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Dickens and the Psychology of Dreams

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Warrington Winters
Warrington Winters*
Affiliation:
Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn
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Extract

The long and curious letter to a certain Dr. Stone, in which Dickens discusses his theories of dream psychology, was not published until 1938. Containing approximately seventeen hundred words, it provides us with an ample platform from which to observe the novelist's fictional use of dreams. Oddly enough, the letter, like the whole subject of Dickens' dream fiction, has not yet attracted students of Victorian fiction.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , September 1948 , pp. 984 - 1006
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1948

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References

1 'Nonesuch Dickens (London, 1938), xi, 267–270. (The letters are collected in volumes x-xii. These volumes are also numbered 1–3.) The letter was in the library of the Count de Suzannet.

2 Charles Dickens (New York, 1898), p. 140.

3 Dr. Stone (whom I have not been able to identify) had previously collaborated with W. H. Wills, Dickens' assistant-editor, on an article entitled “Household Emergencies”, which appeared in Household Words for Oct. S, 1850. Dickens mentions the article in a letter to Wills, Sept. 17,1850. See R. C. Lehmann, Charles Dickens, Editor (New York, 1912), p. 41. The only critical reference which I have seen, either to Dickens' 1851 letter or to “Dreams”, is Walter Dexter's footnote in the Nonesuch Dickens: “Dr. Stone's article, entitled Dreams, appeared in Household Words on 8th March. It embodies many of Dickens' ideas and suggestions.” Dr. Stone's name does not appear, either at the beginning or at the end of the essay. It may have been printed on the cover of the magazine.

4 His reading on the subject was probably sparse. See note 13.

5 Even if we should grant that persons known in “the scientific or literary world” do not deceive themselves, the point is invalidated by the fact that the authorities whom Stone cites frequently quote other dreams than their own.

6 Twenty-seven years earlier, the Dickens family had moved to the Marshalsea prison and Charles was placed in a house in Little College Street, Camden Town. Soon he was employed at Warren's Blacking. “I often forget in my dreams”, he said later, “that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.” See John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (London, 1928), p. 26. Perhaps the best record of Dickens' own dreams is in his fiction. Certainly he has left us relatively few non-fictional dream records. And yet the letter to Dr. Stone makes it abundantly clear that he had a rich dream-life and that he had observed it carefully. His theory concerning recent events seems to be illustrated by his lifelong dream recollections of the Marshalsea period and also by his dreams in connection with “The Battle of Life” (see below). But the odd dream prophecy regarding a Miss Napier (Forster, p. 841) refers to the future and not to the past. As for the recurring dream of Mary Hogarth, which Forster speaks of as having been “with him all his days”, Dickens seldom describes this dream in detail. When he does (as in the Genoese version—ibid., pp. 348–350), the formality and sentimentality render the dream almost as absurd as C. E. B. Robert's “psychoanalytical” explanation of it at the conclusion of This Side Idolatry (London, 1938). Dickens' Yorkshire dream of Mary, and his method of exorcising it by telling it to others, is recorded for the first time, I believe, in the letter to Dr. Stone (see note 15).

7 Since dreams, according to Dickens, do not ordinarily directly represent recent problems, they could not help to solve such problems. Therefore, he seems to say, such apparent assistance must actually have some other source: “The assistance supposed to be furnished in sleep, towards the solution of problems, or invention of things that had baffled the waking mind, I take to be the result of a sudden vigorous effect of the repressed intellect in waking.”

8 Forster, p. 432.

9 The chaotic nature of dreams is elsewhere described as follows: “Are not the sane and insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming.… Do we not nightly jumble events and personages and times and places, as these do daily?” (“Night Walks”, All The Year Around, July 21, 1860; reprinted in The Uncommercial Traveler). A similar point of view, though expressed in a more literary style, may be seen in “The Chimes”: “Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead. Monsters uncouth and wild, arise in premature, imperfect resurrection; the several parts and shapes of different things are joined and mixed by chance; and when, and how, and by what wonderful degrees, each separates from each, and every sense and object of the mind resumes its usual form and lives again, no man—though every man is every day the casket of this type of the Great Mystery—can tell.”

10 Almost all of Dickens' ideas on this subject were incorporated into the article in Household Words. Compare our quotations from Dickens' letter to the following passage from “Dreams”: “There can be no doubt that the dreams of many persons are very greatly influenced by the reflection and emotion they have experienced the preceding day; but this is by no means invariably the case. We have known persons whose dreams refer habitually to events which occurred to them, perhaps, twenty years ago, and upon whom recent events seem to possess no such influence. We have often been told by ladies happily and affectionately married, that while they were engaged, although their thoughts were naturally much set on their engagement, they never dreamt of their lovers. So, also, the father of a family, habitually impressed with a sense of his responsibility and affection towards his offspring, will sometimes dream often enough of his neighbor's children, but seldom, or, perhaps, never, of his own. Try to dream on a given subject—resolve and fix the attention upon it—going to sleep, and no sooner are our eyelids closed, than fantastic fancy will conjure up the most opposite and incongruous imagery.”

11 This passage was incorporated as follows into “Dreams”: “Are dreams so much varied as is generally supposed? Or, taking into consideration our different mental and physical constitutions, is there not rather a remarkable sameness in them. It is certainly a very unusual circumstance to hear of any dream that does violence to the common experience of mankind.”

12 The dream of attempting to read illegible writing recalls Dickens' remark, elsewhere in this letter, that “language has a great part in dreams. I think, on waking, the head is usually full of words.” In connection with the part which words play in dreams, note his comments on the dreams of a deaf and dumb girl: “It is very remarkable that as we dream in words, and carry on imaginary conversations, in which we speak both for ourselves and for the shadows who appear to us in those visions of the night, so she, having no words, uses her finger alphabet in her sleep. And it has been ascertained that when her slumber is broken, and is much disturbed by dreams, she expresses her thoughts in an irregular and confused manner on her fingers: just as we should murmur and mutter them indistinctly, in the like circumstances” (American Notes, Ch. m).

13 “Lying Awake”, Household Words (Oct. 30, 1852). See also Reprinted Pieces. It will be remembered that Dickens had mentioned to Stone the possibility of himself writing an article on dreams. This may originally have been intended as such an article. It opens with a reference to the dream theories of Washington Irving and Benjamin Franklin.

14 Notice also a passage from “Night Walks”: “Are we not sometimes troubled by our own sleeping inconsistencies, and do we not vexedly try to account for them or try to excuse them.”

15 This narrative reappeared in “Dreams” as follows: “We ourselves, when in Italy, could on one occasion trace the origin of a very remarkable dream to our having heard, in an obscure and half-conscious manner, during sleep, the noise of people in the streets, on all Souls‘-night, invoking alms for the dead.” The following passage in the letter to Dr. Stone is also concerned with Dickens’ many dreams of Mary Hogarth: “Recurring dreams which come back almost as certain as the night—unhealthy and morbid species of these visions—should be particularly noticed. Secrecy on the part of the dreamer, as to these illusions, has a remarkable tendency to perpetuate them.” This concept seems to resemble certain modern psychotherapeutic theories.

16 Ch. ix.

17 Sketches By Boz.

18 Pickwick Papers, Ch. xxi.

19 We noticed above that Dickens dreamed all his life of the Warren's Blacking period, the Marshalsea period, the period in which he lodged for a while in Little College Street, Camden Town. It is significant, then, that Heyling's final revenge against the father-in-law who drove him to prison, is to force on the latter a lingering death in the same street of the same town. Moreover, young Paul Dombey's ogress guardian was modelled on the landlady of the same lodging (Forster, p. 27).

20 Bk. ii, Ch. xxii.

21 Barnaby Rudge, Ch. liv.

22 Ch. lxxxi.

23 David Copperfield, Ch. LV.

24 Hard Times, Ch. XIII.

25 Ibid.

26 The Old Curiosity Shop, Bk. ii, Ch. ix.

27 Bk. i, Ch. xxv.

28 Bleak House, Ch. xxxv.

29 Ch. LVII.

30 Nicholas Nickelby, Ch. LIV.

31 Barnaby Rudge, Ch. vi.

32 Bard Times, Ch. viii.

33 “Early Coaches”, Sketches by Boz.

34 Hard Times, Ch. xiii.

35 Charles Dickens (New York, 1917), p. 289. Dickens does have purely evil villains, such as Chesterton's favorite, Quilp (The Old Curiosity Shop), Blandois (Little Dorrit), Rider hood (Our Mutual Friend), and Jasper (The Mystery of Edwin Drood). In others, however, the qualms of conscience are described at great length. One has only to remember Fagin's last night, the flight of Bill Sikes, Ralph Nickleby's suicide, Carker's flight (Dombey And Son), and the remorse of Jonas Chuzzlewit.

36 E. E. Stoll recognizes these qualms of conscience, but maintains that the characters are not really sorry, that they have merely an “external conscience”, and that Dickens' power lies in his psychological inconsistency. See From Shakespeare to Joyce (New York, 1944), pp. 307–327. As a matter of fact, it may be questioned whether any fictional exploration of the “unconscious” is a proper method of developing character. Surely Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are not character studies. C. S. Lewis tells us that “to explore the inner world” has nothing to do with the depiction of character. “The gaze turned inward”, he says, “does not discover character. No man is a ‘character’ to himself .... Character is what he has to produce; within be finds only the raw material, the passions and emotions which contend for mastery.” See The Allegory Of Love (Oxford, 1936), p. 61.

37 Insofar as we may generalize on the basis of insufficient evidence (see footnote 6), it would seem that Dickens' own dreams, like those of his characters, were seldom happy or pleasant, that they almost always involved anxiety and frustration. Is there any psychological significance in this fact, if fact it be? It is not the business of this paper to psychoanalyze. Perhaps such dreams are quite “normal.” On the other hand, an unusual number of unhappy dreams would not be surprising in a man of Dickens' temperament. Consider the record which Forster has left—the painful memories of childhood, which, throughout his life, he desperately attempted to exorcise; the constant struggle with insomnia; the almost hysterical love which he felt for his young sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth (after her death, he actually made arrangements to steal her body from its grave); the life-long preoccupation with the psychology of murder; and, during the last years of his life, his almost insane determination, in opposition to the advice of his doctors, to continue those public readings of the murder scene in Oliver Twist. We have since discovered other evidence of the hectic character of the novelist's life—for example, his frequent hypnosis of an epileptic English lady {Nonesuch Dickens, xii, 752–753). The almost neurotic character of their relationship is evident in the reminiscences of Dickens' daughter, Kate (see Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter [London, 1939], pp. 65–71). There is also the theory that Dickens engaged in a love affair with a young actress, Ellen Ternan, for whom he abandoned his wife, by whom he had a son, and with whom he maintained a household for the last twelve years of his life. The evidence is summarized and rejected by Edward Wagehknecht in a book review in Modern Language Quarterly, m (1942), 161-166. All the details here mentioned, however, are apparently accepted by Una Pope-Hennessy, Charles Dickens (London, 1945), pp. 390–391.

38 Hard Times, Ch. xiii.

39 Ch. lxii.

40 The Old Curiosity Shop, Ch. xxxxix.

41 The Old Curiosity Shop, Bk. ii, Ch. xxv.

42 A Tale of Two Cities, Bk. i, Ch. iii. The psychological quality of these stage-coach passages is certainly based directly on Dickens' own experience. See the very similar depiction of mental experiences throughout one entire chapter of an autobiographical travelogue (“An Italian Dream”, Pictures From Italy).

43 Act iii.

44 Dickens' life-long dream memories of the Marshalsea, Little College Street, and Warren's Blacking are reflected here in the fact that the young Dickens' duty as an apprentice was to paste labels on blacking bottles.

45 Ch. XXXIV.

46 Bk. ii, Ch. xvii.

“ John Jasper's opium dreams differ radically in technique and style from all other Dickensian dreams. It may be that they reflect a new dream experience on the part of the writer. During his American tour as a reader Dickens writes from Portland (March 29, 1868) : ”Last night here, I took some laudanum; and it is the only thing that has done me good, though it made me sick this morning“ (Forster, pp. 792-793). And in a letter dated May 12, 1870: ”Last night I got a good night's rest under the influence of Laudanum, but it hangs about me very heavily today“ (Nonesuch Dickens, XII, 776). Somehow one thinks of Jasper, arising from the opium dream which opens Edwin Drood: ”Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together at length arises, supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around.“

But in addition to any personal experience which he may have had, Dickens had certainly also closely observed the process of opium smoking in others, as we see from this letter of May 5, 1870: “The opium smoking I have described, I saw (exactly as I have described it, penny ink bottle and all) down in Shadwell this last autumn” (Nonesuch Dickens, XII, 775). James T. Field left the following record of the visit: “In a miserable court at night … we found a haggard old woman blowing at a kind of pipe made of an old ink-bottle; and the words that Dickens puts into the mouth of this wretched creature in Edwin Drood, we heard her croon as we leaned over the tattered bed in which she was lying” (Forster, p. 844).

We do not know how Dickens felt, as he leaned over that bed, unless his feelings resembled those of Jasper as he “bends down his ear” to listen to the same muttering of the same woman in the same room. Jasper's feeling, as an experienced opium user, is to merge himself somehow with the woman's dreams: “He bends down his ear, to listen to her mutterings .... As he watches the spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of her face and limbs, like fitful lightnings out of a dark sky, some contagion in them seizes upon him, insomuch that he has to withdraw himself to a lean armchair by the hearth … and to sit in it, holding tight, until he has got the better of this unclean spirit of imitation” (Ch. i).

48 Ch. xxiii.

49 “Dickens in Relation to Criticism”, The Fortnightly Review (Feb., 1872), pp. 141–154.

50 History of English Literature (New York, 1879), p. 597. But he also says that “Dickens is admirable in depicting hallucinations” (p. 588).

51 But Dickens knew the word. He refers, for example, to the “psychological part” of The Scarlet Letter as being “very much overdone” (Forster, p. 505). He also refers to “a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences.” See “The Trial for Murder”, a story in “Dr. Marigold's Prescriptions”, All The Year Around (Christmas, 1865), reprinted in Christmas Stories.

52 Views And Reviews (Boston, 1908), p. 159.

53 “The Praise of Dickens”, Shelburne Essays, 5th Series (New York, 1908), p. 38.

54 Three Masters (London, 1930), pp. 77–79.

55 The Early Victorian Novelists (New York, 1935), p. 53.

56 Dickens (New York, 1935), p. 150.

57 Dickens, Dali and Others (New York, 1946), p. 69.

58 am using the words—partly translation and partly paraphrase—of Ellis N. Gum-mer, Dickens' Works in Germany (Oxford, 1940), pp. 32–33. The Danzel article appeared first in Blatter für Literarische Unlerhaltung (August, 1845). It was later reprinted in Dan-zel's Gesammelte Aufsalze (Leipzig, 1855), pp. 99-117. (The italics are mine.)

Note also Wilhelm Dibelius, the modern German authority on Dickens, who, praising the description of Fagin's last night and Sikes' flight, writes as follows: “Grosse psycho-logische Situationen dieser Art gelingen Dickens fast immer: es sei nur erinnert an Fagins letzte Nacht, an Sikes qualvolle Flucht .... Wo er psychologische Bilder gibt, wie z. B. der Schilderungen der Gewissensqual des Mörders, arbeitet er mit erstaunlicher Sicherheit.” See Charles Dickens (Leipzig und Berlin, 1926), pp. 343, 113.

59 Dibelius tells us that Scott, Godwin, Lewis, Marryat, Hook, Ainsworth, and Bulwer all helped to develop the technique (ibid., pp. 113–115).

60 Still more interesting—but in a style recalling German romanticism rather than English sensationalism—are certain passages in the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë. The striking delirium chapter in Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke seems to be influenced by current evolutionary theory.

61 Dibelius tells us that this accuracy of psychological observation was one of the main differences between Dickens and his predecessors: “Godwin, Lewis, und Bulwer hatten eingehende Schilderungen von Angst und Gewissensqual gegeben; aber solche psycho-logische Treffsicherheit [as that of Dickens] hatte keiner besessen” (ibid., p. 113). Praising the psychological descriptions of Fagin's last hours he writes: “Das ist eine grosse kiinst-lerische Leistung, das ist auch ein epochemachendes Ereignis in der Geschichte der eng-lischen Literature” (ibid., p. 115). Likewise Edmund Wilson has attributed to Dickens a “probing of the psychology of the murderer which becomes ever more subtle and intimate.” See “Dickens and the Marshalsea Prison (I)”, Atlantic Monthly, CLXV (April, 1940), 478—reprinted in The Wound and The Bow (Cambridge, 1941). And Edward Wagenknecht has found in the later Dickens “more than a hint of what we know as ‘stream of consciousness’ fiction.” See The Man Charles Dickens (Cambridge, 1929), pp. 31–32.