Dickens and Autobiography response

Michael Englefield, 'A response to Ferguson-Carr's 'A Wild Beast and its Keeper'

Jean Ferguson-Carr has a very revealing insight into Dickens’s use of autobiography in his work. She writes of an author so seemingly reserved, one who “fear[ed]… releasing too much of himself” yet who “had a pressing autobiographical urge”. Her argument seems to tread the fine line between these two perspectives on Dickens’s life, personality and work; for Ferguson-Carr on the one hand he seems an incredibly private character due to a fear of “losing control of his ‘life’, both the written and lived versions” and yet on the other hand she accuses him of having a “powerful ego” who felt that he was a “public institution”. These two opinions surely need to be reconciled in some way through his works, particular David Copperfield and the posthumously published autobiographical fragment, yet the accounts of Dickens’s early years spent in the blacking factory and the accounts of the eventually-orphaned David Copperfield can be strikingly similar as well as strikingly different.

Perhaps the key aspect of the argument is the fact that David Copperfield was actually finished and published while Dickens was still alive, and yet the autobiographical fragment had to be published by someone else after his death. Though this may have been Dickens’s express wish, perhaps feeling that the mortification of having what he himself describes as a humiliating period of his life made so public given that he was, as Ferguson-Carr rightly asserts, a public institution and known to all, one cannot help but wonder why he was so able to complete David Copperfield, which was based on the intimate details of his early life, and not his own autobiography. Dickens himself admitted, according to Ferguson-Carr, that there was a “connection between David’s life and his own”, yet there was apparently not enough of a connection to treat his own life story the way he treated not only David’s but also the stories of countless other characters in his fiction.

In John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens (the handout) the accounts that Forster claims as Dickens’s own are littered with real-life people that he has consumed into his fiction: a boy at the blacking factory accidentally christened ‘Poll’ made his way into Martin Chuzzlewit; Dombey and Son’s Mrs Pipchin arose from an amalgamation of two elderly women that had been his landladies; an orphan girl in the debtors’ prison became the Marchioness from The Old Curiosity Shop and he borrowed the name of another blacking factory co-worker and gave it to Oliver Twist’s Fagin. The fact that he was so willing to borrow from real life experiences, not just for the names of his characters but also, in the case of David Copperfield, for large parts of the plot shows his willingness to share, albeit covertly, aspects of his life with the general public through his fiction. Despite this appropriation of his life experiences into his fiction, however, Dickens appears to blench at actually composing the real thing; Ferguson-Carr speaks of his fear of “dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world” which, unlike the mere hints and suggestions at his own life in his fiction, would perhaps be too much for Dickens to bear. This ‘shadowy world’ of his writing seems to be composed of “floating ideas” according to an account Ferguson cites in her article; perhaps his own real life experiences were just too tangible, too real, to be committed to paper in the way the experiences of his other characters are.

Ferguson-Carr closes are article with the assertion that the biography of Dickens “both revealed [him] and suggested the ominous nature of what still lay concealed”. This seems an appropriate way to conclude. Dickens interwove his work with real-life experiences, and even wrote part of an autobiography on his early life, yet there is always the sense that Dickens seems to be holding back some part of himself from being published, some part to keep personal to himself, his intimate friends and family. The “shadowy world” of the written word could be seen as Dickens’s obsession, given the sheer volume of work that he published in his lifetime yet also, especially when we learn that he burned an account of an adolescent love-interest of his, it could be seen as his greatest fear. To lose himself in the world belonging to his characters was something Dickens seemed desperate to save himself from, though he flirts closely with that danger in the real-life details of David Copperfield, the shadowy world of the written word was something Dickens never let his entire self fall into.