The Feelings of Childhood: Dickens and the Study of the Child’s Mind

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.