"I lost courage and burned the rest": biofiction, legacy, and the hero-protagonist split in Charles Dickens’s life-writing novels

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SCHOOL OF LITERATURE, LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Doctor of Philosophy

“I LOST COURAGE AND BURNED THE REST”:

BIOFICTION, LEGACY, AND THE HERO-PROTAGONIST

SPLIT IN CHARLES DICKENS’S LIFE-WRITING NOVELS

Word Count 87,170

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The Australian National University

July 2018 Kathryne Hoyle Ford

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Signed Declaration

I hereby declare that this research dissertation is my original work, that all sources have been fully cited, and that it has not been submitted for any other qualification.

Kathryne H. Ford 13th_{July 2018}

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Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Kate Mitchell, for her prudent guidance, unwavering patience, and heartfelt support—all of which have helped make this project possible. I am also grateful to my supervisory panel: A/Prof Ian Higgins, Dr. Monique Rooney, and Dr. Russell Smith, for their productive insights into specific portions of the thesis. Special thanks must likewise go to colleagues in SLLL who extended encouragement along the often-arduous PhD journey. In particular, the ANU “Nerd Herd”—and especially Ashley Orr—have provided much-needed commiseration and celebration (depending upon what the situation required!).

I am indebted to the Charles Dickens Museum, London—specifically Louisa Price for her gracious invitation—and to the British Library, for their invaluable access to archives.

Thank you to Dr. Tony Williams, (then) President of the Dickens Fellowship, for allowing me to join the London Fellowship’s excursion to Gad’s Hill Place in September 2016. Listening to the first chapter of Great Expectations (whilst sitting inside the Cooling, Kent, church which most likely inspired the scene) will forever be a highlight! I am deeply obliged to Jennifer Ide, for proactively facilitating my inclusion in this adventure.

An earlier version of Chapter 5 was published in The Australasian Journal of

Victorian Studies Vol 21, No 1 (2016) as “Rehabilitating Catherine Dickens: Memory and

Authorial Agency in Gaynor Arnold’s Neo-Victorian Biofiction Girl in a Blue Dress.” My earnest thanks to the AJVS editors, A/Prof Meg Tasker and Professor Joanne Wilkes, and to the two anonymous peer reviewers, for helping refine the article for publication.

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am appreciative of the feedback received at these conferences, which has productively challenged me in expanding my talks for the thesis/publication.

This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship, for which I am exceedingly grateful. Sincere thanks must also go to The School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics, and to the Australian National University, for helping fund my conference and fieldwork opportunities via HDR Travel Grants.

I warmly thank my family, in particular my parents, Les Hoyle, and Carol Galey Hoyle. Mom taught me to read, and she subsequently nurtured a love of story with regular trips to that most magical of places, the local library. And Dad’s enthralling childhood “Sally and Cottontail” stories (which inevitably concluded with a cliff-hanger) instilled an early fascination with Dickensian-esque serialisation.

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Abstract

Charles Dickens sought to control the narratives of everyone he encountered, both in life and on the page. He even edited his own identity by burning both his correspondence and an early attempt at autobiography. Dickens’s reputation has since become public domain, however, and neo-Victorian authors are re-imagining the Dickensian. Scholarship has previously examined Dickens’s notorious fusing of fact and fiction, his angst about legacy, and his shifting authorial identity. However, what has not been made explicit is how these concerns manifest in a curious pattern, wherein Dickens’s professed protagonists—the ostensible hero/ine/s of their respective texts—are often deposed; overshadowed, as it were, in their own life histories. I trace this trend through Dickens’s novels self-consciously exhibiting the tenets of life-writing—which I refer to as his life-writing novels—including David Copperfield’s (fictional) autobiography, the memoirs of Mr. Pickwick and Oliver Twist, and Little Dorrit’s biography. Such a focus privileges the life-writing of Dickens’s most famous characters, through whom he asked to be remembered.

Invoking Dickens’s early anxieties about his authorial identity, and his later anxieties over his “lost [autobiographical] courage,” I analyse the implications of this Dickensian hero-protagonist split. Dickens enlisted these life-writing novels as sites to rehearse composing a successful life story—thereby engaging in “biographilia”—but bizarrely, his central

characters are continually compromised. I subsequently probe the tension between Dickens’s fixation upon legacy, and the ongoing neo-Victorian penchant for biofictionally

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Preface: Dickens and Daughters

Dickens’s two daughters, Mamie and Katey, notoriously harboured vastly different opinions of their famous father. Mamie, Dickens’s eldest daughter, revered her father to the extent of editing his image in keeping with the heroic legacy she felt he deserved. Katey, on the other hand, often struggled in her relationship with Dickens. Despite purportedly being his favourite (and the most like him in looks and in temperament,1_{hence, perhaps, the}

favouritism) Katey actively disputed her father’s public persona as the consummate family man. These opposing perspectives foreshadow Dickens’s eventual loss of control over his legacy; he could not even reconcile how his own daughters perceived him.

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

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

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

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legacy: “She laboured with her aunt on an edition of his letters [and] she composed a little children’s book about him which she hoped might be the means of making ‘boys and girls love and venerate the Man—before they can know and love and venerate the Author and Genius’” (Slater Dickens and Women 191). Both sisters reference their father’s genius, but for Mamie it is linked to veneration, while for Katey it is linked to uncanny wickedness. Lillian Nayder reveals that Mamie and her Aunt Georgina destroyed any letters not in keeping with their version of the heroic Dickens selected to survive: “Georgina collected and heavily edited Dickens’s letters, cutting, pasting, and rearranging their contents so as to safeguard his reputation” (333). Nayder assigns the responsibility for this shaping to

Georgina, but she also acknowledges that this edition was “co-edit[ed], with Mamie” (333). Mamie clearly adored her father and strove to protect his image, a goal she pursued further by writing a book about Dickens’s life entitled My Father as I Recall Him (1896). Here Mamie enthuses that “My love for my father has never been touched or approached by any other love. I hold him in my heart of hearts as a man apart from all other men, as one apart from all other beings” (2). She goes on to exalt his “tender and most affectionate nature” (4) and “his excessive thoughtfulness and consideration for others” (5). Mamie’s adoration contests Katey’s conflicted stance towards Dickens, even as Katey’s ambivalence tempers Mamie’s esteem.

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

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you would greatly oblige me.”2_{This, however, is the very image Mamie promotes, writing}

that her father “was the fun and life of those [holiday] gatherings, the true Christmas spirit of sweetness and hospitality filling his large and generous heart” (14). The sisters’ vastly different versions of their father is termed by Edmund Wilson as “Scrooge bursting in on the Cratchits” (57). Katey’s flawed Scrooge thus casts a shadow over Mamie’s idealised scene of Christmas cheer. Mamie’s and Katey’s competing perspectives regarding Dickens are further evinced by their disparate approaches to marriage. Katey’s union with Charles Collins— author Wilkie Collins’s younger brother—is often presented as a manoeuvre to “escape from ‘an unhappy home’” (Storey 105). Storey records that after her parents’ separation, Katey “took her mother’s part in-so-far as it was possible for her to do so. But the situation was a difficult one, since Dickens had sternly impressed upon them that ‘their father’s name was their best possession’—which they knew to be true—and he expected them to act

accordingly” (95). Conversely, Mamie went so far as to profess gratitude for spinsterhood, since it allowed her to forever retain the prized surname of Dickens (Slater Dickens and

Women 191).

Like her father, Katey wrote—and subsequently burned—an attempt at life-writing. Katey’s professed purpose in undertaking this biographical mission was “clearing her mother of false accusations made at the time of their separation” (Storey 91). In his Introduction to

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

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

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

Gad's Hill was Dickens's home when he died; he had aspired to own it since childhood, and this achievement formed an integral part of the famous author’s identity. During an exploration of Gad’s Hill in September 2016, our tour guide related the story of Hans Christian Andersen’s seemingly never-ending visit. Supposedly, after Andersen finally left, Katey Dickens placed a note in the room where he stayed which read “Hans Christian Andersen slept here—and he would not leave!” In the tour guide’s version of the tale, Dickens subsequently removed Katey’s note. Conversely, in Gladys Storey’s Dickens and

Daughter (compiled primarily from interviews with Katey Dickens) it was Dickens himself

who penned the note which read “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES!” (22). According to Storey, Katey removed the card and burnt it (22). This reversal in responsibility—who complained versus who heroically granted

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

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Introduction

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

and why we have lived – Umberto Eco3

We search fiction for the real – Kym Brindle4

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

When we think of Charles Dickens, anxiety is not the first attribute that springs to mind. This is, after all, the revered Victorian author who famously referred to himself as “The Inimitable” 6_{and insisted his grandchildren call him “Venerables.” His characters—Scrooge,}

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

Liverpool Courier queried, “What name is better known or more loved?” Near the turn of the

twentieth century, G. K. Chesterton wrote of observing an “almost hysterical worship” of Dickens (335) dating back to Chesterton’s own childhood. Dickens enjoyed immense

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

3_{Six Walks in the Fictional Woods}_(139). 4_{Epistolary Encounters}_(144).

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

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

(Letters xii).

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

Pickwick is repeatedly upstaged by his servant, David Copperfield is overly reliant upon Agnes, and Little Dorrit seeks the shadows in her own life history.

As such, this thesis explores the tension between Dickensian heroism and anxiety— and its subsequent impact upon Dickens’s own legacy—in his novels based upon the tenets of life-writing, which I hereafter refer to as his “life-writing novels.” Specifically, this group contains the autobiographies of Pip, Esther Summerson, and David Copperfield, Little Dorrit’s biography, and the memoirs of Mr. Pickwick and Oliver Twist. To some extent, of course, all Dickens’s novels can be loosely categorised as “life-writing novels” due to their shared interest in chronicling a character’s history. For instance, Nicholas Nickleby’s (1838-1839) and Martin Chuzzlewit’s (1842-1844) extended titles commence with “The Life and

Adventures of…” However, the texts themselves are not self-consciously invested in the

formal tenets of life-writing, whereas, by contrast, from the very first page of Oliver Twist (1837-1839), Dickens glosses Oliver’s story as the youth’s “memoirs” (1). The Pickwick

Papers (1836-1837) is likewise carefully cast as an example of life-writing; from the

introductory paragraph Dickens advises that Pickwick’s preliminary history has been gleaned—and subsequently edited—from the “Transactions of the Pickwick Club” (1). Living records are thus wrought into a life history. In a similar manoeuvre, Dickens

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

“protagonist” as “The chief personage in a drama; hence, the principal character in the plot of a story, etc.” (675).9_{Comparable definitions apply to “hero.” According to the}_OED_{, a}

hero is “The man who forms the subject of an epic; the chief male personage in a poem, play, or story; he in whom the interest of the story or plot is centred” (171).10_{This assumption that}

the hero is also the protagonist often manifests in an amalgamation of terms, wherein the two words are joined by a hyphen: hero-protagonist. Another written incarnation of this

conflation is hero (protagonist), wherein the parentheses denote implicit acceptance of the shared linguistic status. Merriam-Webster points out the Greek origins behind this

interchangeability: “Struggle, or conflict, is central to drama. The protagonist or hero of a play, novel, or film is involved in a struggle of some kind, either against someone or something else or even against his or her own emotions. So the hero is the ‘first struggler,’

8_{My third chapter discusses the tradition of literary heroism}_—_{including its connection to Victorian masculinity}

and the shift to more commonplace protagonists—in greater detail.

9_{Merriam-Webster echoes that a “protagonist” is “the p}_{rincipal character in a literary work (such as a drama} or story).” (“Protagonist.” Def 1.a. MerriamWebster.com. Merriam Webster Dictionary, Web. 27th_{June 2018.)} 10_{In a similar manner, the}_{Encyclopaedia Britannica}_states_{that a literary hero is “}_{broadly, the main character}

in a literary work.” (“Hero: Literary and Cultural Figure.” Britannica.com. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Web. 15 Oct. 2017.)

Likewise, a hero may be “The chief male character in a book, play, or film, who is typically identified with good qualities, and with whom the reader is expected to sympathize. [e.g.] ‘the hero of Kipling's story.’” (“Hero.” Def

1.1. OxfordDictionaries.com. Oxford Dictionaries, Web. 27th_{June 2018.) This definition pinpoints the further}

nuances inherent in the term, wherein “hero” typically indicates a strength of character beyond the value

-neutral “protagonist.” A distinction is thus implied even as it is elided by the “hero-protagonist” conjunction.

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which is the literal meaning of the Greek word prōtagōnistēs.”11_{Thus, the hero-protagonist}

conflation has a well established etymological precedent.12

Dickensian criticism is peppered with interchangeable references to his novels’ protagonists and heroes, hereby exhibiting an adherence to this tradition. For example, Beth Herst argues that Dickens conjures “his own unique protagonist, a ‘hero of an English book’ who embodies the experience of the individual in society as Dickens perceives it…” (5). Mark Wormald also fuses the figures of protagonist and hero, writing that “Dickens’s heroes were in danger of remaining mere animated collections of exploitable features…” (xix). Here Wormald identifies character qualities which are not obviously heroic; however, in using the term “heroes” Wormald references the novel’s protagonists—in this case Mr. Pickwick and company. Similarly, the Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens identifies Nicholas as “the penniless young hero” (416) i.e. protagonist of his eponymous novel. Indeed, this

terminological union pervades the analysis of heroic typologies: the bumbling hero, for instance, may be called a “hero” simply because he is the protagonist. The heroic designation here refers to the bumbling hero’s status as central character, rather than to a specific

achievement on his part.

Nonetheless, while “hero” is often enlisted as a synonym for literary protagonist, it is important to acknowledge that the term has other significant meanings, since identifying the Dickensian hero-protagonist split demands differentiating between the usages of “hero.” There must, after all, be some scope for establishing how Dickens’s life-writing novels’

11_{“Protagonist.” MerriamWebster.com. Merriam Webster Dictionary}_{, Web. 27}th_{June 2018.}

12_{Others have on occasion challenged this conflation. In}_{The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century} British Novel(2004) Terence Dawson contends that the “effective protagonist is not the obvious hero or heroine, but an apparently minor figure whose critical function in the ordering of the events has been

overlooked” (1; emphasis original). Dawson’s concern primarily pertains to which character evolves the most

throughout the novel, and how a novel’s structure might reflect that its principle mission is in fact to relate the

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protagonists fail to be the hero/ines of their respective narratives—or how his hero/ines cannot truly be deemed the protagonists. Returning to the OED, a “hero” may also be “A man who exhibits extraordinary bravery, firmness, fortitude, or greatness of soul, in any course of action, or in connexion with any pursuit, work, or enterprise; a man admired and venerated for his achievements and noble qualities” (171). In this example, being a “hero” necessitates more than simply being the central figure; the designation also attests to a quality of

character. While a hero may also be “A man distinguished by extraordinary valour and martial achievements; one who does brave or noble deeds; an illustrious warrior” (OED 171) this definition is not implicated in this thesis, since nineteenth-century novelists were already choosing more commonplace hero/ine-protagonists. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a well-known example of this Victorian shift away from the epic heroes of previous eras.

Probing the definitive divide between Dickens’s heroes and protagonists is not a quest for perfection—a hero may certainly be flawed—it is instead intended to illuminate how Dickens’s hero-protagonists consistently fail to be both “noble” and “chief.” My exploration expands, and offers reasoning as to why, “Dickens’s central figures are overshadowed by the minor characters who surround them” (Woloch 132). In assessing this phenomenon, I move beyond the standard acknowledgement that Dickens’s supporting characters, with their array of vivid eccentricities, are often more memorable than the novel’s primary character. David Copperfield is the protagonist of his autobiography, but I maintain that he is not its hero. According to the components of Dickensian heroism which I discuss in Chapter 3 —

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

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

Papers, for example, challenging the protagonist can be a comedic affair, and Sam Weller—

servant of the supposedly “illustrious” Mr. Pickwick—is repeatedly required to rescue his master from misfortune. Still, Mr. Pickwick’s lacking heroism is glossed in more light-hearted terms in keeping with the comic elements in the novel. Then, commencing with

David Copperfield, the life-writing novels assume a darker tone. Little Dorrit is scarcely the

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I attribute this shift to the “lost courage” which Dickens references in the oft-quoted 22nd February 1855 letter to former lover Maria Beadnell. Here Dickens writes that “A few years ago (just before Copperfield) I began to write my life, intending the Manuscript to be found among my papers when its subject should be concluded. But as I began to approach within sight of that part of it [their ruined relationship], I lost courage and burned the rest” (Pilgrim 7:543-544). Occurring in the late 1840s (and thus coinciding with his work on David

Copperfield) Dickens’s devastation with Maria was a deeply significant loss which drove him

to burn his early attempt at autobiography; it also haunts his subsequent efforts at fictional life-writing.

Up to this point, Dickens had dabbled in the genre, primarily through adopting the stance of editor of fictional characters’ memoirs, including those of Mr. Pickwick and Oliver Twist. Even though Nicholas Nickleby’s extended title mentions his Life and Adventures, at this stage Dickens privileged Nicholas’s “adventures” over his “life”; in the novel’s 1839 Preface, Dickens twice references “these adventures” (xlix; l). Then, once Dickens failed at writing his own life—ultimately losing courage to complete his autobiography—his novels reflect an increasingly self-conscious investment in the tenets of life-writing: all three of his autobiographical narrators (David, Esther, and Pip) appear after Dickens burned his own attempt.13_{Moreover, nearly twenty years after}_Nickleby_{, Dickens explicitly frames Little}

13_{In the early 1840s, Dickens briefly experimented with first-person narration in}_{The Old Curiosity Shop}_.

Strangely, Master Humphrey voluntarily leaves the story after only three chapters, and the omniscient

narrator assumes narrative responsibility. Master Humphrey’s “demise” (Dickens 6) was one which “freed [the author] to express some of his own opinions” (Brennan x). Unencumbered by the aging narrator, Dickens could

present his characters’ stories in a more straightforward manner, rather than filtering it through Master Humphrey’s perspective. Although Master Humphrey’s three chapters employ first-person narration, his overt concern is not with chronicling his own story, but with introducing the novel’s central characters, including Little Nell, her grandfather, Dick Swiveller, and Daniel Quilp. However, Master Humphrey’s narratorial credibility is challenged by Dickens’s short-lived miscellany Master Humphrey’s Clock, which served as a complicated narrative frame to The Old Curiosity Shop. In the miscellany, Master Humphrey states, almost as an afterthought, that he was in fact present throughout the story under the guise of the character called the

“Single Gentleman.” Scholars typically dismiss this revelation as “wildly unconvincing” (Slater Dickens 161), or

even a “blunder” (Mundhenk 655) that Dickens exacerbated by attempting to reconcile the narrative

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

Still, such a shift was not without its complications. Dickens’s burgeoning interest in the fictional life-writing genre coincides with a general darkening of subject matter, as Pickwick’s comedic escapades give way to Pip’s forfeited expectations. David Copperfield’s unease about whether or not he will ultimately be deemed the hero of his own life is the inspiration for this thesis, and his fictional autobiography—with Agnes’s (arguable) appropriation of David’s heroic title—provides a fitting case study for the overarching tension between Dickensian heroism and anxiety. To further complicate matters, even when Dickens’s protagonists adhere to the aforementioned principles of Dickensian heroism, their histories are still compromised by perplexing inconsistencies. Little Dorrit is a key example of this phenomenon: she exhibits all the tenets of Dickensian heroism, yet she is constantly maligned by those around her and even disappears for large portions of her own biography. Dickens’s subjects cannot confidently claim heroic ownership of their own stories because their author lost his own autobiographical courage.

Bio-critical scholarship tends to frame Dickens’s fragment of autobiography in light of the trauma inflicted during his childhood experience working at Warren’s Blacking Factory.14 “All roads, it sometimes seems, lead back to Warren’s Blacking” (Bodenheimer

Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel, editor Elizabeth Brennan notes that the frame

of the serial was cut when The Old Curiosity Shop was published in novel form (xxv). Dickens explains in later

Prefaces to the novel that once “the story was finished, that it might be freed from the incumbrance of

associations and interruptions with which it had no kind of concern, I caused the few sheets of Master

Humphrey’s Clock, which had been printed in connexion with it, to be cancelled…” (5). The novel itself is thus presented without reference to Master Humphrey’s return, or his “improbable” (Schlicke Companion 379)

revelation as a character in the story. As such, I have excluded it as one of Dickens’s life-writing novels, since

The Old Curiosity Shopin novel form is not glossed as an example of Master Humphrey’s life-writing. It was not until the end of the decade—after Dickens had attempted to write his own autobiography—that David Copperfield appears as the inaugural first-person narrator to sustain explicit relation of his own life history.

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Knowing Dickens 17). However, while this episode deeply affected Dickens, he still

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

or his marriage and the births of his children, but the four months he spent in Warren’s Blacking warehouse at

the age of twelve” (2).

“I suggest that Warren’s was traumatic for Dickens in the sense that trauma can be recognized through its afterlife in consciousness…it is impossible to read Dickens without hearing echoes of the autobiographical

memory in many different situations” (Bodenheimer Knowing Dickens 19).

For Steven Marcus, Dickens’s autobiographical fragment “figures in some central way in every novel [Dickens]

wrote; and we cannot understand the creative thrust of his life without taking into account his developing attitudes toward this episode, as we find them successively transmuted in novel after novel” (363). I accept this centrality yet shift the focus to Maria Beadnell’s role in Dickens’s abandonment of his autobiographical

project. Moreover, I read this episode with Maria as engendering the theme of the hero/protagonist being

repeatedly undermined in Dickens’s life-writing novels.

In the Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of David Copperfield, Andrew Sanders surmises how

“It is extraordinary to find Dickens losing courage about any aspect of his writing, especially after having forced

himself to describe the shame of the year in the Blacking Warehouse, a ‘shame’, a ‘humiliation’, and a ‘secret agony’ which, as he put it, ‘no words could express’” (ix). And yet, Dickens did describe his time at the Blacking Warehouse in his autobiographical fragment, unlike his failed romance with Maria.

Nicola Bradbury is likewise interested in the blacking factory experience, but she denotes something different as the most important aspect of the autobiographical fragment: “It is the betrayal of the mother, seduced by worldly considerations, that underpins the pain of the autobiographical fragment” (“Fragment” 21). While I

agree that this pain is certainly formative for Dickens, he was still able to commit it to paper as part of his

autobiographical attempt. It was not his mother’s betrayal nor the trauma at Warren’s Blacking that drove Dickens to burn his life history as his courage slipped away; rather, it was his memory of Maria Beadnell’s

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Forster and to others seeking the author in David Copperfield’s trials (457-458).15_{Lest we}

discount how deeply this episode wounded Dickens, we should recall that “Charles Dickens had the sensitivity of an artist, and even calf love could remain a life-long painful memory for him” (Fido Dickens 23). Moreover, as Jon Mee points out, “scarcely anything could be less Dickensian than the sense of the past as something that can be safely put away” (“Seeing” 185). As I detail in Chapter 4, the pain of Maria’s abandonment never left him; Dickens was not one to compartmentalise and “safely put away” past suffering. Dickens confided to Maria that she was the “one creature who represented the whole world to me” (Letters 286), and Lucinda Dickens Hawksley likewise contends that her great great great grandfather

“remained emotionally scarred by his unhappy love affair” (16). Biographer Edgar Johnson observes how the misery Dickens felt over Maria’s treatment of him cemented the prior trauma of the blacking factory and his father’s imprisonment since “It revived and re-emphasized those shapes of suffering that he remembered so well: the suffering of helplessness and of undeserved humiliation” (81). Clearly, Dickens’s perception of his interactions with Maria assigned far more significance to events than would ordinarily be imputed to lost love; these intricacies are discussed further in Chapters 3 and 4. For the moment, I suggest that, although he never again attempted an autobiography as-such, Dickens repeatedly returns to the life-writing genre in his fiction, in part to reclaim his “lost courage.” Nonetheless, this courage, once lost, continued to evade him, and his life—like many of his novels—exhibits a tension between heroism and anxiety, between revealing and concealing, between being known and self-preservation.

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

15_{Carr also ascribes Dickens’s repression—which he links to Maria’s ill treatment of him and claims adversely}

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most of his diaries, and much of his correspondence (received) comprised the (in)famous Gad’s Hill bonfire of 1860, in which thousands of letters served as kindling. Dickens was “a great destroyer of letters” (Hartley viii) who eradicated the bulk of his incoming

correspondence due to “the misuse of the private letters of public men” (Pilgrim 10: 465).16

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

Dickens’s relationship with the American press was already strained prior to this unfortunate publication. Four months after returning from his 1842 American voyage, he bemoaned “the aspersions being greedily believed which make me out a lying adventurer” (Letters 110). Fifteen months later, Dickens was still railing against his presentation by the American press, writing to close friend William Macready that “the whole country is led and driven by a herd of rascals” (Letters 129). Upon completing his rant, Dickens closes the letter by admonishing Macready to “Burn this letter, lest it should be abstracted from your

desk…and published in a newspaper” (Letters 129). The irony of this command now appearing in an edited collection of Dickens’s letters notwithstanding, his missive to Macready is merely one example of Dickens’s proclivity for editing identity by requesting that his correspondence be burned. Fortunately for us, most recipients of Dickens’s letters were not similarly inclined to obliterate by fire.

16_{A bit later in this letter, which was written on 20}th_{December 1864 to Reverend S. R. Hole, Dickens confessed} that “I destroyed a very large and very rare mass of correspondence. It was not done without pain, you may

believe, but, the first reluctance conquered, I have steadily abided by my determination to keep no letters by

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

remembered—since they form the foundation of the “published works” referenced immediately below.

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

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the remembrance of my country on my published works…” (827). Foucault reminds us of “the kinship between writing and death” (1623) wherein Greek heroes achieved immortality through narrative. Dickens’s will reflects a similar concern: the connection between his legacy, his name, and his publishing history is evinced in the legal proceedings between Dickens and his former publishers, Bradbury and Evans. A legal brief from the case—which concerned the dissolution of the journal Household Words—demonstrates Dickens’s staunch protection of his name:

But it concerns not only my pecuniary interests but my honor and reputation that my name should not be erroneously associated with any publication which I have ceased to conduct, and that the Public should know (as they have a right to know) that if any periodical is published subsequently to May 1859 under the name of Household

Words, it is not the same publication which has hitherto borne that name. (10) 18

Honour, reputation—and legacy—are forever bound up in Dickens’s publishing record, and Dickens demonstrates his acute awareness of his readers (the “Public”) whom he deems deserving of accurate information. Or, at least, what he deems accurate information.

Dickens’s desire for complete narrative control is exemplified in the “Personal Statement” incident of the late 1850s—an incident which also wounded his pride and (arguably) further discouraged any overt attempts at writing his own life. Prior to the break with Bradbury and Evans, Dickens used the journal Household Words as a vehicle to restore his readers’ good faith in him. Robert Sawyer relates Dickens’s attempt to “redeem his reputation” after separating from his wife amid rumours of multiple affairs: “Thinking that the public deserved to be told, Dickens published a ‘personal’ page-long statement in his magazine, Household Words, trying to defend his actions” (60). Unfortunately, the public was not as accepting of his statement as Dickens had hoped, and Sawyer speculates that “what offended people was not so much his actions, but the sense that he had transformed his

18_{“Charles Dickens’s Legal Papers.”}_{1837-1897. Western Manuscripts. Add MS 88903. The Britsh Library,}

London. The covering page clarifies that the documents pertain to the case of Bradbury v. Dickens heard 28th

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domestic tragedy into a public drama” (60). Although Dickens had commenced burning his life-writing prior to this debacle, such a poor reception by his beloved readers would certainly not have encouraged future full disclosure. Between the courage lost to Maria Beadnell and the public humiliation suffered after revealing himself in Household Words, an outright Dickensian autobiography drifted further outside the realm of possibility. Instead, Dickens continued to embalm himself through his fiction, where public adoration was expected. However, as we shall see, heroism in his life-writing novels is anything but straightforward.

Further complicating matters is the presence of guilt in these life-writing novels. In his criticism of David Copperfield, a novel widely acknowledged as Dickens’s fictional autobiography, J. Hillis Miller suggests that Dickens experienced guilt in association with self-reliance, and pinpoints “the guilt which always hovers, for Dickens, over the man who takes matters into his own hands” (159). This stance is in opposition to other critics, such as Jerome Meckier, who lobby for the triumph of self-reliance in David Copperfield. My analysis of the novel positions David as a protagonist who cannot ultimately claim heroic ownership of his own history. Despite his promise at the start of his autobiography that “these pages” will reveal whether or not he is the hero (1), David declines to explicitly state his verdict at the end of his narrative. I submit that the reason for this reticence is that David cannot bring himself to outright identify Agnes as the hero/ine of his life, although he signposts this truth throughout the text. Therefore, in my reading, the guilt in David

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

(Clarendon Dickens 752).

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

Likewise, in Little Dorrit, Elaine Showalter pinpoints the narrator’s “guilt about an omniscient invasion” (31) wherein Dickens’s narratorial “secret self” (21) shadows Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam, accessing (and revealing) secrets previously unknown. In Chapter 4 of this thesis, I assess the precedent for Dickens—as self-professed biographer of Amy Dorrit—to claim equal importance with the biography’s subject. According to Juliette Atkinson, the biographer of a marginalised subject is often just as significant as the subject herself, since selecting “an ‘obscure’ subject inflated the importance of the biographer” by serving “as an act of patronage” even as it pinpointed the author’s ability to bring a nobody into the public eye (13). In Chapter 4, I complicate Showalter’s identification of narrative guilt by extending it to include Dickens’s selection of an insignificant character as

biographical subject. Paradoxically, however, Dickens’s decision to honour a “hidden life” in turn illuminates Dickens’s own life-writing anxieties, via a vanishing heroine who disappears from her own life history even as Dickens once burned his. Little Dorrit thus joins the other fractured hero/ine-protagonists of Dickens’s life-writing novels.

Showalter’s pinpointed guilt about the narrator’s access to private information also applies to the biographer’s choices about who—and what—to include in Little Dorrit’s history. Rosemarie Bodenheimer concludes that Dickens felt guilty for “lying” via carefully editing his life history in (rare) responses to reporters clamouring for biographical

information (“Writing” 50-51). Guilt is not the focus of this thesis, but it does form a

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

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

Dickens’s David Copperfield, for instance), and the story of the Victorian self-made man (Charles Dickens himself)” (16). Here, Harley embraces the typical laudatory conflation of Dickens and the Victorian masculine ideal. However, on the other hand, the editors of the

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

Victorians shared a sense of satisfaction in the industrial and political pre-eminence of England during the period, they also suffered from an anxious sense of something lost, a sense too of being displaced persons in a world made alien by technological changes that had been exploited too quickly for the adaptive powers of the human psyche” (980; emphasis mine). Similarly, Dickens, despite his overwhelming professional success, was plagued by restlessness and a similar “anxious sense of something lost,” which in his case can be

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as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?” (Pilgrim 7: 523). Courage was apparently not all Dickens feared he was missing.

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

Dickens—and his characters—are very much alive in the United Kingdom. They haunt alleyways, shop fronts, and even my coffee—at least when I visited the Charles Dickens Coffee House on Wellington, near Drury Lane. Dickens once lived above this shopfront, which formerly housed his journal All the Year Round. Along the Kentish road from London to Higham (the town where Gad’s Hill is located) lies a tiny village called Cooling. This village boasts St. James’ church, the location which arguably inspired the opening chapter of Great Expectations, where protagonist Pip meets convict Magwitch in the shadowy churchyard on Christmas Eve. The church proudly promotes its link (albeit

unproven) to Great Expectations. On a kitschier note, the Dickens World theme park formed part of a strip mall near the Chatham Dockyards where Dickens’s father formerly worked. Here one can channel Nicholas Nickleby by undertaking a lesson in humiliation at Dotheboys Hall, wander past Peggotty’s boathouse, and tour a Victorian Village.

In Dickens’s birthplace of Portsmouth, tributes to the city’s most famous son abound. A glimpse out my lodging’s window grants a view of “Estella” street, and Dickens’s

birthplace-turned-museum is only a five-minute wander away. Portsmouth’s chapter of the Dickens Fellowship organises occasional Sunday afternoon readings in the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum. Inside the Museum, the couch where Dickens died sits mere steps away from the room where he was born, an incongruity reminiscent of the paradox Dickens was himself. Interestingly, Portsmouth boasts the only full-sized statue of Dickens in Great Britain; this statue is one of only three such statues worldwide. Such a surprising dearth (for

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

surrounding areas which were being cleaned; yellow tape denoting “do not enter” was draped through the statue’s arm.20

Dickens’s legacy—much like the man himself—is ever in motion. He has evolved over time, burgeoning into both jolly Father Christmas and grizzled Victorian veteran.21 University students now associate Dickens with the version of A Christmas Carol related by the Muppets. Is this type of remembrance honouring or horrifying to a man so fixated on controlling his legacy? Quite possibly a bit of both, since, like most things Dickensian,

contradictions are expected. As Holly Furneaux pointed out during a roundtable session at the 2016 British Association for Victorian Studies conference, Dickens was a consumer of the Dickensian even during his own lifetime, and the overlap between original Dickens versus

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

21_{As referenced in the Preface, Katey Dickens was famously dismayed over the jolly Father Christmas aspect of} her father’s persona, complaining to George Bernard Shaw that “If you could make the public understand that

my father was not a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of

punch, you would greatly oblige me.”This quote appears repeatedly, most notably in Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman (245), Charles Dickens: A Life (414; also by Tomalin), and Michael Slater’s Dickens and Women

page (201).

In the Introduction to Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, editors John Bowen and Robert L. Patten

comment that “‘Dickens’ is often today taken as a code for Victorian (and therefore atmospheric and

old-fashioned) literature, or a particular brand of characterization or sentimentality, or everything not modern”

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Dickens repurposed was already blurred.22_{Therefore, while part of Dickens would be}

delighted that his characters live on today, he would—as evinced by the anxiety over his public image and staunch protection of his reputation—probably also take issue with their afterlives existing outside his control. As I detail in Chapter 5, the same applies to Dickens’s own afterlife, as evinced through his recent resurrections in neo-Victorian biofictional novels. Indeed, Charles Dickens’s life and legacy, or his “personal iconicity” (1) as Charlotte Boyce and Elodie Rousselot term it, have attracted additional interest in the past decade, due largely to the celebration of his bicentenary in 2012. Cora Kaplan points out how, “At the very least it has intensified the ways in which Dickens’s celebrity status as the great Victorian writer has skewed the critical treatment of his work and his life, and the relentless imbrication of the two” (“Coda” 198; emphasis original). Perfectly timed birthday gifts in the form of Dickensian biographies by revered critic Michael Slater and esteemed biographer Claire Tomalin arrived in 2009 and 2011, respectively. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s biography

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

Dickens’s life with a fictional format also abounded around the bicentenary: Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008), Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress (2008), Matthew Pearl’s

The Last Dickens (2009), and Dan Simmons’s Drood (2009) are key examples. Dickens’s

characters have also experienced modern makeovers in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006), and Ronald Frame’s Havisham (2012), to name a few.

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

22_{Jay Clayton summarises that}_{“In his own lifetime, Dickens saw the Little Nell Cigar, Pickwick Snuff, Gamp} Umbrellas, and a host of other products bearing his characters’ names…there was no provision for licensing

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been greatly exaggerated, or, conversely, that the threat has breathed new life into the idea of the author” (70-71). Kaplan references Victorian authors—Dickens and Henry James in particular—who return as characters in neo-Victorian biofictional novels and literary biographies. Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens is a chief example. Likewise, in “Disparate Images” (2014), Julia Novak and Sandra Mayer argue that “The frequently proclaimed ‘rebirth of the author’ has given rise to fictional re-writings of authors’ lives in the past thirty years, which testify to an on-going fascination with authorship” (25). Victorian afterlives in general—and Dickens’s in particular—are enjoying renewed scholarly as well as popular interest. Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux’s edited collection Charles Dickens in Context (2011) situates “Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it” (Note on the Text, np) as a vital force in shaping the world around him. Ranging from class issues to the rise of celebrity culture, the book’s chapters flesh out Dickens in the context of the nineteenth-century and chart his ongoing impact. There is even a chapter on Dickens’s influence over Christmas. However, Dickens’s current renderings are not all flattering, and Thomas Carlyle’s vision of “The Hero as a Man of Letters” is severely

compromised, at least where Dickens is concerned. Gone is Carlyle’s conception of an author as a deific sage, as Dickens suffers writer’s block (Girl in a Blue Dress) and is

unceremoniously murdered in a Wilkie Collins dream sequence (Drood). Dickens’s popularity may be enduring, but his individual laudability is now repeatedly questioned.

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characteristic Dickensian tension between heroism and anxiety. Namely, that the professed protagonist—the ostensible hero of the life-writing novel—is often undermined, sometimes even by the author himself. This pattern in turn precipitates the characteristic Dickensian hero-protagonist split. Dickens uses these life-writing novels as sites to rehearse life-writing narratives, thereby engaging in “biographilia” through writing biofiction before it was a genre as-such. Second, I situate Dickens’s fixation on controlling his image in conversation with the ongoing neo-Victorian fascination with legacy, reading Dickens as a site for this

fascination. Examining the continuum of Dickensian biofiction allows me to interrogate how other authors and biographers have taken up the project Dickens commenced. Ultimately, despite his best efforts, he lost control of his narrative legacy, which has been repeatedly reimagined in the decades since his death.

Dickens’s “Life-Writing Novels”

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

Strangely, Dickens’s depictions of the protagonists in these life-writing novels call into question what it means to be the hero of the story, and a pattern emerges whereby the professed protagonist is often deposed by another, supposedly lesser, character. David Copperfield declares he would be “nothing” without Agnes, Little Dorrit’s biography often veers away from its biographical subject, and “that great man” Mr. Pickwick must be

repeatedly rescued by his servant. These struggles are productive sites to chart Dickens’s own anxieties, ranging from early concerns over his authorial identity to his later failure to reclaim the autobiographical courage once lost to Maria Beadnell. The legacies of Dickens and his characters are forever fused. As biographer Peter Ackroyd points out, over twenty-five famous Dickensian creations were also “born on this February day…but not dying with him, living on for ever” (1-2). Author and character are forever entangled. Dickens’s characters imbued him with vitality even as he wrote them into existence, and Dickens’s image—not Nicholas’s—appears on the cover of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Nicholas

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

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

23_{“Historiographic metafiction refutes the natural or common}_{-sense methods of distinguishing between}

historical fact and fiction. It refuses the view that only history has a truth claim, both by questioning the ground of that claim in historiography and by asserting that both history and fiction are discourses, human

constructs, signifying systems, and both derive their major claim to truth from that identity” (Hutcheon Poetics of Postmodernism 93).

We can attribute this “constructedness” to the fallible humanity of being an author: “fiction and

biography/historiography have affinities which are based upon the narrative nature of both genres” (Middeke

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More recently, critics like Cora Kaplan have wedded historiography and metafiction with studies of neo-Victorian biofiction.24 Kaplan argues that “So much has [life-writing] encroached on fiction that it has become a commonplace to say that biography has become the new novel” (Victoriana 37). Repurposing this concept for my thesis means that new insight can be gleaned from conflating Dickensian life-writing and Dickensian novels. Charles Dickens identified with his characters to the extent they actually lived for him; thus, it is accepted that reality and fiction overlapped for the author. Malcolm Andrews argues that Dickens’s characters were “more than fictional constructs. They had been partly infused with his own being: he had personally animated them, tried them for sound, rehearsed their

gestures, become them at one point or another…” (87; emphasis original). Andrews’s focus is on Dickens’s reading tours, but the argument holds true for the reality of Dickens’s characters on the page as well. Indeed, this overlap is especially evident in Dickens’s life-writing

novels, which provide miniature worlds for his characters. Here he crafts Little Dorrit’s biography, serves as editor for Mr. Pickwick and Oliver Twist, and installs David Copperfield as his deputy auto/biographer. According to Robert Sawyer, “Dickens firmly believed it was the duty of the artist to illuminate inherent truths of life which were invisible to the common man, so that the lines between reality and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity, are not only blurred, but almost inverted…” (50). Dickens, then, is ideally suited to the biofictional genre. His entire world exists on a sliding scale of reality so acute it imbues Dickens with

24_{Similarly, Kaplan later explains that}_{“Whatever one’s ethical view of ‘authenticity’ as a gold standard for life}

writing, it is now an almost clichéd assumption that autobiography and memoir inevitably construct and invent their authors as quasi-fictional characters. Biography, although it may seek to modify and correct

self-representation, takes the same liberties. The novelisation of biography represents only the next logical stage

of that process” (Victoriana 65).

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premonitions of postmodernity—premonitions including the biographilia which would reinvigorate his legacy (if not necessarily his reputation) two hundred years after his birth. His Victorian readership would have similarly elided boundaries governing fact and fiction: “If narratives seemed ‘real’ to Victorian artists and readers, it was partly because the gap between text and life hardly existed…novels were news and news might be fiction” (Patten Boz 217). Terminology such as Dickens’s “life-writing novels” would not have seemed incompatible to them. Furthermore, as Kate Flint observes in an article for the British Library, one of the nineteenth-century debates surrounded “whether or not readers could distinguish between the escapism afforded by fiction, and the realities of their own lives” (np).25 This concern further accentuates the Victorian conflation of reality and fiction—which Dickens invoked to the fullest.

In the Introduction to the definitive Clarendon edition of David Copperfield, editor Nina Burgis writes that “The fictional framework of the Micawber household strengthened and transformed the telling of the ‘truth’ about [Dickens’s] own childish days; David’s feckless ‘family’ could be laughed at and enjoyed because they were not in fact his family or responsible for his plight” (xxxiv). By tweaking “truth” (in quotation marks) fiction affords some distance, beckoning Dickens to divulge events which might otherwise remain hidden. In my reading, fiction allows Dickens to defer the anxiety about being the hero of his own life onto his life-writing novels, thus transforming them into spaces where he can experiment with what it means to write a successful life story. What emerges, however, is an oft-evinced reticence wherein the professed hero-protagonists of Dickens’s life-writing novels are split rather than fused as is typically expected. The protagonist is not always the hero/ine—and the hero/ine is not always the protagonist.

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Roland Barthes provocatively suggests that “Then perhaps the subject returns, not as illusion, but as fiction. A certain pleasure is derived from a way of imagining oneself as individual, of inventing a final, rarest fiction: the fictive identity” (The Pleasure of the Text, 62; emphasis original). Dickens lives vicariously through his characters; he forges this “fictive identity” for himself by deploying the tenets of life-writing in his fiction. Dickens advocates for the merits of the misunderstood in Little Dorrit, simultaneously edits Mr. Pickwick’s memoirs and steals the show from him, and flirts with the ramifications of David Copperfield not being deemed the hero of his own history. These novels do contain elements from Dickens’s own life, but the author is protected through it all by the veneer of fiction. Yes, fiction was very real for him, but a “fictive identity” still afforded some separation. Cora Kaplan surmises that perhaps Barthes’s insistent separation of author and text has produced the opposite effect: the author’s “death” initiates an even more frantic search for him, which can, paradoxically, result in conflating author and character (Victoriana 70-71). The author, once buried, may insistently return in unexpected ways.

To be clear, I am not focusing on the similarities shared by Dickens and his

characters; rather, I am interested in the ways in which Dickens’s own anxieties about legacy play out in his characters’ life histories. This anxiety is most evident in David Copperfield’s autobiography, which opens with the famous pledge to judge his heroism according to the pages of his life history (1). As many other critics have shown,26 there are remarkable

26_{As early as several years after Dickens’s death, his biographer John Forster—}_{whose biography of Dickens} revealed the famous author’s autobiographical fragment to the world—cautioned against overly conflating

Dickens and David Copperfield: “But, many as are the resemblances in Copperfield’s adventures to portions of

those of Dickens, and often as reflections occur to David which no one intimate with Dickens could fail to recognize as but the reproduction of his, it would be the greatest mistake to imagine anything like a complete

identity of the fictitious novelist with the real one…” (525).

Rosemarie Bodenheimer observes that “At worst, biographical criticism makes assured links between fictional characters and their real-life ‘models’ or interprets hidden parts of a writer’s life by assigning literal

biographical value to certain passages, images, or characters in the novels. Dickens has perhaps received more