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Chapter 1 Genesis and Publication

Dickens never tried to probe the mystery of creativeness. He just wrote books. And when he once set out to relate how one of them, The Pickwick Papers, had come into existence, all he found to say of its conception and execution was I thought of Mr. Pickwick, and wrote the first number: a simple statement, intimating almost spontaneous generation, unless it suggests that Pickwick had always been there, in one of the many little drawers of his creator's imagination, wanting all the time, like the seeds and flower-bulbs and pips in Pumblechook's premises, of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom.

Pickwick had early bloomed into immortality, when the young Boz had thought of him and The first ray of light which illumines the gloom had converted his obscurity into a dazzling brilliancy. Little Pip was given his chance in the autumn both of Dickens's life and of the year 1860. Latecomer though he was, he must have been lurking in the novelist's unconscious ever since the days when Charles Huffam, aged six or seven, had been living in Kent, within walking distance of them misty marshes and of the wicked Noah's ark[s] that then adorned the estuary of the Medway.

But not only does Great Expectations take us back to familiar scenes of Dickens's early boyhood; it also gives new life to the dreams and dreads of childhood and adolescence re-explored by a grown man in the personal mode of an autobiography.

This is not to say that the story of Pip is the story of Charles. But the choice of writing a first-person narrative entailed personal involve-ment on the part of the writer that would have been less compulsive if he had resorted to traditional omniscience. Dickens was well aware of

. See John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens [1872-74], New edition with notes and

an index by A.J. Hopp? (London: Dent, 1966), vol. 1, p. 59. . Great Expectations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), ch. viii, p. 83. . The Pickwick Papers, ed. James Kinsley, Clarendon Dickens (Oxford, 1986), i, 1. . Great Expectations, op. cit., ch. v, p. 71. . The Hulks were moored off Upnor in the Medway estuary, north of Rochester. See

T.W. Hill, Notes to Great Expectations, Dickensian, vol. 53 (Spring 1957), p. 122. Dickens lived in Chatham from 1817 to 1823.

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this. He knew what snares and difficulties would be attending the complex process of identification: the emotional turmoil, the insidious tricks of involuntary memory. As he recorded his hero's fictitious memoirs, some of his own recollections would creep in, inevitably, and he could not overlook the fact. This is made apparent in a letter he wrote to Forster just before embarking on his enterprise. There, he drew his friend's attention to possible similarities between his new story and David Copperfield, the nearest thing he had ever written to an autobiography:

To be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe.

We know, besides, from his correspondence and the revelations of his biographers, that the break-up of his marriage, in 1858, had left him a restless, dissatisfied man, nostalgic and self-pitying, with a growing sense of one happiness he had missed in life and a tend-ency to brood over his past miseries. He often reverted in particular to the days when his family were all inmates of the Marshalsea and he, a common labouring-boy, hired to a Strand manufacturer, had to stick labels on shoe-polish bottles in order to get a living in that universal struggle. To Forster he wrote in 1862:

I must entreat you to pause for an instant, and go back to what you know of my childish days, and to ask yourself whether it is natural that something of the character formed in me then, and lost under happier circumstances, should have reappeared in the last five years. The never to be forgotten misery of that old time, bred a certain shrink-ing sensitiveness in a certain ill-clad ill-fed child, that I have found come back in the never to be forgotten misery of this later time.

Thus in the right mood for confessional writings, at the beginning of 1860, he started contributing, under the title The Uncommercial

. See Forster, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 285. . Ibid., p. 197. . Great Expectations, op. cit., ch. viii, p. 89. . Ibid., ch. i, p. 35. . Walter Dexter (ed.), The Letters of Charles Dickens, The Nonesuch Dickens

(London, 1938), vol. 3, p. 297, June 1862.

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Traveller, a new series of essays, often reminiscent in tone, to All the Year Round, his weekly magazine. In addition to recounting current experiences, comments Leslie Staples in his introduction to these collected essays, he frequently drew upon his memories of the past, and not the least interesting feature of the papers is the autobio-graphical material that is to be found in many of them. Here is much that he probably originally intended for the autobiography that he never wrote, and much to supplement what we gather about his early life in David Copperfield.

One of the best known, and justly celebrated, of these essays is the one called Travelling Abroad where the narrator, on his way from Gravesend to Rochester, meets a very queer small boy whom he takes up with him in his travelling chariot. As they drive past Gad's Hill, the country residence that, after years of frustrated desire, Dickens had eventually bought in 1856, the little boy indulges in dreams only too familiar to his interlocutor:

... But do let us stop at the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please! You admire that house? said I. Bless you, sir, said the very queer small boy, when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And now, I am nine, I come by myself to look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it. Though that's im-possible! said the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of window with all his might. I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy; for that house happens to be my house, and I have reason to believe that what he said was true.

Similarly, the reader of Great Expectations has reason to believe that Pip is to his creator what the very queer small boy was to his tra-velling companion and that, in a broad sense, his confessions are true.

. Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph [1952] (London: Victor

Gollancz, 1953), vol. 2, p. 963. . The Uncommercial Traveller, The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford

University Press, 1958), p. vi. . Ibid., p. 62.