SOURCE: Hutter, Albert D. “Reconstructive Autobiography: The Experience at Warren's Blacking.” Dickens Studies Annual 6 (1977): 1-14.

[In the following essay, Hutter discusses distortions of the accounts of Dicken's childhood labor at Warren's Blacking Factory in the author's own narrative and in various versions of his biographers and critics.]

Any autobiographical statement is a fabrication. Facts are distorted, relationships colored, not necessarily to deceive or persuade an audience, but rather because of the individual's desire to make sense out of the past as he understands it—and always incompletely understands it—in the present. I hope to clarify and redefine the central issues in the autobiographical account to Forster of Dickens' childhood experience at Warren's Blacking Factory. I have, in fact, three aims: to outline the significant approaches taken by critics and biographers toward the period at Warren's; to describe the limitations of these earlier approaches; and to suggest further considerations which must become part of our reading if we are to do justice to Dickens' full experience.

One group of biographers, beginning with Forster, reproduces and fully accepts Dickens' account, or distorts it much as Dickens himself distorted it; a second group accepts Edmund Wilson's now famous description of a “trauma, from which [Dickens] … suffered all his life”; and a final group of critics and biographers, which includes Jack Lindsay and Steven Marcus, regards these events as primarily a disguise for something earlier and deeper.¹

Each of these approaches has contributed to our understanding of Dickens, but each also limits and distorts Dickens' rendering of his own experience. Forster, of course, is essential—and his loyalty to Dickens is so apparent that he often unintentionally clarifies his friend's emotional attitudes. When Dickens recalls crying over Fanny's prizewinning, in such sharp contrast to his own “humiliation and neglect,” he finds it necessary to deny what seems a natural and obvious feeling: “There was no envy in this,” he writes. Forster instantly seconds him: “There was little need that he should say so.” Forster then provides good evidence of his friend's overreaction, citing Charles' “extreme enjoyment” and “utmost pride” in Fanny's success, “manifested always to a degree otherwise quite unusual with him.” The quality of excess (“extreme,” “utmost,” “otherwise quite unusual with him”), like Dickens' “most affecting proof of his tender and grateful memory of her in the childish days” at Fanny's funeral (Forster, I, 31), may suggest a reaction formation. But we do not require a pathological label for behavior which would seem perfectly natural in any child who feels neglected and sees his sister praised. Even without the dramatic difference between his sister's life and his own at the time of Warren's, we would now expect a high degree of rivalry and aggression between siblings. The real pathology here is cultural: it denies the normalcy of envy and aggression and reinforces Dickens' own overwhelming need to make himself helpless and pitiable as he remembers this episode.

Forster's special pleading falsely objectifies Dickens' internal conflicts and reactions. And even his finest modern biographer, Edgar Johnson, reflects this tendency when he repeats Dickens and Forster about the prizewinning, without quoting them directly or commenting on their statements. Johnson simply writes, as if it were now accepted fact, that Charles “loved Fanny, he was proud of her, and he felt no envy” (I, 41). Chesterton was also sympathetic to Dickens, although not necessarily convinced by the direct denial of envy: “I do not think that there was [any envy], though the poor little wretch could hardly have been blamed if there had been.”² Less skilled biographers translate other emotional statements from the autobiographical fragment into fact in more strikingly distorted ways. W. Robertson Nicoll, for example, describes “the miserable three years which [Dickens] spent in tying up pots of blacking.” Margaret Lane lets him out in nine months, while Thomas Wright keeps Charles at work for a full year.³ In evaluating the length of Dickens' stay and his age at the time, Forster notes that David Copperfield was ten when he worked for the firm of Murdstone and Grinby, while Dickens “could hardly have been more than twelve years old when he left” Warren's (I, 33). Forster defends the blurring of ten and twelve by adding that Charles “was still unusually small for his age” (I, 33). Charles seems in fact to have started in at Warren's just after his twelfth birthday (Johnson, I, 45), although he claimed: “I have no idea how long it lasted; whether for a year, or much more, or less” (Forster, I, 32). Less careful biographers have continued to confuse Dickens' quoted statements from the autobiographical fragment with his fiction and with their own sympathetic response to the child's predicament.

Most biographers before 1940—such as A. W. Ward (1882) or Robert Langton (1883)—uncritically reflect Forster and Dickens himself. The exception, as usual, is Chesterton, who anticipates Wilson in a variety of ways: “About any early disaster there is a dreadful finality; a lost child can suffer like a lost soul”; “I think we can imagine a pretty genuine case of internal depression. And when we add to the case of the internal depression the case of the external oppression, the case of the material circumstances by which he was surrounded, we have reached a sort of midnight” (pp. 34-37). George Gissing suggests that “the true reason for … [Dickens'] shrinking from this recollection lay in the fact that it involved a grave censure upon his parents.”⁴ My own argument will develop the conflict and aggression implicit in this censure. Gissing, however, assumes that the censure was perfectly merited by the circumstances as Dickens describes them and, similarly, that Dickens' silence in later years showed “the most natural reserve” (p. 15). In other words, Gissing's full acceptance of the Forster/Dickens view of Warren's prevents him from making an independent judgment. His conclusions are weak and anticlimactic: “An unpleasant topic; enough to recognize in passing, that this incident certainly was not without its permanent effect on the son's mind” (p. 15). Critics after 1941 are clearly influenced by Wilson and blend all three approaches outlined here—although they do not necessarily clarify their theoretical assumptions.⁵

Edmund Wilson's account has become the most widely accepted psychological analysis of Dickens' ordeal. Wilson writes:

These experiences produced in Charles Dickens a trauma from which he suffered all his life. It has been charged by some of Dickens's critics that he indulged himself excessively in self-pity in connection with these hardships of his childhood; it has been pointed out that, after all, he had only worked in the blacking warehouse six months. But one must realize that during those months he was in a state of complete despair. For the adult in desperate straits, it is almost always possible to imagine, if not to contrive, some way out; for the child, from whom love and freedom have inexplicably been taken away, no relief or release can be projected. Dickens's seizures in his blacking-bottle days were obviously neurotic symptoms; and the psychologists have lately been telling us that lasting depressions and terrors may be caused by such cuttings-short of the natural development of childhood. For an imaginative and active boy of twelve, six months of despair are quite enough.

(Pp. 5-6)

But what the psychologists had been telling us, even by 1941, made it impossible to give this incident the status of a formative trauma. Wilson overvalues the external events and underplays the extent to which they seem to have touched much earlier feelings. Because he speaks of “traumas” and “neurotic symptoms,” most critics tend to assume that he articulates a psychoanalytic position, but such statements as these are alien to analytic thought because they tend to treat “the child” as a single, static entity, whether that child is three or twelve: “For the child, from whom love and freedom have inexplicably been taken away, no relief or release can be projected.” Such an assertion, for a twelve-year-old, depends very much on the preceding eleven years, and especially on the first five years. In this respect Lindsay is much more sensitive than Wilson to the premises of psychoanalysis.

Yet Lindsay is also something of an embarrassment, and his use of psychoanalysis reveals the limitations we all face when we disregard the immediate circumstances and context of an event and choose instead only those elements which may be translated back into earlier meanings.⁶ Psychoanalytic criticism is now being retried on the old charge of reductionism, and Lindsay's work reminds us of both the possibilities and limitations of the most powerful diagnostic tool of psychoanalysis: its ability to derive unconscious and infantile meanings from a conscious, adult text. This reductive principle may also lead to significant distortion, whereby all events begin to look the same when seen through the analyst's peculiar prism. For critics familiar with psychoanalytic constructs, Dickens' autobiographical fragment seems to provide the perfect conditions for psychoanalytic inference: a detailed description of Charles' first real separation from his family and his own intense emotions during that period. But so far these events have been used to substantiate some other thesis (Lindsay's “lost Eden” or Marcus' primal scene memory), while most critics, including Johnson, offer only a vague and sentimentalized evaluation: “But it is more than a mere unavailing ache in the heart, however poignant, and however prolonged into manhood, that gives the Marshalsea and Warren's Blacking their significance in Dickens's life. They were formative. Somewhere deep down inside, perhaps unconsciously, he made the decision that never again was he going to be so victimized. He would fall prey to none of the easy slipshodness of financial imprudence that had been his father's undoing. He would work and subject himself to a steel discipline.”⁷

What, then, constitutes a fuller psychoanalytic reading? We may begin by adding, or properly emphasizing, developmental aspects of Dickens' personality which are brought out in this account with great intensity, particularly its focus on orality. Charles' continual preoccupation with food—saveloys and penny-loaves and beef and cheese and beer and milk and puddings, and the various people who serve them—reflect, as Ian Watt has recently noted, a falling back “on the oral patterns of the distant past.”⁸ A closer reading of the characteristic flavor and gustatory detail of the autobiographical fragment links it with Dickens' fiction and reinforces the truth of Lindsay's conjectures: the landlord's wife, “all womanly and good,” who serves Charles ale on “a festive occasion” and follows it with “a kiss that was half-admiring and half-compassionate,” provides the boy with all that his own mother cannot now provide. Admiration and compassion are expressed by feeding. But throughout the fiction, particularly the autobiographical novels, this fundamental need to be fed and loved is perceived as dangerous and requiring control. It is no accident that David chooses to express his strongest feelings against Murdstone, who has deprived him of a mother's love, by biting him, and David receives appropriate punishment—no food and a sign advertising the dangers of oral aggression.

In the autobiographical fragment, Dickens defends against the dangers of dependency and oral greed by characteristically anal concerns: parsimony and the fear of being soiled. Parsimony was, of course, important because of the family's reduced circumstances; but virtually every time Dickens remembers food, he remembers its cost and quantity: the fourpenny plate of beef and the halfpenny tip and the penny cottage loaf and pennyworth of milk and the half-price stale pastry and the comparative cost of pudding and the scantiness of his resources, which had to be carefully measured out on food and prevented him from asking, like Oliver, for more. If food symbolizes love, then cost reflects the limitations of that particular commodity; one must learn to parcel and control it according to very limited resources. Good food is “dear” to Dickens (Forster, I, 24), emotionally and financially, while poverty is equated with a loss of love. On his first visit to Satis House, Pip is reminded of his poverty, and his more general isolation from loving adults, by Pumblechook, who supplements an inadequate breakfast of scraps and watered milk with a generous dose of mathematics.

On my politely bidding him Good morning, he said, pompously, “Seven times nine, boy?” And how should I be able to answer, dodged in that way, in a strange place, on an empty stomach! I was hungry, but before I had swallowed a morsel, he began a running sum that lasted all through the breakfast. “Seven?” “And four?” “And eight?” “And six?” “And two?” “And ten?” And so on. And after each figure was disposed of, it was as much as I could do to get a bite or a sup, before the next came; while he sat at his ease guessing nothing, and eating bacon and hot roll, in (if I may be allowed the expression) a gorging and gormandising manner.⁹

Here, the relationship between ungiving parent and deprived child is both nightmarish and funny, and the compulsive process of counting and calculating comically limits the child's oral gratification.

In his adult life Dickens reversed his earlier dependency and sense of deprivation: he supported an army of relations, widows, charities. He was unquestionably generous, and everyone, including his parents, came to depend upon him. But to what extent did Charles himself unconsciously encourage the improvidence and dependence of his relations? “I never had anything left to me,” he once complained, “but relations.” The bitterness of his old feeling of neglect contributes to the irony of that remark, but he also humorously accepts a situation where now at least they depend upon him, and he was not likely to let them down.¹⁰

Dickens' early attitudes toward money and dependency surely contributed to the repeatedly bitter fights he had with publishers. Humphry House has already noted that many of Dickens' adult character traits reflect an anal character type,¹¹ while from Dickens' own autobiographical account we can see that one such trait—a constant concern with money and its dispensation—helped to offset the child's sense of helplessness, the loss of control which was the peculiar hell of Warren's. Dickens' humiliation at Warren's is conveniently symbolized by the blackest of substances, and Charles saw himself soiled by “the rotten floors … and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars … and the dirt and decay of the place” (Forster, I, 21), and he felt tarnished by his closeness to “common men and boys,” which turned him into a “shabby child” (I, 25).

When Charles was put on display, covering the pots of paste-blacking until they looked “as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop,” he was particularly humiliated. Marcus writes that Dickens' description “seems at once flat and over-intense; it is characterized by extreme, if unarticulated, ambivalence: pride in dexterity and shame over the work; pleasure in skillful performance before a crowd or ‘audience,’ yet anxiety and humiliation at being observed or seen; and of course an utter mélange of feelings about being seen by his father” (pp. 369-70). As Marcus observes, this scene is overdetermined. But before we classify it as fundamentally a primal scene memory, as Marcus does, with the requisite reversals of role and activity, we need to consider a more obvious and immediate psychological determinant in its anal imagery: handling of a soiling material, the pleasure, the anxiety, and the humiliation which are all components of the child's being trained into a most dexterous performance with the pots.¹²

Even according to classic psychoanalysis, this incident has not been sufficiently explored; but for a fuller analysis we need to abandon a simple delineation of the scene's infantile components and to examine the impact of such an experience on a boy of twelve. This is not a plea for the position of the second, or “trauma,” school. Any experience like that of Warren's factory is produced by a congruence of external pressure and internal needs and weaknesses. Being obliged to work at such a job and at that age was not uncommon in the period, and the reactions to it would be as varied as the personalities of the children affected. Dickens' personality at the time is more accurately rendered by the language and tone of the autobiographical fragment than by the events themselves. We need to recognize that the fragment itself is a fiction, an attempt to restructure past experiences and to give them meaning in the adult present. We can only understand what he says about Warren's if we see the fragment itself in the context of a universal process which begins in infancy and allows us constantly to reorganize our internal needs and defenses to cope with each new external problem. And the stress placed upon us by the outer world is intensified at those moments of significant change dictated by a combination of biology and culture: the emergence from infancy, for example, or the entrance into puberty. I am thus turning from a “libidinal” reading of the fragment to an interpretation which analyzes Charles' developing ego and its relation to the world of a child entering adolescence.

In Eriksonian terms, young Charles was just entering that phase in his life which would, under ideal circumstances, culminate in an integrated sense of personal and social identity: “Its most obvious concomitants are a feeling of being at home in one's body, a sense of ‘knowing where one is going,’ and an inner assuredness of anticipated recognition from those who count.”¹³ Dickens tells us quite clearly that Warren's was traumatic because it broke his illusion of being a young gentleman and left him forlorn, with no sense of a future and no recognition whatsoever from those who counted. His attitude toward his own body is less specifically stated, although the ambivalent feelings of pride and shame over his manual dexterity suggest that this was an area of some conflict around the time he entered puberty; the oral and anal implications of his account suggest significant bodily areas where psychological stress was focused and made manifest. Perhaps most significant were the recurrent attacks of spasm, a disease whose symptoms change with each biographer, but which strongly suggests a psychosomatic disorder in response to internal stress—perhaps a form of hysteria.

These spasms, and their relationship to other similar illnesses in Dickens' adult life, seem particularly subject to biographical distortion and contradiction. Forster describes Dickens as a “queer small boy. … very little and … very sickly. … he was subject to attacks of violent spasms which disabled him for any active exertion” (I, 5). Later, Forster calls him “feeble-bodied” (I, 10), echoing Dickens' assertion that he was “delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally” (I, 21). Forster notes that while still employed at Warren's, Dickens “was taken with one of his old attacks of spasm one night.” There was a “similar illness one day in the warehouse” when Bob Fagin nursed Dickens through a bad attack of the “old disorder” (I, 27). Johnson speaks of a “mysterious spasm and fever that still prostrated him. Throughout this later part of his childhood, indeed, his troubled state was marked by a recurrence of the illnesses that had seemed less frequent in the happy Chatham days” (I, 30). A few pages later Johnson describes the “seizures of his old illness” which were “agonizing in their constriction of the kidneys,” and then concludes that they were largely psychosomatic, “doubtless, to a considerable degree, the protests of his poor little body at the unhappiness in his heart” (I, 41).

After this period of Charles' adolescence, Johnson tells us that “no more is heard of bouts of fever or attacks of spasm” (I, 47); however, there are apparently later recurrences. In a letter to Catherine Hogarth the year before they were married, Charles writes: “I am so ill this morning that I am unable to work, or do anything. I … passed the whole night, if night it can be called after that hour, in a state of exquisite torture from the spasm in my side far exceeding anything I ever felt. … I have not had so severe an attack since I was a child.”¹⁴ Johnson (I, 515) cites Forster (I, 327-28), who cites Dickens' account of a fall in Genoa which brought on “the old ‘unspeakable and agonizing pain in the side.’”¹⁵ And while completing Oliver Twist, Dickens wrote to his wife: “My side has been very bad since I left home, although I have been very careful not to drink much—remaining to the full as abstemious as usual—and have not eaten any great quantity, having no appetite. I suffered such an ecstasy of pain all night at Stratford that I was half dead yesterday, and was obliged last night to take a dose of henbane. … I suppose all this is the penalty for sticking so close to Oliver; whatever the cause is, the effect is a very sad one.”¹⁶ Steven Marcus assumes that this illness was another attack of the childhood spasms (pp. 376-77), although the evidence here is not conclusive.

Some medical accounts of Dickens are simply ludicrous, such as the theory that Charles' “well developed adrenals” as opposed to his “subnormal parathyroids” helped to create the estrangement from Kate, who was, it seems, endocrinologically incompatible.¹⁷ A more plausible but hardly complete or satisfactorily documented account of “The Medical History of Charles Dickens” appears as a chapter in a study by W. H. Bowen. Bowen himself has no doubt about the diagnosis: “There is no need to go into any detail about these seizures. They were bouts of renal colic.”¹⁸ The conclusion is an interesting one borne out in part by Dickens' later references to kidney ailments, and this disease bears a significant connection to the urinary diseases of John Dickens. Charles' father had submitted a certificate describing a “chronic affection of the urinary organs” (Johnson, I, 36) to gain early retirement from the Navy Pay Office and thus salvage some of his pension just before going to debtor's prison. Charles' subsequent spasms at Warren's may have represented an identification with his father; they may also have reflected the boy's aggression against John Dickens which was repressed and directed back against himself. Both meanings are consistent with Charles' tendency, at this time, to suppress any evidence of his own aggression and to avoid blaming his father for the family's distress. Charles' physical symptoms were real enough, but they may have also been used to express deeper and more complicated feelings about himself and his relations to his father. The mind, at such times, naturally exploits appropriate bodily weaknesses, initiating a process of “somatic compliance” which characterizes psychosomatic disorders in general.¹⁹ I believe that Dickens' childhood spasms may best be treated as both a physical reality and a symptoms of helplessness and oppression, like Oliver's weakness from starvation or Little Nell's more fatal illness. Even at the time of Warren's they stood symbolically for the child's neglected state.

Charles' illness, however, was only one of a number of devices he used to make himself a passive sufferer, whether from parental cruelty, external circumstances, or internal weakness and need. Yet the period young Charles was about to enter is characterized by active conflict and turmoil. Indeed, a healthy adolescence requires conflict for its successful development and resolution:

Too little attention has been paid to the fact that adolescence, not only in spite of, but rather because of, its emotional turmoil, often affords spontaneous recovery from debilitating childhood influences, and offers the individual an opportunity to modify or rectify childhood exigencies which threatened to impede his progressive development. The regressive processes of adolescence permit the remodeling of defective or incomplete earlier developments; new identifications and counter-identifications play an important part in this. The profound upheaval associated with the emotional reorganization of adolescence thus harbors a beneficial potential.²⁰

This is what Erikson refers to as the “normative crisis” of adolescence. Viewed from this perspective, Dickens might have used the sudden shift in his life situation, and his subsequent memory of that shift, to reorder his earlier experiences, and perhaps, as well, to justify later competitiveness and aggression. Put another way, we need to see Warren's both as something that happened to Dickens and as something he did to himself, something that he used positively in his own self-development. He had no control over the actual events, but his reactions to his new environment, and to the old family environment, reflect specific modes of coping with separation and independent development; Dickens' subsequent memory of this period, particularly in ways we know to be distorted, further indicates the uses he made of his experience, rather than simply the way in which he was used.

When Dickens wrote the autobiographical fragment, his eldest child, Charles Culliford, was somewhere between ten and twelve, that is, between the ages when David went to work at Murdstone and Grinby and when Charles actually went to work at Warren's.²¹ It is tempting then to believe that the growth of his son stimulated the father's desire to work through an unresolved crisis of his own early adolescence.²² Fanny's fatal illness must have similarly stimulated Charles' memories of his relationship to her during the time of Warren's—and before. Her tuberculosis was discovered in 1846 and, as Johnson writes, she “had long been in delicate health” (II, 650); she died in 1848.

But Dickens' powerfully melodramatic tone urges us to forget, as far as possible, his adult perspective: we see him only as child and victim, someone who suffered agonies. He omits from his account virtually any reference to self-assertive activity. And the act of growth in adolescence is very definitely a form of self-assertion: “In the unconscious fantasy,” writes D. W. Winnicott, “growing up is inherently an aggressive act. … If the child is to become adult, then this move is achieved over the dead body of an adult.”²³ Winnicott's language is intentionally strong because it is an attempt to translate the meaning of adolescent unconscious fantasy. The adult is so shocked by the power and potential threat of that fantasy that he tends strongly to repress this element in the memory of his own adolescence and to suppress or rebuke it in the adolescence of others. But its presence is critical for the growth of the child to adulthood: “In the total unconscious fantasy belonging to growth at puberty and in adolescence, there is the death of someone. A great deal can be managed in play and by displacements, and on the basis of cross-identifications; but, in the psychotherapy of the individual adolescent … there is to be found death and personal triumph as something inherent in the process of maturation and in the acquisition of adult status” (p. 145).

Acceptance of this symbolic murder is difficult for the parent, but more difficult for the child himself. And when this universal difficulty is exaggerated by external circumstance, the normative crisis may become a neurotic one. Dickens did not simply suffer a sudden act of deprivation (although it was that, too); he was placed quite abruptly in the role of his father. John Dickens had failed as a provider, and now suddenly this boy of twelve was the one person in the family who was both earning money and living outside of debtor's prison. We can speculate that in addition to the long hours and the separation from his family, the boy would have been frightened by the realization of a normal fantasy of his age—the replacement of his own father. Charles recoiled from this fantasy and re-created himself as a much younger and weaker boy; he defended his father and softened the implications of his father's improvidence. As described above, Charles' spasms not only symbolize his helplessness and neglect: they also suggest an identification with his father, and perhaps a redirection of any aggression he felt toward John Dickens back upon himself. Certainly, this illness helped to intensify the feeling he later re-created through the pathos of his adult memory: “I was so young and childish, and so little qualified—how could I be otherwise?—to undertake the whole charge of my own existence” (Forster, I, 24). And when he later remembered this time, that memory rendered him helpless and childlike; to use the appropriate Victorian expression, it “unmanned him”: “My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation … that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life” (Forster, I, 23—my italics). We can see a similar tendency in his fiction, to relive not simply the child's oppression but its innocence. Indeed, his purest heroes are heroines—Nell and Amy Dorrit and Esther Summerson—all of whom intensify the quality of passive and innocent suffering which Dickens tries to elicit in the fragment.

Elements of his own aggressiveness, however, are also present. He ironically compares himself, for example, to a “small Cain”; he reveals his envy for his sister; and even the description of Bob Fagin betrays an indirect aggression toward his real-life protector, transformed later into his most famous villain. The boy's resolve never to forgive his mother for her part in these events—a resolve he maintained throughout his life—also betrays both the strength of his aggression and an anger founded on a sense of separation and loss rather than a realistic judgment of Elizabeth's actions.

We now begin to see how complex Charles' experience at Warren's must have been: in itself a painful period of separation and readjustment, it would naturally encourage a defensive reaction and a regression to earlier developmental conflicts. In addition, it came at a critical period of Dickens' own growth, and his reaction may have been particularly intense because Warren's brought out elements of aggressiveness and fantasies of replacing the father which are part of every boy's adolescence but, in this case, were frighteningly realized through external events. However, by the time we learn anything directly about Warren's Dickens has grown up and, in the process, learned to use the experience as a part of that growth. This is apparent in the autobiographical fragment and in the reiteration of its theme throughout Dickens' fiction. Dickens portrays himself as he wishes to be seen, and as he needs to see himself, so that the values of innocence and an unaggressive childhood emerge as a significant part of his adult and creative vision.

Perhaps Dickens' critics and biographers have tended to overemphasize the traumatic elements of Warren's and to ignore the normal and even healthy aspects of this event because they fail to place Dickens in a developmental framework. Certainly, they do not compare Dickens to other similarly “traumatized” figures. For example, when Coleridge's father died, young Coleridge was sent away to a charity school, where he felt himself cut off from his mother and family: an “orphan,” as he repeatedly described himself in adult life. For Coleridge, too, isolation and neglect are transformed into a detailed menu, but Coleridge's list is entirely unleavened by humor: “Our diet was very scanty—Every morning a bit of dry bread & some bad small beer—every evening a larger piece of bread, & cheese or butter, whichever we liked—For dinner—on Sunday, boiled beef & broth—Monday, Bread & butter, & milk & water—on Tuesday, roast mutton, Wednesday, bread & butter & rice milk, Thursday, boiled beef & broth—Friday, boiled mutton & broth—Saturday, bread & butter, & pease porritch—Our food was portioned—& excepting on Wednesdays I never had a belly full. Our appetites were damped never satisfied—and we had no vegetables.”²⁴ Both Dickens and Coleridge experienced a painful period in their childhoods when they were abruptly separated from their families and felt isolated and neglected; and both tended to express their neglect through images of feeding. But Coleridge was three years younger than Dickens, his father had died, and the abrupt separation from the rest of his family was far more extensive than Dickens' period at Warren's. Dickens was in a better position to cope with a much more limited crisis and integrate it into a normal process of growth.

It is of course impossible to sustain a comparison of this kind. I am intentionally focusing on a single, apparently traumatic moment common to both biographies, in order to emphasize that the impact of Warren's was relatively limited and that it points to the range of Dickens' unneurotic response, as well as to its pathological side. Coleridge, on the other hand, would suffer throughout his life from screaming nightmares, some of them actually set in Christ's Hospital, and many of his fantasies reflect a combination of anal and oral imagery far more pathological than anything we know of in Dickens: “Instantly there appeared a spectrum, of a Pheasant's Tail, that altered thro' various degradations into round wrinkly shapes, as of [Horse] Excrement, or baked Apples—indeed exactly like the latter—round baked Apples, with exactly the same colour, the same circular intra-circular Wrinkles—I started out of bed, lit my Candles, & noted it down, in order to state these circular irregularly concentrical Wrinkles, something like Horse dung, still more like flat baked or [dried] Apples, such as they are brought in after Dinner.”²⁵ This passage shows the transformation of oral images into something directly anal. Dickens employs anal character traits to guard against the dangers of separation and loss of love; Coleridge's anal imagery more directly renders a complete and irrecoverable loss.²⁶ Similarly, we must assume an oral predisposition to Coleridge's ultimate neurotic dependency, his opium addiction; any possible psychosomatic illness of Dickens, such as the recurrent spasms, is almost trivial by contrast.

In fairness to Coleridge, and in recognition of his lifelong achievements, we need to use the label “pathological” with great care. But the potentially misleading effects of labeling Warren's as pathological become clearer when we look at someone whose conflicts in childhood were even more extreme. Perhaps a final comparison should be made not to another great writer but to a great neurotic: Freud's “Rat Man.” Dickens disguised and transformed his aggression against the father, whereas Freud's patient feared and hated his father intensely. He felt “an ineradicable grudge against his father,” whom he construed as the block to his own growth and sexual enjoyment, and whose death merely intensified a pathology designed to suppress the aggressive wishes of the son. Once, when his father gave him a beating, the child responded with such uncontrollable rage and “elemental fury” that his father stopped and directly anticipated Edmund Wilson's pronouncement about Dickens: “‘The child will either be a great man or a great criminal.’” Freud adds, dryly: “These alternatives did not exhaust the possibilities. His father had overlooked the commonest outcome of such premature passions—a neurosis.”²⁷

To summarize: the earlier descriptions of Dickens' experience at Warren's, beginning with Forster and Dickens himself, have been incomplete and distorted. The events, and Dickens' reaction to them, reflect a significant external reordering of the child's life, a pressure which reactivated the needs and the characteristic defenses built up in the child throughout his earlier life; this pressure intensified an experience common to adolescent development. I have analyzed the seemingly neurotic components in this affair but have finished by stressing the normality of some of Dickens' reactions. I have suggested that he used this experience to manage and resolve earlier crises and that he continued to use his adult memory of Warren's to preserve a sense of his own boyishness, his own identity as a child—elements that say as much about the idiosyncratic nature of his personality and charm as about neurosis. Throughout his life Dickens absorbed experiences—bizarre, painful, unexpected—recreating and controlling them through his fiction. We know he did this when Maria Beadnell returned as Maria Winter, or with the disintegration of his marriage and his affair with Ellen Ternan. We are prepared to see, in his response to the apparent traumas of adult life, a dynamic quality: he changes loyalties and viewpoints and reflects those changes as he writes, always attempting to understand his behavior and, implicitly, to justify it. But in considering his experiences at Warren's, we have been inclined to read those events, and Dickens' much later account of them, as static. We tend to forget that Warren's was not, as most biographers would have us believe, the beginning; it is subject to that autobiographical reconstruction which characterizes so much of Dickens' fiction, and Dickens' account is a crucial attempt to redefine real-life events through the “fiction” of biography.

Notes

1. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1966); Edmund Wilson, “The Two Scrooges,” in The Wound and the Bow, rev. ed. (1952; reprinted, London: Methuen, 1961), pp. 1-93; Jack Lindsay, Charles Dickens (London: Andrew Dakers, 1950); Steven Marcus, “Who is Fagin?” in Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), pp. 358-78. It should be noted that Marcus' primary aim is a fresh reading of Oliver Twist, not a biographical reappraisal of Dickens. A number of modern critics integrate their own understanding of Charles' reaction to Warren's with their reading of specific texts; see, for example, George H. Ford, “David Copperfield,” in The Dickens Critics (New York: Cornell University Press, 1961), pp. 349-65; Robert L. Patten, “Autobiography into Autobiography: The Evolution of David Copperfield,” a forthcoming essay in a volume on Victorian Autobiography; Warrington Winters, “Dickens' Hard Times: The Lost Childhood,” in Dickens Studies Annual, 2 (1972), 217-36; Harry Stone, “The Genesis of a Novel: Great Expectations,” in Charles Dickens 1812-1870, ed. E. W. F. Tomlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), pp. 110-31; and “The Love Pattern in Dickens' Novels,” in Dickens the Craftsman: Strategies of Presentation, ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), pp. 1-20. Leonard Manheim's analysis of father-son conflict in Dickens' life and fiction involves a specific reappraisal of Wilson's analysis, which reached “only a part of the truth” (“The Law as ‘Father,’” American Imago 12 [Spring 1955], 17-23); see also “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” American Imago 9, no. 1 (April 1952), 21-43, and, most recently, “A Tale of Two Characters: A Study in Multiple Projection,” in Dickens Studies Annual, 1 (1970), 225-37.

2. Charles Dickens (1906; reprinted ed., New York: Schocken, 1965), p. 37.

3. W. Robertson Nicoll, Dickens's Own Story (London: Chapman & Hall, 1923), p. 13; Margaret Lane, “Dickens on the Hearth,” in Dickens 1970, ed. Michael Slater (New York: Stein & Day, 1970), pp. 153-71; Thomas Wright, The Life of Charles Dickens (New York: Scribner's, 1936), p. 43.

4. Charles Dickens (1898; reprinted ed., London and Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1929), p. 14.

5. See, for example, Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vols. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952); K. J. Fielding, Charles Dickens: A Critical Introduction, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964); and Angus Wilson, “Dickens on Children and Childhood,” in Dickens 1970, ed. Michael Slater (New York: Stein & Day, 1970), pp. 195-227; and The World of Charles Dickens (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1970), pp. 49-61. Julian Symons (Charles Dickens [New York: Roy Publishers, 1951], pp. 7-29) is psychological with a vengeance: he uses Kraepelin's Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia to classify Dickens as manic-depressive, but fortunately “‘still in the domain of the normal,’” and bases much of his analysis on the “evidence” of Warren's.

6. Lindsay's methodological limitations are compounded by his distortions of fact: he makes Elizabeth Dickens far more active than she was even in Charles's account. Lindsay, for example, had Elizabeth pay for Charles's first lodgings whereas Charles believed that it was his father who took the lodgings for him (Lindsay, p. 54; Forster, I, 24).

7. Johnson, I, 45. In a more recent article on the life of Dickens (“Dickens: The Dark Pilgrimage,” in Charles Dickens 1812-1870, ed. E. W. F. Tomlin [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969], pp. 42-63), Johnson writes similarly of Charles's experience at Warren's:

   The experience was crucial for Dickens's entire future course. It is hardly fanciful to say that in the blacking warehouse that unhappy child died, and into his frail body entered the spirit of a man of relentless determination. Deep within him, he resolved that he should never again be so victimized. He would toil, he would fall prey to none of his father's financial imprudence, he would let nothing stand between him and ambition. He would batter his way out of all the gaols that confine the human spirit.

   (P. 45)

   Angus Wilson follows Edmund Wilson in describing “these traumatic months at Warren's” and their importance for the novelist's ability to portray the criminal and the oppressed. Angus Wilson, however, is more critical of Dickens' tone: “The phrases pour out of the autobiographical narrative so that the speaker seems like the most strange of Dickensian characters, a grown human being utterly enclosed in a vivid stylization of his childhood self, cut off from all his own everyday rational, decent ‘manliness’ by a lament for his own lost innocence—in short, one of the isolated, verbalizing monsters of his own novels. And so in a sense he is—a little mad about what happened to him as a child, unjust, snobbish, and uncaring for others” (The World of Charles Dickens, p. 58).

8. Ian Watt, “Oral Dickens,” in Dickens Studies Annual, 3 (1974), 174.

9. Great Expectations (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 50. For a full description of the relationship between love and feeding in Great Expectations, see Barbara Hardy, “Food and Ceremony in Great Expectations,” Essays in Criticism 13, no. 4 (October 1963), 351-63.

10. Dickens' remark is from a letter describing the sudden death of his brother Alfred (“he … has left a widow and five children—you may suppose to whom”). He then goes on to talk about Elizabeth Dickens: “My mother, who was also left to me when my father died (I never had anything left to me but relations), is in the strangest state of mind from senile decay; and the impossibility of getting her to understand what is the matter, combined with her desire to be got up in sables like a female Hamlet, illumines the dreary scene with a ghastly absurdity that is the chief relief I can find in it. Well! Life is a fight and must be fought out. Not new, but true, and I don't complain of it” (The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter [Bloomsbury: Nonesuch, 1938], III, 172; to Mrs. Dickinson, 19 August 1860). Here again is the bitterness toward his mother, but with their positions reversed: Charles can now afford to be ironic.

11. See The Dickens World, 2d ed. (1942; reprinted., London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 202-3. Such an explicit statement is particularly interesting in a nonpsychoanalytic critic.

12. “Pots” had a clear anal meaning in the nineteenth century, and the term was also slang for a woman, usually a lower-class woman or prostitute. See Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). The second meaning allows us to speculate on the relationship between this “soiling” experience and the almost certain (and sudden) sexual education young Charles would have received on entering a new working environment around the beginning of puberty. But any serious reconstruction of Charles' introduction to sexual knowledge is impossible without the more detailed and explicit information which Dickens was unlikely to have made available to anyone, especially Forster.

13. Erik H. Erikson, “The Problem of Ego Identity,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 4, no. 1 (1956), 74.

14. The Letters of Charles Dickens, eds. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), I, 119; (?) 22 January 1836.

15. See also Dickens' letter to Forster, August 1844 (Letters, ed. Dexter, I, 618) and to Evans, 4 July 1849 (Letters, ed. Dexter, II, 159). And see Charles Kligerman, “The Dream of Charles Dickens,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 18 (October 1970), 783-99.

16. 1 November 1838; Letters, ed. House, I, 448.

17. See Paul C. Squires, “The Case for Dickens as Viewed by Biology and Psychology,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 30 (1936), 468-73. Squires, in turn, relies on the earlier speculation of a 1934 article by H. B. Fantham in Character and Personality.

18. Charles Dickens and His Family: A Sympathetic Study (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1956), p. 138.

19. See Franz Alexander, Psychosomatic Medicine (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), pp. 85-215.

20. Peter Blos, On Adolescence (New York: Free Press, 1962), pp. 10-11.

21. There is some confusion over the exact date of the autobiographical fragment: Forster suggests 1847 in one place, several months before Dickens conceived the idea of David Copperfield in another (which would put it late in 1848 or early 1849), and several years before writing Copperfield in yet another reference. Edgar Johnson, noting these discrepancies, suggests somewhere between September 1845 and May 1846 (Johnson, I, 63 n.).

22. His son's emerging adolescent aggression may have also been an important part of this stimulus. See below.

23. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 144-45.

24. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), I, 389; to Thomas Poole, 19 February 1798. In citing this passage Norman Fruman comments: “It seems curious for the letter to break off so abruptly, without even his usual affectionate compliments and regards. And it is with this pointed sentence. ‘Our appetites were damped never satisfied—and we had no vegetables,’ that the famous series of autobiographical letters comes so unexpectedly to an end, almost as if there was nothing more to be said” (Norman Fruman, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel [New York: George Braziller, 1971], p. 24). Fruman's reading of this period, as of the whole of Coleridge's life, stresses the poet's strongly pathological character. Other biographers, like Walter Jackson Bate (Coleridge [New York: Macmillan, 1968]), portray Coleridge's childhood in the mildest of terms and focus instead on his success at Christ's, his closeness to school friends and relations and acquaintances in London. However, Bate tends to oversimplify motivation and to ignore modern psychological understanding. He claims that in Coleridge, for example, especially in dealing with others, “there was comparatively little of self. Above all there was nothing personally aggressive or competitive” (pp. 6-7). Lawrence Hanson (The Life of S. T. Coleridge: The Early Years [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938], p. 17) strives for a more balanced approach.

    Coleridge, at a later date and in his best conventional manner, bewails the fate of his “weeping childhood, torn By early sorrow from my native seat.” But it is difficult to believe that this “depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved” represents more than a phase through which most of the boys had to pass. The conditions at the school must indeed have seemed grim to a newcomer: the brutality of some monitors, the fearsomeness of the punishments, the inadequacy of the food, were alone sufficient to chill the stoutest heart. But they were not the whole of school life, they did not even form the major part of it. … He possessed, even at that age, a highly developed capacity for bemoaning the loss of that which he had never enjoyed; and if he mistook a love of nature for a longing for home and shed some tears, it is not surprising.

    What is surprising, however, is the suffering of the adult Coleridge, and Fruman argues persuasively for seeing the separation and loss of childhood in the adult's nightmares, anxieties, and dependencies.

25. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), I, 1681 [references are to entry rather than page number]. For a full account of the deeply disturbing imagery of Coleridge's dreams and fantasies, see Fruman, pp. 365-412. Fruman notes that while some images may be attributable, as in any dream, to immediate life events, we need to see the child's conflicts in the adult's dreams; nor is it sufficient to explain these images as simply the results of an opium vision. See also Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).

26. Coleridge's record of his dreams, visions, and waking fantasies provides a rich source for substantiating this pattern of oral into anal and connecting it with the child's image of a frightening and dangerous mother, like the “frightful pale woman” who wants to kiss him and whose very breath “had the property of giving a shameful Disease” (Notebooks, 1250). Fruman, making a somewhat different argument, connects the dream in which this woman appears with Coleridge's fantasy of the moon, where people are “exactly like the people of this world in every thing else except indeed that they eat with their Backsides, & stool at their mouths … their Breath not very sweet—but they do not kiss much & custom reconciles one to every thing” (Fruman, pp. 376-77). The pale woman of the dream gives way to another dream woman “of gigantic Height” who is changed “into a stool.” Presumably Coleridge consciously intends “stool” to mean an article of furniture, but it is even more suggestive as a link between the dream and the anal fantasies, showing the child's perspective of a “gigantic” mother, his fear of the mother and of attachment itself (the kiss, the disease), and finally his fear and despair indicated by the transformation of food to excrement, apples to horse dung.

27. Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-64), X, 205.

Page and chapter references in the text are to The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford University Press, 1948-58), unless otherwise noted.