SOURCE: Tracy, Robert. “Stranger Than Truth: Fictional Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction.” Dickens Studies Annual 15 (1986): 275-89.

[In the following essay, Tracy compares Charles Dickens's novel David Copperfield and Anthony Trollope's An Autobiography in order to suggest generic affinities and distinctions between autobiographical fiction and autobiography.]

… Il me semblait que j'étais moi-même ce dont parlait l'ouvrage … le sujet du livre se détachait de moi, j'étais libre de m'y appliquer ou non …

Proust, Du coté de chez Swann

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life or of the work …

W. B. Yeats, “The Choice”

The two passages, from Proust and from Yeats, which I have prefixed as epigraphs, suggest to me a direction to take in considering the nature of literary autobiography, and its relationship to a writer's use of his own experiences in fiction. Proust, to be sure, is thinking of his own childhood habit of dozing off while reading and somehow merging into the subject of his book, and I am slightly misusing his words here to suggest the writer's ability to move in and out of real experience and his or her real identity in creating autobiography or autobiographical fiction: “it seemed to me that I myself were that of which the work spoke … the subject of the book would detach itself from me, I was free to have it be about me or not about me.” The writer of autobiography uses the techniques of prose fiction, and imposes upon the confusing crosscurrents of a life a discernible pattern—a life is made sense of. There is, to be sure, a relationship between the life described in the autobiography and the life that the subject of it actually lived, but it is often an uneasy relationship, for life is less tidy than literature. By imposing a theme upon his life, the autobiographer applies the disciplines of imaginative literature rather than those of absolute historical veracity. He can be the subject of the book, but when necessary he can separate that subject—his protagonist—from his own living, breathing, suffering, and potentially embarrassing self, can withdraw and watch his protagonist follow the pattern of a written destiny.

Yeats's utterance defines the choice that the autobiographer evades. Perfection of the life, however unattainable in the real world, can paradoxically be achieved by turning the life into a work of art; perfection of the autobiographical work transforms the life. And if the life prove too refractory, there is always the possibility of an autobiographical fiction, a novel with a protagonist whose adventures and development resemble the author's, but are freed from dependence upon them.

Autobiographies, then, are fictional in form and to some extent perhaps in content; autobiographical fiction is partly based on fact. It is easy, perhaps even necessary, to blur the distinctions between them, for we are dealing not with truth versus fiction but rather with two closely related forms of prose narrative which employ the same literary strategies to transform experience into art. This is particularly true of the autobiographies of novelists and other writers, for their accustomed use of these strategies separates them from the politician or military man who ventures into literature only as an autobiographer, and whose purpose in writing is slightly different—to justify, perhaps even to conceal his role in carrying on public business, while the novelist or poet turned autobiographer is usually obsessed with subtle and intensely private moments of self discovery or aesthetic discovery, and with offering a coherent account of his development as an artist that dramatizes that development. Remembering his days in art school, Yeats tells us, in his Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1914), the first section of his Autobiographies, that his drawing masters “understood nothing but neatness and smoothness,” their art that of the careful copyist, and contrasts his father's touching a drawing of the Discus Thrower, “making the shoulder stand out with swift and broken lines.”¹ The incident offers us a kind of metaphor for the literary autobiography, which imposes literary form to clarify an already perceived form in the life described, though that perceived form may itself be imposed, an act of fiction.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are rich in literary autobiographies and autobiographical fictions which offer us an opportunity for exploration of what may well be a no-man's-land. The writer consciously and consistently shapes his own past in Wordsworth's The Prelude; in DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater; in Newman's Apologia pro Vita sua; in Ruskin's Praeterita, suggestively subtitled “outlines of scenes and thoughts perhaps worthy of memory in my past life”; in that sad, angry cri de coeur, Oscar Wilde's De Profundis; in Yeats's Autobiographies. Against these self-proclaimed autobiographies we can set a series of thinly disguised autobiographical fictions: Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; Jane Eyre, which Charlotte Brontë subtitled “An Autobiography,” supposedly edited by “Currer Bell”; Villette; Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh; Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. If I were forced to make a distinction between these two kinds of works, which seem to me so closely to resemble one another and to share so many traits, I would, rather tentatively, suggest that the fictions tell—that is, they narrate a story, a series of events, more or less dramatic in nature. The autobiographies also tell, but they go further—they explain. They tell us why and how the events of the protagonist's life occurred, and what he or she made of them—and, more important, how he or she now sees those events as part of a pattern which they have come to understand and which is finally clarified by the very act of writing it down—and writing it up.

Two books offer themselves as attractive specimens for examination and analysis in an attempt to clarify these perhaps nebulous distinctions: Dickens' David Copperfield and Anthony Trollope's An Autobiography. David Copperfield—The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, & Observation of David Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery, Which He never meant to be Published on Any Account—pretends to be the autobiography of a successful novelist, but is really a novel about the development of a successful novelist, from childhood until maturity, written by another successful novelist who has adapted and incorporated events from his own life and assigned them to his fictional creation—events which we can separately study in the fragmentary autobiography which Dickens gave to his friend and biographer, John Forster. In Trollope's Autobiography, a successful novelist tries to tell us how he became one, and to examine and celebrate his own achievement.

There are some striking resemblances between these three accounts and indeed between the careers of David Copperfield, Dickens, and Trollope. All three scrutinize childhood to find the origin of the mature successful personality—a reasonable procedure for any autobiographer, and particularly important to a nineteenth-century writer aware of the Romantic cult of childhood and of Wordsworth's declaration that “The child is father of the man.” As Agnes writes to David, “the endurance of my childish days had done its part to make me what I was.”²

For all three writers, childhood is not only a time of growing awareness of the surrounding world and of the individual's place in that world—the subject, for example, of the opening sections of The Prelude and Yeats's Autobiographies—but it is also a time of overwhelming crisis. In each case the family, which should be the source of stability and identity, undergoes a disaster. For Dickens and Trollope this disaster was financial. John Dickens' inability to live within his income is well known, especially as transformed into the pecuniary disasters of Mr. Micawber. Arrested for debt, the elder Dickens, like Micawber, was sent to prison—the Marshalsea in John Dickens' case, the King's Bench in Micawber's. One consequence of this, in the family's straitened circumstances, was Charles Dickens' period of employment pasting labels on blacking-bottles at “Warren's Blacking” in Hungerford Stairs. In his fragment of autobiography, Dickens describes this event as a social rather than as a financial disaster. He comments on his poverty and hunger, to be sure, but he is shamed and outraged by his loss in social status and by the apparent impossibility of ever rising to his rightful status. He is degraded by being forced to work beside the common men and boys of the establishment. “No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship,” he wrote,

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. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, 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.³

Dickens could never forget that, after he had been placed to work at a window on the street, in plain sight of passers-by, his father had visited the establishment when a little crowd of idle spectators had gathered to watch the boys at work, “and I wondered how he could bear it.” When he was suddenly discharged, after his father had quarrelled with the cousin who had found him the job, he hoped that his father had protested this working at the window, and resented his mother's effort to return him to work: “My father said I should go back no more, and should go to school. I do not write resentfully or angrily: for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am: but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.”⁴ Dickens adds that his parents never afterwards referred to this period; that he could not bear to walk near the warehouse for years. He told Forster of the blacking warehouse only after Charles Wentworth Dilke had remembered seeing the child Dickens in some such place and had mentioned the recollection to Forster. Even then, in 1847, he preferred to hand Forster a written account rather than speak to him about those days, and Dickens' wife and children learned of the episode only after the publication of Forster's biography in 1872-74.

Forster tells us that the autobiographical impulse aroused by his questions, and the fragment of autobiography Dickens then wrote, was the origin of David Copperfield. “It had all been written, as fact, before he thought of any other use for it,” and only after several months,

when the fancy of David Copperfield, itself suggested by what he had so written of his early troubles, began to take shape in his mind, that he abandoned his first intention of writing his own life. Those warehouse experiences fell then so aptly into the subject he had chosen, that he could not resist the temptation of immediately using them; and the manuscript recording them, which was but the first portion of what he had designed to write, was embodied in the substance of the eleventh and earlier chapters of his novel.⁵

Forster does not tell us why Dickens abandoned the idea of writing an autobiography, and suggests something almost accidental in his thrifty re-use of autobiographical material in David Copperfield—“he could not resist the temptation.” Perhaps he still could not bear to expose his early humiliations and his family history to the world. It is suggestive that in turning his experiences into fiction he kills off David's father and mother before David's life darkens, and so more or less absolves them of responsibility—at worst, they are guilty only of poor judgment. David's disgraceful labors in the wine firm of Murdstone and Grinby and his loss of social status are the fault of the villainous and usurping Mr. Murdstone, who virtually disappears from the novel after this supreme act of villainy. But it is equally possible that Dickens recognized that his talents would be straitened by an autobiography. He chose fiction not to preserve his secrets but because it offered him a greater freedom to dramatize events, to make them stand out more boldly by freeing them from the tyranny of fact and chronology.

Though he becomes a successful novelist, David says almost nothing about his own writings except that they are successful. “It is not my purpose, in this record, though in all other essentials it is my written memory, to pursue the history of my own fictions,” he tells us. “They express themselves, and I leave them to themselves” (DC, 48: 758). But when he writes his second novel, in an Alpine valley after Dora's death, he makes it sound very much like David Copperfield: “I wrote a Story, with a purpose growing, not remotely, out of my experience” (DC, 58: 889). Earlier David has told us of his own extensive reading in the English novelists of the eighteenth century, and of his habit, during his warehouse days, of imposing recollections of these stories on the men and women he met. When Mr. Micawber, in prison, writes a petition “praying for an alteration in the laws for imprisonment for debt,” David sets

down this remembrance here because it is an instance to myself of the manner in which I fitted my old books to my altered life, and made stories for myself, out of the streets, and out of men and women; and how some main points in the character I shall unconsciously develop, I suppose, in writing my life, were gradually forming all this while. … When my thoughts go back, now, to that slow agony of my youth, I wonder how much of the histories I invented for such people hangs like a mist of fancy over well-remembered facts! When I tread the old ground, I do not wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on before me, an innocent romantic boy, making his imaginative world out of such strange experiences and sordid things!

(DC, 11: 224-225)

David recognizes that fiction transforms, exaggerates, that the fiction-maker's mind is continually tempted away from literal truth. In doing so, he casts a shadow of unreliability over his memoir—it may, he hints, all be fiction, or so strongly colored by fiction as to merge imperceptibly with it. Recalling his own boyhood reading, he tells us how he consoled himself “by impersonating my favourite characters” in the novels of Fielding and Smollett “and by putting Mr. and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones. … I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch.” His own surroundings became the scene of fictional events: “I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church-steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlour of our little village alehouse” (DC, 4: 106).

Fiction imposes itself upon truth. And attempts at straightforward autobiography are unreliable, perhaps impossible. Micawber, in his letters, which constitute a series of autobiographical dispatches, is continually beguiled into ornamenting the narrative with recollections of his reading. When Mr. Dick, who shares half of Dickens' name, tries to write his “Memorial about his own history” (DC, 14: 261), he finds that he cannot keep King Charles the First's head out of it—a surrealistic touch that perhaps hints at the ubiquitous presence of Charles Dickens, novelist, in whose head, after all, all this is taking place. Aunt Betsey avoids autobiography, but includes a fictional character in her reality—the nonexistent “Betsey Trotwood Copperfield,” self-reliant and honest, who “‘would have told me what she thought of anyone, directly’” (DC, 14: 259).

David explicitly and Dickens implicitly warn us that, despite the pretense of an autobiography, we are reading fiction. Speaking in his own voice, in a letter to Forster (10 July 1849), just after he had completed David's warehouse adventures, Dickens congratulated himself on having “done it ingeniously, and with a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction.” Later, as he completed the book, he told Forster that he seemed “to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World.”⁶

Nevertheless, fiction and its modes predominate in David Copperfield, from the opening sentence when David wonders “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life.” We learn of the separate fortunes of David's caul, and meet the old woman who won it at a raffle, before Aunt Betsey arrives as unexpectedly and briskly as the fairy godmother she is eventually to become. When he hears the story of Lazarus read, he immediately applies it to his own father lying in the adjacent churchyard, and is “so frightened that they are afterwards obliged to take me out of bed, and shew me the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window, with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon” (DC, 2: 62). Novels console him during his isolation at home, and when he goes to school he gains Steerforth's protection by retelling the plots of those novels. When he resolves to run away from Murdstone and Grinby and seek his aunt, he behaves like one of the picaresque heroes he has read about—a “child's Tom Jones”—and takes to the road to seek his fortune by reconciliation with the magical and powerful relative who can restore him to rank and fortune; and, this being a novel, that is precisely what happens. Later on Micawber, by behaving like his own idea of a Gothic conspirator, restores Aunt Betsey's fortune and destroys Heep—who behaves like a deserving charity boy in a moral tale for children, and later like the hero of a tract on rehabilitating criminals. David Copperfield encapsulates the history of narrative fiction, beginning as a fairy tale and moving through picaresque and Gothic to domestic realism.

When we turn back from David's adventures to those of Charles Dickens in his brief autobiography, we can measure the degree of fictional transformation in the novel, but we can also recognize the presence of fictional elements and techniques in the autobiography. David Copperfield is isolated throughout his early life—an only child, with only his mother and Peggotty for companions, and later completely solitary except for the occasional society of the Micawbers. Dickens depicts himself as equally solitary, even though he was the second of eight children (two died in infancy) born over a period of seventeen years. It is true that he lodged alone during his father's imprisonment, but there is a sense of solitude throughout the autobiographical fragment. In a passage from David Copperfield that Forster identifies as part of the earlier memoir, Dickens describes himself reading alone, apart from other boys: “the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.”⁷ But in a later, more genial passage of autobiography, “Dullborough Town” (1860), he recalls an old playmate and how they “made the acquaintance of Roderick Random together,” and remembers spirited games which re-enacted the storming of Seringapatam, while to Forster he spoke of a more acceptable kind of isolation, set upon a table to tell stories and sing comic songs to his father's admiring, or at least tolerant friends.⁸ David's solitude is created by fictional means. He is made an only child, and then an orphan; he is sent on solitary journeys, and even at school singled out by a sign reading “He Bites.” Dickens' childhood solitude in his autobiography is to a considerable extent a literary contrivance of omission and careful selection.

Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi has commented on the tendency among Victorian autobiographers to exaggerate their own isolation in childhood, and has even suggested that they did so under the powerful influence of David Copperfield. She cites John Stuart Mill's account of his own rigorous education, seated each day with his father at a large work-table, four years old and already deep in Greek and Latin, allowed only sedately improving walks for recreation, forbidden to play with children his own age. It is a picture Mr. Murdstone might have envied. But in fact the Mill house was a small one, and even the workroom was usually shared with a number of smaller children and a busy mother; the solitude is a literary device, used to focus our attention on the autobiographer in a single relationship, that with his father, and in a single process, that of his intellectual development. In “The Child in the House,” Pater depicts himself as the solitary Florian, though Pater's childhood was spent in another small house with his mother, grandmother, aunt, brother, and two sisters.⁹ The same tendency to portray oneself as isolated appears in Yeats's Reveries, though Yeats was the eldest of four children, born in the brief space of six years, while Joyce almost totally excludes his three brothers and six sisters from A Portrait, and when they are grudgingly admitted, Stephen Dedalus feels “that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and fosterbrother.”¹⁰ The autobiographer is, of course, self-centered. He thinks of himself as unique, and therefore as isolated from parents and family—indeed, the autobiographical impulse seems to be akin to that tendency which so often leads children to imagine themselves as not belonging to their families, their real parents not the humdrum figures with whom they spend their days but some king and queen, or prince and princess. In his paper “Family Romances” (1909), Freud describes this tendency as part of the process by which the child frees itself from the authority of the parent.¹¹ For the autobiographer, who is describing the creation of a unique and successful career, this tendency is presumably exaggerated, for both as persona and as autobiographer he is in a special sense his own creator, his own inventor and the determiner of his own personality.

With these notions in mind, let us turn to An Autobiography, which Trollope wrote in 1875 and left to be published after his death. In the opening chapters, Trollope describes a childhood descent into poverty and a loss of social status which are strikingly similar to the adventures of Charles Dickens and David Copperfield. Like John Dickens, Trollope's father was incapable of living within his income or of dealing with financial problems in a sensible way. A barrister who quarrelled with potential clients, an heir who quarrelled with the man from whom he was to inherit, an unwise investor and purchaser of unprofitable land in order to set up as a country gentleman and also to have his sons educated as “parish boys” at Harrow, Thomas Trollope eventually fled to Belgium to avoid imprisonment for debt. His wife tried to retrieve the family fortunes with schemes almost as impractical as those of Mrs. Micawber—one was to open a kind of department store in Cincinnati, Ohio—and partly succeeded by becoming a travel writer and novelist.

Trollope rigidly excludes his personal life from his autobiography in order to discuss the profession of novelist. He describes his own writing habits, comments on each of his own novels and on contemporary novelists—he considers Dickens' characters “puppets,” his “pathos … stagey and melodramatic,” his style “jerky, ungrammatical”¹²—and even gives us a detailed statement of how much he earned from each book, and the grand total: sixty-eight thousand, nine hundred and fifty-nine pounds, seventeen shilling, and five pence (AA, 20: 364). He devotes a sentence to his wife and marriage—“My marriage was like the marriage of other people, and of no special interest to any one except my wife and me” (AA, 4: 71)—in a paragraph about the risk of marrying on little money, and his two sons get a brief paragraph each, the younger because his settling in Australia gave Trollope the opportunity to visit there and write a travel book and two novels set in that country. “It will not, I trust, be supposed by any reader that I have intended in this so-called autobiography to give a record of my inner life,” he remarks, a few paragraphs from the end. “No man ever did so truly,—and no man ever will. … If the rustle of a woman's petticoat has ever stirred my blood; if a cup of wine has been a joy to me … of what matter is that to my reader?” (AA, 20: 365-366).

Trollope, then, pursues that “history of my own fictions” which David Copperfield deliberately excludes from his record, and omits all those personal incidents which comprise both Dickens' autobiographical fragment and David Copperfield. But there is a stiking exception to this self-imposed rule of reticence—the chapters dealing in detail with the miseries of his childhood and young manhood. Until he was twenty-six, he tells us, he was “wretched,—sometimes almost unto death, and have often cursed the hour in which I was born. There had clung to me a feeling that I had been looked upon always as an evil, an encumbrance, a useless thing,—as a creature of whom those connected with him had to be ashamed. And I feel certain now that in my young days I was so regarded” (AA, 4: 60). Though both parents were usually present, Thomas Trollope treated his son with Murdstonian rigor: “He allowed himself no distraction, and did not seem to think that it was necessary to a child” (AA, 1: 14) as he heard his son repeat his lessons. As a despised day boy at Harrow (the boarders were the aristocrats of the school, and very much in the majority), Trollope found even his daily journey “to and fro between our house and the school … a daily purgatory,” and recalls the headmaster stopping him in the street “and asking me, with all the clouds of Jove upon his brow and all the thunder in his voice, whether it was possible that Harrow School was disgraced by so disreputably dirty a little boy as I!” (AA, 1: 4). At Winchester, as his father's fortunes sank even lower and his bills went unpaid, he “became a Pariah … I suffered horribly! … I had no friend to whom I could pour out my sorrows. I was big, and awkward, and ugly … how I considered whether I should always be alone; whether I could not find my way up to the top of that college tower, and from thence put an end to everything.” Back at Harrow, he “had not only no friends, but was despised by all my companions … a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from a dunghill … I was allowed to join in no plays. … Something of the disgrace of my school-days has clung to me all through life” (AA, 1: 9-17). Like Mill and Yeats, he portrays himself as essentially an only child, though he was one of six surviving children born to his parents in a period of eight years (a seventh child died after a single day of life).

Sir William Gregory, Trollope's Harrow contemporary, confirms Trollope's “tabooed” state as a schoolboy, though Thomas Adolphus Trollope, the novelist's eldest brother, suggests in his own autobiography that the whole picture of family life and childhood is too dark.¹³ But I am less interested in Trollope's accuracy than in the strategy of his autobiography. It is clear that these uncharacteristic glimpses into his private life are offered for a reason. In fact they define the plot of An Autobiography and impose coherence and form upon Trollope's life. The lonely boy did not take refuge in reading novels, as did Dickens and David Copperfield—though he does wonder “how many dozen times” he read the first two volumes of Cooper's The Prairie, the only fiction in his father's house, and describes himself at nineteen as having read “Shakespeare and Byron and Scott” and convinced that Pride and Prejudice “was the best novel in the English language” (AA, 1: 15; 3: 41). Instead of reading, Trollope assuaged his loneliness by telling himself sustained stories:

For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year, I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions, and proprieties, and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced—nor even anything which, from outward circumstances, would seem to be violently improbable. I myself was of course my own hero. Such is a necessity of castle-building. But I never became a king, or a duke,—much less when my height and personal appearance were fixed could I be an Antinous, or six feet high. I never was a learned man, nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be fond of me. And I strove to be kind of heart, and open of hand, and noble in thought, despising mean things; and altogether I was a very much better fellow than I have ever succeeded in being since. This had been the occupation of my life for six or seven years before I went to the Post Office, and was by no means abandoned when I commenced my work. … I have often doubted whether, had it not been my practice, I should ever have written a novel. I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life. In after years I have done the same,—with this difference, that I have discarded the hero of my early dreams, and have been able to lay my own identity aside.

(AA, 3: 42-43)

Trollope's theme in An Autobiography is his transcendence of his miserable childhood to achieve, as did David Copperfield and Dickens, success by creating fictions. The stories he told himself he now tells to others, and so has become a social and financial success. Like David, this success begins by the decisive act of running away from a sordid life and a job that seemed mere drudgery. Haunted by a debt collector and the mother of a girl to whom he had allegedly proposed marriage, inefficient at his duties as a Post Office clerk, he successfully applied for a Post Office position in Ireland. “This was the first good fortune of my life,” he tells us; “from the day on which I set my foot in Ireland all these evils went away from me. Since that time who has had a happier life than mine?” (AA, 3-4: 59-60). Ireland became Trollope's fairy godmother, his Aunt Betsey Trotwood, but with an important difference. Ireland did not offer charity or an immediate restoration in social rank. She offered Trollope an opportunity to work purposefully to create his own good fortune and regain the social position that his father had put in abeyance. Steady application to the work of writing becomes Trollope's theme—industry becomes his Muse. He insists on denying himself genius and scorns the idea of inspiration. Instead, he compares himself to a shoemaker who, on completing one pair of shoes, immediately sets to work on another: “I had long since convinced myself that in such work as mine the great secret consisted in acknowledging myself to be bound by rules of labour similar to those which an artizan or a mechanic is forced to obey” (AA, 17: 323). When he comments on his mother's success as a writer, he emphasizes her lack of education and commends her ability to write even beside the deathbeds of her husband and children (AA, 2: 22, 29).

Trollope's account, then, is strikingly different from David Copperfield's and Dickens'. They present a more or less Edenic childhood out of which they fall into misery and horror, only to be rescued by unexpected benevolence—Aunt Betsey's charity, John Dickens' quarrel with his son's employer and decision to send the boy to school. That kind of benevolent intervention is, of course, characteristic of Dickens' novels, and of the novels Dickens and David Copperfield read in boyhood. Suffering makes the hero worthy of the benevolence and good fortune he is eventually to achieve. This passive aspect of Dickens' heroes has often bothered critics. Though they deserve their good fortune, they seldom act to make it happen. Dickens portrays himself as less enterprising than David—he does not run away, but tamely sticks to his bottles and labels until fate intervenes.

This “endurance of my childish days had done its part to make me what I was,” David tells us in maturity (DC, 58: 888); “I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am,” writes Dickens.¹⁴ Mr. Wickfield, remembering the passive suffering he has caused Agnes, “would not cancel it” because he cherishes the “patience and devotion” it evoked in her (DC, 60: 914). Suffering is justified by the patient endurance it occasions, and the theme of Dickens' novel and his autobiographical memoir hints that a return to suffering through memory can be a continual source of strength and even of melancholy pleasure.

The hero of David Copperfield is formed by sad events, and never really escapes from them, nor really wants to escape. His happiness at the end of the novel depends on a continual contemplation of earlier miseries and misfortunes. This insistent preservation of the past seems to me characteristic of fiction, and therefore of autobiographical fiction; fiction ends when the hero achieves happiness and stability and there is nothing dramatic to tell.

Trollope as autobiographer imposes on his life the same plot, a rise from misery to fortune, though unlike David and Dickens he describes no pre-lapsarian stage of innocent happiness. But though he uses fictional techniques to dramatize his own childhood misery, and so creates fictional autobiography, his story emphasizes his deliberate and successful attempt to free himself from circumstances. He has created himself by hard work and enterprise, and now recreates himself by describing and, as it were, asserting his career. As a boy, he recalls, he had been afraid

that the mud and solitude and poverty of the time would ensure me mud and solitude and poverty through my life. Those lads about me would go into Parliament, or become rectors and deans, or squires of parishes, or advocates thundering at the Bar. They would not live with me now—but neither should I be able to live with them in after years.

And he follows this with an exultant triumphal sentence: “Nevertheless I have lived with them” (AA, 9: 168-169). Dickens, according to Forster's informed account—Forster's Life was undertaken with Dickens' knowledge, and so shaped by his careful providing of information to Forster that it can almost be discussed as an autobiography—was equally decisive in creating his own life. He gradually arrived at “a passionate resolve, even while he was yielding to circumstances, not to be what circumstances were conspiring to make him.” But while Trollope celebrates his achievement of social equality with those who once scorned him, Forster suggest that Dickens' early experiences left him too determinedly the individual, still solitary despite his success, unable to become part of society:

in conversation with me after the revelation [of his days in the blacking warehouse] was made, he used to find, at extreme points in his life, the explanation of himself in those early trials. He had derived great good from them, but not without alloy. The fixed and eager determination, the restless and resistless energy, which opened to him opportunities of escape from many mean environments, not by turning off from any path of duty, but by resolutely rising to such excellence or distinction as might be attainable in it, brought with it some disadvantage among many noble advantages. Of this he was himself aware, but not to the full extent. What it was that in society made him often uneasy, shrinking, and over-sensitive, he knew; but all the danger he ran in bearing down and over-mastering the feeling, he did not know. A too great confidence in himself, a sense that everything was possible to the will that would make it so, laid occasionally upon him self-imposed burdens greater than might be born by any one with safety. In that direction there was in him, at such times, something even hard and aggressive; in his determinations a something that had almost the tone of fierceness … when I have seen strangely present, at … chance intervals, a stern and even cold isolation of self-reliance side by side with a susceptivity almost feminine and the most eager craving for sympathy, it has seemed to me as though his habitual impulses for everything kind and gentle had sunk, for the time, under a sudden hard and inexorable sense of what fate had dealt to him in those early years.¹⁵

Clearly Dickens was selective in assigning a version of his own early adventures to David, but sparing him the drive and arrogance on which his own success depended. For David, to suffer is to deserve better; for Dickens and Trollope, to suffer is to resolve to suffer no more. Their fictional heroes are shaped by circumstances, but in writing their own lives they see themselves as free to transcend circumstance—though we doubt how free they really are. And we may doubt, as Trollope doubts, the autobiographer's ability to be completely self-knowing and completely honest.

Though David warns us that the “mist of fancy” may intervene to alter the truth of his childhood recollections, an autobiographical fiction like David Copperfield is, it seems, more truthful than Dickens' or Trollope's fictional autobiographies. It is more truthful because it tells us everything there is to tell about David, and everything it tells us is true. There is no alternate version of David's story, or of any episode in it. What happens to him in the pages of David Copperfield is complete, and nothing can differ from David's recollection and Dickens' narration. There is no arrogant or compulsive David to conceal. When Dickens or Trollope writes autobiography, we can never be sure of the truth or the completeness of the account. We can question the reality of the persona so convincingly presented and examined. We know our own dependence on chance and circumstance, our own inability to shape our lives and personalities so clearly, so decisively. We sense our own lives' inability to cohere, to reveal a consistent theme. A novel satisfies, an autobiography disturbs.

Notes

1. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York: Collier, 1965), p. 52.

2. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, edited by Trevor Blount (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), chapter 58, p. 888. All subsequent references are placed in the text; to assist those using other editions, I cite chapter as well as page, thus: DC, 58: 888.

3. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899), I, 26-27.

4. Forster, I, 37-38.

5. Forster, I, 23-24.

6. Forster, II, 60 (“he had introduced a great part of his [autobiographical] M.S. into the [fourth] number”); II, 120.

7. Forster, I, 10.

8. “Dullborough Town” (All the Year Round, 30 June 1860), in Charles Dickens, Selected Short Fiction, edited by Deborah A. Thomas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 216-217; Forster, I, 11.

9. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, “The Innocent I: Dickens' Influence on Victorian Autobiography,” The Worlds of Victorian Fiction (Harvard English Studies, 6), edited by Jerome H. Buckley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 57-71.

10. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, edited by Chester G. Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 98.

11. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” Collected Papers, edited by James Strachey (New York: Basic, 1959), vol. 5, 74-78.

12. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), chapter 13, pp. 248-249. I shall cite chapter as well as page for An Autobiography in the text, thus: AA, 13: 248-249. Trollope caricatures Dickens as “Mr. Popular Sentiment” in The Warden (1855) by imagining the crude and melodramatic way he would tell Mr. Harding's story. Though our conclusions differ, I am generally indebted to James R. Kincaid's comparison of Trollope's Autobiography and David Copperfield in his “Trollope's Fictional Autobiography,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37 (December 1982), 340-349.

13. Sir William Gregory, An Autobiography, edited by Lady Gregory (London: J. Murray, 1894), p. 35; Thomas Adolphus Trollope, What I Remember (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1887).

14. Forster, I, 38.

15. Forster, I, 40-41.