Abstract
Critics have often remarked on Dickens’s particular knack for assuming the child’s perspective in his novels. Robert Higbie, for instance, points out that Dickens ‘is able to see the world as a child, full of desires and fears’, while Holly Furneaux discusses in more guarded tones Dickens’s ‘particular valuation, and determined identification with, what had become accepted as childlike characteristics’.1 Novels such as David Copperfield (1849–50) and Great Expectations (1860–1) are famous for their vivid evocation of the child’s quirky imagination and sensual immersion in the world. However, accounts of Dickens’s ‘childlike’ imagination sometimes underplay the extent to which Dickens himself complicates the process of recovering the child’s point of view in his writings, his careful teasing apart of what it means for the adult to feel like a child or to have feelings about childhood. In this chapter, I read a cross-section of Dickens’s works from the 1850s and early 1860s, including David Copperfield, A Child’s History of England (1851–3), Christmas stories written for Household Words and the first two series of the ‘Uncommercial Traveller’ essays (1860, 1863), in the context of emerging medical and psychological debates about the emotional life of the child. I argue that Dickens explored — in more complex detail than his medical contemporaries and friends — how some childhood feelings are easier for the adult to recover and sympathize with than others, and how identification with some of the (remembered) feelings of childhood draws the biographical child closer to the consciousness of the adult, while other feelings set it further apart.
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Notes
Robert Higbie, Dickens and Imagination (Gainesville: University of Horida Press, 1998), p. 58
Holly Furneaux, ‘Childhood’, Dickens in Context, ed. John Bowen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 186–93
Charles West, ‘On the Mental Peculiarities and Mental Disorders of Childhood’, Medical Times and Gazette, 1 (1860), 133–7
See Charles West, Lectures on the Diseases of Infancy and Childhood, 3rd edn (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1854), pp. 185–206.
John Conolly, ‘Recollections of the Varieties of Insanity: Part II [Cases and Consultations]’, Medical Times and Gazette, 1 (1862), 130.
See John Bowen, Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 16–22
Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Harriet Martineau, Household Education (London: Edward Moxon, 1849), p. 203.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Jeremy Tambling, rev. edn (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 274.
Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting and British Fiction, 1810–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 128.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury, rev. edn (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 36.
See Malcolm Andrews, Dickens and the Grown-Up Child (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 60–70.
Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Knowing Dickens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 80.
Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans. Haniet Martineau, 2 vols (London: Chapman, 1853), I, 3.
For a recent assessment see John Gardiner, ‘Dickens and the Uses of History’, A Companion to Dickens, ed. David Paroissien (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 240–54
For a detailed discussion of Dickens’s sources see Philip Collins, Dickens and Education (London: Macmillan, 1863), pp. 60–9.
See Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 68–9.
Charles Dickens, A Child’s History of England, 3 vols (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1852–4), I, 36.
Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783–1867, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 2000), p. 355.
Robert J. C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 177–95.
Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 49.
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, 2nd edn, 2 vols (New York: Appleton, 1873), II, 631.
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© 2013 Katharina Boehm
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Boehm, K. (2013). The Feelings of Childhood: Dickens and the Study of the Child’s Mind. In: Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362506_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362506_5
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