Afterword: Having It Both Ways

Abstract

Michael Slater has remarked Dickens’s way of “telling and not telling the readers about his past,”¹ of sharing “his most intimate secrets … but in some coded fashion.”² A number of the novels featured so much detail about life in real prisons, the Marshalsea in particular, that some readers must have wondered where the author got all that information.³ He put David Copperfield in a close facsimile of the blacking warehouse and scattered blacking references through the rest of his writings. While carrying on with an attractive young woman named Ellen (of all things) Lawless Ternan, he introduced into his last novel an attractive young woman named Helena Landless. Paying the rent for Miss Ternan’s hideaway, he sometimes used his first name “Charles,” sometimes went by the last name “Turnan.”⁴