‘Where We Stopped Growing’

Abstract

Towards the end of his 1853 essay for Household Words, ‘Where We Stopped Growing’, Dickens paid one of his many tributes to the birthplace of his fancy: ‘We received our earliest and most enduring impressions among barracks and soldiers, and ships and sailors’. He insisted he had outgrown none of these impressions and that they were as fresh to him in 1853 as they had been over thirty years earlier. In many ways this essay runs against the grain of ‘Dullborough’: it has little of that essay’s ambivalent remorsefulness at the way the experiences of the present relentlessly undermine the structures of the childish imagination. Instead, here, he celebrates the adult’s ability obstinately to retain certain childlike faculties, almost as a mode of arrested development: ‘right thankful we are to have stopped in our growth at so many points’.