Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley Page B

and it appeared that those hopes were to be utterly given up. His sister Fanny was not, by contrast, required to leave her studies. Ackroyd suggests that the humiliation of doing his work in the window of the blacking factory and being observed by passing strangers was especially galling to a child of Dickens’s sensitivity—the nightmare counterpart to performing songs and speeches, which he always enjoyed. He had a horror of the factory and the district, and portrayed them later on as representations of evil and corruption. He was ejected from his family—while they lived rather comfortablytogether in the debtors’ prison, he was required to make his way through the streets alone, purchasing his own provisions and running the gauntlet of all the street people and eccentrics who might notice him. He was small and unprotected and suddenly required to grow up without sympathetic companionship. And yet, of course, as he well knew then and later pointed out to his readers over and over, there were thousands of children in London suffering under far greater danger and hardship. His servitude lasted five months, after which his father’s debts were relieved by a providential act of Parliament. His mother (no doubt attracted by the idea of a little extra money and one less mouth to feed) was reluctant to end his employment—something that Dickens never forgot or forgave; but he did go back to school for a few more years, before leaving finally at fifteen and embarking on his working life.
    Dickens had other memories of childhood, some of them cherished. It was not only the unpleasant ones that compelled him as he began to address his early life in his work. In her last weeks, his sister Fanny had recounted to him an odd experience, which he related to Forster: “In the night, the smell of the fallen leaves in the woods where we had habitually walked as very young children had come upon her with such strength of reality that she had moved her head to look for strewn leaves on the floor at her bedside.” Dickens’s characteristic hypersensitivity to everything, but especially to sensory experiences, surely was a permanent feature of his makeup, and, of course, he had an extraordinary and well-developed memory. The impressions left by his childhood were a treasure; in order to revisit them, he had to rob the darker ones of theirpower, which he began to do through the autobiographical fragment. The fragment portrays the young Charles as the hapless victim of those around him, which Dickens the experienced author certainly sensed was not quite right, rhetorically, for a work that was to see publication. Confession and self-regard are the trickiest forms of rhetoric, the most likely to arouse ridicule or antagonism in the reader. Dickens the editor could distinguish between a document that had value for the author in organizing memories of experience and a document that had value for the reader in telling an entertaining or enlightening story. The autobiographical fragment didn’t succeed, and Dickens subsequently sent it to Forster, who waited until after Dickens’s death to publish it.
    In the autumn, Dickens wrote his last Christmas book, The Haunted Man . The haunted man in question, a chemist named Redlaw, is an isolated scholar beset by memories of the death of his sister and of his betrayal by a trusted friend, who many years before had seduced away Redlaw’s beloved. Like Scrooge, he is visited by a ghost, who offers to remove his faculty of memory and to give him the power to do likewise for everyone he meets. A kind and benevolent man, Redlaw suffers so much with his memories that he accepts this gift. In The Haunted Man, Dickens makes his most explicit argument for the primacy of mental attitude over external circumstances in the achievement of peace, happiness, and even prosperity. Redlaw’s associates and acquaintances live in more problematic circumstances than he