dickens’s life-writing novels, because David Copperfield is the first life- writing novel Dickens wrote after he “lost courage” and burned his own attempt at autobiography. As such, this novel marks the shift in tone from the more comedic early

Dickens, where challenging the hero-protagonist is generally a more light-hearted affair, to the darker, more brooding late Dickens. Once their author forfeited his own autobiographical courage, the hero-protagonists of his life-writing novels suffer as well. As I discussed in the

Introduction, Dickens commenced writing his autobiography in the 1840s, but, after writing about his failed romance with Maria Beadnell, he “lost courage and burned the rest” (Pilgrim

7: 543-544), leaving only the famous “autobiographical fragment” which appears in John

Forster’s biography The Life of Charles Dickens. I analysed the implications of Forster’s biography on Dickens’s legacy in the preceding chapter, particularly the complicated, interwoven shared authorship of the text.

According to Dickens’s sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, he continued to speak of resuming his autobiographical mission, even mentioning it mere months before his death in

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1870: Dickens “always intended to do it—and it was only that last spring that he was talking of taking it up again some day.”56 Nonetheless, Dickens never did return to his autobiography in the two-plus decades after burning his original attempt. And his stance on others writing his life was similarly fraught, with Dickens vacillating between providing a (glowing) account of himself to editor Paul Forgues in 1856 (excerpts quoted below, from Philip

Collins’s Interviews and Recollections) after outright declining to satisfy the biographical enquiries of another French journalist in 1845 because he wished to perform his own autobiographical honours (Burgis xvii). Dickens expressed similarly convoluted sentiments by writing “jokingly” to an American editor (who had “ludicrously” botched information involving his 1842 American tour) that “‘I may one of these days be induced to lay violent hands upon myself—in other words to attempt my own life’” (xvii).57 Nina Burgis glosses

Dickens’s speculation as jest, and the mock suicidal overtones do support this interpretation.

Jenny Hartley, editor of the Oxford edition of Dickens’s letters, takes the quote more seriously, introducing it with the enigmatic phrasing “he hinted that” (xii) before allowing

Dickens’s words to stand on their own. Hartley also records that Dickens “told an enquirer, ‘I may probably leave my own record of my life for the satisfaction of my children’” (xii).

“May probably” does not resonate convincingly, although it does reinforce Georgina

Hogarth’s assertion that Dickens continued to speak of writing his autobiography throughout his life. And yet, he never did write it, although—in a shift which arguably indicates his acceptance that he would never complete his own autobiography—in later years Dickens did more willingly provide carefully edited biographical morsels to editors.

56 According to an unpublished 1872 letter Georgina Hogarth sent to a Mrs. Field; quoted by Nina Burgis in the Introduction to the Clarendon edition of David Copperfield (xxi).

57 Rosemarie Bodenheimer imputes both comedy and tragedy in this quote, when she outlines that “The image of autobiography as suicide, emerging as it does from Dickens’s wordplay, suggests that he was holding the terror and self-division associated with the story of his life on a comically distanced verbal plane” (“Writing” 51). And, from the 1840s on, “Dickens spoke of autobiography only in connection with his own death” (51).

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For example, in an 1856 letter to Wilkie Collins, Dickens outlines an approved version of his life for Collins to release to editor Paul Forgues. Here, Dickens carefully sidesteps any mention of his darker life experiences in the Marshalsea or the blacking factory, boasting instead that “I was then put to a school near London, where (as at the other place) I distinguished myself like a Brick” and “(I dare say I am at this present writing, the best Short

Hand Writer in the World)” (Pilgrim 8:131). It is tempting to read such a confidently debonair description as tongue-in-cheek, but editor Philip Collins takes it at face value, stating that “Dickens’s not over-modest account of his earlier life indicates what he wanted to be known and thought about himself” (1). Biographers including John Forster have also credited Dickens’s friend and fellow reporter Thomas Beard as claiming that “‘There never was such a short-hand writer [as Dickens]’” (Forster 44; emphasis original). While Dickens certainly did exhibit proficiency at writing shorthand—a skill which was self-taught—this depiction of himself as the absolute best is, as Rosemarie Bodenheimer contends,

“exaggerated self-praise” (“Writing” 53). Moreover, such bravado remains at odds with

Dickens’s self-professed loss of courage in writing a more comprehensive account of his life.

Torn between pride over his heroic achievements at school and shame over the unspeakable taint of imprisonment—and his failed romance with Maria Beadnell—Dickens turned to fiction to explore the inherent complexities of writing one’s life.

My analysis of David Copperfield scrutinises Dickens’s sustained flirtation with the life-writing genre, in particular the tension surrounding what it means to claim (or to forfeit) the heroic title of one’s own life history. As I have been discussing, Dickens’s novels encompass a broad range of life-writing types: autobiography (David Copperfield, Bleak

House, and Great Expectations), biography (Little Dorrit), and memoir (Oliver Twist, The

Pickwick Papers). Clearly, Dickens was fascinated by the possibilities within the fictional life-writing genre; here he could experiment with the vulnerability of life-writing—rehearsing

152 how to construct a successful life narrative—from an ostensibly “fictional” position, thus blurring biofictional boundaries. The most important example is David Copperfield, which is the novel most often identified as Dickens’s honorary autobiography, given its intense

(fictional) depictions of events in Dickens’s own life. Therefore, while this chapter does reference Dickens’s other fictional character autobiographies (Bleak House and Great

Expectations) the focus will be on David Copperfield.

Fear and fascination, anxiety and heroism converge in David’s story: here, more than in any of his other life-writing novels, Dickens displays his status as an invested biographiliac, exploiting the overlap between memory and imagination in life-writing. He thus gestures toward future readers who would read David’s life history more as a biographical novel about Dickens. And woven throughout is the possibility that David is not the hero of his own autobiography. As I shall discuss shortly, my reading of David

Copperfield actually positions Agnes as the hero/ine of the protagonist’s life. My purpose in this chapter, therefore, is to demonstrate how David Copperfield’s failure to claim heroic ownership of his life story illuminates Dickens’s own anxieties about legacy. I argue that the characteristic hero-protagonist split in Dickens’s life-writing novels—wherein Dickens continually divides what is traditionally accepted as a fused entity by allowing a secondary character to usurp the heroic title from the protagonist—is most pronounced in this intensely personal life-writing novel.

In fact, John Forster suggests that Dickens’s work on his own autobiography ceased once he decided to write David’s life instead, whereby the author could “sufficiently disguise himself under cover of his hero” (18). Some seventy years later, subsequent biographer Edgar

Johnson makes this link more explicitly about exploring painful parts of Dickens’s life via fiction: “The decision to fuse some of his own youthful experiences with those of his hero, and to make the story of David Copperfield at least in part his own story, would enable him at

153 the same time to reveal and conceal the dark unhealed wounds that he could not expose without disguise, to analyse, to assess, and to assuage” (661). Even more recently, Nicholas

Dames’s Amnesiac Selves (2001) argues that fiction enabled Dickens to create order and meaning from his previous experience, noting how “Dickens’s fictional autobiography reworks the architecture of a personal past to construct a more organized, more classified, more coherent self” (148). Yet despite such extensive assessing and classifying, the hero- protagonist remains fractured. Portions from Dickens’s autobiographical fragment are replicated verbatim in the novel itself, such as Dickens’s autobiographical recollection of his traumatic tenure in Warren’s blacking factory: “No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these every-day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast” (Forster 21). Likewise, when young David Copperfield commences work at Murdstone & Grinby’s wine packing warehouse, he writes: “No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these henceforth every-day associates with those of my happier childhood—not to say with

Steerforth, Traddles, and the rest of those boys; and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my bosom” (150). The words are almost identical, with the exception of the explicit reference to David’s friends in the novel excerpt. Dickens turns to biofiction—melding elements from his life with his narrative—to make sense of his own life story.

To be clear, the purpose of this chapter is not to discuss how similar David and

Dickens are, or to identify which real-life experiences Dickens incorporates into David’s autobiography. This line of analysis has already been repeatedly (and rigorously) pursued— as I outlined in the Introduction, Dickensian scholarship demonstrates a long-standing fascination with how Dickens’s own trials at the blacking factory resonate in David’s tenure

154 at the wine packing warehouse. Such intense childhood trauma has often inspired critics to pursue a psychoanalytic approach to David Copperfield. For example, Robert Lougy invokes

Freudian psychoanalysis when he argues that “For Freud and for Dickens, the problematic dynamics and origins of memory, especially childhood memories, are similarly entangled, complicating, if not making impossible, any kind of interpretive certainty we may want to carry away from their texts” (407). Although not part of Lougy’s methodology, the same could be said for the entire continuum of biofiction discussed in Chapter 1 of this thesis. The very nature of life-writing, with its dependence upon memory and the fluctuations between fact and fiction, defies “interpretive certainty.” I do not engage with psychoanalytic theory in the sense that I refrain from following the strand of specifically Freudian-inspired analysis.

However, my approach can be termed psychoanalytical to the extent that trauma evokes questions of heroism and anxiety, which I contextualise in terms of how Dickens losing his autobiographical courage deepens the hero-protagonist split in David Copperfield.

Additionally, following on from my discussion in preceding chapters, I also refrain from an in-depth analysis of the similarities between David Copperfield and his author since it is now critically accepted that the constructed nature of life-writing renders it fictional in a formal sense. Northrop Frye explains that “most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer’s life that go to build up an integrated pattern” (597). This accepted conflation of life-writing and fiction was not the norm during Dickens’s day, however. Max Saunders relates how

“Victorian culture was in many ways inimical to the playing of fictional games with the forms of autobiography or biography” (10) because “establishing sincerity and earnestness were paramount” (10). Ironically, Dickens enjoys the release of unburdening his past without

155 the possibility of personal attack, given scarcely anyone—John Forster excepted58—knew how closely Dickens’s own life mirrored David’s.

Victorian Masculinity and the Tradition of Literary Heroism

Following on from the definitions of “hero” and “protagonist” outlined in the

Introduction, conceptions of masculinity necessarily inform discussions about the evolution of literary heroism. In Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature, Andrew

Dowling explains that in the nineteenth century, “The meaning of masculinity was self- evident and it involved emotional reserve and physical discipline, what was known as the

Englishman’s ‘stiff upper lip.’” (1). Dowling also notes the inherent anxieties surrounding masculinity in general, which are so embedded they belie specific tracing of origins (3).

Masculinity might be “self-evident,” but the nineteenth-century conception of the heroic was less clear. Juliette Atkinson notes how the Victorian Age was one of heroic instability, where the term itself was continually evolving (10). And in a similar vein, Mary Poovey points out that at the time Dickens was writing David Copperfield, “the ‘hero’ was a figure everywhere under siege” (144). We are not seeking a hero of epic proportions here. Beth Herst clarifies,

“The domestication of the heroic in English fiction is frequently identified as a peculiarly nineteenth-century development…the ‘hero’ in his larger-than-life incarnation has been…in eclipse. The tradition rises with the rise of the novel itself” (2). Gone were the warrior hero- protagonists who valiantly won battles; the Victorians instead embraced “ordinary” individuals as their hero-protagonists. Herst cites Jane Eyre, the “rebellious governess” as an example (3). Jane, along with Thackeray’s Arthur Pendennis and Dickens’s David

58 According to Dickens’s biographer Claire Tomalin, Dickens confided in Forster alone (212). Conversely, both Nina Burgis and Michael Slater reference Charley Dickens’s Introduction to the 1892 Macmillan edition of David Copperfield, wherein he claims that his mother, Catherine, was also aware of Dickens’s deep personal investment in this novel (Burgis xxi; Slater Dickens and Women 156-157). The point remains that scarcely anyone was aware of the Dickens/David link until John Forster’s biography of Dickens was published in 1872, two years after Dickens’s death.

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Copperfield, “deliberately call into question conventional notions of literary ‘heroism’” in that they all exude the everyday (Herst 43). Andrew Sanders, in his Introduction to the

Oxford World’s Classics David Copperfield, likewise proposes a less lofty vision of literary heroism—one in keeping with the Realism of the Victorian novel, with its subject matter drawn from everyday life: “the getting of wisdom, a disciplined assimilation of experience,

[was] so often associated by nineteenth-century writers with the concept of heroism…” (vii).

Sanders’s account prizes discipline over dragons, and the domestic over danger.

Such a perspective complements the insecurities surrounding the male author’s place in Victorian society. Dowling lists David Copperfield as an example of books that “were enormously influential in establishing a literary history for the male novelist and they all positioned this figure in close proximity to the ‘stiff upper lip’ ideal of English manhood.

However, the main strategy used to achieve this was to define the male novelist against a demonised male ‘other’” (3). Dowling cites James Steerforth as a case study: Steerforth’s

“deviant masculinity” (47) contrasts David’s more noble quest for discipline, thereby privileging David (who is, like Dickens, an author by profession) through dissimilarity.

Claire Tomalin describes Steerforth as “a Byronic figure irresistible to [David]” (Dickens

220). But his Byronic attributes are also his downfall, and Steerforth, who “becomes the first clear hero of David’s life” (Dunn 2) eventually loses his heroic position in David’s mind.

Upon first meeting, however, Steerforth quickly becomes David’s “great subject”

(Dickens 110). Specifically, Steerforth is “the best cricketer you ever saw; such a speaker; such a generous, fine, noble fellow” (136). Steerforth is presented as a paragon of masculinity, and all the schoolboys revere him—David, to the point of hero-worship. Upon returning to school after the holidays, David writes: “Except that Steerforth was more to be admired than ever, I remember nothing” (116). David’s own life pales in comparison to

Steerforth’s escapades, for “He was a person of great power in my eyes; that was of course

157 the reason of my mind running on him” (84). Later David elaborates that Steerforth had “a kind of enchantment” which “carried a spell with him to which it was a natural weakness to yield, and which not many persons could withstand” (99). David even entrusts his money to

Steerforth for safekeeping (81). However, Steerforth betrays David’s trust in him by seducing

Little Em’ly and nearly ruining her; Steerforth’s brazenly selfish, cowardly behaviour upends

Little Em’ly’s family and completely changes David’s outlook on his former “favourite theme” (136). Steerforth’s prized masculinity ultimately feeds his undoing. The novel questions the heroic value of the traditional masculine figure, but it also challenges the less obviously masculine one—for David would likewise have failed without Agnes. Agnes perceptively uncovers Steerforth’s true character (or lack thereof) and cautions David against his “‘bad Angel’” (357). David initially dismisses Agnes’s warning, but time proves her right.

Despite the novel’s overall shunning of masculine extremes, David does periodically dream of being heroic in the traditional epic sense:

It was night tide; and soon after we went to bed, Mr. Peggotty and Ham went out to fish. I felt very brave at being left alone in the solitary house, the protector of Em’ly and Mrs. Gummidge, and only wished that a lion or a serpent, or any ill-disposed monster, would make an attack upon us, that I might destroy him, and cover myself with glory. But as nothing of the sort happened to be walking about on Yarmouth flats that night, I provided the best substitute I could by dreaming of dragons until morning. (143-144)

David eventually takes matters into his own hands when he runs away to his Aunt Betsey’s house in Dover. This adventure does not afford the opportunity to “cover [himself] in glory” as proposed above, but David demonstrates a remarkable amount of perseverance throughout multiple ordeals, including being robbed. And, upon finally arriving at Aunt Betsey’s house, he refuses to be sent away, pleading his case “without a scrap of courage, but with a great deal of desperation” (187). Perseverance aids him when courage fails, and Aunt Betsey consents to let young David live with her. David’s relationship with Aunt Betsey has its own complications, most notably regarding her infamous disappointment over his failure to be

158 born a girl. I delve into the implications of this disappointment (in terms of the novel’s gendered dynamics) at the end of this chapter.

David’s fleeting wistfulness for an epic heroism hearkens back to an earlier Dickens:

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, which was serialized from 1838-1839, depicts the hero-protagonist as a knight on a quest, paying tribute to Nicholas’s “great gallantry”

(107) and “becoming gallantry” (247). Here Dickens presents a hero-protagonist who is confident despite his imperfections, and Nicholas’s assertiveness stands in stark contrast to

Mr. Pickwick’s bumbling naivete and Oliver’s helpless uncertainty. Nicholas’s defending the marginalised by throttling the vile schoolmaster Wackford Squeers is case in point, although, as John Lucas points out, Nicholas’s “aggressive self-confidence” renders him rather unsympathetic as far as the average reader is concerned (58). Dickens himself addresses such concerns in the Preface to the novel, where he explains that Nicholas is intended to appear flawed: “If Nicholas be not always found to be blameless or agreeable, he is not always intended to appear so. He is a young man of an impetuous temper and of little or no experience; and I saw no reason why such a hero should be lifted out of nature” (lvi).

Heroism does not mandate perfection, but it does require more than the pattern of disappearance, dethroning, and general failure typically evinced by Dickens’s central characters.

Intriguingly, Nicholas Nickleby also dethrones the supposed hero-protagonist—in the novel’s opening chapter no less—but only to make way for Nicholas to rise to the forefront of his story. We are immediately introduced to Nicholas’s uncle Ralph Nickleby, who appears promising as a diligent and hard-working lad: “From what we have said of this young gentleman, and the natural admiration the reader will immediately conceive of his character, it may perhaps be inferred that he is to be the hero of the work which we shall presently begin. To set this point at rest, for once and for ever, we hasten to undeceive them, and stride

159 to its commencement” (4). Far from being heroic, Ralph is in fact a miser who ends up hanging himself. Dickens’s decision to use Ralph Nickleby as a tease for revealing the true hero-protagonist hints that the author—having grown in confidence—was attempting to purge the pattern associated with his earlier anxieties over his authorial identity. The ironic inflections with which Dickens introduces a character such as Ralph as “hero” likewise hearkens back to the playfulness previously noted in Pickwick. With Nickleby, Dickens dispenses with the ostensible hero-protagonist at the outset, and Nicholas stands alone as the sole protagonist allowed hero-ship of his own Life and Adventures. At this juncture, Dickens was building to his own life-writing attempt in the 1840s, making this novel a transitory instance of Dickens with his anxieties in check: he had tasted success in finding his authorial identity and had not yet lost his autobiographical courage.

To be sure, as previously outlined, Nicholas Nickleby is not officially a Dickensian

“life-writing novel,” in that Dickens has not explicitly glossed it as an autobiography, biography, or memoir. Rather, Nickleby (and David Copperfield, to a lesser extent) demonstrates Dickens’s affinity for novelists of the preceding century: “Of all Dickens’s novels, Nicholas Nickleby most closely follows the ‘life and adventures’ pattern of Fielding,

Smollett, and other 18th-century novelists whose works [Dickens] had loved from childhood, in which a young hero encounters a variety of colourful characters and meets with diverse experiences in the course of his travels” (Oxford Companion 415).59 Specifically, these novels feature “penniless youths who journey to the city to make their fortunes—and do—

59 Dickens’s other “Life and Adventures” novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844), proved contentious in that Dickens was proud of it, but the public did not share his enthusiasm—a reception which induced anxiety and an instinct to retreat in the young author. In November 1843, Dickens complained to Forster: “I think Chuzzlewit in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories. That I feel my power now, more than I ever did. That I have a greater confidence in myself than I ever had…But how many readers do not think! […] this very book warns me that if I can leave it [the writing ‘scene’] for a time, I had better do so, and must do so” (Letters 126; emphasis original). Martin likewise suffers from Dickens’s desire to withdraw, noticeably vanishing in his own life history.

160 and gallant young men generally succeed to beautiful wives, large estates and happy endings”

(Herst 10-11). As a boy, David Copperfield reads Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of

Peregrine Pickle. Despite David’s youthful pining for epic heroism, however, Dickens’s life- writing novels exhibit a marked pattern of dividing the hero and protagonist. To reiterate, what makes Dickens’s hero-protagonist split distinctive is not that his central characters largely lack achievement on an epic scale, or that they hail from humble origins—such characteristics are hallmarks of the Victorian novel—rather, the distinction is that Dickens repeatedly undermines the hero, or removes the protagonist from centre stage, effectively severing the protagonist from the hero.

As I have been discussing in this section, it is accepted that Dickens’s hero- protagonists are not overtly masculine, according to Victorian standards. Similarly, Dickens himself was often criticised for his own dearth of masculinity: “Dickens’s [contemporary] critics diagnosed him as being insufficiently canonical because he was insufficiently masculine: though his body was male, his mind was female” (Rena-Dozier 823). Dickens’s novels tend toward the domestic (i.e. feminine) in nature, featuring passive male protagonists.

This concern leads Beth Herst to query, “But do Dickens’s novels possess heroes at all?

There are no Carlylean ‘Great Men’ among the young male protagonists who people their pages, nothing to suggest the transcendent qualities of the ‘Hero-soul’ to be worshipped” (1-

2). Alex Woloch adds that “many of Dickens’s novels feature a weak protagonist” (178). In response to these apprehensions, Andrew Dowling describes how Forster’s version of

Dickens (in the author’s biography) appeals to the concept of traditional masculinity as he

“constructs Dickens as a robust man and a virile writer” (31). This projection combats the critical concern that Dickens himself was somehow lacking in this area (30). Mamie Dickens records that her father was not initially skilled in sport, since he was denied opportunities to play sport in childhood due to poor health. Yet he more than made up for this initial

161 disadvantage as an adult, when he enthusiastically revelled in “all kinds of outdoor exercise and sports, and it seemed that in his passionate enjoyment and participation in those later years he was recompensed for the wary childhood years of suffering and inability...in sustained energy Dickens certainly distanced every competitor” (29). Later in life, Dickens achieved the traditionally revered manly status imputed to sport, but the childhood insecurity surrounding exclusion and inability lingers.

This insecurity—intensified by autobiographical courage only recently lost— manifests in the ultimate failure of the more traditionally masculine figure in David

Copperfield. As referenced earlier in this chapter, I have an unconventional proposal: what if we read Agnes as the hero of David Copperfield’s life? She is, after all, celebrated by David as “‘Ever my guide, and best support!’” (841). Despite—or perhaps because of—David’s excessive praise for her, scholarship has often dismissed Agnes as “boring” (Cordery

Companion 372) pitied her as victimised (Needham 96 and Dyson 136) and even gone so far as to suggest that David is “devitalised by his second marriage; that in escaping the wheel of passion and suffering, he is too gratefully putting off youth for middle age” (Dyson 150).

Similarly, Michael Slater deems Agnes “a major embarrassment for Dickens’s readers”

(Dickens and Women 100). Nonetheless, as “the book’s ‘true heroine’” Agnes cannot be

“ignored” (Slater 100). Slater subsequently traces compelling parallels between Dickens’s portrayal of Agnes and his own personal obsession with his deceased sister-in-law Mary

Hogarth. Agnes is Dickens’s “attempt to make a novel-heroine out of [Mary’s] spirit” (101) which Dickens told Forster was “that spirit which directs my life” (Slater 101). Building upon

Slater, my interpretation of Agnes’s role envisions her as moving beyond the novel’s angelic inspiration or central female figure to actually embody the answer to David’s enigmatic declaration about who is the hero of his life.

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To be sure, Agnes does meet the traditional requirements of the Victorian “Angel in the House.” Even though Coventry Patmore’s narrative poem “The Angel in the House” was not published until some five years after David Copperfield, Patmore’s conception of idealised womanhood aptly describes Agnes Wickfield, whose “disposition is devout; [h]er countenance angelical” (48). Agnes’s housekeeping skills have been honed from a very young age; in the wake of her mother’s death, Agnes has managed her father’s household since she was practically a girl. She also imparts positivity wherever she goes, leading David to term her “the better angel of the lives of all who come within her calm, good, self-denying influence…” (262). While the Angel in the House has often been seen as an enabler to active, decisive masculinity, my argument assesses Agnes as an extreme example, whose influence over David ultimately enacts the hero-protagonist split in this life-writing novel as he subtly signposts her as the hero/ine of his life history.

Agnes’s Angel in the House role is one numerous critics have noted, albeit typically in a dismissive manner. For example, Catherine J. Golden cites Agnes in her assertion that

“Dickens’s stereotypical presentations of angels…regrettably leave [modern readers] in search of a viable heroine” (17-18). Critics are divided as to whether or not Agnes can even be characterised a heroine in her own right, regardless of whether or not she challenges David for his own heroic title. Yet even though Agnes’s impossible perfection has often irked modern readers, some scholarly approaches still allow for more empowering readings of her character, or, at least, for her character type. In “Nobody’s Angels: Domestic Ideology and

Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Novel” Elizabeth Langland argues that “the wife, the presiding hearth angel of Victorian social myth, actually performed a more significant and extensive economic and political function than is usually perceived” (290-291). Langland explains that the wife oversaw household expenditure and managed servants, thus

“maintaining middle-class control” (295). For Langland, the Angel in the House was a force

163 to be reckoned with. Gareth Cordery also imputes more power to Agnes than she is traditionally afforded:

The ideology of separate spheres, in which the husband works in the office or factory to return home to be soothed and uplifted by his domestic angel ever pointing upwards, collapses in David Copperfield since David's is true domestic labor and without his wife's “dear presence” he would be “nothing” (ch. 64), personally or professionally. It is the silent Agnes who at the end claims authority in both spheres. Is David eventually emasculated and does the novel's hero turn out to be a heroine? (Companion 376-377) Cordery does not examine his concluding question about Agnes being the novel’s hero/ine any further; indeed, in a separate article he terms her both David’s “muse” (79) and

“inexorable moral Policeman” (76).60 Cordery’s passing query thus exists primarily as his rhetorical tease. Richard J. Dunn also hints that David may have “found a heroine instead of a hero” (157) but he does not probe this possibility beyond a few sentences. Dunn views

Agnes’s status as David’s heroine as capable of existing alongside David’s indeterminate status as hero of his own life, meaning that Agnes can remain David’s heroine without usurping the heroic title from him (158). Like Cordery and Dunn, Emily Rena-Dozier’s reading of Agnes is typical of critics who acknowledge Agnes’s positive influence in directing David, yet decline to probe the full impact of her authority further. Rena-Dozier notes that David “attributes his success to Agnes” (821) but scarcely credits her with shaping

David’s life any further than as a depiction of “idealized feminine authority” (819) in David’s description of her in his autobiography’s conclusion. Beth Herst states that “Agnes is the source of his best self” (64) but she does not assign David’s heroic title to her. Hilary M.

Schor is unique in ascribing specific authority to Agnes, arguing that:

David’s own answer would seem to be clear: the hero of his life is his wife Agnes, who, busily pointing upwards at the end of the novel, represents the highest he can attain, represents the self-sacrifice he must learn, represents his own aspirations back to him so that he can pursue them. It is Agnes who has made possible the author’s heroism—and his novels—and it is her light, the light of the near-final chapter title

60 This article is entitled “Foucault, Dickens and David Copperfield,” and in the article Cordery notes that the term “inexorable moral Policeman” is borrowed from Esther Summerson’s assessment of Mrs. Pardiggle in Bleak House. 164

(“A Light shines on my Way”) by which, not to put it too quaintly, we all read the novel. (12; emphasis original) However, despite Schor’s confident declaration that Agnes is “the hero of [David’s] life,” she does not explore the implications of this identification in detail. David Copperfield does not even merit its own chapter in Schor’s study, unlike Dombey and Son and Bleak House, which are the two novels written on either side of Copperfield. Schor’s argument then, is an extension of Cordery’s rhetorical tease I referenced earlier, one which she primarily employs to demonstrate that Dickens’s female characters have more vitality than critics traditionally acknowledge.

I also submit Agnes as the response to David’s ultimately unanswered opening query; she is the hero/ine of his life, the “anybody else, these pages must show” (1). In so doing, I extend Schor’s argument about empowering Agnes’s character to instead demonstrate how such a reading perpetuates the characteristic hero-protagonist split in Dickens’s life-writing novels. For the remainder of this chapter, I closely analyse the issue most other critics have named then evaded. By positioning Agnes as contender for hero of David’s life, I demonstrate that David’s consigning the title of his life’s hero to another—while not overt— nonetheless sets the precedent for the Dickensian tension between heroism and anxiety that this thesis explores as a whole.

Dickensian Heroism: Self-Reliance, Perseverance, and the Significance of Being Right

Building upon my more general discussion of Victorian masculinity and the tradition of literary heroism, I will now establish the specific parameters of Dickensian heroism. Very early into my research on the hero-protagonist split in Dickens’s life-writing novels, I knew I needed to define Dickensian heroism: what did Dickens consider heroic? In scouring his novels, and also scrutinising biographies about Dickens, the three most prominent features which emerged were: self-reliance, perseverance, and being right. Dickens notoriously

165 privileged self-reliance and perseverance—which both hearken back to how he sustained himself during the trials of Warren’s blacking factory—and throughout his life he demonstrated a consistent need to to have his perspective accepted as being right. Identifying these three essential parameters of Dickensian heroism is pivotal to my discussion of Agnes’s appropriation of David’s heroic title. Up to this point, Dickens had been experimenting with what it meant to write a successful life story, as evinced by my discussion of Dickensian memoir in Chapter 2. Dickens’s interaction with memoirs bled into his (failed) attempt at writing his own autobiography, which then evolved into him writing David’s autobiography instead.

Thomas Carlyle also shaped Dickens’s conception of literary heroism. According to biographer Peter Ackroyd, Dickens deemed Carlyle the man “who had influenced him most”

(301). Ackroyd argues that “Dickens was always to have reservations about Carlyle’s worship of power, and the men of power, but he could not have helped but be stirred by

Carlyle’s encomia on “The Hero as Man of Letters” (302). This chapter Ackroyd references hails from Carlyle’s “Lectures on Heroes,” which were compiled into a book entitled On

Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Many critics have linked this interpretation of heroism to David Copperfield’s profession as a novelist. Carlyle praises the power of books in enacting “miracles” in that “They persuade men” (161). He also links legacy and the written word, wherein “All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men” (101). Dickens—with his love of narrative control—would doubtless have been captivated by this literary power of persuasion, particularly since his male protagonists are not known for being physically powerful.

Indeed, as previously noted, despite the Victorian fascination with “Concepts of manliness and heroism” (Dunn 11) Dickens’s central characters are not masculine in the

166 traditional sense. Dickensian heroism must therefore be achieved through other, more grounded, measures. Therefore, bearing Carlyle’ influence in mind, Dickens is arguably advocating for David’s heroism on the basis of the latter’s literary achievement.61 While completing a novel is an impressive feat, I still contend that David compromises this accomplishment by his over-reliance upon Agnes. As with Pickwick’s anxious elements being potentially linked to playfulness, the point with David Copperfield is that David’s repeated deference to Agnes fits the pattern of hero-protagonist split across Dickens’s life- writing novels.

Dickens’s severed hero-protagonist is not a gendered divide. As I discuss in the following chapter on Little Dorrit’s biography, Dickens’s female protagonists fail to claim ownership of their life histories as well. For example, in Bleak House, Esther Summerson undermines herself from the outset of her personal narrative, writing how “It seems so curious to me to be obliged to write all this about myself! As if this narrative were the narrative of my life! But my little body will soon fall into the background now” (35; emphasis original). Disappearing into the background is also the fate of Amy Dorrit—supposedly the principal character of the eponymous Little Dorrit—who is perplexingly absent for much of her own biography. In volume, however, Esther does not fade away, since her autobiography comprises roughly half of Bleak House. This false modesty so often maligned,62 is yet

61 Two other works published at precisely the same time as David Copperfield—Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, both engage with Carlyle’s conception of literary heroism. In The Prelude: Book V, Wordsworth extols texts and authors “as Powers For ever to be hallowed…” (246) while Tennyson immortalises his beloved friend via narrative elegy. Dickens’s investment in his—and David’s—literary legacy is thus indicative of the time.

62 “Readers from Charlotte Bronte on have been irritated by Esther’s tone, always the cheerful little woman and nobly forgetful of self” (Tomalin Dickens 242).

“To the extent that generations of readers have found her ‘unlikable’ as a narrator, she has succeeded in this effort at concealment” (Jordan Supposing Bleak House 72-73). 167 another example of the hero-protagonist split in Dickens’s life-writing novels, as his central characters struggle (unsuccessfully) to embrace ownership of their life histories.

Doubless inspired by Dickens’s aforementioned admiration of Thomas Carlyle, references to both Carlyle and his contemporary Samuel Smiles pepper criticism surrounding what constitutes the heroic in Dickens. Richard J. Dunn nicely summarises this discussion when he explains that:

More than a decade before Dickens wrote [David Copperfield], his friend Thomas Carlyle had insisted that heroes of all ages must evince strong moral character coupled with hard work. In Self-Help, one of the century’s best sellers and earliest versions of self-improvement non-fiction, clergyman and educator Samuel Smiles applied the Carlylean work ethic to his account of numerous men who succeeded in becoming gentlemen, if not heroes. (11)

Therefore, self-reliance is a key component of Dickensian heroism, and this theme is woven throughout David Copperfield. David’s determination to succeed, and, in particular, his fixation on becoming a gentleman, has long fascinated critics and biographers alike.

Nonetheless, success and self-reliance are not unreservedly promoted by Dickens, and

Jerome Meckier picks up on the problematic nature of self-reliance in Dickens’s two most autobiographical novels. Meckier writes that “Correcting David Copperfield with Great

Expectations, [Dickens] penned the autobiography of a failure” (537). Claiming that Dickens was concerned about the growing Victorian preoccupation with materialism, and

“diagnos[ing]” an “anti-Cinderella story” (538) as the remedy, Meckier analyses the concept of two autobiographies ten years apart, one determined to be heroic, and one outlining “a young snob’s defeat and self-reclamation” (538). Consequently, “failure” for Meckier is calculated primarily in economic terms, at least in Great Expectations, which he argues

“should be read primarily as Dickens’s reconsideration of himself” since “money, position, and success” are not ultimately as enticing as originally supposed (539). Meckier further argues that Dickens is “preoccupied” with failure in Great Expectations and that “Without an understanding of failure, Dickens warned, it was impossible to view life whole” (553). Again,

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Meckier is primarily concerned with economic failure, whereas I am more interested in how these two autobiographies frame failure by challenging the heroism of their professed hero- protagonists. Meckier is correct that Dickens approaches success and failure differently in his later novel. At several key points in Great Expectations, Pip refuses to become self-reliant; for example, when he fails to secure Magwitch’s “portable property” (albeit for noble ends), which results in Joe discharging his debts.63 It is only at the end of the novel that Pip seems to accept responsibility, eventually becoming a partner in Clarriker’s. Nonetheless, I do not see

Great Expectations embracing failure to the extent that Meckier claims, most likely because I assign more failure to David Copperfield than he does.

David Copperfield does herald the importance of self-reliance via the neglected boy who sustains himself at the wine packing warehouse before escorting himself all the way to

Dover and later achieving professional success. But David Copperfield also challenges the reality of self-reliance. As I demonstrate later in this chapter, David’s much touted self- reliance is at odds with his utter dependence upon Agnes. And notwithstanding his astonishing fortitude in travelling all the way to Dover on his own—where would David

Copperfield have ultimately ended up had his Aunt Betsey not consented to take him in? It is true that Pip fortuitously inherits his “expectations,” but he earned them in the sense that he surreptitiously assisted Magwitch’s escape at the start of the novel—a feat which demonstrated a solid measure of self-reliance in permanently borrowing items from his sister’s house. Then again, he also loses his expectations. My point is that neither novel wholeheartedly embraces or shuns either self-reliance or failure. I have selected David

Copperfield as the focus of this chapter given its autobiographical connection to Dickens himself and for its status as Dickens’s aforementioned “favourite child.” Regardless, David

Copperfield and Great Expectations are undoubtedly connected. Dickens wrote to John

63 See especially Great Expectations chapter 57. 169

Forster in October 1860 that “To be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe” (Letters 357). These two novels clearly share more than an autobiographical format; they also share hero-protagonists whose life histories are branded by disappointment and doubt. Even while allowing characters to make mistakes—to exhibit humanity in their life histories—a pattern still emerges in Dickens’s life-writing novels where the hero- protagonist is defined by defeat.

In many ways, the young, pre-Agnes David is far more self-reliant than the older, post-Agnes David. For example, while working at the warehouse and living with the

Micawbers, David recalls that “From Monday morning until Saturday night, I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from any one, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!” (155). David had no choice but to rely upon himself, even for the sake of survival, as he “led the same secretly unhappy life; but

I led it in the same lonely, self-reliant manner” (162). He is self-reliant, but lonely. David undoubtedly possesses certain aspects of Dickensian heroism: he survives the abusive

Murdstone regime, where “all I had to anticipate was neglect” (128), hereby exhibiting self- reliance and perseverance. Similarly, he consistently proves himself right in his interactions with the utterly unreliable Micawbers. Once he meets Agnes, however, his former self- reliance transitions to complete dependence upon her. She shapes his character and bolsters his confidence to the point that his own identity is practically non-existent apart from her.

David clearly sees Agnes as an overwhelming positive in his life, an “influence for all good”

(226). Nonetheless, her all-consuming presence—particularly in usurping David’s heroic title—is perplexing in a novel which supposedly praises the virtues of self-reliance. J. Hillis

Miller suggests that Dickens experienced guilt in association with self-reliance by pinpointing “the guilt which always hovers, for Dickens, over the man who takes matters into

170 his own hands” (159). Is Agnes a punishment rather than a hero’s reward? The young, self- reliant, persevering David is “devitalised” (to use A.E. Dyson’s term, quoted earlier in this chapter) through his relationship with Agnes. The text leads us to believe that Agnes heals

David, but there is likewise evidence that her healing actually robs him of fortitude, despite his insistence otherwise. Even in conviction David falters; his plea for Agnes not to marry the detestable Uriah Heep reads like an apology and ends with a question mark: “‘Dear Agnes,’ I said, ‘it is presumptuous for me, who am so poor in all in which you are so rich—goodness, resolution, all noble qualities—to doubt or direct you; but you know how much I love you, and how much I owe you. You will never sacrifice yourself to a mistaken sense of duty

Agnes?’” (563). David starts his speech by tracing his inadequacy and finishes with a question—even a plea would be preferable at this point. He cannot muster boldness even for a subject matter he passionately supports.

Perseverance is self-reliance’s first cousin; both qualities share the similarity of sustained endurance, although perseverance is not as inherently individualistic. Perseverance also entails more brute determination, whereas self-reliance is more creative and nuanced.

Both qualities are key aspects of Dickensian heroism. In one of his sketches from The

Uncommercial Traveller, Dickens imagines conversing with a youthful incarnation of himself, depicted as “a very queer small boy” (71). The boy admires Dickens’s home at

Gad’s Hill, revealing that “ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, ‘If you were to be very persevering, and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it’” (72). Dickens, being exceedingly persevering insofar as finances were concerned, fulfilled his childhood dream, purchasing Gad’s Hill Place in the mid 1850s.

Jerome Meckier notes the importance of perseverance in David Copperfield, particularly as related to Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help principles (537). Here again, Meckier argues that Great Expectations challenges many of the characteristics David Copperfield

171 praises. Meckier cites Magwitch as an example: Magwitch exhibits extreme perseverance but

“lacks a lofty ideal” which, when coupled with the abuse he has endured, leaves him instead seeking revenge on “a system that neglected, then punished him” (548). In actuality, the problem with Magwitch is not perseverance itself but injustice and subsequently perverted goals. Dickens clearly still prized perseverance; both endings to Great Expectations reward perseverance through suffering. The original ending reads: “I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview [with Estella]; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be” (443). Pip and Estella still part ways in this original ending, but with the assurance that perseverance through suffering has nonetheless proven purposeful. In the revised ending, the one Dickens actually published,

Estella tells Pip that “suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape” (441-442). This ending concludes with Pip and Estella leaving Satis House hand in hand, as Pip “saw the shadow of no parting from her” (442). Even though Dickens privileges perseverance, a shadow (literally) lingers over the final scene, which has since inspired much “critical brouhaha” (Rosenberg 501) surrounding the subtle variations of this final sentence.64 It is possible to interpret this shadow either positively or negatively—the shadow could be Pip’s premonition of being forever united with Estella, or, conversely, their future together could be overshadowed by suffering. Ankhi Mukherjee interprets Pip’s journey positively, in that this “autobiographical novel of endless reversals ends with the hope that Pip’s belated authorship of his life will mark a rebeginning, not a return” (115).

And yet, Pip’s autobiography concludes with the shadow of doubt. Perseverance may

64 See Edgar Rosenberg’s “Putting an End to Great Expectations” for a thorough examination of Great Expectations’ endings (and subsequent variations).

172 ostensibly be rewarded, as Pip and Estella exit the garden together, but the protagonist may not fully enjoy his hero’s reward.

Dickens’s attention to perseverance also appears in Little Dorrit, where the leading male character, Arthur Clennam, wonders whether it might be better to simply give up. His life, after all, seems essentially pointless, and Clennam “thought—who has not thought for a moment sometimes—that it might be better to flow away monotonously, like the river, and to compound for its insensibility to happiness with its insensibility to pain” (205). This moment is crucial: Clennam can either select stagnation or perseverance. Importantly, he chooses the latter option, a decision linked to Dickens’s own determination, boundless energy, and overarching scorn of indifference.65 These qualities are noted in Dickens and Daughter; even when Dickens was in pain he persevered: “Onward, ever onward, never stopping” (92). Here we detect echoes of Clennam’s thoughts about floating away, except in a different context.

Clennam considers allowing the river to take him onward thus admitting inertia, whereas

Dickens relied upon himself to move forward. When he felt strained and dissatisfied, he doggedly persevered, for, in his own words, “It is much better to go on and fret, than to stop and fret” (Forster 607). This approach was not without its setbacks, however, including physical pain in his foot and larger health issues arguably stemming from overwork. Indeed,

Samuel Smiles speculates that “too much unrest” (245) was one of the primary causes of

Dickens’s death, and John Forster records that Dickens’s “ordinary habits of activity…were doubtless carried too far” (90). Several decades later Gladys Storey stresses that “the dominant characteristic lying behind every trait which, with hurricane force swept through his entire mental and physical being, was his amazing energy, at times demoniacal in its fierceness” (91-92). Restlessness and overexertion: the negative inverses of perseverance’s positivity.

65 “The one thing entirely hateful to him, was indifference” (Forster 792). 173

The third most important aspect of Dickensian heroism is being right. When the need to be right becomes extreme, it manifests as control—this pattern is evident in Dickens’s own life. My chapter on Dickens’s neo-Victorian literary legacy outlines the implications of

Dickens’s need to control all narratives concerning him. This compulsion for control emerges quite vividly in Dickens’s messy separation from his wife, Catherine. As noted in my

Introduction, in June 1858, Dickens published the infamous “Personal Statement,” defending himself after the separation: “he believed himself to be a good man who had been wronged, and this was the truth which he had to convey to his public” (Ackroyd 820). Dickens manufactures his own truth. Accordingly, Lillian Nayder describes “Dickens’s revisionist history of his marriage” (206), and Claire Tomalin describes Dickens as “a husband who…always knew himself to be right” (Dickens 66). Michael Slater interprets Dickens’s control more generously, reading it as a necessary coping mechanism rather than “gratuitous cruelty” (Dickens and Women 146). The common theme emerging from all four biographers is that Dickens wanted to be right.

On occasion—as revealed by the stories which sprang up around Charles and

Catherine Dickens’s very public separation—his obsessive need to be right gains mythic proportions, and Dickens’s personalised editing of accounts to render himself more heroic survive alongside the versions wherein he is not so favourably represented. Myth challenges truth, since in Dickens’s mind, being right was tantamount to being heroic. An example is the resolution of the feud between Dickens and fellow Victorian author William Makepeace

Thackeray. The Dickens Trails app, created in conjunction with the Charles Dickens Museum in London, presents Dickens as the peacemaker in his reconciliation with Thackeray. The version presented in the app echoes that listed on the Athenaeum Club’s website, which states that:

There are many stories [involving the Athenaeum] - one on record describes the reconciliation at the foot of the stairs in 1863 between Dickens and Thackeray, who

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had not spoken to each other for years, after a famous quarrel. Thackeray, although only 52, was clearly a dying man. Dickens, seeing him slowly descending into the hallway, stepped forward, offered his hand and here in the hall made up a quarrel of some twelve years' duration so that Thackeray could die at peace with the man who had once been his close friend. The scene was observed and later described by a fellow member, Percy Fitzgerald.66 In this depiction, Dickens magnanimously initiates the reconciliation with Thackeray, extending his hand, “so that Thackeray could die at peace.” Dickens is the hero who puts aside past grievances for the sake of another. However, as is typical with stories surrounding

Charles Dickens, another, less flattering, version of the story exists. Peter Ackroyd offers a competing, “rather more convincing” (923) account of the Athenaeum encounter:

Dickens claimed that it was he who made the first move...[however] A rather more convincing account is given by Sir Theodore Martin who was speaking to Thackeray at the time when Dickens came into the club [the Athenaeum]. He passed close to Thackeray “without making any sign of recognition”. Suddenly Thackeray broke away from his conversation, and reached Dickens just as the latter had his foot on the staircase. “Dickens turned to him, and I saw Thackeray speak and presently hold out his hand to Dickens. They shook hands, a few words were exchanged, and immediately Thackeray returned to me saying ‘I’m glad I have done this.’” This sounds much more likely to be true than Dickens’s self-serving version, particularly in light of the fact that he was notoriously bad at being the first to “make up” in such circumstances. (923) In one version, Thackeray is descending the Athenaeum’s staircase, in the other, Dickens is ascending. My purpose here is not to interrogate history to determine what actually happened

150-odd years ago. Two different eye witness accounts are recorded here, one by Sir Percy

Fitzgerald, the other by Sir Theodore Martin. People notoriously have differing views on the same subject, and Fitzgerald’s account was likely influenced by his friendship with Dickens.

Rather, I offer this instance to illustrate Dickens’s ability as a mythologiser: by mingling fact and fiction, he leaves a (biofictional) legacy attesting to his preferred version of himself.

Moreover, both the Dickens Trails app—which was created in conjunction with the Charles

Dickens Museum in London—and the Athenaeum Club’s website, participate in projecting

66 “The Athenaeum Club.” www.athenaeumclub.co.uk Web. Accessed 18th September 2016. 175 the heroic Dickens and validating his need to be right. This example also supports my inclusion of the powerful need to be right as one of the pillars of Dickensian heroism.

In David Copperfield, being right relates to being “disciplined,” the favoured term from the text. David repeatedly laments his “undisciplined heart” which often leads him to make poor decisions, as evinced by his misplaced trust in James Steerforth and his unhappy marriage to Dora Spenlow. Tellingly, Dora—the Maria Beadnell character—is not a good match for David, despite his youthful infatuation with her. Michael Slater suggests that Dora may be a version “of comic forgiveness of Maria” (Dickens and Women 64) in that she tries to love David well. Despite her efforts, however, Dora and David are proven ill-matched, and

David’s early infatuation with Dora gives way to sadness when he realises that the childish silliness he previously prized leaves him lonely in their marriage. David writes of his “many anxieties” (629) and feels the return of “The old unhappy loss or want of something” (629).

Dickens did struggle with how to depict her character: “We know from [Dickens’s] notes that, as author, he found it hard to make up his mind whether to let [Dora] live or kill her off, partly perhaps because he drew on his memories of Maria Beadnell when writing about her”

(Tomalin Dickens 221). As author, Dickens could, in a sense, control Maria’s life via Dora’s narrative. On paper, Dickens writes Maria/Dora to her death, which is in itself both a failure, in that it signifies the end of David and Dora’s marriage, but also a relief, in that it frees

David to marry Agnes instead.

Strangely, even in Dickens’s alternate, fictionalised account, his romance with Maria still fails, suggesting that the scars from Dickens’s real-life experience were too deep to allow a happy-ever-after ending. Dickens’s “lost courage” resurfaces as David flounders and again requires Agnes’s rescue (as his second wife, since his selection of first wife proved unwise.)

Also unsettling is that Dickens—in a characteristic conflation of life and art—named his newborn daughter Dora when he was only days away from crafting the demise of her

176 fictional counterpart. “I have still Dora to kill—I mean the Copperfieldian Dora,” Dickens wrote to Catherine shortly after their daughter’s birth (Pilgrim 6: 153). Sadly, Dora Dickens’s fate mirrored that of Dora Copperfield, for Dickens’s third and youngest daughter died in

April 1851, at only eight months of age. While it is possible that Dickens’s decision to eradicate Dora Copperfield could be interpreted as a form of punishment for Maria’s abandonment of him, David’s reminisces about Dora are largely sympathetic, even as they lament their marital incompatibility. For instance, after a disagreement which has vexed them both, “Dora came stealing down in her little slippers, to meet me…and cried upon my shoulder, and said I had been hard-hearted and she had been naughty; and I said much the same thing in effect, I believe; and we made it up…” (623). Dora’s status as “child-wife”

(627) results in David’s assuming responsibility for “the toils and cares of our life, and [I] had no partner in them” (629). He is lonely, but he loves her still. Dickens further explores his complicated feelings for Maria in his portrayal of Flora Finching in Little Dorrit (to be discussed in the following chapter).

Nicola Bradbury paints a heroic picture of Dickens’s triumph in David Copperfield, whereby “Dickens retrieves from taboo the latent power of his unspeakable past”

(“Fragment” 21). Bradbury’s assertion is true, and yet, troubling remnants remain lodged within this “unspeakable past,” namely, the discomfort inherent in assuming complete ownership of himself and his story. This discomfort manifests again in David-the- autobiographer’s confusion over his intended audience. His opening statement acknowledges the reader’s presence—in that he pledges to reveal his life’s hero—and “The reader” is referenced on page 54, but later, David avows that “this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine” (590). He knows in his heart that Agnes has more claim as hero of his life (than does he) but perhaps, a reader might have a different interpretation, one which would vindicate David. To further complicate matters, the novel was initially published under the

177 full title The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences, and Observations of David

Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery (which he never meant to be published on any account)” (Dale 201). Such contradiction and indecision reveal further tension between the revealing and concealing so characteristic of Dickens’s own life. What is left for us is to read between the lines, for the Dickensian tension between heroism and anxiety rests in this very hesitancy. As autobiographer, David is only as visible as he renders himself.

Max Saunders identifies psychoanalysis—in particular, the unconscious—as fundamental to the uncertainty inherent in narrating the self: “both are products of the nineteenth-century’s increasing preoccupation with what is hidden in the self, what cannot be grasped rationally even when it does manifest itself” (136). I suggest that what is “hidden” in

David is the realisation that he cannot honestly answer his own opening question: he cannot fully identify Agnes as the hero of his life, but he knows he cannot claim this title either. This becomes the truth that he cannot explicitly revisit, and so he fluctuates between praising himself and praising Agnes, without ever truly satisfying the tease. David instead consigns responsibility to “these pages [which] must show” (1) thus effectively dodging the need to cleanly resolve lingering questions about his own heroism.

Why open the autobiography this way at all then, if the answer is so troubling?

Because heroism nonetheless remains a significant issue for David. This is the crux of the tension between Dickensian heroism and anxiety: vulnerability is always warring with control. Hence David cannot decide whether he writes solely for himself or if he is reaching out to others with his life history, thereby effectively inviting judgment. In “Autobiography into Autobiography: the Evolution of David Copperfield” Robert L. Patten argues that

“David Copperfield becomes a third version of the abandoned child, another try at connecting past to present and writing oneself into adequacy” (278). Nonetheless, this effort cannot fully reclaim the abandoned child, for “David Copperfield as text defines David Copperfield as

178 hero heuristically, but in a mysterious and disappointing way it defines neither David

Copperfield nor heroism. The questions and answers remain teasingly and obstinately posed between the covers of the book” (285). In my reading, the riddle is that Agnes appropriates

David’s heroic title. Although David cannot bring himself to outright confess this actuality, he still commences his autobiography with the invitation to consider whether (or not) he can in fact claim this status for himself. Such uncertainty hearkens back to Oliver Twist’s narrative indecision, wherein “every action is surrounded by a cluster of ghostly alternatives, signalled by an insistent counterfactual grammar of ‘could have,’ ‘would have,’ and ‘might have’” (Douglas-Fairhurst 277). Modifying this point for David Copperfield, the “ghostly alternative” to “whether or…[not]…” is not a ghost but the Angel in the House.

The answer to his provocative introductory pledge haunts David much like his recurring lament of “an old unhappy loss or want of something” (629). He cannot outright identify Agnes as the hero/ine of his life, but the conception of legacy is so integral that it must be mentioned from the outset. This subject is ever on David’s mind, even from an early age. When young, orphaned David makes up his mind to escape to Dover, he considers the potential impact upon his reputation:

Being a very honest little creature, and unwilling to disgrace the memory I was going to leave behind me at Murdstone and Grinby’s, I considered myself bound to remain until Saturday night; and, as I had been paid a week’s wages in advance when I first came there, not to present myself in the counting-house at the usual hour, to receive my stipend. (171)

Once again Dickens’s personal connection to the text is evident; after all, “Dickens did not abandon his intention [to write an autobiography], but rather decided to write his life in a different way” (Lougy 408). Another one of the novel’s working titles was The Last Will and

Testament of David Copperfield the Younger, Being His Personal History, Which He Left as a Legacy (Oxford World’s Classics David Copperfield 873). Dickens—and his obsession with legacy—is very much alive in the novel, and Agnes’s arguable appropriation of David’s

179 heroic title is linked to Dickens’s reluctance to overtly write his own life. Moreover, a distinctive discomfort in fully embracing the heroic title appears in all Dickens’s novels dealing with life-writing, wherein the supposed hero-protagonist is often compromised by other, seemingly lesser characters (or fades into the background as does Little Dorrit).

Agnes: the Hero/ine of David Copperfield’s Life?

As I have outlined, David declines to cleanly satisfy lingering curiosity about who he thinks “these pages” reveal as the “hero of [his] own life” (1). However, comparing the commencing and concluding lines of David Copperfield’s autobiography provides insight into David’s thoughts. As we have seen, David opens with the famous “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show” (1). Tellingly, he concludes his life history with a tribute to Agnes, “the dear presence, without which I were nothing…O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed…” (855; emphasis mine). David’s conclusion hereby responds to his opening promise; the final pages of his life history reiterate Agnes’s impact upon his life and fulfil what he pledged to reveal at the outset. For all the discussion surrounding David’s self-reliance, sans Agnes, he is “nothing.” This reliance upon Agnes transcends the traditional support given by the Victorian Angel in the House in anchoring the domestic sphere. Agnes undoubtedly fits into this stereotypical category, yet David’s dependence upon her is absolute, even as it extends beyond the domestic sphere to cover all aspects of David’s life.

Andrew Sanders notes that “At its close David is less conscious of personal heroism and of his place in the tale he has told than he is of the inspiring, and inspiriting, presence of

Agnes…” (Oxford World’s Classics Introduction to David Copperfield vii). However, the text also affords the interpretation that David is fully conscious of both his “personal heroism” and of Agnes, for she is in fact the answer to his promise to reveal his life’s hero.

180

Dickens’s number plans for David Copperfield (reprinted in the Clarendon edition of the novel) further cement Agnes’s centrality: Chapter LVIII “Absence” is one wherein

David’s “Despondency changed by Agnes; Loves her—And finds, dreamily, that he has long loved her. Too late…For he made her his sister! Her, & her own noble heart” (Clarendon

774). The good in this chapter hinges upon Agnes, while David assumes the blame for his predicament. The concluding chapter, LXIV, “A Last Retrospect” tells a similar tale: “Close with Agnes” (Clarendon 775). Dickens does not conclude with David recapping his achievements or reiterating his own self-reliance in overcoming adversity. Rather, Dickens chooses to have the protagonist—the presumed hero—conclude his own life history by reiterating someone else’s significance, via Agnes’s “one face, shining on me like a Heavenly light by which I see all other objects…” (855). This statement is strikingly similar to C.S.

Lewis’s observation, nearly a century later, that “I believe in Christianity as I believe the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else” (141). Agnes influences David’s entire worldview, religious and otherwise; he has no perspective apart from her. In a similar manner, J. Hillis Miller suggests that “David has that relation to Agnes which a devout Christian has to God, the creator of his selfhood, without whom he would be nothing” (157). Miller does not project Agnes as the hero/ine of David’s life, but he does assign her a pivotal role in shaping David’s identity. I will now assess Agnes’s heroism according to the three critical components of Dickensian heroism outlined above: self- reliance, perseverance, and being right.

David never explicitly names “the hero of my own life” (1)—but rather hints at the answer by concluding with Agnes—because he does harbour some anxiety over this result, given it means displacing himself. This anxiety is evinced by his prolonged wandering (i.e. procrastinating) in Europe before at last professing his love for Agnes near the conclusion of his autobiography. Shadows hinting at something darker marring David’s adoration of Agnes

181 have lingered since their initial meeting, when David writes that “Although her face was quite bright and happy, there was a tranquillity about it, and about her—a quiet, good, calm spirit—that I never have forgotten; that I never shall forget” (217; emphasis mine). This italicised portion echoes Dickens’s own pained recollection, contained in his surviving autobiographical fragment, that his mother, Elizabeth Dickens, pushed for his return to the torturous drudgery of the blacking factory: “I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back” (Forster 30). This memory haunted Dickens for the rest of his life. It is arresting, then, that David’s language about a supposed positive—meeting Agnes—so closely mirrors Dickens’s language about a definitive negative—the source of his strained relationship with his mother.

One interpretation of this inverse is that Dickens tries to rewrite his painful maternal recollections in a positive way via Agnes. Patten argues that “Since in Copperfield (1849-50)

Dickens rewrites his childhood, he may have to some degree discharged his anger and reconsidered the trauma in those pages. David learns that all the abuses and neglect he experienced in childhood have made him what he is, a loved and successful author. Failure establishes the grounds for success” (Boz 27). Nonetheless, Patten’s reading does not account for the possibility that this very positivity Agnes imparts to David—her fortitude and wisdom that in turn bolster him—also thwarts David’s ability to be the hero of his life, as Agnes takes that title instead. The similar language Dickens uses to describe his own mother and David’s wife can therefore both be seen as the souring of roles that should be nurturing and supportive. Dickens’s hero-protagonist remains fractured, and the pained echoes from

Dickens’s recollections of his mother are only partially redeemed: Agnes’s very positivity is so intense that it warps David’s ability to function on his own, thus compromising the positive via negative extremes. He is so entranced by her virtue that it entraps him; he is

“nothing” (855) without her; she encompasses his very identity. “‘I am sure I am not like

182 myself when I am away,’ said [David]. ‘I seem to want my right hand, when I miss you’”

(269). Without Agnes, David is stunted emotionally and (metaphorically) deformed physically. In keeping with this sense of deformation, David credits his triumphs to Agnes, but he assigns his failures to himself. For instance, when pondering his past regret in maintaining too platonic a relationship with Agnes, David laments that “She in whom I might have inspired a dearer love, I had taught to be my sister...It was right that I should pay the forfeit of my headlong passion. What I reaped, I had sown” (809). The courage Dickens lost to Maria Beadnell shortly before writing David’s life, haunts David’s narrative; David even internalises blame for wronging both himself and Agnes through his foolish teaching.

Conversely, Agnes’s teaching is faultless. When David heeds her advice, he prospers.

During David’s courtship of his first wife, Dora, Agnes helps him win her hand by instructing

David how to interact with her guardian aunts. David pens Agnes a “fervent and grateful” letter “narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice” (587).

After Dora’s death, David undertakes healing travel. He cannot recall precisely who suggested this course of action, but he ultimately credits it to Agnes, since, “The spirit of

Agnes so pervaded all we thought, and said, and did, in that time of sorrow, that I assume I may refer the project to her influence” (750). Agnes is David’s compass, and without her guidance, he strays off course, making poor decisions: “‘Whenever I have not had you,

Agnes, to advise and approve in the beginning, I have seemed to go wild, and to get into all sorts of difficulty’” (551). An example of this difficulty is David’s drunken revel with

Steerforth; his shame is intensified by Agnes seeing him at his worst. “‘If it had been any one but you, Agnes,’ said I, turning away my head, ‘I should not have minded it half so much.

But that it should have been you who saw me! I almost wish I had been dead, first’” (357).

Agnes’s opinion is as valuable to David as life itself. Agnes subsequently warns him against his “‘bad Angel’” Steerforth (357). Despite how much David esteems Agnes’s opinion, his

183 hero-worship of Steerforth prevents him from perceiving her wisdom at first. David is too blinded by his adoration of Steerforth to see the older boy’s true character. It is not until

Steerforth entices Little Em’ly away (and nearly ruins her life) that David realises his misplaced reverence for his former hero.

The passage in which Agnes warns David about Steerforth’s dangerous character has often been discussed in critical commentary, most often to highlight the distinction between

Agnes as David’s “good angel” and Steerforth as his “bad angel.” I employ this scene first to illustrate David’s reliance upon Agnes, and second to demonstrate how she is always right, both of which are heroic in Dickens’s mind. David falters, while Agnes is steady; she shapes his character. David confesses to Agnes that he wants “‘reliance’” and tells her first “‘I rely on you’” and then echoes “‘Now, my reliance is on you’” (550; 551). David assigns reliance

(i.e. dependence) to Agnes rather than to himself. Aunt Betsey continually admonishes David to be self-reliant, but in actuality, Agnes is the self-reliant one upon whom David depends.

The first time David sees Agnes crying, he attempts to comfort her in “a foolish, helpless manner” (361) however, “Agnes was too superior to me in character and purpose, as I know well now, whatever I might know or not know then, to be long in need of my entreaties.”

(315). He needs her far more than she needs him.

Agnes’s academic teaching is also vital to David’s development. She assists David academically when she “looked into [David’s books], and showed me what she knew of them

(which was no slight matter, though she said it was), and what was the best way to learn and understand them” (226). Agnes has confidence in David when he doubts himself, and encourages him that he may eventually be top boy at school (259-260). He eventually achieves this honour (262), but without Agnes’s encouragement and support during his seasons of doubt, David would not have performed nearly so well. She perseveres on his behalf when he is tempted to give up hope. Self-reliance is tempered by self-doubt.

184

Confessions like “Agnes has my confidence completely, always” (262) can easily be tweaked to “Agnes is my confidence.” David declares that “How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love” (591). David never explicitly fulfils his pledge at the start of the text; however, asides like these point to Agnes as the hero/ine of his life.

Agnes also helps David heal, which enables him to persevere. When David starts school at Doctor Strong’s, his environment is far healthier than it was at Salem House, but he still keenly feels his differences from the other boys and the weight of his past experiences.

“My mind ran upon what they would think, if they knew of my familiar acquaintance with the King’s Bench Prison?” (222). David records how he was “ashamed” of his knowledge of the seedier side of London (223). The result of this anxiety is “that I felt distrustful of my slightest look and gesture; shrunk within myself whensoever I was approached by one of my new schoolfellows…” (223). Fortunately, the Wickfields’ house is a healing refuge for

David: “the grave shadow of the staircase seemed to fall upon my doubts and fears, and to make the past more indistinct” (223). This affect renders him “hopeful of becoming a passable sort of boy yet” (223). Although David does not directly ascribe this change to

Agnes Wickfield, (indeed, he refers to the house as “Mr. Wickfield’s old house” (223)) the very next word after this hopeful sentiment is “Agnes” (223). It is true that David has persevered through his past ordeals, even before he met Agnes, but she is the one who helps him hope again (223). Before Agnes, he was merely surviving.

Nonetheless, troubling aspects deface David’s relationship with Agnes, transitioning her healing influence from a reforming positive to a deforming negative by taking it too far.

As previously noted, there are perplexing similarities between the language David employs to describe Agnes and the language Dickens used when recalling deep harm inflicted upon him by his mother. Another unsettling element is the theme of blindness. First, David is blinded

185 by his hero-worship of Steerforth, but he is also blinded by his reliance upon Agnes. Both instances of blindness reap unhealthy repercussions. Aunt Betsey calls David “‘blind! blind! blind!’” (489). Critics often accept that this blindness of David’s is due to his infatuation with

Dora.67 However, the text also suggests that David is in fact blinded by his complete dependence upon Agnes. In a passage near the novel’s conclusion, David subtly blames

Agnes for his (over) reliance upon her:

“If you had been more mindful of yourself, and less of me, when we grew up here together, I think my heedless fancy never would have wandered from you. But you were so much better than I, so necessary to me in every boyish hope and disappointment, that to have you to confide in, and rely upon in everything, became a second nature, supplanting for the time the first and greater one of loving you as I do!” (841) Agnes’s selfless devotion to David in their youth—which elicits his burgeoning dependence upon her—blinded him to her potential as a romantic partner. This blindness is significant in that Agnes (and Aunt Betsey) are the ones blessed with insight. Yet again, Agnes is right, and

David is wrong.

Inconsistency is another theme woven throughout the text, further destabilising supposed norms in a life history where the protagonist is not the hero. David laments the

“perplexities and inconsistencies” comprising “the shifting quicksands of my mind” (798) as he struggles with whether or not he should pursue Agnes romantically. He has long been unable to envision anyone “worthy” of Agnes’s love (himself included): “‘there is no one that

I know of, who deserves to love you, Agnes. Some one of a nobler character, and more worthy altogether than any one I have ever seen here, must rise up, before I give my consent.

In the time to come, I shall have a wary eye on all admirers; and shall exact a great deal from the successful one, I assure you” (238; emphasis original). David certainly does demand a

67 Gwendolyn B. Needham posits that “Although love’s proverbial blindness is excuse enough, Dickens makes David’s infatuation still more probable by having the bewitching doll [Dora] an almost exact replica of the lad’s mother—prettily pettish, innocently vain, truly fond, charmingly childish” (96).

186 high price for successfully winning Agnes’s heart; he is continually veering off course, causing them both to suffer. Like David’s convoluted assessment of his relationship to

Agnes, his perspective on her influence over his wandering ways is likewise enigmatic:

[Agnes] filled my heart with such good resolutions, strengthened my weakness so, by her example, so directed—I know not how, she was too modest and gentle to advise me in many words—the wandering ardour and unsettled purpose within me, that all the little good I have done, and all the harm I have forborne, I solemnly believe I may refer to her. (438-439)

Exactly how Agnes accomplishes this feat is a complete mystery. Somehow—as if by magic—she has silently strengthened and guided David to the extent that he credits her with any “good” he has enacted. Moreover, he once again attributes his perseverance to her by referencing her role in his forbearance of harm.

This credit necessarily extends to Agnes’s role in redeeming David’s frequently (self) deplored “undisciplined heart.” In an oft-quoted article on the subject, Gwendolyn B.

Needham argues that David at last conquers himself and is “reward[ed]” with Agnes:

“Having thus proved his hero’s disciplined heart, Dickens rewards him with Agnes’ hand and life-long love” (106). David does not actually deserve this hero’s reward though; it is only through Agnes that he survives the shock of Dora’s and Steerforth’s deaths. David here compares his “undisciplined heart” to a mortal wound, as he perceives his hope ebbing away and with it his will to live (793). At this critical point, Agnes sends David a letter which essentially restores him to life: “I put the letter in my breast, and thought what had I been an hour ago!” (795). In his reply, David writes that “without her I was not, and I never had been, what she thought me; but, that she inspired me to be that, and I would try. I did try” (795).

Agnes’s encouragement, and, in particular, her confidence in him, enable David to resume his work and build his career as an author. Near the end of his sojourn in Europe, when he allows himself to entertain the possibility of a romantic future with Agnes, David at first convinces himself that it is too late: “I had always felt my weakness, in comparison with her constancy

187 and fortitude; and now I felt it more and more” (797). David’s eventual declaration of love is

(unsurprisingly) excruciating and (as per usual) utterly dependent upon Agnes for success.

When David finally summons the courage to profess his love, he does so on the strength of Agnes’s tears, which “awakened something in me, bringing promise to my heart”

(840). For all the focus upon self-reliance, David so doubts himself that he even second- guesses his own convictions. In actuality, the novel’s resolution is not a simple case of an at- last-happily-ever-after; David has not really proven himself worthy of the hero’s reward. This honour clearly goes to Agnes: “‘What I am, you have made me, Agnes. You should know best’” (821). To this end, David concludes the text with Agnes next to him. He reiterates her essentiality: “O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!” (855). Even though David does not explicitly credit Agnes with being the hero of his life, he concludes the novel by reinforcing her significance in shaping his identity. David opens his history by pledging that his written record will reveal his life’s hero, and he concludes his history by pledging to continue following her example for the rest of his life. Agnes’s influence has transformed David from a little lost boy to a confident and successful novelist. She kept the wanderer from veering hopelessly off course and tamed his undisciplined heart. David has relied upon her for instruction and sustenance; she has inspired him to persevere; time has proven her right even when David was wrong.

Any claim David might make on a heroic title belongs to Agnes, the one who overtly displays the qualities of Dickensian heroism: self-reliance, perseverance, and being right. However, in an unexpected twist, crediting Agnes to this extent further cements the hero-protagonist split in Dickens’s life-writing novels. She does instil David with confidence, but in an extreme way that erodes his ability to envision an identity separate from her. Something that should be positive is instead warped into a negative, and any attempt by Dickens to rewrite the pain in

188 his past is ultimately thwarted. The words from his own autobiographical fragment—there describing Dickens’s despair over his mother’s role in returning him to the blacking factory—and resurfacing in connection with Agnes in David Copperfield’s autobiography: “I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget…” easily adapt again to encompass the rejection which prompted Dickens to burn his life history. David forfeits to

Agnes the right to be “hero of [his] own life” (1). Even though he has managed to produce an autobiography, the result is nonetheless still tainted by Dickens’s own “lost

[autobiographical] courage.”

Shifting Names, Shifting Identity

The instability engendered by David Copperfield’s hero-protagonist split further manifests in David’s rotation of names, ranging from his mother’s gentle “Davy” to

Steerforth’s bantering “Daisy.” Critics including A. E. Dyson discuss David’s multiple names and how this signifies a lack of confident identity: “Perhaps this suggests something flexible in him: is he the potter or the clay?” (119). However, this is more than mere malleability, particularly when aligned with the possibility of Agnes usurping his heroic identity. Nina

Burgis instead imputes the dearth of confidence to Dickens himself, connecting the repeated alterations to both the protagonist’s name and the novel’s title to “the uncertainties attendant on the new departure of telling a story in the first person” (Clarendon David Copperfield xxiv).68 Such an interpretation is reminiscent of Dickens’s early anxieties about his emerging authorial identity.

The name David’s Aunt Betsey assigns him is particularly significant in further clarifying the connection between his shifting names and shifting identity, since “Trotwood” is is not a nickname or a play on his Christian name but an outright replacement. Shortly

68 Schor points out how “at several points in the original manuscript [David is] actually referred to as Charles by his confused creator, who hadn’t noticed, until Forster pointed it out, that he had given his hero his own initials” (11). 189 before David’s birth, his Aunt Betsey Trotwood is convinced the baby will be a girl and requests she be named “Betsey Trotwood Copperfield” (7). Upon learning that the baby is, in fact, a boy, Aunt Betsey beats the attending doctor’s head with her bonnet and marches away

(12). Aunt Betsey’s consternation stems from disappointment over the lost opportunity to redeem her own story. During her plea for a namesake Aunt Betsey asserts that “There must be no mistakes in life with this Betsey Trotwood” (7; emphasis original), and so unequivocal are Aunt Betsey’s feelings on the matter, that her head jerks in time with her declaration “as if her own old wrongs were working within her” (7). Later we learn that Aunt Betsey has suffered greatly due to an unwise marriage. When David arrives in Dover, Aunt Betsey declares that David “‘has done a pretty piece of business. He has run away. Ah! His sister,

Betsey Trotwood, never would have run away.’ My aunt shook her head firmly, confident in the character and behaviour of the girl who never was born” (188). Later, Aunt Betsey asks

David’s opinion of the eccentric Mr. Dick. David is initially evasive, and Aunt Betsey urges him “‘Come! Your sister Betsey Trotwood would have told me what she thought of any one, directly. Be as like your sister as you can, and speak out!’” (198) Aunt Betsey does, however, commend David’s courage when he stands up to her in disagreement over her wrongful assessment of his beloved Peggotty (193). And, shortly thereafter, Aunt Betsey levels disappointment on the non-existent Betsey Trotwood, who “disappointed” Aunt Betsey ten years previously, presumably by not being born (199).

David does prove his worth to his aunt, but her acceptance of him is on her terms not his. As such, when Aunt Betsey becomes his new guardian, refusing to believe the

Murdstones’ assessment of him as “‘the worst boy’” (204) she re-christens him Trotwood

Copperfield. “Thus I began my new life, in a new name, and with everything new about me”

(209) David recalls. David continues to gain ground on his sister-who-never-was, and Aunt

Betsey “shortened my adopted name of Trotwood into Trot; and even encouraged me to hope

190 that if I went on as I had begun, I might take equal rank in her affections with my sister

Betsey Trotwood” (211). There are humorous edges to David’s recollections here, but, when juxtaposed with his anxiety about whether or not he will be proven his life’s own hero, these references to shifting names and competition with a non-existent sister are rendered rather more troubling as they point to another female who ultimately usurps him—at least in his aunt’s mind.

Agnes, the one responsible for shaping David’s character and identity—and outdistancing him as hero/ine of his life history—likewise calls David by his adoptive name,

Trotwood, thus exacerbating the instability of identity in a novel which divides the hero and protagonist. Indeed, David’s shifting names emphasise the unsettled (i.e. wandering) nature of the text as a whole; from birth, David has felt out of place. Since his father died before he was born, David categorises himself as “a posthumous child” (2) entering “a world not at all excited on the subject of [my] arrival” (3). David is unsure where to assign his own heroism because his identity has been in flux from the beginning. Is he Davy or Trotwood? In fact, he is both, depending upon the situation. When David’s baby brother arrives, the Copperfields’ housekeeper, Peggotty, muses whether Aunt Betsey might “‘be inclined to forgive [David] now’” (108). (As if a subsequent disappointment and another lost opportunity to redeem herself through a female namesake would clear David of blame that was not his to bear in the first place.) Misplaced blame and shifting identities contribute to David’s outsourcing of his heroic identity to Agnes, his sole source of constancy.

Conclusion

David was born at midnight on a Friday, wherein gossipy old women declared him

“destined to be unlucky in life” (1). David’s assessment of this prediction is that “I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show better than my history whether that prediction was verified or falsified by the result” (1). David continually points to his history

191 to provide answers, an action which is simultaneously straightforward and evasive, as it throws interpretive responsibility back upon the reader. It is straightforward in that by pointing to his text, David seemingly has nothing to hide, but evasive because he declines to outright answer the question. This tendency is replicated in his refusal to satisfy our curiosity surrounding his history’s opening statement: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show” (1).

On the one hand, this is a bold assertion, but on the other hand, David never explicitly states the answer. As I have argued, he does signpost his own feelings about Agnes deserving his life’s heroic title, but he also hides behind his ostensible openness by placing the burden of proof upon his text. Jeremy Tambling posits, “Who is the hero of Copperfield's life? [...] in a novel where identities are interchangeable, we are not to know” (xxxii). Perhaps we cannot know for certain, but the text affords the reading I have proposed: Agnes is the hero/ine of

David Copperfield’s life, thus Dickens’s hero and protagonist are once again severed. Agnes is the one who possesses the qualities of Dickensian heroism in her self-reliance, perseverance, and ability to be perpetually right about everything. However, the extreme nature of David’s dependence upon her culminates in the hero-protagonist split, a pattern— propelled by Dickens’s own anxieties about legacy—which appears across Dickens’s life- writing novels. The problem is that Dickens takes Agnes’s support too far, and instead instead of being a helpmeet she becomes a crutch. Dickens often delves into biofictional extremes in these co-mingled novels (those which combine elements of life-writing and fiction) as if the tension between heroism on the one hand and anxiety on the other is simply too taxing, ultimately resulting in one destabilising the other.

John Forster picks up on these warring extremes in his biography of Dickens: “Like his life, his genius was made up of alternations of mirth and melancholy” (477). Mirth and melancholy, heroism and anxiety: rarely does Dickens find a happy medium. Even his energy

192 eventually halted him. David Copperfield’s life is comprised of similarly extreme alternatives. Before Agnes, David considers the possibility of “growing up to be a shabby moody man, lounging an idle life away, about the village; as well as on the feasibility of my getting rid of this picture by going away somewhere, like the hero of a story, to seek my fortune...” (128-129). David envisions two possible futures for himself, on completely opposite ends of the spectrum. He will either be an utter failure or an outright hero. His eventual reality is somewhat more complex, although no less devoid of extremes. For David,

Agnes has shaped his character, infusing him with fortitude; unfortunately, he also develops a debilitating dependence—bordering upon idolatry even—where she is concerned. David concludes his life’s history by praising Agnes; she thus bookends the novel by providing the solution to his enigmatic opening promise that the pages of his history would reveal his life’s hero. I propose that Agnes is the “anybody else” (1) David hints could be his heroic possibility at the outset. Whether or not Agnes is a hero/ine we can praise, however, is another story entirely.

193

Chapter 4: (Fictional) Biography Wherein Dickens’s “lost courage” materialises in an effort to promote the merits of the misunderstood, but in fact results in perpetuating the hero-protagonist split In the Preface to Little Dorrit, Dickens states that he “became Little Dorrit’s biographer” (7). However, despite identifying Little Dorrit as the biographical subject, she is perplexingly absent for large portions of her own life history, as other characters and events assume narrative priority. This tendency to fade into the background in her own biography means that Little Dorrit is not the protagonist in the most literal sense of the term, since the protagonist is meant to be the text’s central character. To this end, the Oxford World’s

Classics Introduction to Little Dorrit deems Arthur Clennam “the central figure of the novel”

(viii). Therefore, the hero-protagonist split—which I have thus far been examining in the context of the protagonist failing to be the hero—reverses in Little Dorrit. Amy Dorrit demonstrates self-reliance, perseverance, and a tendency to be right. By thus adhering to the principles of Dickensian heroism outlined in the preceding chapter, she is the life-writing novel’s hero/ine, but not its protagonist. Unlike David Copperfield and Mr. Pickwick before her, Little Dorrit does not sacrifice her heroic spot to another character through some personal shortcoming, but she is nonetheless marginalised in her own life history despite being the titular heroine.

This chapter, like the two before it, heeds Dickens’s mandate to evaluate his legacy in the context of his “published works,” by examining his (published) novel Little Dorrit. As I have been discussing, despite the dearth of (surviving) life-writing about himself, Dickens was clearly interested in the genre, and his turn as the biographer of a fictional character is in keeping with his tendency to create biofictions by conflating real and fictional realms. In fact,

Peter Ackroyd’s biography of the author points out that during seasons where Dickens did not write as heavily, “it is almost as if all that imaginative appetite for the creation of character was transferred to his own self; so that he became, as it were, a series of characters in search

194 of an author” (474). In Little Dorrit’s case, this search culminates when Dickens’s self- caricatures meet another fictional character in need of an author—specifically a biographer— and this character is of course Amy Dorrit herself. This chapter considers how the collision between reality and fiction, and the divide between the hero and the protagonist, impact

Dickens’s own legacy in Little Dorrit—a life-writing novel framed as a fictional biography.

“I became Little Dorrit’s biographer”: Life and Art Collide

Life-writing and hero-worship have long been linked. Hermoine Lee reminds us how, historically speaking, “Western biography has its origins in such educational stories of remarkable men” (22). However, as discussed in the previous chapter, the parameters of the

“heroic” have evolved considerably, and narrative heroes are no longer required to enact epic feats. Virginia Woolf’s “The Art of Biography” (1939) takes a characteristically Modernist approach by querying “Is not anyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography — the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious? And what is greatness? And what smallness? We must revise our standards of merit and set up new heroes for our admiration” (121).69 Some seventy years later, Juliette

Atkinson pursues this thread in her book Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of

Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives (2010). Here she connects the biographer and his/her biographical subject, arguing that the Victorians’ biographical interests had in fact included less overtly exemplary individuals, and that some “biographers used narratives of hidden lives in a self-reflexive manner” (31). One way this is apparent is that “A biographer always acts as a mediator between his subject and the reader. However, whereas a biography of a

‘great’ man implies an act of homage, the biography of an ‘obscure’ man involves an act of patronage...To a significant extent, biographies of hidden lives are therefore as much about

69 Similarly, Lytton Strachey’s infamous Eminent Victorians (1918) symbolised the sentiments of its time via taking “great delight in puncturing overinflated Victorian balloons” (Norton Victorian Age 981). 195 the biographer as they are about the subject” (13). In Little Dorrit, Dickens’s selection of two

“obscure” nobodies as his hero and heroine—the marginalised Amy Dorrit and the unfortunate Arthur Clennam—illuminates his fascination with the tension between anxiety and heroism in (his)story. Such a selection again foregrounds the hero-protagonist split; Little

Dorrit is just as much about Arthur Clennam as it is about its ostensible biographical subject.

This pairing of misunderstood characters also illustrates “the ability of hidden lives to absorb the biographer’s autobiographical concerns” (Atkinson 61). Little Dorrit’s continued disappearance and Arthur Clennam’s weakness are both symptomatic of the life-writing courage Dickens lost roughly a decade and a half before: Little Dorrit disappears from her own life history, and Arthur Clennam struggles to persevere in the face of perpetual disappointment. Moreover, as I shall discuss shortly, Dickens’s loss was intensified during writing Little Dorrit by a failed reunion with Maria Beadnell.

One of Little Dorrit’s best aspects is her selflessness, as demonstrated in her determination to help her siblings, Fanny and Tip, live outside the Marshalsea while she remains to care for their father. Dickens’s narrator—Little Dorrit’s primary biographer— records Amy’s determination to put others first, thus rendering her sacrificial behaviour public knowledge. This tactic was common among nineteenth-century life writers: “Victorian editors, biographers and reviewers usually composed ‘laudatory’ portraits that presented the subjects as emulable ‘minor’ or major heroes, whose life experience provided instructions for self-improvement, intellectual development and emotional sophistication” (Millim 29). Even though her family may undervalue her efforts, Amy Dorrit’s selfless perseverance on behalf of others is still presented as instructional. Little Dorrit qualifies as an “emulable ‘minor’ or major hero[ine]” via her biographer’s portrayal of her strengths. Dickens hereby adapts a life- writing tactic for his own fictional purposes, but by including elements of life-writing methodology in his fiction, he also invites autobiographical scrutiny of his fictional

196 constructs. Readers can query how the fictional biographer’s authorial agenda is reflected in his calculated approach, effectively re-focusing attention on the biographer’s biofictional proclivities.

As previously outlined in this thesis, Dickens comprehended both life and art through writing. I revisit this significance here to contextualise Dickens’s positioning himself as the biographer of a fictional character. Robert Gottlieb observes that “It seems at times that nothing is real for him until he’s written it down” (35). Such a concept helps explain why

Dickens could not bring himself to write (in his own autobiography) about his failed relationship with Maria Beadnell; committing the memory to paper would further cement the suffering. Moreover, Dickens saw no logical conflict—despite the paradox—of fashioning his own legacy through fiction, and he writes in the Preface to the 1847 cheap edition of The

Pickwick Papers: “Nevertheless, as Prefaces, though seldom read, are continually written, no doubt for the behoof of that so richly and so disinterestedly endowed personage, Posterity

(who will come into an immense fortune), I add my legacy to the general remembrance”

(Penguin 760). Dickens’s fixation on life-writing and legacy is emphasised in this gesture toward future readership, to whom he envisions allocating a generous literary endowment.

Punning on the term legacy, Dickens hints at both the legacy of inheritance—in a legal sense—and his own lasting remembrance. His wordplay belies the anxieties lurking within the text itself, which I evaluated in Chapter 2.

Dickens’s penchant for conflating reality and fiction has been well documented.

Critical discourse on this subject often examines the significance of people from Dickens’s real life appearing in his fiction. For example, the recurring appearance of Dickens’s dead sister-in-law Mary Hogarth under the guise of his idealised heroines has been repeatedly analysed by scholars including Michael Slater, whose work on the topic I referenced in

Chapter 3. Dickens’s whisking of people from his “real” life into the pages of his novels

197 sometimes caused trouble for the author. Claire Tomalin relates that Dickens’s neighbour,

Mrs. Seymour Hill, threatened legal action against Dickens for her personification as Miss

Mowcher in David Copperfield. Dickens managed to salvage the matter by transforming her character from “badly behaved” to exemplary (Dickens 224-225). Biographer Edgar

Johnson—in his characteristic defence of Dickens—describes the author as “moved to remorse” about giving Mrs. Seymour Hill “a moment’s distress” (both quotes from 674).

Another troublesome life-to-art conversion involved the similarities between Dickens’s friend

Leigh Hunt and Bleak House’s idiosyncratic idler Harold Skimpole. According to Forster,

Dickens never meant to hurt Hunt, even reassuring his friend that, despite quirks shared by both Hunt and Skimpole, “The character is not you” (522). Nonetheless, Hunt was still hurt by his less-than-flattering affiliation with Skimpole, and “the harm was done” (Tomalin

Dickens 243). For better or for worse, written words impact reputation.

This Dickensian process of fictionalisation also worked in reverse, for Dickens often imagined those around him as fictional creatures—even without positioning them in his novels. Robert Gottlieb notes how Dickens’s description of his infant son Walter “look[ing] when he is being washed, like a plucked turkey” (75) effectively renders Walter a Dickensian character through his father’s “relentless eye and pen” (76). Stranger still are the instances where reality and fiction collide in Dickens naming his children after characters from his novels. The previous chapter referenced Dickens’s naming his third daughter “Dora” after

David Copperfield’s first wife—whose demise he was crafting at the time of his baby’s birth.

Less disturbing but still rather bizarre is Dickens naming his son after a female character in one of his stories. Ackroyd points out how “The fact that Francis was named after a character in The Chimes suggests how easily Dickens moved from his fictional family to his real

198 family” (452).70 John Forster records that Dickens “had his own creations always by his side.

They were living, speaking companions” (603). And this is my very point in chronicling

Dickens’s fluid transitions between his own life and the life histories he conjured on paper:

Dickens’s narrative creations lived for their author, thus writing the biography of a fictional character was perfectly natural for him. When Dickens’s characters died—albeit at his authorial hand—he mourned their loss. Writing to his friend Miss Coutts on 18th January

1847, Dickens laments, “Between ourselves—Paul [Dombey] is dead. He died on Friday night about 10 o’Clock; and as I had no hope of getting to sleep afterwards, I went out, and walked about Paris until breakfast-time next morning” (Pilgrim 5:9).71 This loss aroused

Dickens’s pervasive restlessness, urging the author to roam Paris throughout the witching hours.

Since fact and fiction often merged in Dickens’s mind, it is important to again acknowledge—as I did in the Introduction and in Chapter 1—the fluidity between life-writing and fiction. Biography, which is the life-writing form explored in this chapter, is still steeped in authorial construction, despite its traditional “non-fiction” categorisation. William

Wordsworth writes how “biography, though differing in some essentials from works of fiction, is nevertheless, like them, an art.”72 Well over one hundred years later, Linda

Hutcheon reiterates that “to write of anyone’s history is to order, to give form to disparate facts; in short, to fictionalize” (The Canadian Postmodern 82). The biographer, then, is not so

70 To be clear, it is Francis’s nickname (“Chickenstalker”) that is taken from The Chimes, rather than his forename.

71 Prior to writing Paul to his death, Dickens had expressed more calculated narrative control regarding his character’s impending demise, writing to Forster on 6th December 1846 that “Paul, I shall slaughter at the end of number 5” (Letters 178). Nonetheless, when the time came to actually “slaughter” Paul, the fictional youth had so possessed Dickens’s mind that the author was deeply grieved.

72 A Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, III, 115-36.

199 distant from the novelist as might be assumed—according to the Encyclopedia of Life-

Writing, biography and fiction share a desire to animate the subject (109)—and Dickens’s biofictional experimentations illustrates this entanglement. Ina Schabert further queries, “But where is the line to be drawn between the novelist’s imagined facts and the biographer’s imaginative use of the facts?” (1). In Little Dorrit, Dickens declines to draw this line, electing instead to merge the novelist’s and biographer’s roles in his capacity as Amy Dorrit’s fictional biographer.

We witness these roles collide in Dickens’s easy establishment of himself as the fictional Amy Dorrit’s biographer. In the Preface to Little Dorrit, Dickens relates without irony that “I became Little Dorrit’s biographer” (7). We do not know how this came about;

Dickens merely relates that it happened. Little Dorrit’s reality is reinforced as the passive voice hints that she has not been constructed by the author. Dickens need not delve into detail regarding his research or support his claims with evidence—Little Dorrit lives, and he simply

“became” her biographer. The conceit of biography is sustained throughout the text via

Arthur Clennam’s role as a surrogate biographer who “resolved to watch Little Dorrit, and know more of her story” (68). When Clennam commences this role, we do witness how he uncovers his information concerning Little Dorrit: “For these particulars or generalities concerning Little Dorrit, Mr. Arthur was indebted in the course of the day to his own eyes and to Mrs. Affery’s tongue” (65). Clennam likewise speaks to other members of Amy

Dorrit’s community to learn more about her. However, we do not know where the narrator— presumably Dickens himself given his identification as “Little Dorrit’s biographer” (7)— obtains his “biographical” knowledge.

The word “became” is also interesting in its capacity to suggest a gradual progression or burgeoning. Dickens wrote the Preface—where he paratextually propels himself into the main text in the capacity of biographical narrator—in May 1857, after the novel had already

200 been serialised (Walder vii). By this point, Dickens had spent over a year and a half with his heroine, and Sherri Wolf relates how Little Dorrit’s character had grown in significance during this time: “If Little Dorrit’s minimal presence has a powerful influence on Arthur and the reader, the working notes to the novel indicate that it had a similar effect on Dickens and the narrative. Little Dorrit expanded in importance well beyond the author’s original intentions” (227). In fact, Dickens did not decide to officially alter the novel’s title from

Nobody’s Fault to Little Dorrit until some six months into the project, prompting Wolf to conclude that “The new title is symptomatic of Little Dorrit’s effect within and upon the narrative—the influence, the ‘sphere of action,’ of this tiny figure was expanding in and over the novel” (228). In essence, then, Little Dorrit willed herself into existence, for her story evolved from what Dickens initially envisioned as a different venture.

Strangely, however, her escalating significance still enacts the hero-protagonist split.

Despite being the title character—and thus presumably the main character—Little Dorrit is repeatedly pushed to the margins of the story. The theme of “nobody” thus stubbornly persisted even after Dickens changed the title “in honor of the heroine, who stepped in when he was at a standstill with a social satire called ‘Nobody’s Fault’” (Booth 193). Alison

Booth’s selected verbiage “stepped in” reinforces Little Dorrit as a living creature rather than a fictional construct, which is in keeping with Dickens stating—at the Preface penned upon completion of her history—that he “became [her] biographer” (7; emphasis mine). While she did live for Dickens, hints that he still had to actively render her appear in a letter Dickens wrote to John Forster in September 1855, revealing his grand plans for the young woman whose name would eventually comprise the novel’s title: “I can make Dorrit very strong in the story, I hope” (Letters 298). The editor’s note clarifies that this reference is indeed to

Amy Dorrit herself, who would not be christened Little Dorrit until later in the manuscript

(298). Dickens must still “make” Little Dorrit appear before stating that he “became” her

201 historian. Such a progression, hinging upon the interplay between active and passive,73 attests to the tension between Dickens’s real and fictional realms, which in turn illuminates the tension between heroism and anxiety. Dickens determines to make a heroine out of Amy

Dorrit, and she is an exemplar of the heroic traits Dickens prizes: self-reliance, perseverance, and being right. Little Dorrit is the one who holds her family together in prison, persevering on their behalf through her father’s debts, her sister’s selfishness, and her brother’s gambling problems. However, she is still repeatedly sidelined, mistreated, and overlooked; and, most significantly, she is a vanishing protagonist whose repeated disappearance splits the typically fused hero-protagonist position.

Unlike other nineteenth-century female protagonists Madame Bovary and Anna

Karenina, Little Dorrit characteristically shuns the spotlight. She is more shrinking. Alison

Booth asks, “Why is Little Dorrit not received as primarily ‘about’ its eponymous heroine?

[...] Critics have been more enthusiastic about the structures of which she forms a part; themes of imprisonment, red tape, shadows, disease, or genteel fictions seem to explain more than does the tender little cipher going about her chores” (194). Critical discourse then, often follows Dickens’s lead in failing to treat Little Dorrit as central to her own story, even though she is the titular character. Sherri Wolf constructs Little Dorrit as very active, even cunning, in her vanishing manoeuvres. According to Wolf, Little Dorrit’s “tactical invisibility” (235) is covertly orchestrated to enact surveillance upon those around her, which culminates in

“dissemination of her disciplinary power” (248). Ironically, then, through Amy’s seeming self-sacrifice, she in fact heightens others’ awareness of their own failures. Wolf interprets

Little Dorrit’s ostensible insignificance as powerful in bending others to her will; her

73 The Preface provides the key for perceiving the text as a whole. Here, Dickens frames the novel as (fictional) life-writing, and here, in a single sentence, Dickens deftly navigates between the invented residence of his fictional subject “that arose in my mind’s-eye” (7), and his status as her biographer, recording her imagined life at the real Marshalsea prison. Reality and fiction co-exist, even from the outset.

202 vulnerability amplifies Clennam’s guilt and entices him to help her (236-237). Such a reading ascribes authority to Little Dorrit’s shrinking presence, but this paradox in turn tarnishes

Dickens’s desire “to pursue the embodiment of his belief in a redemptive female character through ‘my Little Dorrit’” (Walder xi). It is a paradox which also points to the incongruity of splitting the hero and protagonist, for, despite Dickens’s gratitude for Amy’s appearance— which assisted him when he was floundering with Nobody’s Fault—and his commitment to rendering her “very strong” (as he told Forster, quoted above) she is noticeably absent in a narrative meant to chronicle her history.

This absence is not only at the outset, when traces of the previous project would be more apt to linger, but it is woven throughout the text.74 For instance, just over halfway through the novel, Little Dorrit is displaced for three consecutive chapters, from “The

Dowager Mrs. Gowan is reminded that ‘It Never Does,’” to “Appearance and

Disappearance,” and concluding with “The Dreams of Mrs. Flintwinch thicken.” Even these chapter titles shift the focus to other characters. Elsewhere, Little Dorrit’s biography must share space with Dickensian diatribes about the ills of the Circumlocution Office, descriptions of events at Bleeding Heart Yard, Miss Wade’s personal aside in the chapter entitled “The History of a Self-Tormenter,” and, of course, Arthur Clennam’s voluminous presence, including his interactions with other romantic interests Pet Meagles and Flora

Finching.

In this chapter, I discuss the impact of Dickens’s life-writing anxiety on Little Dorrit’s primary players, Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam. Peter Ackroyd proposes that “Little Dorrit is in part about the permanence and solidity of human identity” (470). Nonetheless, while

Dickens’s narrative presence consistently presents these vulnerable, typically under- appreciated characters in the best possible light—the hero-protagonist split still prevails. In a

74 As Alison Booth points out, “The Child of the Marshalsea is barely perceptible for six chapters” (205). 203 novel ostensibly about life-writing and longevity, Dickens channels his own anxiety about effectively writing his own life—and this endeavour’s associated failures—into an authorial mission to record the histories of his beloved fictional creations. Given Dickens’s penchant for merging fact and fiction, these (bio)fictional histories in turn offer an interesting glimpse into the author’s desire for his own legacy—one which is similarly fractured. According to

Carolyn Dever, “Dickens constructs a crisis in which self-understanding, represented as the ability to craft a coherent life story or autobiography, is entirely dependent on the solution to a mystery” (7). Dever’s argument (as related to Dickens) specifically focuses on the missing mother figure in Bleak House. Incidentally, her argument could be similarly explored in Little

Dorrit given Mrs. Clennam’s status as matriarchal impostor; however, I am applying it to my exploration of Dickens’s return to life-writing forms in his fiction, even though these forms are enigmatically absent in his own life. The search for what constitutes a successful life story is woven throughout Dickens’s life-writing novels, like a mystery he cannot comprehend.

Even within the novelistic realm, Little Dorrit must promulgate further fictions; her biography is thus steeped in multi-layered tensions between real life and the stories interwoven with this life, producing a life-writing mystery of a slightly different nature. Little

Dorrit’s sensitivity to her father’s fragility necessitates forming fictions from her everyday life. William Dorrit cannot abide the thought of his children—offspring of the “Father of the

Marshalsea”—working to survive, so Amy seeks to protect him from the truth that she works outside the prison as a seamstress. She conceals this fact from her father since she knows it would wound him. Her biographer relates, “So, over and above her other daily cares, the

Child of the Marshalsea had always upon her, the care of preserving the genteel fiction that they were all idle beggars together” (84). Little Dorrit’s commitment here foreshadows

Forster’s efforts on Dickens’s behalf several decades later, when Forster likewise enlists a

204

“genteel fiction” to enact biographical protection for Amy Dorrit’s former biographer.75

Author, character, and (multiple!) biographers hereby converge to reinforce that words influence reality.76

Failed Reunion with Maria Beadnell

At the time Dickens was writing Little Dorrit’s biography, the impact of his “lost courage” was exacerbated by other secrets, such as a deteriorating home life and revisiting his father’s shameful imprisonment in the Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison. Previous anxieties about his authorial identity were also resurfacing, and he even considered a fresh start in

Australia. John Forster writes, almost confidentially, that “It was during the composition of

Little Dorrit that I think he first felt a certain strain upon his invention which brought with it other misgivings” (604). Forster elaborates how Dickens’s fear over “the possibility that what had ever been his great support [his ‘creative genius’] might someday desert him” provoked

“intervals of unusual impatience and restlessness” (604). Although Forster does not ascribe these anxious symptoms in any way to Maria Beadnell, we can still understand Dickens’s fear about losing his writing ability as stemming from his previous “lost courage,” whereby his failure with Maria rendered him unable to write his life as he had initially intended.

In fact, Forster seemingly dismissed Maria’s role in the author’s crisis of self- confidence, confessing that for many years he maintained a “stout refusal to believe” (44) in

Maria’s ongoing influence over Dickens. Forster aligns Dickens’s abandoned autobiographical mission with his general decision to instead pursue this venture via the fictionalised David Copperfield (18). Lest we—like Forster—underestimate the significance

75 As I discussed in Chapter 1, the Pilgrim editors allow Forster grace in his “numerous small distortions of fact” since “paradoxically these distortions were in the interest of a larger, or ideal, truth” (1:xi).

76 I pursue this concept further in the next chapter, which explores how Dickens’s legacy is reimagined today through the biofictional renderings of neo-Victorian authors.

205 of Maria’s role in Dickens’s lost autobiographical courage, consider the following letter from

1855. Here Dickens indignantly seeks to impress upon his friend the seriousness of his previous attachment to Maria:

I don’t quite apprehend what you mean by my overrating the strength of feeling of five-and-twenty years ago…only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is, and that this [attachment] began when I was [Dickens’s son] Charley’s age; that it excluded every other idea from my mind for four years, at a time of life when four years are equal to four times four... (Forster 44)

Maria had clearly left her mark on Dickens’s psyche: the pain engendered by her youthful abandonment of him, albeit encouraged by her parents, haunted everything from his authorial assurance to his relationships with his family. Professor Michael Slater, whose biographical work on Dickens I have quoted throughout this thesis, attests to Maria’s impact on the youthful Charles: “It is true to say, I believe, that Dickens never loved any other woman as he loved Maria” (Dickens and Women 59). Dickens even identified Maria’s treatment of him as the reason for his difficulties emotionally connecting with his children as they grew older, confiding to her (when they resumed correspondence in the mid 1850s) that:

My entire devotion to you, and the wasted tenderness of those hard years which I have ever since half loved, half dreaded to recall, made so deep an impression on me that I refer to it a habit of suppression which now belongs to me, which I know is no part of my original nature, but which makes me chary of showing my affections, even to my children, except when they are very young. (Pilgrim 7:543-544) At least in his own mind, Dickens was so wounded by Maria’s desertion that he distanced himself from his own children. Her abandonment in turn inspired him to abandon his attempt at autobiography, a decisive rejection that further darkened the hero-protagonist divide.

It has become common practice to divide Dickens’s novels into his earlier, more comic novels and his later, more brooding novels. Lionel Stevenson identifies Little Dorrit as

“the culmination of the dark period” (406), which he sees as primarily encompassing Bleak

House, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit. Allowing that the darker themes of injustice and corruption marking these novels can also be attributed to “political conditions which were

206 annoying Dickens and his friends at the time” (408), Stevenson is still symptomatic of critics, commencing with Edmund Wilson in the 1940s, who attribute the darkness permeating

Dickens’s later novels to the author’s own increasing marital discord and anxiety about middle age. However, it is also possible to interpret Dickens’s darkening novels in accordance with his lost autobiographical courage. Most critics adopt Q.D. Leavis’s position,

“That there are no happy endings after Copperfield” (72; emphasis mine). As I proposed in the previous chapter, David Copperfield—the first novel written after Dickens burned his own autobiography—in fact deepens the hero-protagonist divide, despite its self-conscious search for (narrative) heroism. Bleak House’s darkness is evident even in its title. Little

Dorrit, with its looming prisons, both literal and metaphorical, coincides with Dickens’s failed reunion with Maria Beadnell. And after Little Dorrit, Dickens only wrote one life- writing novel, Great Expectations. Lost “expectations” aside, even in the revised ending which hints that Pip and Estella end up together, there is still an ambiguous shadow haunting this possibility. From David Copperfield on, then, the hero-protagonist split lacks any of

Pickwick’s comedic lustre, and Dickens’s life-writing characters suffer for their author’s courage—lost prior to David Copperfield and irrevocably revoked in Little Dorrit.

As such, Little Dorrit’s biography, like the other life-writing novels preceding it, becomes an intermediary realm for Dickens to biofictionally explore life-writing topics too painful to outright register in the context of his own life. Lucy Newlyn notes instances in the nineteenth-century where “authorial identity was negotiated at the crossing between private and public spheres” (30). Her concern is primarily with Romantic authors, but it also relates to Dickens. His own legacy, which he so jealously guarded via smokescreens (quite literally, given the autobiographical attempt and letters which met a fiery end) are implicated in his public rendering of Amy Dorrit’s biography. A key example is how keenly dejected Arthur

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Clennam, who is often seen as Dickens’s projecting part of himself into the text,77 feels over his reunion with Flora Finching, Maria Beadnell’s fictional counterpart in Little Dorrit.

Dickens writes that “In [Clennam’s] youth he had ardently loved this woman, and had heaped upon her all the locked-up wealth of his affection and imagination” (155). This emphasis upon the treasure of “imagination,” indicates the impact Dickens assigns to the (anxious) affiliation between his own creativity and Maria. Stephen Wall suggests that “The memories that lie behind Flora, like those of the Marshalsea itself, are among the most remarkable illustrations of Dickens’s capacity to embed private meanings within narratives of the widest social significance” (xxvii). I specifically link these “memories” and “private meanings” to

Dickens’s failed initial relationship—and subsequent reunion years later—with Maria, which intensified both his “lost courage” and the Dickensian hero-protagonist split.

As outlined in the preceding chapter, Maria was the inspiration for David’s beautiful but childish first wife, Dora Spenlow, in David Copperfield. Dickens reconnected with Maria in the 1850s, and he briefly entertained the possibility of a fresh start with her as his marriage to Catherine was strained. Maria’s initial letter whisked Dickens back in time: “suddenly the remembrance of your hand, came upon me with an influence that I cannot express to you.

Three or four and twenty years vanished like a dream, and I opened it with the touch of my young friend David Copperfield when he was in love” (Letters 283). However, Maria had not aged well, and Dickens responded to the death of his youthful remembrances by eventually evading time with her (Oxford Companion 34). As usual, he turned to his fiction to process the experience, and Maria Beadnell, now Maria Winter, subsequently morphed into Little

Dorrit’s (largely) unfortunate Flora Finching:

77 For instance, in the Oxford World’s Classics Introduction to Little Dorrit, Dennis Walder writes that “the character of Clennam, at 40 just short of the author’s age when writing the novel, resembles Dickens in his self-questioning, his dwelling on the past and memory” (Walder viii). I elaborate upon the possibility of Clennam as Dickens’s double later in the chapter.

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Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad too, and short of breath; but that was not much. Flora, whom he had left a lily, had become a peony; but that was not much. Flora, who had seemed enchanting in all she said and thought, was diffuse and silly. That was much. Flora, who had been spoiled and artless long ago, was determined to be spoiled and artless now. That was a fatal blow. (155)

Even though Flora is portrayed as a kindly soul, she is also, as Claire Tomalin summarises,

“overweight, greedy, a drinker and garrulous to match, absurd in her unstoppable and only half-comprehensible conversation, and given to arch reminders to her old lover [Arthur

Clennam] of the distant past” (Dickens 268). Leonard Manheim likewise perceives

Dickensian distress in Flora Finching, writing that Dickens was so distraught by the undesirable metamorphosis of his youthful ideal that he could “only relieve his tortured soul by writing a Little Dorrit, in which he can, among other things, distort, pillory, and avenge himself upon the now-despised female in all her aspects” (185). Manheim’s perception is a bit overly dramatic, but it is clear that, all in all, Maria “had paid for the double disillusionment she had inflicted on [Dickens]” (Tomalin Dickens 269). Any secret hope for a redemptive second chance with Maria had been eradicated.

Anxious Author, Anxious Arthur: Doubt and the Dickensian Hero-Protagonist

Dickens’s second disappointment with Maria, or his “double disillusionment” as

Claire Tomalin terms it above, further complicates the hero-protagonist split. To elaborate on points mentioned earlier in this chapter, if we accept both Arthur Clennam as Dickens’s double in the text, and Juliette Atkinson’s argument that “biographies of hidden lives are therefore as much about the biographer as they are about the subject” (13) then ironically, in his quest to promote the biographical merits of the misunderstood, Dickens (via his double) overshadows the title character. Arthur Clennam commands more space in Little Dorrit’s biography than does the ostensible biographical subject, thereby effectively dethroning the protagonist. Dickens edges out his professed protagonist—literally the title character in this case—in part through employing Clennam as a surrogate biographer in portions of the novel.

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Employing Clennam to advocate for the worth of another marginalised character—one who, as I shall outline shortly, is repeatedly devalued by those around her—perpetuates the pattern of separating Dickens’s heroes from his protagonists as Clennam commands centre stage.

Pursuing Atkinson’s point further, Little Dorrit’s “hidden” life becomes a catalyst, exposing

Dickens’s employment of a textual double to reflect his own life-writing anxieties.

Clennam’s first query concerning Little Dorrit is “‘It was a girl, surely…almost hidden in the dark corner?’” (52). Arthur Clennam’s search for Little Dorrit’s concealed story is hereby established from the outset of their relationship. And Arthur’s role in recording Amy’s life history also reflects Dickens’s fraught relationship with life-writing, enacting both the hero- protagonist split and pointing ahead Dickens’s own surrogate biographer, John Forster.

Dickens insisted that Clennam’s value be visible, so to counterbalance his struggles with self-doubt, Dickens “repeatedly had to stress [to illustrator Hablot Browne] that Arthur

Clennam must always look the hero” (The Dickens Collection 21 p. 3). Despite Clennam’s internal anxieties, it is important that he at least appear outwardly capable of heroic confidence. And yet, Clennam’s repeated association with “nobody,” his intermittent desire to escape the pain around him and float peacefully though life, and his lack of self-worth, all circle back to David Copperfield’s acknowledgement that hero-ship of one’s own life is not automatically assumed. As I outline shortly, Dickens’s desire to portray Clennam at his best notwithstanding, and despite Clennam’s dethroning of the biographical title character as protagonist, he only possesses one characteristic of Dickensian heroism: perseverance. Little

Dorrit is far more heroic in Dickensian terms, even though she fades away in her own biography. The split is solidified; the life-writing novel features Amy Dorrit as heroine, but

Arthur Clennam as protagonist.

At the outset of planning the novel that would become Little Dorrit—at the point when the working title was still Nobody’s Fault—Dickens initially envisioned “a leading man

210 for a story who should bring about all the mischief in it, lay it all on Providence, and say at every fresh calamity, ‘Well it’s a mercy, however, nobody was to blame you know!’”

(Forster 590). Forster further relates that this working title lingered in Dickens’s mind longer still; the novel “continued to be called [Nobody’s Fault] by him up to the eve of its publication...” (545).78 Dickens’s lost autobiographical courage again (re)surfaces in Little

Dorrit through the repeated use of “Nobody”; these residual references to the original title remain, as “Clennam himself constructs the fiction of ‘Nobody’” (Herst 93). Dennis Walder states that “‘Nobody’ came to refer to Arthur Clennam’s deepening sense of inadequacy and loss of self…” (x). Dickens’s notion of Clennam as “nobody” transitioned from that of bumbling mischief-maker deflecting blame elsewhere to haunted hero heaping the blame upon himself. “Nobody” is thus largely internalised rather than externalised, although on occasion the overlap with Dickens’s original plan still shows. For example, at one stage of the novel Clennam struggles with whether or not to completely fall in love with Pet Meagles.

He wonders, “Why should he be vexed or sore at heart? It was not his weakness that he had imagined. It was nobody’s, nobody’s within his knowledge, why should it trouble him? And yet it did trouble him” (205). Here we see Dickens’s initial plotline at play: “nobody was to blame you know!” Yet Dickens’s later plotline emerges more strongly: “And yet it did trouble him.” Clennam has nowhere else to shift the responsibility, so he continues to shoulder it.

We are repeatedly reminded of Clennam’s anxiety (all emphases mine): “Clennam, harassed by more anxieties than one…” (641) notes his “‘[p]rivate anxieties’” to Daniel

Doyce (661). Later, we learn that “The assurance he now had that Blandois, whatever his right name, was one of the worst of characters, greatly augmented the burden of his

78 Dennis Walder clarifies that “Dickens changed the title a few weeks before publication of the first number began, on 1st December 1855, to Little Dorrit” (xi). 211 anxieties” (665). And his mother’s evasiveness regarding her business with Blandois

“enhanced his sense of helplessness” (665). Nearing the end of the novel, shortly before his decline into debtor’s prison, Clennam is “fast subsiding into despair” (673), and once he is imprisoned, the narrator reminds us that “Haggard anxiety and remorse are bad companions to be barred up with. Brooding all day, and resting very little indeed at night, will not arm a man against misery” (738). Clearly, Clennam is shouldering an unsustainable burden. Critical commentary will acknowledge Clennam’s anxiety, but rarely does it discuss Dickens’s repeated positive posturing of Clennam—this positivity is important in terms of Dickens’s investment in “obscure” and “hidden” life histories. For example, Garrett Stewart contends that “Clennam is a man haunted by his idiomatic doppelganger in the pronominal ‘nobody,’ a self-cancelling ghost sprung from the vernacular substrate of the hero’s own equivocated desire” (529). Stewart succinctly summarises Clennam’s problem of being haunted by

“nobody,” but he does not engage with Dickens’s resolution, wherein the “self-cancelling ghost” is challenged through the narrator’s tri-fold attention to Clennam’s positive attributes.

First, Clennam’s determination to see the best in others is highlighted. His graciousness to rival Henry Gowan is apparent when he tells Daniel Doyce: “we should make up our minds that it is not worthy of us to say any ill of Mr. Gowan. It would be a poor thing to gratify a prejudice against him. And I resolve, for my part, not to depreciate him” (309).

Despite his own mistreatment, Clennam declines to inflict this harm upon others, seeking instead what is in their best interest. To this end, he consents to visit Mr. Gowan’s mother for dinner, even though the evening is painful for him since Gowan is engaged to Clennam’s love interest Minnie “Pet” Meagles. References to “nobody” resurface during the dinner, when

Mrs. Gowan interrogates him about Pet Meagles’s attractiveness: “In nobody’s difficulties, he would have found it very difficult to answer; very difficult indeed to smile, and say

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“‘Who?’” (315). Here Clennam slightly distances himself from the identity of nobody, which is presented as a past problem. But after dinner, this association returns:

In that state of mind which rendered nobody uneasy, his thoughtfulness would have turned principally on the man at his side [Gowan]…The current of these meditations [pondering whether or not Gowan is intentionally tormenting him] would have been stayed sometimes by a rush of shame, bearing a remonstrance to himself from his own open nature, representing that to shelter such suspicions, even for the passing moment, was not to hold the high, unenvious course he had resolved to keep. (318)

Clennam struggles to combat both the lurking spectre of nobody and the temptation to think the worst of his rival Gowan. At times, it almost seems easier to fully embrace nobody and its accompanying characteristics; here again the text retains glimpses of Dickens’s original design for a character who blithely does as he pleases and dismisses the ramifications as

“nobody’s fault.” But Clennam is anything but blithe, and his moments of weakness do bother him. In keeping “the high, unenvious course,” he comprehends that even a seeming nobody can inflict harm upon others. With the word “unenvious” we are reminded of the difficulties inherent in pursuing good. The struggle is part of the heroic journey—even though Clennam cannot combat his foes with a sword, and he requires Little Dorrit’s rescue from despair near the novel’s end.

Henry Gowan (in his utter ignorance and complete self-involvement) exclaims,

“‘What a good fellow you are, Clennam! [...]What a capital fellow! You have never been disappointed. That’s easy to see.’ It would have been so cruel if he had meant it, that

Clennam firmly resolved to believe he did not mean it” (399-400; emphasis original). Still determining to see the best in others, Clennam chooses to overlook Gowan’s cutting remarks, even when Gowan goes on to claim, “‘Now here’s one of the advantages, or disadvantages, of knowing a disappointed man. You hear the truth’” (400). At this point, Clennam “began to fear Henry Gowan would always be a trouble to him, and that so far he had gained little or nothing from the dismissal of Nobody, with all his inconsistencies, anxieties, and contradictions” (400). Warring against nobody is a constant battle, and one that Clennam

213 often wishes to forfeit. Just as nobody retains the power to inflict harm, nobody also feels the pain inflicted by others; overall, being nobody is not an escape as the “inconsistencies, anxieties, and contradictions” remain.

Even in the face of these anxieties, Dickens draws attention to Clennam’s good sense; this is the second aspect of his narratorial attention to Clennam’s positive attributes. When everyone else is embracing the (ultimately doomed) Merdle investment craze, Clennam has intuitive reservations, but “He began to think it was curious, too, that it should be everywhere, and that nobody but he should seem to have any mistrust of it” (575).

Unfortunately, Clennam subsequently second-guesses himself, and is ultimately convinced to invest his business. Here nobody’s instincts are accurate, but Clennam, unaccustomed to having confidence in himself, disregards his intuition. The narrator must highlight Clennam’s good sense, given its possessor mistrusts it—perhaps dismissing it as one of nobody’s aforementioned inconsistencies. Clennam is here further linked to Dickens, as someone who loses the courage of his convictions at the last moment.

Third, Clennam bravely accepts full responsibility for his mistakes, refusing to pass any blame along unfairly. Clennam’s attorney does not comprehend his willingness to shoulder all the liability for the failure of the Doyce & Clennam company, but Clennam insists the blame be his: “‘If the money I have sacrificed had been all my own, Mr. Rugg,’ sighed Clennam, ‘I should have cared far less’” (700). His primary concern is for Doyce to be completely absolved of any culpability (700-701). Clennam’s determination to make amends

(for urging his business partner to invest in the ultimately doomed Merdle bank) is unwavering, and its culmination is incarceration in the Marshalsea. Unfortunately, despite his admirable qualities, Clennam is misunderstood even in prison, for “The opinion of the community outside the prison gates bore hard on Clennam as time went on, and he made no friends among the community within” (719). Somehow he retains his graciousness and

214 compassion, freely forgiving the lower-class John Chivery’s refusal to shake his hand (704).

This insistence on overlooking a slight—even while suffering himself—hearkens back to his determination to see the best in others.

However, even though Dickens constructs Clennam as an admirable character who pursues good despite his anxious lack of confidence, thus demonstrating perseverance, one of the three key aspects of Dickensian heroism, Clennam is lacking in the other two criteria: self-reliance and being right. Little Dorrit sustains him here. She encourages him during his imprisonment, restoring his ability to hope; she also proposes marriage to Arthur, righting his ineffectuality. Clennam might be the novel’s central character—its protagonist—but Little

Dorrit is the novel’s true heroine. Dickens partially fuses this hero-protagonist split via their wedding at the novel’s conclusion, uniting the hero and the protagonist in marriage. He previously attempted something similar by bringing together David (protagonist) and Agnes

(hero/ine) in David Copperfield. But a concluding “happily ever after” for these fictional couples cannot really reclaim belated recompense for Dickens’s own failed romance with

Maria Beadnell—particularly since in both situations, the supporting character overshadows the (professed) primary character in perplexing ways. David Copperfield remains the protagonist of his autobiography, but his extreme, even crippling, dependence upon Agnes splits the protagonist from the hero. Little Dorrit remains the heroine of her biography, but she is often pushed to the margins as Clennam claims centre stage, in this case splitting the heroine from the protagonist. Dickens’s vision of Clennam as “a leading man” (Forster 590) morphed from a main male character to the main character despite framing the text as someone else’s biography. It is certainly possible to read Clennam’s more ubiquitous presence in light of the project transition from Nobody’s Fault to Little Dorrit. Amy Dorrit rescues Clennam from his (metaphorical) imprisonment, and Dickens from a writing rut— and they both express approbation for her fortitude, the latter even promoting her to title

215 character. Nonetheless, the fact remains that Little Dorrit is yet another example of the pattern wherein Dickens divides the hero and the protagonist. His life-writing novels are thus indelibly marked by his own autobiographical anxieties, specifically the “lost courage” that stubbornly refuses to fully repair the fractured central figure, since Dickens can never completely solve the mystery of what a successful life story entails.

Perceptions of a Seeming Nobody

Little Dorrit is repeatedly marginalised by those around her. Mrs. Clennam’s housekeeper, Affery Flintwinch, dismisses the young woman as insignificant: “‘Oh! She?

Little Dorrit? She’s nothing; she’s a whim of—hers.’” (52; emphasis original). Little Dorrit’s own family is similarly dismissive of her value. Amy’s own father tells Mrs. General that

“‘there is something wrong in—ha—Amy’” simply because “‘Amy is not, so to speak, one of ourselves’” (both quotes from 467). Similarly, her sister, Fanny, continually complains that

Amy embarrasses them, and her brother, Tip, is utterly ungrateful for his little sister’s efforts on his behalf. Little Dorrit’s biographer and Clennam both reference her diminutiveness and childlike tendencies, but they also emphasise the strength of character others overlook.

Dickens uses his status as narrator—and biographer—of Amy Dorrit to enhance her best qualities and outline the strength of character often snubbed by those around her. The narrator reveals that, despite having been born in prison, Amy is the strongest of the three Dorrit siblings: “She took the place of eldest of the three, in all things but precedence; was the head of the fallen family; and bore, in her own heart, its anxieties and shames” (81). Little Dorrit serves as the head of her family, and, although they do not honour her as such, her biographer reverences and reveals her true character—praising her as heroine even while dethroning her as protagonist.

Arthur Clennam’s perceptions of Amy Dorrit augment those of the primary narrator, and this augmentation forges a certain tension between Dickens’s narrator and his protagonist

216 in that both serve as Little Dorrit’s biographer. After the reader’s introduction to Little Dorrit, the narrator observes Clennam observing her: “This was the life, and this the history, of the

Child of the Marshalsea at twenty-two…This was the life, and this the history, of Little

Dorrit; now going home upon a dull September evening, observed at a distance by Arthur

Clennam” (87). The primary narrator is clearly happy to share the authorial mantle with

Arthur, as evinced by the repetition of “This was the life, and this the history” twice on the same page—once in relation to the narrator’s revelations and once in relation to Clennam’s observations. The narrator guides Clennam even as he guides us as readers; it is the biographer’s prerogative to co-narrate, if desired. I will explore this authorial connection between Dickens’s narrator and his protagonist in more depth later, but first I will more fully establish the extent to which Little Dorrit is demeaned by those around her, in order to complicate her status as a vanishing heroine.

Little Dorrit’s family members are the primary offenders in this degradation, but others also easily dismiss the humble heroine, as evinced by Affery’s indifference at the start of this section. Mrs. Clennam (Affery’s mistress) expresses similar sentiments about the seamstress she has hired, since, “In a hard way, and in an uncertain way that fluctuated between patronage and putting down, the sprinkling from a watering-pot and hydraulic pressure, Mrs. Clennam showed an interest in this dependant” (64). Mrs. Clennam later tells

Little Dorrit, “‘I believe I was your friend, when you had no other who could serve you’”

(342). Of course, Mrs. Clennam has her own complicated, ulterior motives (involving wills and illegitimate offspring) spurring her interest in Little Dorrit, but the point remains that her impressions of Amy align with those espoused by the diminutive seamstress’s own family.

For instance, John Chivery’s affection for Little Dorrit is perfunctorily dismissed by the

Dorrit clan: “In this affair, as in every other, Little Dorrit herself was the last person considered” (217). John is the only one who actually cares about Little Dorrit in this

217 situation, for “It was an instinctive testimony to Little Dorrit’s worth, and difference from all the rest, that the poor young fellow honoured and loved her for being simply what she was”

(218). However, Amy instructs John to “‘think as little of me as you can; the less the better.

When you think of me at all, John, let it only be as the child you have seen grow up in the prison…’” (223). Amy thinks of herself as a nobody of very little consequence; it takes a select few around her to demonstrate her true worth. However, in a poignant twist that I examine more closely in the next section, this demonstration also fulfils Little Dorrit’s wish of fading away, since Clennam’s observations of Amy often result in his story overshadowing hers.

Arthur Clennam’s biographical research on Amy Dorrit includes frequent trips to the

Marshalsea prison. On one of these visits, Clennam is trapped in the prison overnight and ends up conversing with Litle Dorrit’s father, William Dorrit, the self-described “Father of the Marshalsea.” Clennam reveals how “impressed” he is with what he has learned of Amy so far, and William concurs that Amy is “‘a very good girl [who] does her duty’” (102). And yet, perplexingly, like Mrs. Clennam’s previous blend of “patronage and putting down” (64)

William’s words bear a mixed message:

Arthur fancied that he heard in these praises, a certain tone of custom which he had heard from the father last night, with an inward protest and feeling of antagonism. It was not that they [Amy’s family] stinted her praises, or were insensible to what she did for them; but that they were lazily habituated to her, as they were to all the rest of their condition…He fancied that they viewed her, not as having risen away from the prison atmosphere, but as appertaining to it; as being vaguely what they had a right to expect, and nothing more. (102)

This passage is key in demonstrating that others tend to dismiss Little Dorrit’s worth even as they ostensibly value her, thus necessitating that Dickens’s narrator—with Arthur’s biographical assistance—portray Amy the way she deserves to be seen. Her biographers promote Little Dorrit’s heroic qualities, but their detours from her story still replicate the pattern of allegedly valuing her but effectually dismissing her.

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Little Dorrit is herself a study in contrasts. She is the “Child of the Marshalsea” who also summons the strength to serve as “the head of the fallen family” (81); she is frequently described as being both childlike and motherly, as in her interactions with Maggy; she is simultaneously helpless and resilient. Despite being diminutive and often fading into the background, Little Dorrit provides Arthur Clennam his much-needed purpose for moving forward, particularly in his despair over Pet Meagles marrying Henry Gowan. However, she must still share her history with her overarching biographer’s (aka Dickens’s omniscient narrator’s) political perspectives on the Circumlocution Office and the Barnacle family—not to mention the page time devoted to exploring Arthur Clennam’s own personal trials. The underlying message resounds clearly: even Little Dorrit’s life story does not wholly belong to her, and her biographer’s anxiety over the possibility of other factors inhibiting heroic ownership of one’s own history returns.

Additionally, not only is Amy Dorrit surprisingly absent from significant segments of her biography, but she is often maligned when she does appear. She is misunderstood, and her differences are deemed defective: “It was the family custom to lay it down as family law that she was a plain domestic little creature, without the great and sage experience of the rest.

This family fiction was the family assertion of itself against her services. Not to make too much of them” (237-238). Of course, Little Dorrit creates her own fictions about the family, but hers are designed to protect rather than to belittle. The novel constructs Little Dorrit’s fictions positively, deeming them “genteel” (84), which emphasises her kindly intentions, while also highlighting Little Dorrit’s heroic self-reliance in sustaining her family.

Furthermore, the narrator challenges the Dorrit family’s fictitious demeaning of Little Dorrit, sometimes through the perspective of Arthur Clennam, a character similarly denigrated by

Mr. Dorrit, who dislikes Clennam’s lack of deference to the fiction of the Father of the

Marshalsea. The narrator reveals that “The father went so far as to say, in his private family

219 circle, that he feared Mr. Clennam was not a man of high instincts...There appeared to be something (he didn’t know what it was) wanting in him” (257). William Dorrit’s criticism of

Amy and Arthur is eerily similar and equally enigmatic: with Amy, there’s “something wrong” while with Arthur there is also an issue with a nameless “something.” John Forster notes that an enigmatic something also haunted Dickens shortly before he penned Little

Dorrit, and “evidences presented themselves in his letters of the old ‘unhappy loss or want of something’ to which he had given a pervading prominence in Copperfield” (605). Forster links this discontent to Dickens’s anxieties about his home life and creative challenges with his writing (605), but, as I suggested earlier in this chapter, we can also interpret his extreme restless anxiety in light of the second failed interaction with Maria Beadnell, which further fractured Dickens’s already fragile auto/biographical inclinations.

Dickens’s advocation here for merits of the misrepresented hints at his own frustrations when writing Little Dorrit. Feeling unappreciated at home, misunderstood by his best friend, Forster, and anxious about his creative inspiration, Dickens—as per usual— sought solace in his fiction. Accordingly, to combat the Dorrits’ negative perceptions of their most steadfast member, Amy Dorrit’s biographer stresses her virtues. Despite being repeatedly maligned and misunderstood herself, Little Dorrit attempts for her loved ones to enjoy the understanding she so often lacks. She pleads with Arthur Clennam not to

“misunderstand” or “judge” her father, since “‘He only requires to be understood. I only ask for him that his life be fairly remembered’” (105). The desire to be remembered well and to have a voice in achieving this end is a hallmark of life-writing, even when it is intermingled with fiction as in Little Dorrit’s case. Little Dorrit specifically asks Clennam to view her father as she does: “‘You have been so good to us, so delicately and truly good, that I want him to be better in your eyes than in anybody’s’” (177). To this end, she argues that “‘I know

220 him better than any one does, and love him, and am proud of him” (177). Little Dorrit is determined that others see the value in what she prizes.

Dickens’s narrator praises Amy’s staunch defence of her father: “What affection in her words, what compassion in her repressed tears, what a great soul of fidelity within her, how true the light that shed false brightness round him!” (105; emphasis mine). Like

Clennam, Little Dorrit insists on seeing the best in those she loves, and her biographer does the same for her, relating that “If ever pride were innocent, it was innocent in Little Dorrit when she grew boastful of her father” (105). Little Dorrit’s love frees others to be both vulnerable and strong; the narrator observes that her “love alone had saved [her father] to be even what he was” (234) and “when had she not accepted him as he was!—and made the most and best of him” (598). Sadly, her father does not return the favour: “All this time he had never once thought of her dress, her shoes, her need of anything. No other person on earth, save herself, could have been so unmindful of her wants” (233). It is up to Little

Dorrit’s biographer to record her best aspects, but he ends up following those closest to her in allegedly valuing her yet repeatedly overlooking her. He highlights her best qualities but then shuttles her back into the shadows.

Little Dorrit habitually downplays her own merit, as when she “condensed the narrative of her life into a few scanty words about herself, and a glowing eulogy upon her father” (288). When her family later discourages her from remembering or revealing what they view as their disgraceful history, Amy loses her voice. Fanny falsely insists that “‘The principal pleasure of your life is to remind your family of their misfortunes’” (367). As they urge Little Dorrit to forget, she eventually balks at revealing her history—not because she is ashamed of her origins, but because her past pains her family. She loses the right to reveal her own narrative. Little Dorrit enquires of Pet Meagles (now Gowan), “‘Perhaps you don’t…perhaps you don’t know my story? Perhaps he never told you my story?’ ‘No.’ ‘O,

221 no, why should he! I have scarcely the right to tell it myself at present, because I have been entreated not to do so’” (439). After their dramatic change in fortune, her father urges her not to do or say anything that could potentially link them to their former life in the Marshalsea.

He believes they must “be vigilant in making themselves respected” (450). William Dorrit reprimands his daughter for her tendency to “‘habitually hurt me’” (471) by her refusal to completely ignore their past. But for Little Dorrit, “this same society in which they lived greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea” (503). She is still sensitive to the adverse effects of life spent stagnating behind bars, whether these bars be literal or metaphorical.

As we have witnessed, in spite of her biographer/s’ professed commitment to chronicle her merit, Little Dorrit often vanishes from her own biography—and even when she is present, she is often overlooked. At her sister Fanny’s wedding, “Nobody noticed the first

Bridesmaid. Few could have seen Little Dorrit (who held that post) for the glare, even supposing many to have sought her” (597). Arthur Clennam’s narratorial “nobody” is absent, but Little Dorrit’s story is recorded nonetheless, through her primary biographer. It is remarkable how often the purported protagonist is rendered invisible. Yet perhaps this is

Dickens’s very point; he seeks out her “hidden” life, advocating for others to appreciate her strengths. His condescension in selecting such a subject reflects both his biographical generosity and his own life-writing anxieties. We learn in the first half of Little Dorrit’s story that “To pass in and out of the prison unnoticed, and elsewhere to be overlooked and forgotten, were, for herself, her chief desires” (291). Ironically, her wish is fulfilled, for even as Dickens promotes her value—often through his biographical double Clennam—her visibility remains compromised. Little Dorrit disappears in her biography even as Dickens destroyed his autobiography; he plucks her from the shadows only to have her story subsequently dominated by other characters and concerns. Much like Dickens’s own flame-

222 torn history, Amy’s presence flickers to the forefront as her biographer highlights her heroic acts, then fades prematurely.

A Tale of Two Biographers: Dickens’s Narrator and His Hero

Perhaps surprisingly, Dickens’s own doubts and anxieties—while problematic on paper, at least where his life-writing novels’ hero-protagonists are concerned—seem at least partially responsible for his enduring appeal. Brian Rosenberg designates Dickens “as a novelist of doubt, conflict, and contradiction” (145) skilled in depicting “interesting forms of doubt” (147). Contradiction can prove captivating. As I have been discussing, Dickens was certainly no stranger to doubt and anxiety himself. John Forster described Dickens as a man

“sensitive in a passionate degree to praise and blame” (602-603) who worried about losing the talent for invention upon which his life depended. Forster considers how “It was strange that he should have had such doubt, and he would hardly have confessed it openly” (604).

Similarly, Douglas-Fairhurst invokes Dickens’s self-doubt when he writes that “No author enjoyed greater success; no author was more terrified of failure. The two feelings were inextricably woven together” (333). These tendencies toward doubt and anxiety repeatedly spill from life to page—from Dickens’s novels, in the first instance, then later from biographers and critics—and through it all is evident a compulsion to make Dickens extraordinary, even in his fear of failure.

By engaging with Little Dorrit’s history, Dickens becomes both her fictional biographer and Elaine Showalter’s guilty omniscient narrator, harbouring “guilt about an omniscient invasion” (31) as his narratorial “secret self” (21) shadows the primary players in

Little Dorrit. Why guilty? For Showalter, this guilt stems from the novelist’s “position akin to that of the observer in the tower of a panopticonal prison” (23). A vantage point linked to

“Dickens’s sense of the narrator’s position as ethically compromised” (23) since “Dickens also feels a horror of the surveillant, of the intimate intruder who violates individual privacy”

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(24). After all, as Janet Malcolm reminds us, “The biographer at work, indeed, is like a professional burglar” (9). Dickens’s narrator is still revealing secrets, even if he is doing so with the best of intentions, and for an author notorious for burning most of his diaries and letters received—and having personally suffered from public exposure of private documents—lingering guilt is understandable.

I extend Showalter’s discussion of narrative guilt to include the echoes of Dickens’s

“lost courage,” which results in Dickens dethroning his professed protagonist, his heroine whom he affectionately called “‘my Little Dorrit’” (Walder xi). Showalter also explores doubles and “shadows [which] function as dramatizations of the repressed self” (32), but within the context of Dickens funnelling negative features—such as anger or avarice—away from Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam and into a double, a feat which affords “Dickens a kind of narrative charity towards his characters” (32). Arguably, then, Little Dorrit could repeatedly disappear in her biography due to her biographer’s guilt about surveilling her.

Such a possibility would be more compelling if this was an isolated instance of Dickens’s hero-protagonist split, rather than a pattern replicated across all his life-writing novels.

Dickens’s “lost courage” haunts the narratives of his favourite characters, manifesting itself in the tension between heroism and anxiety, between revealing and concealing—or in Little

Dorrit’s case—between being watched and being omitted.

This section next explores the authorial connection between Dickens’s narrator and his protagonist, Arthur Clennam, in more depth. Clennam realises that his interest in Little

Dorrit grows rapidly: “His original curiosity augmented every day, as he watched for her, saw or did not see her, and speculated about her...At last he resolved to watch Little Dorrit, and know more of her story” (68). Dickens’s narratorial self already has privileged access to

Amy’s story, yet Clennam is often the vehicle through which readers discover this history.

Douglas-Fairhurst selects Scrooge as “another of Dickens’s surrogate novelists, who begins

224 by observing characters from a distance, but ends up meddling in their lives once they prove how much they deserve to be rewarded” (239). Clennam likewise fulfils this role as he initially watches Amy Dorrit remotely, then moves to actively assisting her once he recognises her superior worth. My work here expands Douglas-Fairhurst’s point about

“surrogate novelists” by linking Clennam’s burgeoning place in Little Dorrit’s biography to the hero-protagonist split.

Arthur Clennam must solve the mystery of Little Dorrit’s past in order to participate in her future: “Looking back upon his own poor story, she was its vanishing-point.

Everything in its perspective led to her innocent figure” (719). Clennam claims everything in his story converges in Little Dorrit, since “her innocent figure” is “the centre of the interest of his life…beyond there was nothing but mere waste, and darkened sky (719). In actuality, however, his perspective helps effect her vanishing. Clennam’s revelation is sometimes employed in feminist arguments about the (rather drab) Dickensian heroine’s subordinate status, or:

[T]he standard role of supporting and substantiating the hero’s growth…Little Dorrit’s self-effacing and nurturing manner in the novel enacts a persistent process of diminishment that makes her necessary but always secondary to those around her. Without ever completely rubbing her out, this process suspends her, preventing her from becoming more: she is always at that point of vanishing, but also always behind Clennam’s growth and behind the weave of the novel’s pattern. (Masters 58-59)

Masters aptly assesses Little Dorrit’s paradoxical suspension as a character simultaneously essential yet marginalised. However, it is equally possible that the issue mandates not a feminist lens but a life-writing one, since it stems from Dickens’s insecurities about composing a successful life history. In any case, the hero-protagonist is not always divided by gender; Nancy and Agnes challenge Oliver Twist and David Copperfield for hero/ine-ship of their histories.

In Little Dorrit, Clennam represents culpability more than control, and his quest to prove her merit—to shadow her story—culminates in him overshadowing her. Little Dorrit’s

225 picture is on the novel’s frontispiece, and her name is on the cover, but her twin biographers destabilise her as biographical subject. Tellingly, even when the narrative briefly shifts to

Little Dorrit’s perspective, the first thing she focalises is Arthur Clennam: “This history must sometimes see with Little Dorrit’s eyes, and shall begin that course by seeing him” (171). She is granted a voice and her perspective is validated, but for the purpose of growing Clennam’s character. Almost as an apology for overtaking Little Dorrit’s biography, Arthur convinces himself that a detour to visit his former lover’s family could, somehow, someday, possibly assist Amy, and “that he was still patronising Little Dorrit in doing what had no reference to her” (150). Such an excuse exemplifies how Little Dorrit is displaced even when her best interests are apparently being considered. Clennam’s efforts to reveal the best in Little Dorrit often effectually exiles her. He recognises value in Little Dorrit that others overlook, and this fuels his desire to help her. His presence guides Amy through life as her narrator guides her through story, but all the focus on Clennam—even as a vehicle for uncovering Little Dorrit’s history—still contributes to overriding the professed biographical subject. For example,

Dickens’s narrator reveals that Clennam “was so moved by compassion for her, and by deep interest in her story as it dawned upon him, that he could scarcely tear himself away” (95).

Clennam’s emotions are the focus here; we are drawn to Little Dorrit via his interest. And in actuality, Little Dorrit expresses some reservations about Clennam shadowing her: “‘You are very good sir. You speak very earnestly to me. But I—but I wish you had not watched me’”

(95). Clennam continues to converse with her; he is already deeply invested in her story now that he has adopted the biographical mantle. Eventually, he reveals that he followed her in order to help her and her family. Their conversation inspires Little Dorrit to retract her previous desire: “‘I said I wished you had not followed me, sir. I don’t wish it so much now, unless you should think—indeed, I don’t wish it at all, unless I should have spoken so confusedly, that—that you can scarcely understand me, which I am afraid may be the case’”

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(106). Little Dorrit worries about being misunderstood—which has been the case in many of her other interactions with those around her—but Clennam shelters her both literally and figuratively by “putting himself between her and the sharp wind and rain” (106). Dickens arguably allows Clennam to share authorial credit in unveiling Little Dorrit’s story because

Clennam can likewise relate to being unappreciated and misunderstood. Clennam can perceive Little Dorrit’s value because he has suffered similarly himself. Even Arthur

Clennam’s name—itself only one letter removed from Author—hints at this additional role.

In a series of incongruities, Clennam’s own anxiety about failure attunes him to Little

Dorrit’s value; she lives in prison surrounded by failure, yet she has somehow escaped its sinister influence. Despite her family’s characteristic derision, Clennam sees Little Dorrit as

“a strong heroine in soul” (381). Likewise, Clennam’s encounters with failure and disappointment notwithstanding, glimmers of his determined nature still emerge: “It was the momentary yielding of a nature that had been disappointed from the dawn of its perceptions, but had not quite given up all its hopeful yearnings yet” (46). Both Little Dorrit and Arthur

Clennam pursue good in the face of perpetual disappointment, and their perseverance is rewarded by Amy’s biographer who—writing at a time of personal disillusionment himself— is attuned to the merits of the misunderstood. But even with this sensitivity, a pattern re- emerges wherein Dickens himself vies for centre stage in the life-writing narrative. Returning to the previous discussion regarding Dickens’s ties to Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers— and Sam’s arguable usurping of the heroic title from protagonist Mr. Pickwick—in Little

Dorrit, Dickens destabilises the professed heroine-protagonist via the page time given

Dickens’s textual double Clennam.

Specifically, one of Clennam’s early observations of Little Dorrit is presented as the narrator’s commentary, but it is focalised through Clennam:

Now that he had an opportunity of observing her, Arthur found that her diminutive figure, small features, and slight spare dress, gave her the appearance of being much

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younger than she was. A woman, probably of not less than two-and-twenty, she might have been passed in the street for little more than half that age. Not that her face was very youthful, for in truth there was more consideration and care in it than naturally belonged to her utmost years; but she was so little and light, so noiseless and shy, and appeared so conscious of being out of place among the three hard elders, that she had all the manner and much of the appearance of a subdued child. (64) Clennam is hereby allowed to reveal the good news to Little Dorrit about her reversal of fortune: “‘Bravest and best of children, I thank Heaven that you are rewarded!’” (411).

Significantly, Arthur Clennam is also afforded the honour of naming her Little Dorrit, the name Amy tells Pet Meagles Gowan is “much dearer to me than any other” (542). Not only does Clennam research Little Dorrit’s story, he also christens the principle character—much like an author would.

Clennam’s insight into Little Dorrit’s life—although keenly insightful—is still hampered by humanity. He does not have overarching omniscience into his subject’s history.

Dickens’s primary narrator sometimes demonstrates limited insight as well; for example, when relating Little Dorrit’s very early years, he states: “At what period of her early life the little creature began to perceive that it was not the habit of all the world to live locked up in narrow years, surrounded by high walls with spikes at the top, would be a difficult question to settle” (79). Here the two perspectives are conflated, and the narrator, despite his many moments of lucid omniscient insight, is further joined with Clennam in sharing a void of narratorial knowledge. In his own quest to learn more about Amy, Clennam decides to visit the Marshalsea, and he realises that Little Dorrit’s previously observed peculiarity of eating alone is so she can ferret away food for her father (91). Clennam is touched by Amy’s tenderness for her father, and “Her look at her father, half admiring him and proud of him, half ashamed for him, all devoted and loving, went to his inmost heart” (91). The narrator provides evidence of Little Dorrit’s character through omniscient insight into Clennam’s observations of her. In this example, the narrator’s omniscience extends to Clennam even

228 when a void seemingly surrounds his knowledge of Little Dorrit herself. Dickens’s narrator and his protagonist are thus further fused through omniscient telepathy.

Omniscience and telepathy are explored by Paul Dawson in his article “The Return of

Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction.” Dawson outlines Nicholas Royle’s views on the subject by explaining how Royle “argues that in the late nineteenth-century, at the moment when omniscience becomes a common term in literary criticism, the concept of telepathy emerges in the discourse of psychology” (145). Royle himself contends that the term omniscience is “flawed” and should be replaced; hence his affinity for alternate terms such as telepathy. Dawson likewise acknowledges the imperfections inherent in the term omniscience but nonetheless persists in employing it, in large part for simplicity’s sake given the term’s prevalence (and for lack of a more suitable replacement). Returning to Royle’s telepathy, I assign Dickens’s narrator and Clennam telepathic capabilities based on Royle’s “conservative conception of telepathy as something that is figured on the basis of the assumed unity and identity of the subject” (271). Therefore, the narrator’s relationship with Clennam is more telepathic than omniscient due to the connection between the two, as Clennam shares biographic responsibilities with Dickens’s narrator in the novel. Dawson describes how

“authors can imagine a personalised ‘second self’ to narrate their story, effectively establishing themselves as extradiegetic characters” (149). I would take this one step further to suggest that Dickens’s narrative identity is shared by both his narrator and the character of

Clennam, who are united in their narratorial mission to uncover Little Dorrit’s story.

As previously noted, Dickens claims that he is Little Dorrit’s biographer (in the

Preface to Little Dorrit) and Dickens does indeed fulfil this role by dividing himself across his narrative “second self” and the character of Arthur Clennam. Through this simultaneous splitting and fusing—in terms of separate roles yet a shared purpose of documenting Amy—

Dickens accomplishes his overarching aim of biographing Amy Dorrit. However, it is a

229 tension-riddled manoeuvre mimicking Dickens’s “lost courage” and the hero-protagonist split. Dickens takes credit for the biography at the outset, but he has two authorial proxies— his narrator and Clennam—upon whom to deflect any potential criticism and upon whom to project his anxieties. Despite the novel’s clear portrayal of Clennam’s superior character, and his status as the novel’s protagonist, he must also serve as a scapegoat if necessary. Probing these narrative perspectives elicits echoes of the tensions between Dickens’s role/s of author/editor/narrator, revealing that his tenure as Little Dorrit’s biographer is filled with as much tension between heroism and anxiety as his turn as Mr. Pickwick’s memoirist. David

Copperfield’s haunting question lingers: who is the hero of one’s own life? Anxiety is

Dickens’s constant companion in life-writing—occurring both in his lived reality and in its fictional counterpart.

Audrey Jaffe argues that “While expressing a distinctively Victorian anxiety about knowledge, then, omniscient narration is also in the business of constructing the knowledge that shapes Victorian ideologies, affirming for readers what appear to be truths of character and of private life” (9). The image of Elaine Showalter’s guilty omniscient narrator returns.

Dickens demonstrates a marked concern for both protecting Little Dorrit’s privacy and invading it. He “became” her biographer, thus cleverly side-stepping any awkwardness over revealing his research materials, and he vacillates between removing her from the shadows and returning her from whence she came. When he cannot decide, she disappears altogether.

Little Dorrit’s biography emerges from the interplay of Dickens’s constant companions, heroism and anxiety. As we have seen, the professed primary subject of this biography is often perplexingly absent from her own history. And even though Amy Dorrit has successfully side-stepped the dreaded Marshalsea prison taint, she still seeks its shadows, which for her are sheltering. Juliette Atkinson observes that “the relationship between the biographer, the subject, and the reader is recast when the subject is deliberately removed from

230 the shadows, and the biographer is in many cases more famous and influential than his or her subject” (9). But what about when the author deliberately returns the subject to the shadows?

By moving Little Dorrit amongst the shadows, Dickens can comment on the very instability of heroism in life-writing. Even in the novel’s joyous conclusion at Amy and Arthur’s wedding, this resolution retains a mysterious shadow: Arthur Clennam’s new bride is withholding vital biographical evidence about herself to which Clennam—despite his collusion with Dickens in uncovering Little Dorrit’s history—is not privy. The subject asserts some autonomy as Little Dorrit’s biography concludes with her secret. Amy’s motive for secrecy (about her forfeited fortune) is embedded in a desire to protect her husband. As the former “nobody” Arthur Clennam and the oft-invisible, always diminutive Little Dorrit are joined in marriage, the tension shifts yet again: Little Dorrit’s hidden knowledge, much like the often-hidden biographical subject possessing it, is further evidence of the hero-protagonist split. Through her self-reliant sacrifice, she regains some power over both her story and his— a closing reminder that he may have attained more narrative visibility, but she retains the characteristics of Dickensian heroism.

Conclusion

The significance of story and its slippage between fact and fiction is woven throughout Little Dorrit’s biography, pointing to Dickens’s own biofictional proclivities.

Inside the Marshalsea, Amy hides the truth that she works outside the prison to provide for the family, then outside the Marshalsea, her family insists upon a respectable fiction to hide their shameful history. Fiction was quite real for Dickens, and it certainly impacted his everyday existence; however, despite this reality, his characters are still constructs through whose lives Dickens can explore deeply personal events without directly attaching his name to said events or characters.

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Fittingly, then, Dickens’s narrator (who simultaneously is and is not Dickens) identifies with the characters as travellers together: “move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life” (41). In a letter to John Forster in August 1855, Dickens refers to himself in the third person as he discusses the broader theme of this passage: “It occurred to me that, by making the fellow-travellers at once known to each other, he missed an effect”

(Letters 297; emphasis mine). Pronouns point to the legacy of the narrator/biographer being bound up with those of these travellers. He shares the restless anxiety which propels them forward. David Copperfield’s anxiety involved demonstrating whether or not he has lived his life well; Amy’s anxiety is less self-referential and more focused on how her family is faring.

David Copperfield is the protagonist but not the hero of his life, whereas Little Dorrit is the hero/ine but not truly the protagonist due to her perpetual disappearance. Dickens’s guilty narrator ostensibly promotes his heroine—the title character and professed biographical protagonist—but he in fact decentres her through the attention afforded his double, Arthur

Clennam. Little Dorrit thus joins the other fractured hero/ine-protagonists of Dickens’s life- writing novels. Paradoxically, Dickens’s decision to honour a “hidden life” in turn illuminates Dickens’s own life-writing anxieties, and the impact of his “lost courage” manifests in a vanishing heroine who disappears from her own life history even as Dickens once burned his.

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Chapter 5: Neo-Victorian Literary Legacy Wherein Dickens appears in a neo-Victorian biofiction, and his characters assume afterlives of their own The scene is London: it is late summer 2016, and I am tracking Lady Dedlock. I trace her steps from the Dickens Coffee House on Wellington, to the Athenaeum on Pall Mall, passing the Victoria & Albert Museum along the way. She takes me to Coutts, a private bank on the Strand founded by the father of Dickens’s great friend Angela Burdett-Coutts. Later, we wind past the Haymarket Theatre, where Dickens’s (alleged) mistress, actress Ellen

Ternan, formerly performed. In actuality, I am tracking Dickens rather than Lady Dedlock; most of these locations link to him rather than to the Lady herself. And yet, as we have seen expressed in Dickens’s will, the author directs us to seek him through his “published works”

(i.e. fictional creations.) By seeking his characters, we find him, and vice versa. This overlap is encouraged on the iPhone application I am following. The app itself is called “Dickens

Trails,” and it invites users to “follow Lady’s trail” (i.e. visit sites linked to Bleak House) to learn more about women during Dickens’s day. This award-winning app was created in conjunction with the Charles Dickens Museum on Doughty Street in London. Fittingly, then, one of the stops takes me to the Museum itself, which is owned by the Dickens Fellowship, an organisation endeavouring:

to knit together in a common bond of friendship, lovers of that great master of humour and pathos Charles Dickens; to promote the knowledge and appreciation of his works; to spread the love of humanity, which is the keynote of all his works; and to exercise such charitable support as would have appealed strongly to the heart of Charles Dickens…”79 Despite its commitment “to promote the knowledge and appreciation of his works,” the

Museum refrains from presenting an idealised Dickens. The characteristic tension between

Dickens’s multifaceted characteristics emerges within its very walls—walls which once housed the Dickens family.

79 As per the Dickens Fellowship Constitution, page 1, available on the Dickens Fellowship website www.dickensfellowship.org. Accessed 18th September 2016. 233

For example, the book shop clearly displays Dickens’s connection to his mistress, Ellen

Ternan. Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens is comfortably nestled next to Tomalin’s biography of Ternan, entitled The Invisible Woman. Adjacent to this suggestive pairing stands

Michael Slater’s biography of Dickens, coupled with Slater’s The Great Charles Dickens

Scandal—the latter of which features a sketch of Dickens and Ternan on the cover. Tributes to Dickens’s more upstanding characters surround their author: in a corner nearby, a frolicsome Oliver Twist tea towel sits in the shadow of his creator’s less admirable personal life. Cora Kaplan describes a similar scene at London’s Wellcome Institute, where “Dolls from Dickens’s works, also for sale, are, interestingly, Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim, evoking family, sentiment and Christmas rather than the author himself who brutally ejected his blameless wife from his home and refused her access to their children” (“Coda” 194). The

Charles Dickens Museum seems—perhaps ironically, given its intense connection to the

Dickens Fellowship—more open to challenging its most famous occupant’s rosy reputation.

Upstairs, the Museum’s archive contains the notorious Gladys Storey papers, which helped fuel the rumour that Dickens and Ternan had a son together who ultimately passed away.

Throughout the Museum, Dickens’s shortcomings are not glossed over, even as his genius is celebrated. Dickens’s writing desk, where he penned classics such as Great Expectations, is on display, but then so is the infamous “Personal Statement” which appeared in the journal

Household Words, publicly broadcasting the Dickens’s marital breakdown (written solely from his perspective, of course, in an attempt to justify his bad behaviour and quell the rumour mill). Dickens’s former home—now turned Museum—presents his legacy in all its complexity. The consummate family man who delighted in finding happy homes for his literary children, stripped his living children of this privilege when he essentially banished their mother and subsequently abused her reputation.

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Charles Dickens’s more salacious side did not become public domain until the 1920s, when C.E. Bechhofer Roberts (under the pseudonym “Ephesian”) published This Side

Idolatry. As discussed in Chapter 1, this novel biofictionally blended fact and fiction, enticing readers by querying “Was Dickens a Hypocrite?” Biofiction thus initiated the posthumous interest in reinventing Dickens’s legacy. Michael Slater chronicles how the author’s

(personal) reputation unravelled: “For over seventy years the vigilance of, first, Dickens himself, and then, after his death, of his immediate family, managed to keep scandalous rumour pretty much stifled, thereby maintaining his highly bankable image as not only a supremely great writer but also as a truly good and pure man” (The Great Charles Dickens

Scandal 4). “Ephesian’s” novel ignited controversy, then the last of Dickens’s children,

Henry, died in 1933, clearing the way for “a blazing revival of the scandal” which continues to intermittently resurface (Slater 5). After Dickens separated from Catherine in 1858, there was gossip, some of which even reached the papers—ironically fuelled, in part, by Dickens’s insistence on publishing such notices as the aforementioned “Personal Statement.”80

However, Dickens still managed to largely retain his family-friendly image. Reinventing himself via his Public Readings and his heroic efforts ministering to fellow victims of the

Staplehurst Railway Accident helped here. But Dickens could not live forever, and his mission “to project an idealised image of himself as eligible to join every family in the country” (Engelbrecht 2) has since been questioned.

Catherine herself was notably silent regarding the separation. A.T. Engelbrecht suggests she may have feared incarceration in a mental institution had she attempted to broadcast her side of the story (88).81 However, Catherine’s voice has since been

80 See Peter Ackroyd Dickens (820-821) and Michael Slater Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing (618) for additional details about criticism Dickens received for these written accounts.

81 Such a fear would not have been outlandish. As Engelbrecht points out, members of Dickens’s circle— including fellow authors W. M. Thackeray and Edward Bulwer Lytton—had their wives committed to asylums. Moreover, “Given Dickens’s dark hints at the ‘mental disorder under which she sometimes labours’ in the 235 retroactively restored, partly through the collaboration between Catherine’s biographer,

Professor Lillian Nayder, and the Charles Dickens Museum. The “Discovering Catherine” exhibition, which ran from 3rd May-20th November 2016, shares her story in response to the negative narrative Dickens’s disseminated at the end of their relationship. The exhibition thus effectively reintegrates Catherine’s legacy into her former home. Catherine is typically viewed solely in relation to Charles, but displays throughout the Museum counter this narrow vision by granting glimpses into Catherine’s other key relationships with friends and family.

Sound clips in several of the Museum’s rooms contribute to “sonically retrieving” Catherine by highlighting her talents, such as the successful cookbook she published entitled What Shall

We Have For Dinner? Dickens is not vilified in this exhibit honouring his wife, but neither is his behaviour excused. A display board notes Catherine’s interaction with Dickens’s sister

Letitia post-separation, observing that “Although Letitia was Dickens’s sole surviving sibling, she goes unmentioned by him in his will, hinting at his disapproval with her continued contact with his estranged wife.” Not everyone in Dickens’s circle yielded to his demands for control.

Charlotte Boyce and Elodie Rousselot aptly explain the dualistic tension inherent in this relationship between the Victorian original and the neo-Victorian response: “Both an appreciation and a revision of the nineteenth century, the neo-Victorian adequately conveys the idea of celebrating while contesting, of looking back while moving forward” (2). In this chapter, I extend this appreciation of contraries to include the tension between controlling and surrendering narrative legacies, a lá Charles Dickens. Letters from Dickens literally frame

Museum’s entrance; his words hereby welcome visitors, but excerpts from Catherine’s will, painted on the Museum’s back stairwell, bid visitors farewell. She has the last word, much

Violated Letter at this time, perhaps Catherine feared a similar outcome had she, too, made her concerns public” (88). 236 like the Catherine Dickens character in the Gaynor Arnold neo-Victorian biofictional novel I discuss shortly.

Biographilia, Heteroglossia, and The (Tenacious) Legacy Issue

At the start of this thesis, I differentiated between Cora Kaplan’s approach to biographilia, which privileges the “novelisation of biography” (Victoriana 65) while I instead privilege the life-writing aspects of the novel. My first four chapters have drawn biographilia back in time, extending it to cover John Forster’s 1872 The Life of Charles Dickens, as well as Dickens’s life-writing novels. For the past three chapters, I have been analysing Dickens’s biofictional investment in the lives of his characters; specifically, how his anxieties about his authorial identity and his lost autobiographical courage perpetuate the hero-protagonist split in his life-writing novels. In this fifth and final chapter, I now turn to two neo-Victorian

Dickensian biofictional novels to scrutinise the tension between Dickens’s desire that his written legacy survive as his sole memorial, and current authors who narratively contest

Dickens’s image and authority—thereby defying his mandate not to be posthumously made

“the subject of any…testimonial whatever” (Forster 827; emphasis mine).

This chapter cannot possibly encompass the vastness of Dickens’s recent reincarnations and adaptations. I delve into further detail on this subject in my Introduction. I here position two neo-Victorian biofictional novels as case studies for the projection of Dickensian biographilia in the twenty-first century—specifically as it concerns his narrative legacy. First,

I analyse Gaynor Arnold’s 2008 novel Girl in a Blue Dress, linking Arnold’s narrative resuscitation of Catherine Dickens to the 2016 “Discovering Catherine” exhibit at the Charles

Dickens Museum. Both the novel and the exhibit participate in restoring Catherine Dickens’s voice; thereby revoking her husband’s narrative control over her story. I then examine the anxieties of Dickensian legacy visible in the literary afterlife of Miss Havisham, as imagined by Ronald Frame in his 2012 novel Havisham. In a manner akin to their author, Dickens’s

237 characters have also assumed prolific afterlives of their own. Like Lady Dedlock in the

Dickens Trails app, Miss Havisham’s afterlife is permanently entangled with that of her creator, Charles Dickens. Given Dickens’s deep connection to his characters, and his attention to their shared legacies, Dickens would almost certainly be quite concerned with their neo-Victorian adaptations and afterlives, which necessitate, to a certain extent, an appropriation of his authorial identity. As discussed later in this chapter, even during his own lifetime, Dickens had a fraught relationship with adaptations of his work.

Biographilia, much like the other Dickensian tensions I have explored, both challenges

Dickens’s authority, and keeps him at the forefront of cultural memory—thereby propelling his ongoing popularity by intensifying his mythic status. Andrea Kirchknopf points out the power of authorship in fuelling legacy: “Considering the cultic status of authors in the

Victorian era, I think that the post-Victorian rewriting of nineteenth-century authors could also be read as a symbolic move of reinstating the importance of authorship” (“Rewriting the

Victorians” 65). Kirchknopf here enlists “The proliferation of Henry James biographilia” (65) as her case study in unpacking modern literary biographers’ and biofictional novelists’ fascination with “the writing process itself” (65). This interest applies to Dickens as well; issues of authorship feature prominently in neo-Victorian recreations of his life and art.

Dickens’s death halfway through The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) is a pivotal plot point in Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress (2008), Dan Simmons’s Drood (2009), and Matthew

Pearl’s The Last Dickens (2009). An incomplete mystery—by an immensely popular novelist notorious for narrative control—is an enticing basis for modern novelists. Arnold seizes it as an opportunity for her Catherine Dickens character to reclaim her voice; it exposes Wilkie

Collins’s jealousy in Drood; and Pearl’s James Osgood proclaims that “‘Half a Dickens novel is half more than any other novel on the shelves!’” (35). Edwin Drood’s unfinished half provides tantalising opportunities for neo-Victorian authors keen to engage with Dickens’s

238 narrative legacy. As Ann Rigney points out, “Stories stick. They help make particular events memorable by figuring the past in a structured way that engages the sympathies of the reader” (347; emphasis original). Arnold’s method of rehabilitating Catherine by adapting her story into novel form makes it more likely to captivate the public imagination. Ronald Frame likewise latches onto this novelistic potential by assuming authorial control of Miss

Havisham—one of Dickens’s most iconic characters. Dickens’s desire that his legacy live on through his fiction, rather than through inert monuments, attests to his investment in the power of authorship, and the power of writing a novel, in particular.

Biofiction—the hybrid genre of biography and fiction—is well suited to the narrative revisionism analysed in this chapter: “Ostensibly providing a (fictional) glimpse into the author’s private life, the genre of biofiction caters to the voyeuristic gaze of the public and their obsession with recovering the (historical) author’s ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ self behind the mask of his/her renowned public persona” (Novak and Mayer 25). In writing biofiction,

Gaynor Arnold challenges the traditionally accepted version of the Dickens’s marriage, promulgated by Dickens himself—which portrays Charles as the long-suffering hero and

Catherine as the clumsy, dimwitted, ultimately unlovable dunce—by telling their story from

Catherine’s perspective, under the guise of Dorothea Gibson. Ronald Frame’s Havisham is more loosely categorised as a biofiction, in a manner akin to Dickens’s life-writing novels being considered biofictions. As John Forster reminds us, “[h]is literary work was so intensely one with his nature that he is not separable from it and the man and the method throw a singular light on each other” (686-687). Dickens and his characters were—and are— forever entangled.

By choosing biofiction, both Gaynor Arnold and Ronald Frame consensually play

Dickens’s own fact-and-fiction-mingling game; however, they assume authorial authority. In so doing, they participate in the neo-Victorian revisionist tradition by “self-consciously

239 engag[ing] with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the

Victorians” (Heilmann and Llewellyn 4; emphasis original). Arnold employs Dorothea

Gibson to help set Catherine Dickens’s record straight, thereby challenging Charles’s interpretation of events—and thus his legacy. In her Author’s Note at the start of the novel,

Arnold states that she has “taken a novelist’s liberties as I explored an imaginative path throughout their relationship” (np). However, she is equally quick to confirm that she has also

“attempted to keep true to the essential natures of the two main protagonists as I have come to understand them” (np). Attempting to uncover the “authentic” or “essential” story of the

Dickens’s marriage through the mode of revisionist fiction is paradoxical, but as Cora Kaplan reminds us, biofiction “can be interpreted in various ways, as highlighting the tension between biography and fiction, as well as marking the overlap between them” (Victoriana

65). Biofiction, then, is ideally suited to both illuminating Dickensian tensions and collapsing them. Arnold simultaneously effaces this boundary and restores it, by allowing Catherine a voice in her own story. Frame likewise exploits biofiction’s fractious malleability, shaping

Dickens’s legacy as he assumes control over one of the very characters Dickens’s conflates with his posthumous identity.

Arnold’s Dorothea Gibson interrogates heteroglossic voices in her role as a narrative detective, seeking to understand how her life fell apart. Evaluating these conflicting perspectives in turn prepares Dorothea for authorship herself. According to Bakhtin, the dialogic interaction between authors, narrators, and characters is fundamental in dispersing heteroglossia and encouraging “interrelationships” (1192-1193). Frame exploits these

“interrelationships” in Havisham’s tension between authorial perspectives in narrating Miss

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Havisham’s history. The omnisciently framed “Valediction” reminds readers that, while Miss

Havisham may narrate her story in first-person, another voice has the final say. This post- mortem loss of narrative control likewise attests to Dickens’s inability to micromanage his legacy long-term.

Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress (2008): The Author’s (In)Visibility

Letters from Catherine Dickens are on display in the Charles Dickens Museum’s

“Discovering Catherine” special exhibit, while excerpts from her will—painted on the museum’s exit stairwell—bid visitors goodbye. Here she establishes the terms of her legacy, appointing her son, Henry, executor, and distributing her possessions to her loved ones.

Personal pronouns abound: “I appoint…to my son… wife of my said son… my silver sugar basin…” Integrating Catherine’s own words into this exhibit is important, given her voice has traditionally been silenced—most emphatically by her own husband. At the end of her life,

Catherine sought to validate her side of the story by entrusting her letters from Charles to their daughter Katey, urging her to “Give these to the British Museum—that the world may know he loved me once” (Oxford Companion 162).82 Gaynor Arnold’s neo-Victorian biofictional account of Charles and Catherine Dickens’s marriage, entitled Girl in a Blue

Dress (2008), heeds Catherine’s imperative to tell her side of the story by embodying her in the novel’s narrator, Dorothea (or) “Dodo” Gibson; likewise, Charles Dickens is cast as

Dorothea’s estranged husband Alfred Gibson. Both Catherine Dickens and Gaynor Arnold recognise an author’s power to influence truth and impact historical memory via the written word.

82 Gladys Storey records that Katey’s doctor donated the letters to the British Museum in 1899 (164). They are currently housed in the British Library.

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In life, Catherine Dickens attempted to regain control of her story by employing her husband’s own words (in the form of letters he authored to her) to counteract his claim that they had always been miserable83 and to corroborate her narrative of their life together. In fiction, Gaynor Arnold continues Catherine’s rehabilitative mission, specifically building upon her husband’s personal investment in fiction’s connection to legacy, by inviting readers to consider the truth of Catherine’s history through the memorable mode of story. Moreover,

Arnold’s Catherine Dickens equivalent—Dorothea Gibson—significantly reclaims her life at the end of the novel by assuming authorship of her late husband’s as yet unfinished final novel. Dorothea continues Catherine’s mission by indignantly recalling how Alfred “declared me a bad mother and a worse wife. Two untrue statements together” (93). And “‘to say we’d never been happy after all the loving things he said to me; after all the letters he wrote—that was a simple lie’” (264). Dorothea offers a more balanced (and thus arguably more believable) version of events. The historical Catherine and her fictional counterpart Dorothea both engage with Charles Dickens’s words as a means of recovery. Dorothea takes a critical additional step though: while Catherine left Charles’s words to her to speak for themselves,

Dorothea adds her own words to the narrative he initiated, thus achieving authorship and creating memory herself.

By constructing Dorothea Gibson and installing her as the novel’s narrator, Arnold forms one of the “neo-Victorian attempts to redress historical wrongs” (Smith 1) as she invites modern readers to reimagine the Dickenses in a newly memorable way. Such an approach complements recent, more balanced, biographical offerings, such as those by Slater

83 In May 1858, at the height of their marital turmoil, Dickens wrote to his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts that “It is [Catherine’s] misery to live in some fatal atmosphere which slays every one to whom she should be dearest. It is my misery that no one can ever understand the truth in its full force, or know what a blighted and wasted life my married life has been” (Letters 336). Miriam Margolyes includes this letter as part of Dickens’s “tissue of self-serving lies” (23). Despite producing ten children in their twenty-two years of marriage, Dickens adopted a revisionist approach to his history with Catherine, extending their later dysfunction to cover most of their relationship. 242 and Tomalin which I discussed previously. The novel thus adheres to Andrea Kirchknopf’s argument that Victorian adaptations “display critical perspectives, particularly in postcolonial or feminist revisions of canonical texts” (“(Re)Workings” 68). Kirchknopf cites Jane Eyre’s

“adaptive chain” (68) consisting of Jean Rhys 1966 offering Wide Sargasso Sea and D.M.

Thomas’s more recent Charlotte (2000). Both examples focus on “foregrounding female narrative voices” (68), and Wide Sargasso Sea, like Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress, privileges the perspective of an abandoned wife. In this way, the stories of women become part of “neo-Victorian fiction’s recovery of suppressed or silenced voices...” (Brindle 119).

Nonetheless, not all critics interpret Arnold’s novel as a feminist victory for the Catherine

Dickens character.

Current scholarship on Girl in a Blue Dress predominantly focuses on the long- silenced wife’s opportunity to speak at last, as Dorothea determines to complete her husband’s unfinished final novel Ambrose Boniface. While united in its interest in Dorothea’s decision to work on Alfred’s novel, scholarly opinion is nonetheless divided on whether

Dorothea’s authorial opportunity is ultimately empowering or restricting. Julia Worthington reads it as empowering: through assuming authorship herself, Dorothea is “thereby outlasting

[Alfred] in life and literature” (86), and Margaret D. Stetz deems Arnold’s novel a

“representative text” of “feminist didacticism” in the Neo-Victorian genre (144). Conversely,

Lai Ming Ho argues that “For a writer, being asked by Dickens’s spirit to finish his book would seem to be an honour and recognition. This is however hardly an ideal feminist reconciliation and resolution for an estranged wife” (68). In Ho’s reading, a posthumous invitation to authorship cannot cover offences enacted during Alfred and Dorothea’s life together. Nonetheless, like Worthington, I see Dorothea’s decision to write fiction as an important and empowering transition from living in the past, where she is stuck in the rut of repeatedly reading Alfred’s first letter to her, to living in the present—and even envisioning a

243 future for herself. The novel ends with the words, “And I start to write” (414). Dorothea is finally moving forward; she is now creating rather than merely regurgitating.

Lillian Nayder likewise remains unconvinced by Arnold’s rendering of Dorothea as empowering for Catherine Dickens’s legacy. In her 2011 biography of Catherine, entitled The

Other Dickens, Nayder concedes that “Arnold grants [Dorothea Gibson] more agency than others usually do in such depictions” (341)84. Nonetheless, Nayder’s overarching assessment is that “writers such as Arnold challenge those who scapegoat Catherine Dickens yet share a common assumption with them: that Catherine’s significance and that of her sisters lie solely in their relationships with Dickens” (16). While Arnold’s depiction of Dorothea may be

“evocative and sympathetic” (16) Nayder still sees it ultimately falling short of the mark, since she views Catherine Dickens as more actively reclaiming her own, separate identity in her “animated” post-Charles life: “For the ‘real’ Catherine Dickens, not simply for the figure imagined by the novelist, widowhood was a starting point and offered more than a chance for retrospection and nostalgia” (341). Although Nayder’s observation about the danger in using

Charles Dickens as the sole starting point for establishing Catherine’s consequence is valid, this opportunity to revisit the past cannot be so easily dismissed. Rather, it proves critical in building Dorothea’s narrative confidence. As narratorial detective, Dorothea initiates reputational repair which is both retrospective (as she reflects upon memories of life with

Alfred) and future-oriented (as she sets out to leave her mark on Alfred’s final novel).

Perhaps Nayder has since reconsidered the value of “retrospection and nostalgia,” given her involvement in the 2016 “Discovering Catherine” exhibit at the Charles Dickens Museum participates in the push to rehabilitate Catherine’s reputation as it challenges Charles’s presentation of her. Visitors are reminded that while they may have arrived intent upon

84 Specifically, Nayder cites the examples of Jean Elliott’s play My Dearest Kate, Claire Tomalin’s biography The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, and Phyllis Rose’s study of love and power in Victorian marriage entitled Parallel Lives, which all deem Catherine Dickens’s post-Charles life “empty” (338). 244 experiencing the home of England’s foremost Victorian novelist, it was her home too.

Dickens’s dismissive and denigrating treatment of Catherine after their separation now forms part of his legacy, and his talent co-exists with his faults.

Reviewing Girl in a Blue Dress for The Dickensian, Jean Elliot points out that

Dorothea’s nickname “Dodo” arguably connects Catherine Dickens’s fictional doppelgänger to Middlemarch’s Dorothea “Dodo” Brooke (64). If so, then Elliot reads this move as Arnold

“ambitiously invoking” George Eliot’s earlier protagonist. Due to the space limitations of a book review, Elliot does not explore this potential connection in detail. Such an alliance would certainly bolster Arnold’s Dorothea’s authorial power by also, in a sense, redeeming

Eliot’s Dorothea’s lost literary idealism.

In Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke—captivated by visions of contributing to her husband’s (Edward Casaubon’s) work—traverses from idealism, to frustration, to renewal, not by completing her husband’s unfinished scholarly work (The Key to All Mythologies) but by abandoning it. Recognizing it “as a seductive yet impossible task” (Marchetta 7) enables

Dorothea to move beyond the “epic that fossilizes…[which] begins to free her from the narrative labyrinth” (Travis 381). A “key” (if I may) difference, however, is that Eliot’s

Dorothea commences her work while her husband is still alive. This arrangement means that—unlike Arnold’s Dorothea—Eliot’s Dorothea is subject to her husband’s feedback on her efforts. Tensions inevitably arise as Casaubon cannot relinquish control over his life’s work; Dorothea’s role is more tediously clerical than liberatingly creative. She suffers under her husband’s reproach, which increases the divide between them, “for her ardour, continually repulsed, served, with her intense memory, to heighten her dread, as thwarted energy subsides into a shudder…” (Eliot 425). Although Arnold only allusively connects her heroine with Eliot’s, she certainly draws out the implications of illuminating Catherine

Dickens’s life, which was often obscured by her husband. In so doing, Arnold invokes

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Middlemarch’s concluding comment about the value of “liv[ing] faithfully a hidden life”

(838). Moreover, the nickname “Dodo” surely links to the extinct bird, as Arnold breathes new life into her Dodo—and arguably Eliot’s as well.

Productive Recollections: “I began to feel a person in my own right.”

The power to speak—and significantly the power to speak first—clearly has lasting implications. Arnold challenges Charles Dickens’s perspective, which has traditionally overshadowed Catherine’s, through Dorothea’s role as narratorial detective, seeking to comprehend how her life with Alfred disintegrated. As such, attempting to tell her own counter-story, and distinguishing between true and false narratives, are essential for

Dorothea, as she remembers her life with Alfred. Dorothea assigns prodigious consequence to the written word, and she repeatedly turns to letters to search for the truth, whether it is to uncover Alfred’s potential infidelity or re-instil confidence that he once loved her. Dorothea professes, “I felt that letters were my only chance of finding out the truth” (233). Dorothea’s detective work with letters can be read as a nod to Catherine’s plea that the public review her love letters from Charles as evidence of their mutual affection.

Arnold incorporates this reverence for written narratives into the novel, giving credence to Dorothea’s initial struggle to write confidently by juxtaposing it against Alfred’s insistence on the veracity of his version of events. In the middle of the novel, family friend

Michael O’Rourke makes the critical observation that “‘Alfred always made sure you saw things exactly as he saw them’” (166) and disagreements were certain to end with “‘the conviction that somehow I was in the wrong’” (166). Dorothea’s situation was even more difficult; her disagreements with Alfred ultimately ended up in eviction from her own home, while Alfred’s confidence ensured public opinion was on his side. Through Dorothea, however, Arnold imagines an alternate ending to Catherine Dickens’s story, one where her perspective is validated during her own lifetime, rather than retrospectively through museum

246 exhibits and biofictional novels. Such an approach elides time’s traditional confines, wherein

“The historical novel can be considered an act of memory, as Mieke Bal describes it, designed to bring the past into the present and to shape it for present purposes” (Mitchell and

Parsons 13). As the novel’s overarching author, Arnold grooms her narrator—Dorothea—by helping her to productively remember. Part of this process requires Dorothea to confront her lost memories. During a difficult pregnancy Dorothea confesses, “I forgot things. I lost things” (193) and then her daughter died, after which “I was given so much laudanum I can remember only blackness” (193). Alfred attempts to marginalise Dorothea at this vulnerable time by sending her away to the Midlands to recuperate, (ostensibly) to aid her convalescence, but he later uses her absence to support his claim about her failures as wife and mother. When she returns home, she instantly notices how strangely detached the children are from her (204-205). The novel does not shy away from presenting Dickens’s darker, selfish, and manipulative aspects through the fictionalised Alfred.

Dorothea’s trip to the Midlands does prove purposeful, however, in that here she experiences her first foray as a storyteller; here she finds solace in sharing stories of her life with Alfred. At the outset, this audience is drawn to Dorothea as “the wife of Alfred Gibson”

(202), but she notices that “As the days went by, they began to ask me my opinion of matters, and were interested in what I had to say. Indeed for the first time I began to feel a person”

(202; emphasis mine). Dorothea demonstrates her merit as a story-teller and conversationalist, and in so doing, starts to establish her own, independent identity. Dorothea feels more fully human when afforded a legitimate voice, and remembering how her perspective was validated in the Midlands contributes to Dorothea’s eventual authorial return.

Reflecting upon past memories encourages Dorothea to move forward with her life. This is a substantial step in Dorothea’s narrative of identity and stands in stark contrast to Alfred,

“who never once looked to me for confirmation of anything...he never sought my views”

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(297). While Alfred may have initially played on Dorothea’s weakness and memory losses to write her out of their family narrative, she reintegrates herself by remembering her recovery as a time of transition from being a voiceless wife to an individual with valid perspectives.

Recovering and confronting painful memories, and acknowledging time lost to laudanum, enable Dorothea to eventually challenge the selective history Alfred assigned her.

When the time comes to read Alfred’s will, Dorothea explains, “I do not want or expect that anything material has been left to me. My memories are far more precious” (37). This sentiment echoes Charles Dickens’s own desire, as expressed in his final will and testament, that he be remembered through his writing, rather than through a physical monument. His memory should live on through his immaterial fictional creations. And yet, Dorothea does imbue her immaterial memories with material power. Recounting her early courtship with

Alfred, she muses, “When I read his letters, though, it was almost as good as being with him”

(41). The material letters point to an immaterial memory that is nearly as powerful as physical presence. Even Dorothea’s description of Alfred’s first letter to her as her most prized possession (39) is steeped in the slippage between physicality and immateriality, itself an offshoot of the overarching slippage between fact and fiction in the novel. Arnold exploits the fluidity between physical words on paper and the intangible significance they represent.

The letter has no (inherent) value as an object, but the meanings behind it are valuable to

Dorothea. Paradoxically, through embracing her immaterial memories Dorothea decides to re-engage with material things, and when she eventually reclaims choice possessions from her past life, she carefully picks objects that attest to her strengths and to her individuality.

Although Dorothea does not wish to forget Alfred entirely, she is also learning to separate her perspective from his.

Dorothea’s decision to write fiction—to exercise narrative authority—is significant in that it also quite literally marks the start of a new chapter in her own life. Paul Ricoeur points

248 out the restorative power of narrative as “the place where a certain healing of memory may begin” (9). Alfred may have created the characters in Ambrose Boniface, but it is Dorothea who will ultimately control them. Similarly, Alfred may have striven for sole authorial control over Dorothea’s history, but she learns to use his words to support her perspective, as when she re-reads his early letters to her in defiance of his lies that he never loved her. Like her historical counterpart Catherine Dickens, Dorothea employs her husband’s early words to thwart his later fictions; however, Dorothea takes the crucial next step by adding her own words to his narrative. This step also revisits the distinction between an author and a narrator, as outlined in my second chapter: a narrator has the power to speak, but the author constructs the narrator. Significantly, Alfred’s incomplete novel is a mystery, and Dorothea—as the new author—will now control Alfred’s narrator. This post-mortem loss of narrative control likewise links to my analysis later in this chapter about a modern author conjuring new possibilities for one of Dickens’s characters in the novel Havisham.

As I have outlined elsewhere in this thesis, Dickens’s conception of heroism is haunted by a quasi-fanatical obsession with being right. He maligned Catherine’s character via the written word in letters to friends, and he crafted his will “with a definite design upon the reader” (Slater Charles Dickens 615) in part to further shame Catherine. Slater does, however, grant Dickens some grace in his drive to exonerate himself by spinning a false narrative about Catherine’s failures as a wife and mother: “It was not gratuitous cruelty, I believe, but something that Dickens had to get himself to believe so that he could the more freely pity himself in the image of his own children...” (Dickens and Women 146; emphasis original). Arnold’s rendering of Alfred Gibson draws heavily upon these controlling tendencies Charles Dickens exhibited. Alfred’s (incorrect) insistence that his sister-in-law,

Alice, requested on her deathbed that he henceforth wear her ring, is another unsettling example of how Alfred shapes his own historical record (251). He manipulates memories to

249 suit his agenda, leading Dorothea to speculate that “He told the story so often I wonder if he’d come to believe it in the end” (251). For Alfred, as for Dickens before him, narrative certainty equals truth.

Nonetheless, Dorothea challenges the infallibility of Alfred’s textual constructs by exercising her interpretative rights. She seeks the truth about Alfred’s relationship with the other woman, Wilhelmina Ricketts, through letters. She (re)discovers the truth about Alfred’s initial love for her through letters. She once held out hope “that if Alfred and I could resume our correspondence, we might perhaps contrive a reconciliation of our own” (243). This is not to be, however, and Dorothea finally comes to understand that while she desired “to remember him at his best” (265) she had become “too much of a reminder to him, a reminder of the wrong thing he had done” (265) for him to desire to remember her. Thus, Dorothea productively channels her memories to decipher the narrative myths encircling her history. In reading Alfred’s autobiographical notebook, Dorothea comprehends his inclination for

“showing the scars only in his books” (279). Fittingly, then, it is through fiction that Dorothea heals her scars inflicted by Alfred. Like Dorothea’s treasured letters—which accrued value via the immaterial memories they contained—the fictive words Dorothea will write have worth beyond their physical presence on the page. They assist her in reclaiming the visibility

Alfred appropriated.

Woman of Letters: Dorothea’s Narrative Detective Work

Reading Dorothea as a narratorial detective interrogating living suspects and evaluating the evidence (surrounding her shattered former life) allows us to reconsider, with

Dorothea, how distorted facts become convenient fiction. The figure of the detective was coming into its own in nineteenth-century England. This figure is most famously associated with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but there were in fact a number of

Sherlockian precursors, including Dickens’s Inspector Bucket (Bleak House, 1852) and

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Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff (The Moonstone, 1868). A certain glamour surrounded this role, since “A Victorian detective was a secular substitute for a prophet or a priest. In a newly uncertain world, he offered science, conviction, stories that could organise chaos”

(Summerscale xii). There was, however, a darker side to detection: monomania, which is an

“Exaggerated or obsessive enthusiasm for or preoccupation with one thing.”85 Unlike Alfred, who manipulated narratives in accordance with his “very partial memory” (73),86 Dorothea incorporates a variety of perspectives into her story. Seeking such a variegated narrative is to

Dorothea’s strength, since it helps stave off monomania by adopting a balanced approach.

She acknowledges that, while Alfred did not always treat her well, “he wasn’t a bad man”

(404). Dorothea is more objective about where the evidence will lead her, even when this course necessitates a visit to her rival for Albert’s affections: Wilhelmina Ricketts.

Alfred did not allow his wife nearly as much grace as she gave him, describing her to

Miss Ricketts as “A virtual invalid. A recluse. A woman who no longer shared anything with her husband—including, no doubt, her bed” (353). Dorothea clarifies to herself, “Perhaps that is how he saw it, but it is not the whole truth” (353) and she proceeds to correct Alfred’s skewed perspectives to his mistress. In so doing, Dorothea evaluates the evidence much like a detective would: before interrogating an “utterance,” it is necessary to first reveal “it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language”

(Bakhtin 1199). Dorothea, the wife-turned-detective, reconciles heteroglossic tensions as she first comprehends how her life with Alfred unravelled; and second, prepares to solve

85 “Monomania.” OxfordDictionaries.com. Oxford Dictionaries, Web. Accessed 8th May 2018.

86 Dickens himself was accused of monomania in the mid 1850s by Frenchman Hippolyte Taine, whose account, appearing in Revue des deux Mondes, was “cast in hyperbolic sentences that competed with Dickens’s own: ‘The difference between a madman and a man of genius is not very great...The imagination of Dickens is like that of monomaniacs’” (Bodenheimer Knowing Dickens 3). John Forster stresses it was Dickens’s imaginative “exuberance” and “vividness” Taine found particularly confronting (687; 692). We know from biographical accounts already examined in this thesis, that Dickens was certainly prone to obsessive, one-sided fixations.

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Ambrose Boniface’s mysterious conclusion. Miss Ricketts reveals how Alfred claimed, “that as far as England was concerned, he was Public Opinion” (355). Alfred/Charles may have promoted himself as “Public Opinion” itself, but more recently authors—like Arnold—have turned to biofiction to challenge this image. In a subtle, yet powerful, manoeuvre, Arnold positions Dorothea Gibson as a detective who seeks perspectives and interrogates memories so that Catherine Dickens’s Public Memory can co-exist alongside Charles Dickens’s long- lauded “Public Opinion.” We can almost imagine Catherine Dickens applauding her literary double for surveying the evidence uncovered by her investigations and declaring: “And I was loved by him, no matter what anyone says” (73). This was, after all, why Catherine submitted her love letters from Charles to public scrutiny following her death. Dorothea enlists letters as a form of evidentiary defence; the novel thus reinforces the power of letters in offering an alternative interpretation of the accepted historical record.

The physicality of letters is particularly emphasised in the novel; remembering is experienced both emotionally and physically. For instance, a letter from Alfred advising that they should separate is felt as a physical shock: “I started at those so unforgiving words. The black letters seemed to spring out at me like words on a newly cut gravestone” (235).

Dorothea literally associates Alfred’s penned cruelty with death itself. This is a marked change from the young Dorothea, who experienced vitality through Alfred’s letters. She had even contemplated telling her father, Mr. Millar, how her love for Alfred has grown through their (secret) correspondence: “I longed to tell him about the letters, how I felt I knew Alfred

Gibson’s very soul…” (53). Young Dorothea is deeply connected to Alfred’s correspondence because for her, Alfred is his letters. Similarly, the older Dorothea cannot bear to think of

Alfred writing love letters to Wilhelmina Ricketts, because “his love letters are like my own blood” (362). Dorothea feels a certain physical possessiveness of Alfred’s letters; they are more than merely memories for her, they form part of her very identity and existence as they

252 prepare her for authorship. Letters may wound her, but they also invigorate her as she reconciles to the truth of her story. Again, in contrast to Lillian Nayder’s dismissal of

Dorothea’s “chance for retrospection and nostalgia” (341), I read this opportunity as instrumental in helping Dorothea uncover her authorial voice.

In addition to letters, Dorothea also recalls newspaper accounts of Alfred’s misrepresentation of her in the press, discovers an old notebook of Alfred’s, discusses her former life with friends and family, and even interviews the other woman. Dorothea’s narrative detective work is here reminiscent of the Victorian sensation novel, with its recourse to media and evidence. Brimming with conflicting accounts of the mystery to be solved, The Woman in White, by Dickens’s friend and collaborator Wilkie Collins, is an example. Alfred’s notebook proves to be a particularly vital piece of evidence in Dorothea’s investigation. Within the notebook she discovers a brief autobiography, and by here engaging with Alfred’s memories, she realises his desperation to believe that “He is not Alfred the adulterer, the caster-off of wives, but Alfred the gentleman-hero—standing up nobly against the trials of life…Yours Truly. The One and Only. The Great Man” (289-290). Dickens famously referred to himself as “The Inimitable,” and so it is for Alfred as well; all narratives must point to his laudable identity, hereby deflecting attention away from the deep-seated insecurities lurking beneath the confident façade. This realisation enables Dorothea to reconcile the competing accounts of their relationship history in her own mind: “no one forced him to refer to me among his friends as the best wife that ever was. No, as Michael says, he is convincing himself, justifying why he did not love me at the end by saying he never loved me at the beginning and that the marital mistake was not his” (289; emphasis original). Alfred’s inconsistent narratives now make sense, and, having satisfactorily interpreted the mystery of her past, Dorothea can face the future.

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By thus chronicling Dorothea’s turn as a narrative detective who scours old documents and new discussions alike—thus wrestling conflicting viewpoints into a narrative she can accept—Arnold further participates in the neo-Victorian revisionist tradition, wherein previously marginalised individuals are allowed a greater voice. As Kym Brindle perceives,

“neo-Victorian novelists stress that material traces of the past are fragmentary, incomplete, and contradictory” (Introduction, np). This is certainly true—Arnold’s novel is full of fragmented accounts and contradictory perspectives—yet it also acknowledges that with enough fragments, a coherent picture can emerge. Assessing these inconsistent pieces of the past has been a vital aspect of Dorothea’s narrative detection; it is also preparation for her future venture as a novelist, wherein she will encounter heteroglossic voices, themselves a

“prerequisite for authentic novelistic prose” (1194) according to Mikhail Bakhtin. Navigating the tension inherent in these differing voices is a critical aspect of authorial growth, particularly in a layered novel attesting to the power of narrative voice in assessing revised truth.

The novel leaves ambiguous the critical scene in which Alfred returns from the grave to invite Dorothea to finish his novel: “Is this a dream? Is he a ghost?” (390). Arnold declines to decisively answer these questions. It seems most likely that Dorothea’s imagination conjures this scene as a posthumous apology from Alfred. After all, she has sought the elusive “Truth,” and while some questions remain as yet unanswered, confronting Alfred’s,

Miss Ricketts’s, and her own memories has yielded a narrative she can accept. Now that

Dorothea is released from pondering Alfred’s insistence upon destroying any tender memories of their courtship and early marriage, and now that she has confronted his relationship with Miss Ricketts, Dorothea’s unencumbered imagination accepts authorial responsibility from post-mortem Alfred, who tells her: “‘Ambrose Boniface needs concluding. And you, Dodo, will be the one to see to it’” (391). Far from being a sign of

254 continued subservience, as Lai Ming Ho suggests, Dorothea’s receipt of the authorial mantle from Alfred is pivotal in her transition from self-described “footnote” (383) to author outright. She has literally been marginalised—pushed to the edge of the page—and her life usurped by the “One and Only.” But by investigating her history, Dorothea’s narrative evolves from one akin to Miss Havisham’s (imprisoned, albeit willingly, by spectres from the past permanently replicating epic disappointment) to one which acknowledges the disappointment but is able to move past the past.

In her dream, Alfred invites her to authorship—an invitation correlating to an important revelation Dorothea discovered in the aforementioned notebook of Alfred’s. Here,

Alfred confesses his flagging confidence while grappling with Ambrose Boniface:

I hope only to stay alive long enough to complete Boniface. I should not want to leave it as a mystery to my readers—although at this moment I have to admit it is something of a mystery to myself… I have an almost superstitious dread as I see the last chapters come towards me, as if they are some kind of Nemesis; and I shy away from them. Perhaps my powers of invention are failing. (270-71) Alfred’s fear is important evidence for the reversal of narrative power as the authority to author shifts from Alfred to Dorothea. This insecurity returns in Dorothea’s dream where at last Alfred is willing to acknowledge the validity of Dorothea’s perspective. Arnold contrasts the “real” Alfred, whose beliefs “became to him as inviolable as Scripture” (264) where he

“chose to see” (289) Dorothea as having sole responsibility for their marital unhappiness and wrote “convincingly” on this point (289), with the reconstructed Alfred of Dorothea’s dream, who relinquishes his perspective to her control. Dorothea’s confidence has grown as Alfred’s has diminished. Arnold’s novel likewise toys with the tension between heroism and anxiety that I have traced (in this thesis as a whole) throughout Dickens’s own novels, as gaps appear in Alfred’s seemingly impervious narrative confidence.

Lillian Nayder points out that even the definitive collection of Dickens’s letters (the

Pilgrim edition) positions a letter from Catherine in a manner that strips it of its individual

255 merit and renders it merely a “footnote” (22) to the volume. Catherine in fact wrote the majority of the letter in question, requested Dickens add a postscript (which he did) yet the volume reverses these positions, promoting Dickens’s postscript to prominence and only printing what survives of Catherine’s letter in the footnote (21-22). Here again, Arnold’s novel rehabilitates Catherine through the fictional Dorothea, for at the end of Arnold’s text,

Dorothea emerges from the margins to assume overarching authorship of Alfred’s unfinished novel. Alfred has long claimed sole narrative authority, but this authority now passes to

Dorothea. She seeks guidance from him, some clue as to his intended resolution, but he demurs: “‘It is a Mystery, after all.’ He laughs… ‘Oh, you’ll find the answer if you look hard.

I’ve every confidence in you, Dodo’” (391; emphasis original). In a stark transition from

Alfred’s former tyrannical control of all words concerning himself, in Dorothea’s dream he leaves the ending entirely in Dorothea’s hands. Dorothea—or at least her subconscious—is ready to move forward. This generous rendering of Alfred is in keeping with him as a figment of Dorothea’s own making. In her dream, she has imagined him the way she wished he was in life.

Dorothea’s influence over the exact narrative Alfred started is important. Until now, he has denied her a voice in their shared life story. Therefore, it is essential that she now finishes the same story he started. The counter-argument remains that Dorothea requires

Alfred’s authorial status in order to be heard, but so be it.87 Regardless, she will at last have a platform to share her perspective; once she has her audience’s attention, they may well be willing to hear her perspective on other matters as well, as happened previously in the

Midlands. And above all, Dorothea retains the power to solve his mystery—thus changing the novel as a whole—while he fades into the background. At the start of the novel, Kitty accuses

87 Arnold herself enlists Charles Dickens’s status to attract readers to Catherine Dickens’s story: the novel’s cover advertises it as “A novel inspired by the life & marriage of Charles Dickens.” Once Arnold has her audience’s attention, she turns the focus to recovering Catherine’s voice. The “Discovering Catherine” exhibit likewise adopts this approach. 256 her mother of being “‘a ghost from the past, wandering around the room in the dark.

Expecting him to ‘turn up,’ perhaps?’” (8). Arnold cleverly juxtaposes Kitty’s accusation at the beginning and Dorothea’s vision of Alfred at the end: initially Dorothea is the listless, purposeless ghost, utterly enmeshed in her husband’s false narrative, but by the end,

Dorothea is the dominant author and Alfred is the ghost (writer). For all his certainties,

Alfred lacked the capability to “will himself a happy ending” (265). In fact, he could not even will himself to finish his final novel. Instead, it is Dorothea—bolstered by her work as a narratorial detective—who will conclude Alfred’s novel. As Mikhail Bakhtin points out,

“The prose writer makes use of words that are already populated with the social intentions of others, and compels them to serve his own new intentions, to serve a second master” (1219; emphasis mine). In fine Bakhtinian form, Dorothea assumes control of words bearing

Alfred’s signature. He may have invented the fictions of his life with Dorothea and his final novel, but she—having successfully engaged with heteroglossic voices in her narrative detective work—now inherits control of this written legacy after Alfred’s passing.

In Girl in a Blue Dress, both the author, Gaynor Arnold, and the primary protagonist she creates use their authorial positions to challenge Charles Dickens’s words. Arnold explicitly outlines her intentions to intervene in the Dickens legacy: “Above all, in Dorothea

Gibson I have tried to give voice to the largely voiceless Catherine Dickens, who once requested that her letters from her husband be preserved so that ‘the world may know he loved me once’” (Author’s Note, np). Indeed, in Arnold’s biofiction, Dorothea finds her voice and assumes narrative mastery when she sets out to complete Alfred’s unfinished final novel. Catherine Dickens claimed Charles did in fact once love her—and she left his letters to her as proof—but nonetheless he remains primary author of their story. The letters are authored from his perspective. Conversely, Arnold’s Dorothea Gibson furthers Catherine’s restorative cause: she expands upon her husband’s words to articulate her own authorial

257 voice, thereby actively participating in shaping their legacy. Previously denied a part in naming their children (90), Dorothea now has the chance to christen literary characters.

Alfred may have initiated Ambrose Boniface and the narrative of his life with Dorothea, but it is she who (quite literally) has the last word.

Dickensian Adaptations, Then and Now

Having explored Dickens’s appearance—albeit under the guise of fiction—in Gaynor

Arnold’s neo-Victorian biofiction, Girl in a Blue Dress, I now explore the anxieties of

(literary) afterlife and legacy via Ronald Frame’s neo-Victorian rendering of Dickens’s iconic

Miss Havisham. In Havisham (2012), Frame elaborates upon the scanty history Dickens allows Great Expectations’ notoriously macabre spinster. I read Havisham’s engagement with Miss Havisham’s anxiety about legacy as a means for charting the neo-Victorian genre’s role in both preserving, and challenging, Charles Dickens’s own legacy—one which he clearly saw as entangled with the afterlives of his novelistic creations.

During Dickens’s lifetime, adaptations of his work met with mixed reactions from the author himself. Jon Mee states that “Sometimes Dickens gave his permission for these adaptations of his texts, but often he was annoyed” (Cambridge Introduction 84). This assessment links back to Holly Furneaux’s point (discussed in my Introduction) about

Dickens’s desire for enthusiastic readerly engagement warring with his need for creative control. In a letter he wrote to Frederick Yates in November 1838, Dickens’s possessiveness over his creations is evident: “My general objection to the adaptation of any unfinished work of mine simply is that being badly done and worse acted it tends to vulgarize the characters, to destroy or weaken in the minds of those who see them the impressions I have endeavoured to create, and consequently to lessen the after-interest in their progress” (Letters 47).

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According to the British Library,88 this letter was inspired by Edward Stirling’s adaptation of

Nicholas Nickleby. Yates produced the play—which ran at the Adelphi—and acted in the role of Mr. Mantalini. Significantly, Dickens eventually extends approval for Stirling’s adaptation, retracting “all objection to its publication” (Letters 47) once its success is realised. Still, as Malcolm Andrews argues, “The dream of complete control over the representation of imaginary worlds is a very Dickensian fantasy” (28).89 And yet, despite

Dickens’s dislike of relinquishing control, adaptability is key to his popularity, since “Even as it launched Dickens’s celebrity, Oliver Twist sustains the Dickens legacy…” (Sadoff 270).

Sadoff argues this is due to the novel’s variegated genre, which allows for perpetual adaptation for new audiences across place and time. The Pickwick Papers alone has inspired a plethora of “adaptations, improvements, continuations, selections, plagiarisms, and imitations” (Bowen Other Dickens 47). The inherent complexity of the very thing Dickens disdains—loss of control—also being vital to his success, is reminiscent of the other

Dickensian tensions explored across this thesis.

To reiterate, as part of positioning Dickensian adaptations in relation to their creator’s legacy, Dickens’s documentation of his own life was—much like his hero-protagonist split— fractured at best. Having destroyed his own life-writing, the author urges readers to instead evaluate his legacy in the context of his “published works.” In this last will and testament,

Dickens dictates that “I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever. I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country on my published works, and to the remembrance of my friends upon their experience

88 “Edward Stirling’s Play Adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby.” https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/edward- stirlings-play-adaptation-of-nicholas-nickleby. The British Library. Web. Accessed 11th October 2017.

89 Andrews also envisions Dickens’s narratorial role in his public readings, wherein “he liked to think of himself as narrator, guiding the action, prompting the responses in close companionship with the reader” (28-29). Such investment can be interpreted both as devotion to his audience—and as narrative manipulation.

259 of me in addition thereto” (827).90 Here we are explicitly instructed to identify Dickens in light of his fictional creations; however, in the broader context of Dickens’s life, he is not content to actually “rest his claims” at all. As Juliet John observes, “Dickens’s will appears to suggest a man who wanted the legacy of his books to speak for themselves, but other evidence suggests that he worked hard to control the way in which he would be regarded by posterity” (76). John specifically references Dickens’s attempts at “airbrushing” his history where it concerned his mistress, Ellen Ternan (76).91 Dickens attempts to extend the image control enacted during his life, to cover his afterlife as well.

Regardless, despite this tension between relinquishing and controlling his legacy,

Dickens clearly envisioned it as fused to the legacies of his fictional characters. As outlined in Chapter 3, Dickens admired his friend Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that “All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books.

They are the chosen possession of men” (101). Dickens entrusted his legacy to this magical preservation. As outlined elsewhere in this thesis, novels such as Little Dorrit, David

Copperfield, and Bleak House flirt with the overlap between reality and fiction as Dickens— embroiled in biographilia—presents a fictional biography, quasi-fictional autobiography, and personal narrative (respectively). He chronicles the lives of his fictional characters, blurring the boundaries between life-writing and fiction, and thereby effectually constructing early biofictions as he poured his life into their histories.

During a speech at a celebratory event in Scotland, “Dickens compared his ‘fictitious creatures’ to ‘real’ beings that he ‘conceived,’ and he sometimes spoke of his real children as

‘volumes’ he authored” (Nayder 106). The Dickens children were even named for authors

90 Dickens’s will is reprinted in full as an appendix to John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens.

91 He went to great lengths to cast their relationship as platonic; evidence even suggests that he rented a house for her in Slough under the pseudonym John Tringham. Michael Slater chronicles the evolution of this discovery in The Great Charles Dickens Scandal (128-130). 260 their father admired (including himself): Boz, Henry Fielding, Alfred Tennyson, and Edward

Bulwer Lytton being chief examples. His eldest daughter, Mamie, writes how her father’s

“characters live to vouch for themselves, for their reality” (22), and her brother Charley once claimed that “‘The children of his [Dickens’s] brain…were much more real to him at times than we were’” (Gottlieb 239). The 1867 Preface to David Copperfield does in fact support

Charley’s claim, for here Dickens confesses that “like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD” (Clarendon Dickens

752). Dickens’s intense connection to his novels—and the links between his fictional children and his real ones—further support adaptations like Havisham being considered biofictional novels. As discussed in Chapter 2, Dickens believed that “‘your book stands and lives’”

(Ackroyd 405). His juxtaposition of “lives” and “book” reinforces Dickensian biofiction’s broad scope. Regardless of Dickens’s resolute commitment to preserving his legacy narratively, neo-Victorian authors have since turned to narrative to reimagine Dickens’s life—and the lives of his characters—thus appropriating his authorial identity and challenging his legacy.

Ronald Frame’s Havisham (2012): Dickens’s Iconic Spinster, Reimagined

Ronald Frame’s novel, which is primarily narrated in the first person by Miss

Havisham herself, opens with the confronting confession: “I killed my mother” (5). We are thus starkly introduced to Miss Havisham as a young girl, christened “Catherine” by Frame.

Dickens declined to give his Miss Havisham a name; possibly Frame’s choice of Catherine is a nod to Dickens’s wife. Miss Havisham’s first name was “Amelia” in the 2015 BBC television miniseries Dickensian—an endeavour uniting characters from across Dickens’s novels and bringing some, like Little Nell, back to life. Havisham also originated as a BBC project, airing in the late 1990s as a radio drama that:

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creates an alternative past for Charles Dickens' character from ‘Great Expectations’…Charles Dickens sketches in the bare bones of a history for the character of Miss Havisham, the old woman who sits in a shuttered old house in her soiled bridal dress, as she has done since the day she was jilted many years before. Ronald Frame's play asks how she got to be in that state.92 In Frame’s rendering of Miss Havisham’s “alternate past,” her life commences with her mother’s death, and she relates how her “eyes became accustomed to the half-light” (5) in the early days of her existence—one commenced among the shadows. Throughout the novel,

Frame constructs Miss Havisham’s pre-Pip existence and chronicles her descent into post- jilting madness. Here we witness Catherine Havisham’s consumption first by her covert romance with Compeyson, then by his betrayal, and finally, here as in Great Expectations, she is (quite literally) consumed by flames.

Havisham has thus far received surprisingly little scholarly attention. Two explanations seem most probable. First, critical discourse surrounding neo-Victorian novelistic reworkings of Great Expectations tend to favour the ample postcolonial opportunities within Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs or Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip. Beverly Taylor’s article “Discovering New Pasts: Victorian Legacies in the Postcolonial Worlds of Jack

Maggs and Mister Pip” is an example of this trend. And second, academic interest in neo-

Victorian biofictional challenges to Dickens’s legacy privilege novels where Dickens appears as himself—or at least a fictionalised version of himself as Girl in a Blue Dress demonstrated. For instance, as outlined in Chapter 1, Nadine Boehm-Schnitker’s and Susanne

Gruss’s edited collection Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and

Revisitations (2014) foregrounds neo-Victorian biofictional authors who “refuse to portray their literary protagonists as the ‘great’ Victorian authors who have been inscribed into

92 “Ronald Frame: Havisham.” http://www.suttonelms.org.uk/r3-havisham-1998.html. Web. Accessed 7th May 2018.

In Great Expectations, Herbert Pocket briefly summarises Miss Havisham’s history to Pip over dinner in chapter XXII. 262

British cultural memory” (Steveker 76). Steveker’s Dickensian case study is Richard

Flanagan’s Wanting. As previously noted, other neo-Victorian biofictional novels featuring

Dickens as himself include Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens, and Dan Simmons’s Drood.

The Kindle description of Drood commences by deeming its version of Dickens a “public hero for rescuing survivors” following the Staplehurst Rail Disaster, but it concludes with the chilling query: “is Charles Dickens really capable of murder?”93 A sinister edge thus undermines the heroic initial impression and reinforces Dickens’s loss of control over his post-mortem representation.

This focus on neo-Victorian biofictional representations of Dickens as himself makes sense. His own conflicted history—with its myriad myths—affords abundant material for novelistic imagination. However, given the accepted conflation of Dickens’s real and fictional realms, we have much to gain from extending Dickens’s biofictional anxieties of afterlife to include his characters–whose legacies he envisioned as fused to his own.

Dickens’s Miss Havisham is a fitting case study; her contentious legacy has long divided critics over whether (or not) she is ultimately redeemed at the end of Great Expectations. On one side of the debate, Dorothy Van Ghent argues that Miss Havisham “has been changed retributively into a fungus” (423) whereas John Cunningham expresses hope for Miss

Havisham’s “repentance” and “regeneration” (43). She does lament her misguided efforts in raising Estella, and she begs Pip’s forgiveness. Gravely wounded from catching fire, Miss

Havisham pleads with Pip to inscribe the words “‘I forgive her’” beneath her name (369).

Like Arnold’s Dorothea—and indeed both Dickenses—Miss Havisham recognises the centrality of written words in establishing legacy. To this end, she craves tangible evidence

93 “Drood.” https://www.amazon.com/Drood-Dan-Simmons-ebook/dp/B0038QN2AI/. Web. Accessed 29th June 2018. 263 releasing her from intangible guilt. Unfortunately, Miss Havisham dies before she can prove whether her contrition is real.

Perhaps this is precisely Dickens’s point though: a refusal to cleanly finalise Miss

Havisham’s story acknowledges the loss of control over one’s legacy post-mortem. Despite the Victorian penchant for happy endings—a preference which Dickens readily indulges elsewhere—the lack of closure surrounding Miss Havisham’s story is a reminder that our histories are eventually subjected to interpretation by others. Written in the final decade of

Dickens’s life, on the heels of his tumultuous marital breakdown, and plagued by health concerns, 94 themes of reputation, mortality, and endings (narrative and otherwise) were doubtless on his mind. Textual evidence suggests that Dickens altered his plans for Miss

Havisham’s exit. He initially intended to more decisively sever her from the narrative with

“‘And I never saw her more’…Dickens may have struck for a number of reasons: because he wanted to foreground the act of forgiveness, not the farewell, or perhaps because he wanted to keep the options open—that Pip might see her again…” (Norton GE 453). Whatever the reason, Dickens ultimately decided to conclude Miss Havisham’s portion of the narrative with a hint of ambiguity, and a focus on forgiveness. As discussed in Chapter 3, Dickens also rewrote Great Expectations’ conclusion. Although the revised ending is ostensibly cheerier than what he had originally intended (Pip leaves Satis House with Estella rather than parting ways in Piccadilly) they are still haunted by the ambiguous “shadow of no parting from her”

(442). Dickens modified conclusions for Miss Havisham, Pip, and Estella, but their futures are still overshadowed by looming uncertainties. The original Miss Havisham insists Pip physically inscribe forgiveness to her; this visibility exists as textual evidence of the immaterial reality of forgiveness. But death prevents her legacy penned from being lived out,

94 During this season he “suffered prolonged bouts of illness and much of the time was under medical treatment for neuralgia” (Norton GE 433). 264 hence her penitence is ultimately unproven. Had she lived, and subsequently returned to her old ways, Pip’s forgiveness—written or otherwise—would be negated.

Legacies Penned and Legacies Lived

In Havisham, the tension transpiring between narrative perspectives is critical.

According to Bakhtin, the dialogic interaction between authors, narrators, and characters is fundamental in dispersing heteroglossia and encouraging “interrelationships” (1192-1193).

Frame’s novel exploits these “interrelationships” in Havisham’s tension between the various perspectives narrating Miss Havisham’s history. There are two authors (Dickens, who originally created Miss Havisham, and Frame who fleshes out her story), two narrators (Miss

Havisham herself, and the concluding omniscient narrator) and multiple characters providing their own assessments of Miss Havisham’s character and history. Even though the bulk of the narrative is related in first-person by Miss Catherine Havisham, the final chapter is told from the perspective of an unnamed, omniscient narrator. This narrative pairing of first-person and omniscient perspectives is reminiscent of Dickens’s Bleak House, where narratorial privilege is likewise divided between an omniscient narrator and Esther Summerson’s first-person account. However, unlike Bleak House’s more equal allocation of narratorial responsibility, in Havisham, only the conclusion—entitled “Valediction”—is related from an omniscient perspective. Miss Havisham’s voice dominates the narrative, yet she is denied the opportunity to conclude her story.

Readers are reminded of legacy’s tenuous nature at Havisham’s every turn: specifically, the Prologue provides a flash forward to the day Miss Havisham meets Estella, and the Valediction affords a glimpse into Estella’s future after Miss Havisham’s death.

Estella—Miss Havisham’s living legacy—thus frames the novel, bookending the main narrative’s autobiographical tone with literal reminders that legacies penned are not necessarily legacies lived. Dickens’s own life attests to this claim; he staunchly defended his

265 reputation via the written word. Robert L. Patten stresses Dickens’s “need for a clamorous reception from his audience: that, more than money, family, or mistress, was his greatest love affair” (Boz 306). However, despite staunchly insisting upon full acceptance of his version of events, Dickens’s beloved public has not always been quick to acquiesce. As we have seen, even in his own lifetime he was criticised for both the “Personal Statement” and for his cold treatment of Catherine in his will. Despite attempting to enact narrative control via the written word, he could not control his audience’s interpretation. Dickens helped salvage his reputation after his marital breakdown by first reconnecting with his audience through the public readings of his novels, and later through his heroic actions ministering to survivors of the Staplehurst Railway accident.

After Dickens’s death, however—and subsequently the deaths of family members who guarded his reputation while they still lived—the public latched onto revelations about his private life to reimagine the eminent Victorian author. While historical biography and biofiction can certainly enact “retroactive repair of injustices to the subject” (Kaplan

Victoriana 51) they can also just as retroactively tarnish the subject. Neo-Victorian novelists are now adapting Dickens’s history, and the afterlives of his characters, to suit their own authorial agendas—whether that be to rehabilitate someone else’s reputation, or experience

Dickens’s creative role themselves. In so doing, they become Bakhtin’s previously referenced

“prose writer” who “makes use of words that are already populated with the social intentions of others, and compels them to serve his own new intentions, to serve a second master”

(1219). Dickens penned his legacy, but it has not necessarily been posthumously interpreted in the manner recorded; the shadow of doubt lingers upon the accuracy of his perspective, and he cannot retain his creative license from the grave.

Writing one’s life history is an assertion of power, then, but it also invites vulnerability since there is no guarantee that readers will accept—or even respect—the

266 perspective recorded. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn emphasise that “some neo-

Victorian fictions deliberately confound the distinction between reality and imagination, lives lived and lives created” (19-20). Dickens’s capacity to engender myth positions him as the ideal neo-Victorian subject. And Havisham, a novel toying with the tenets of life-writing by presenting the life history of a fictional character, blurs these boundaries even further, especially as it challenges the validity of Miss Havisham’s very existence via an enigmatic ending. Miss Havisham’s first-person account is by far the most voluminous portion of the narrative, but the concluding section, entitled “Valediction” (i.e. “Farewell”), contests her account through visions of an unsettling future. The narrative’s conclusion, then, with its omniscient narrator and a focus on Miss Havisham’s post-mortem legacy, is its most significant; it calls into question the permanence of Miss Havisham’s perspective.

The Valediction’s omniscient narrator, like the Ghost of Christmas Future, whisks readers across various points in time, revealing key moments in the (separate) lives of Pip and

Estella after Miss Havisham’s death. We witness Pip, considering the story that we know as

Great Expectations, who “stares into the flames. What he sees is what he remembers, or what he thinks he remembers. He has the shape of a story in his head, and trims the details to fit.

There are different versions of the story, though. One story, with—he believes—three viewpoints. Estella’s. His. The madwoman’s” (357). Pip embraces the narrator’s—and biographer’s—prerogative to influence legacy as he “trims…details.” Dickens’s original Miss

Havisham is likewise produced by Pip, in the sense that he constructs her as part of his first- person narrative in Great Expectations. The decisive difference, though, is that Dickens still controlled Pip. He has no such control over Frame’s Miss Havisham. Although Frame’s Pip allows for one overarching story, there is still tension between the various versions, and, in his own version, he moulds the details according to hazy memories and a nebulous agenda.

Miss Havisham’s version of events is contained in her autobiographical account, but the other

267 players in her story—primarily Pip and Estella in this instance—are not required to accommodate her perspective.

To this end, Estella “thinks often of that woman, and of her childhood in that big gaunt house. She feels bitterness towards her, and she feels pity too, and she becomes exhausted trying to balance her feelings” (358). Bitterness and pity—another pairing of contraries—vie for top position in Estella’s memory. Estella’s childhood is bound up with

Miss Havisham’s; the “childhood in that big gaunt house” is initially read as referring to

Estella’s childhood, but it also extends to Miss Havisham’s childhood, which was likewise overshadowed by Satis House. Past wrongs taint the future: “[Estella’s] past is just a shadow’s length behind her. She spent long enough under that cursed roof, inside Satis

House, to be able now to speak Catherine Havisham’s words for her. Death might have stolen the breath from old Havisham’s daughter, but he hadn’t concluded her narrative” (358).

Death silences Miss Havisham’s voice, but her history is still open to interpretation—and therefore potentially revision—by others.

For her part, Estella claims the authority to “speak Catherine Havisham’s words for her” (358). Miss Havisham’s professed noble intentions reverberate in Estella’s memory: “‘I only ever wanted to protect you, Estella mine, nothing else; I didn’t wish anyone to harm you’” (359). Unfortunately, Miss Havisham’s “protect[ion]” itself inflicted harm. Estella is thus torn between warring emotions as she recalls Miss Havisham’s impact on her life: was her benefactress a hero or a villain? At a loss for resolution, Estella and Pip resort to markedly impersonal terminology in their recollections of Miss Havisham: “that woman,”

“old Havisham’s daughter,” “the madwoman.” Miss Havisham’s legacy is muddled at best.

Perhaps her efforts on Estella’s behalf were in fact noble attempts to save Estella from the pain she knew herself, but, tragically, the results are warped. And in the end, Estella and Pip can scarcely refer to Miss Havisham by name, hereby denying her identity as an individual.

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Pip’s and Estella’s impersonal references to Miss Havisham in the narrative’s conclusion contrast sharply with Miss Havisham’s own fixation on her family name, her inheritance as the daughter of a wealthy brewer, in the main narrative. Here, on the opening page, she relates that Havisham “was the first word I remember seeing” (5; emphasis original). From the outset, her family name is inseparable from her overarching identity, and

Miss Havisham outlines the responsibilities of having a name of some significance. “People expected to see us [at church], and I took their expectation as a kind of right, due acknowledgement of our importance in the local order” (11). When disagreements occur,

Miss Havisham’s trump card is that “I was a Havisham” (34), meaning that “I had the onus— the millstone—of Havisham dignity to defend” (47). While preparing for her marriage to

Compeyson, Miss Havisham writes: “I had the name to think of, as always the name, because without it where was I, and where would he be?” (204). The name Havisham is all- consuming; income, identity, and vocation are all bound up in the family business, which bears their surname.

Consequently, “Havisham” even assumes physical attributes; others analyse Miss

Havisham’s appearance and personality in accordance with her family name, to the point of conflating it with her character. She concedes that “I’m not beautiful, not by a long chalk. I’m not plain either. My appearance is…distinctive. People suppose they can read my character from it…But I’m not just a face, or a body. I’m a Havisham.... I don’t need to be a beauty.

Yet no one, except some person ignorant of my name, would consider me less than handsome” (63;64; emphasis original). As we have seen, Dickens himself had a similar investment in his own surname, stressing to his offspring that “‘their father’s name was their best possession’—which they knew to be true—and he expected them to act accordingly”

(Storey 95). Miss Havisham is her surname; her failed marriage attempt further solidifies this identity, by removing any hint of changing her name via marriage. After overhearing gossip

269 about her appearance, Miss Havisham realises others exhibit compromised visibility when evaluating her character, since they only have access to her physical appearance: “It was me they were discussing. But it also wasn’t me. I had a claim on this person, but so did others.”

(27). She can analyse her significance, but so can others. She can record her history, but so can others.

Words are powerful, but their reliance upon readerly interpretation also renders them slippery. Material evidence still necessitates interpretation, which in turn invites ambiguity.

Miss Havisham has little control over their ultimate remembrances of her life, regardless of the written record she leaves behind. Pip’s and Estella’s impersonal post-mortem references to Miss Havisham are devastating to the legacy of a woman whose appearance, livelihood, and very character, are entangled with her family name. This surname slowly yet steadily vanishes from the Havisham brewhouse, even as Miss Havisham’s own humanity ebbs away after her failed engagement: “The name was on the point of disappearing; it seemed to be doubting its own existence, or its ever having existed” (317; emphasis original). Once a proud emblem of the family business—and, to a greater extent, their claim to wealth and thus to status—the fading physical reminder calls into question whether the Havishams ever mattered at all. Miss Havisham deteriorates alongside the first word she learns:

“HAVISHAM” (5), all in capitals, inscribed on the brewery wall.

Her family home likewise suffers in the process, and the narrative concludes with images of Satis House being dismembered, piece by piece. The omniscient narrator reveals how “In after years the contents of Satis House were scattered about several counties, sold at auctions or already in the hands of pawnbrokers or debt-collectors” (359). The afterlife of

Satis House’s possessions is far from static, however; they possess more post-mortem power than their owner. “They were restless” (359) and some seemed “haunted” (359) or “trying to pass on a lesson: that the former owners of these things had suffered for them, and had also

270 loved and laughed…” (359). There is some longevity, and even laughter, connected to Satis

House’s memory, but the name Havisham has nonetheless faded into the nondescript realm of

“former owners” alongside Pip’s and Estella’s similarly impersonal references to Miss

Havisham. Despite being significant during life, Havisham’s afterlife is not nearly as noteworthy. In relation to Dickens’s legacy, this fading significance is another nod to precisely how difficult legacy is to ultimately control. Dickens may have stated that “I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country on my published works…” (Forster 827; emphasis mine) but by binding his personal legacy to the legacies of his characters, Dickens affords other authors some say in how he is remembered. Like Satis House’s restless possessions, the afterlives of Dickens’s “published works” are themselves far from static.

“‘We Never Recognise Ourselves’”

Miss Havisham’s maid and erstwhile friend, Sally, confesses to sometimes imitating her mistress. “‘I haven’t seen that.’ [Miss Havisham replies] ‘No, of course not. [says Sally]

We never recognise ourselves’” (70). For all her apparent perceptiveness in penning her autobiography and recording her observations of those around her, Miss Havisham is perpetually undermined. Sally steals Miss Havisham’s fiancé for herself, and the unnamed omniscient narrator steals the ending. Miss Havisham’s attempts at control are ultimately thwarted. Her narrative perspective is not necessarily honoured by Pip and Estella, her family name surrenders its authority, and even her body eventually fails her.

Returning to Dickens: how does Miss Havisham’s neo-Victorian afterlife, as imagined by Frame, intersect with Dickens’s own anxieties about legacy? Claire Tomalin describes Dickens as “a man who treasures the past and seeks to recapture and relive it” (39).

And Dickens instructs us to remember him through the characters he created; he “was never more himself than when escaping into other lives” (Douglas-Fairhurst 299). Already leery of writing his own life, perhaps Dickens assumed that encapsulating his legacy within his fiction

271 was the safer alternative. However, other novelists have since taken the characters Dickens created and given them new life. Frame’s novel attests to this contentious nature of legacy: concluding Miss Havisham’s narrative not in her own words, but in the words of the omniscient narrator, is a reminder that we can provide our side of the story, but eventually, other perspectives emerge. The lack of closure surrounding Miss Havisham’s story—like the ending to Great Expectations, where Miss Havisham’s repentance is ultimately untested— exists as a reminder that our histories are eventually subjected to interpretation by others. In

Havisham’s “Valediction,” the omniscient narrator enigmatically states that “Death…hadn’t concluded her narrative” (358). Miss Havisham has had her say, but that is not the end of the story. Dickens was acutely aware of this fact, hence his vacillation between surrendering and controlling his legacy by “airbrushing” his history, often through burning written records.

Constructing autobiography can be empowering; however, the life-writing genre is also inherently unstable, since authors cannot control subsequent interpretation. Dickens himself

“lost courage” and experimented with life-writing narratives under cover of fiction instead— or by enlisting his “surrogate” biographer John Forster. Miss Havisham leaves a written record of her life, but it still fails to cement the terms of her legacy. Pip and Estella are not obligated to accept her perspective, just as Arnold’s Dorothea Gibson interrogated written records to establish her own outlook. Moreover, in a manner akin to Dickens’s autobiography and letters, Miss Havisham is herself enveloped by fire: all smokescreens attesting to the murkiness inherent in life-writing and legacy.

Conclusion

This chapter explores Dickens’s desire that his written legacy survive as his sole memorial. His books are to be his substitute for a stone statue, hereby blending the physicality of the written word with immaterial memories, in a manner akin to Arnold’s

Dorothea Gibson. Perhaps aligning his legacy with the characters he controlled during his

272 lifetime seemed a safer alternative, a way to retain narrative control post-mortem. However, today’s neo-Victorian authors are further memorialising him via their own fictional constructs. Authors such as Ronald Frame and Gaynor Arnold are breathing new life into

Dickens—and his fictional creations—hereby recalling him from the grave. Arnold rewrites

Dickens’s legacy by casting a fictionalised version of the famous author in her novel. His name is changed to Alfred Gibson, but, as Arnold herself confirms, this character is clearly meant to intervene in Dickens’s legacy. Through biofiction, Arnold challenges the once readily-accepted version of Catherine’s failures, by permitting his wife to speak at last. Frame does not confront Dickens so directly, but by conceiving additional possibilities for Dickens’s iconic character Miss Havisham, Frame nonetheless participates in reimagning what we now term Dickensian. Dickens briefly sketches Miss Havisham’s history in Great Expectations, but Frame’s novel—much like Arnold’s Dorothea Gibson—seizes Dickens’s words to become Bakhtin’s “second master” over the famous Victorian’s original creation. Miss

Havisham’s afterlife is bound up with the afterlife of her creator, as Dickens explicitly instructed in his will.

Dickens’s daughter Katey told her biographer, Gladys Storey, that “‘I always wanted to be loved for myself…though I am very grateful to be loved for my father’s sake’” (22).

Katey’s wish echoes Lillian Nayder’s point about the inherent danger in using Charles

Dickens as the primary reason for Catherine Dickens’s validity. Nonetheless, the

“Discovering Catherine” exhibit at the Charles Dickens Museum—which, interestingly,

Nayder has been heavily involved with—attracts visitors who are there to see him, only to discover her as well, poignantly within the walls of her former home. A tour of the exhibit and the museum reveals that “The Inimitable” is merely mortal after all. Cora Kaplan argues for the value of “apparent contradictions” wherein authors such as Dickens are publicly perceived as “flawed personalities, but redeemed—for their readers and in their public

273 legacies—through the ethical and aesthetic value, and distinctive pleasure that their writing confers” (“Coda” 195). Paradoxically, then, the capacity exists for Dickens to be “redeemed” despite his failures, fittingly via the medium by which he tenaciously insisted his legacy be remembered. Neo-Victorian biofictional authors might imagine alternative afterlives for

Dickens and his characters, but Dickens’s original novels still attest to his extraordinary talent. Dickens sought to control the narratives of everyone he encountered—both in life and on the page—but this control has been revoked since his death. He was ambivalent about adaptations of his work, but this very mutability propelled his popularity. Like most things

Dickensian, tension is to be expected. After all, “Inimitable” does not mean perfect, simply

“Matchless,” and these captivating inconsistencies help keep Dickens’s legacy alive—for better or for worse.

274

Conclusion

“Venerables.” “The Sparkler of Albion.” “The Inimitable.” Even Dickens’s nicknames attest to his extraordinary talent. He is widely recognised—along with

Shakespeare himself—as one of the all-time greatest authors of the English language. There is no denying Dickens’s talent, or the joy his characters, and their associated narratives, have imparted to millions. Dickens’s passion for the poor and the vulnerable is likewise legendary: he co-founded Urania Cottage, a haven for “fallen women,” with his friend Angela Burdett-

Coutts. Moreover, his portrayal of Wackford Squeers’s atrocities in Nicholas Nickleby engendered such an intense public response, that many real-life incarnations of Dotheboys

Hall subsequently collapsed from “shame” by association (Fido World 94). These closures provided Dickens “considerable satisfaction” (Schlicke Nickleby xvii). The author’s words powerfully enacted tangible justice, but Dickens’s devotion to his own family was far more fraught. As discussed in the Preface, his daughters, Katey and Mamie, expressed decidedly different opinions of their father’s character. Katey once called him “‘a very wicked man’”

(Storey 219), while for Mamie, he was “a man apart from all other men” (2). Dickens’s relationship with his wife, Catherine, was equally contradictory. After their separation,

Catherine received 600 pounds annually from Dickens for living expenses, a “generous” allocation according to Michael Slater (Dickens and Women 151). However, Dickens later lorded this very generosity over Catherine in his will (Slater Dickens and Women 154).

Dickens was clearly embroiled in perplexing incongruities, including the hero- protagonist split in his life-writing novels, wherein Dickens’s professed protagonists—and thus the ostensible hero/ine/s of their respective texts—are deposed in their own histories. I have traced this trend through Dickens’s life-writing novels, thus privileging the life-writing of Dickens’s most famous characters, through whom he asked to be remembered. Despite his investment in biographilia, Dickens declined to leave an overtly autobiographical account of 275 his own life, having “lost courage” and destroyed his initial attempt. Scholars often attribute

Dickens’s anxieties to the childhood trauma he endured at Warren’s blacking factory: “the profound sense of humiliation generated by his childhood ordeal left him feeling vulnerable and unsure of his social respectability despite his later fame and fortune” (Schlicke

Dickens…off the record 13). As I have suggested, while Warren’s no doubt indelibly scarred

Dickens, it was his failed romance with Maria Beadnell that precipitated the burned autobiography and thus exacerbated the hero-protagonist split. Early in his career, Dickens’s anxieties more likely stemmed from uncertainty over his authorial identity. Then, after

Dickens failed at writing his own life, narrative inconsistencies in his life-writing novels darken, and from David Copperfield onward, the hero-protagonist divide lacks any of

Pickwick’s cheer.

This thesis has therefore privileged Dickens’s anxieties—in particular the “lost

[autobiographical] courage” in contextualising themes of Dickensian biofiction, legacy, and the hero-protagonist split in his life-writing novels. To this end, Chapter 1 established the continuum of Dickensian biofiction, serving as a bridge between my introductory discussion of Dickens’s fictional reality and my later analysis of the individual novels. It also complicated Dickens’s anxieties about legacy and his predilection for narrative control. In

Chapter 2, I built upon the preceding chapter’s evaluation of the critical commentary surrounding Dickensian life-writing, to commence my analysis of Dickens’s life-writing novels. Much like the continuum of biofiction, Dickens’s engagement with the genre of memoir exists on a sliding scale of fictionality. Chapter 3 examined Dickensian autobiography, in particular, the all-important David Copperfield. Here I proposed that

Agnes’s presence contests David’s right to heroic ownership of his own story. Chapter 4 turned to another staple of the life-writing genre: biography. Dickens’s decision to write the biography of a fictional character further illuminates his biofictional proclivities, but the

276 hero-protagonist split still prevails. Mr. Pickwick and David Copperfield are protagonists but not heroes, whereas Little Dorrit is a hero/ine but not a protagonist. Chapter 5 adopted a different vantage point by examining how Dickens has forfeited narrative control of his reputation since his death. Neo-Victorian authors are re-imagining the Dickensian via biofictional renderings of Dickens’s life and art, which in turn perpetuates Dickens’s mythic status—and highlights the iconic author’s anxieties about his legacy.

Who then, was “the hero of [Dickens’s] own life?” The response of course depends upon who answers the question. According to the components of Dickensian heroism established in Chapter 3—self-reliance, perseverance, and being right—Dickens would probably identify himself as both hero and protagonist of his own life. And yet, he never could bring himself to overtly write his autobiography, despite continuing to muse about the possibility of doing so up until his death. Perhaps some of this reticence stemmed from a fear that committing his story to paper would reveal that “these pages” in fact pointed to a challenger in his life history—akin to the hero-protagonist split in his life-writing novels. He

“lost courage” in writing his own history, and thereafter resorted to shields: fiction in his semi-autobiographical David Copperfield, and John Forster as his ostensible biographer.

Dickens hereby removed himself, while still retaining creative control. Such a manoeuvre also effectively side-stepped the need to overtly engage with Maria’s part in his life. In David

Copperfield, he controls the outcome, and Forster—although he famously revealed the suffering of the Marshalsea and blacking warehouse in Dickens’s childhood—does not mention Maria by name. Instead, he obliquely references her as “[Dickens] too had his Dora, at apparently the same hopeless elevation…” (44). These defensive tactics are in keeping with Dickens aligning his legacy with the characters he created; they are part of him, they lived for him, and yet he can still stage manage events behind the scenes without being so explicitly connected. We have witnessed the pain Dickens experienced when his writing was

277 criticised, and how much more intensely would it have hurt had an audience engaged negatively with his actual life story—specifically his relationship with Maria Beadnell.

Indeed, Dickens exhibited a life-long ambivalence to written records, which is a further manifestation of the tension between revealing/concealing and heroism/anxiety traced across this thesis. Dickens burned his life-writing, but then he also commited his legacy to his novels. David Copperfield invites scrutiny of “these pages” in determining the hero of his life, but declining to outright answer the question allows for another to usurp his heroic title.

Writing one’s life is an assertion of power, but it also invites vulnerability due to the inherent instability of interpretation. Dickens was captivated by the consequences of being (or not being) “the hero of my own life,” to quote David Copperfield. These (thesis) pages have therefore shown 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.

278

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