Dickens's nightmare: dreams, memory and trauma

Abstract

This article considers the role of stress in nineteenth-century literature and culture as both a catalyst for, and a symptom of, troubled sleep. Taking the figure of Charles Dickens as my principal case study, I investigate Dickens's fictional and non-fictional explorations of sleep as a space and time where traumatic memories might be relived and repeated, where grief and longing might be articulated, and, finally, where guilt and loss may give rise to sentimental visions of possible future reunions. The model of stress depicted here is that resulting from trauma, which manifests in later life as a psychological disturbance affecting sleep. For Dickens, I will argue, the state of the mind as it was emerging from sleep was fundamentally associated with human mortality and fragility, and it facilitated the possibility of crossing between different temporalities and states of being, while positing a kind of threshold to the past, the future and the dead.

1. Introduction

Had Trotty dreamed? Or, are his joys and sorrows, and the actors in them, but a dream; himself a dream; the teller of this tale a dreamer, waking but now? If it be so, O listener, dear to him in all his visions, try to bear in mind the stern realities from which these shadows come; and in your sphere—none is too wide, and none too limited for such an end—endeavour to correct, improve, and soften them. [1, p. 161]

In Dickens's 1844 Christmas story, The Chimes, the elderly ticket-porter Toby (Trotty) Veck dozes by the fire on New Year's Eve, only to find that the church bells seem to be calling to him. He then experiences a series of visions of the troubled lives of his loved ones over the coming years, and is forced to watch, while helpless to interfere. When he finds himself awakening at home, as if from a dream, as the bells ring in the New Year, the narrator questions both the nature and origin of Trotty's experience. The possibility Dickens raises here—that Trotty's ‘awakening’ might, in fact, be a further dream within a dream—is perhaps a metafictional reflection on the nature of story-telling itself as a kind of fantasy. However, it also points to the mind's capacity for altered states of consciousness, figured as the infiltration of the subject's normal self by ‘shadows’, darker thoughts and fears derived from life's ‘stern realities’, which find themselves strangely freed when the subject is, or is falling, asleep.

The notion that the mind might be haunted by its own distressing memories or deep-seated anxieties was one that became increasingly prevalent throughout the nineteenth century, as writers and scientists sought to explore the complex relations between consciousness and unconsciousness, and the shaping force of memory on the construction of identity. This article focuses on the figure of Charles Dickens, a writer who was both deeply interested in contemporary theories of dreaming and the mind, and who offered fictional and non-fictional case studies of sleep as a place and time where traumatic memories might be relived and repeated, and where grief and longing might be articulated. First, I explore the ways in which dreams relate to trauma and the return of the repressed in Dickens's writing, before turning to Dickens's well-known interest in ghost stories, in order to argue for an intimate connection between the emotional and psychological conditions of dreaming and haunting. Spectral encounters, I suggest, at least for Dickens, served as a means of negotiating a troubled past. The model of stress depicted here is that resulting from trauma, which manifests in later life as a psychological disturbance affecting sleep. Ultimately for Dickens, I will argue, the state of the mind as it was emerging from sleep was fundamentally associated with human mortality and fragility, and it facilitated the possibility of crossing between different temporalities and states of being, while positing a kind of threshold to the past, the future and the dead.

2. Trauma revisited

On 2 February 1851, Dickens wrote a letter to Thomas Stone, a medical doctor who had recently submitted an article on the subject of dreams for potential publication in Dickens's weekly journal Household Words. Noting that the subject was one of great interest to himself, Dickens ventured to offer a critique of Stone's theories, and to suggest some alterations and revisions to the article before its publication. At the outset of his letter, Dickens expresses his doubt regarding the ‘kind of conventional philosophy and belief’ [2, p. 276] that the content of one's dreams largely comprises events and experiences of the recent past, or any subject closely occupying the waking mind. Rather, he declares, if one dreams of the present, it is typically only in an allegorical manner, while the sleeping mind tends to busy itself far more regularly with affairs that are long past. His own dreams, he declares, ‘are usually of twenty years ago’, and often strangely at variance with his present-day self:

I often blend my present position with them; but very confusedly; whereas my life of twenty years ago is very distinctly represented. I have been married fourteen years, and have nine children, but I do not remember that I ever, on any occasion, dreamed of myself as being invested with those responsibilities, or surrounded by those relations. [2, p. 276]

For Dickens then, the past is not a settled matter; nor is it even past, as his dreams disrupt any linear construction of time. His early experiences are at once complete and still in process, blending with the present to confuse even his own sense of self and his relationships with others.

In his waking moments, Dickens expressed a clear interest in the workings of dreams, and his notebooks reveal an ongoing fascination with their relation to current theories of memory. The inventory of his books indicates that he owned a copy of the Scottish surgeon-physician Robert Macnish's 1840 edition of The Philosophy of Sleep, a seminal volume on sleep and its disorders, which investigated the physical and mental processes at work during sleeping and dreaming. Dickens's insistence upon dreams’ capacity to dissolve or to blend the perspectives of past and present selves is also reflective of a broader mid-Victorian interest in dreams as potential intimations of the individual's psyche and childhood, as well as a more distant, shared human past. Dreams in this period, as Helen Groth and Natalya Lusty have shown, ‘became a catalyst for new kinds of networks of knowledge across psychological, physiological, philosophical, aesthetic and vernacular domains' [3, p. 2], as they interacted and overlapped with several burgeoning fields of research. Dreams themselves, like the consciousness from which they emerged, were understood to be both elusive and highly unstable. Figures such as John Addington Symonds, Henry Holland, John Abercrombie and George Henry Lewes each, as Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth have demonstrated, stressed the nature of sleeping not as a unified state, but as an experience of constantly fluctuating modes of consciousness ‘in which different mental functions are under its influence at the same moment in time’ [4, pp. 69–70]. More particularly, however, Dickens's revelation regarding his own dreams, I want to argue, points to the role of stress and childhood trauma in prompting his unconscious mind's repeated re-enactment of past events. Dickens possessed, as Catherine Bernard has demonstrated, almost ‘intuitive insight’ into the ‘autobiographical meaning of dreams' [5, p. 197], as his own experiences demonstrated to him that dreams were ‘psychic acts’ [5, p. 214] with the potential to expose conflicts and resentments routinely suppressed in waking life. Those horrors regularly presented to the dreamer by his sleeping mind were, I would suggest, compounded by the psychological and emotional strain of their rejection by his conscious self, as stress became both a catalyst for, and a symptom of, troubled sleep.

Dickens, writing to Dr Stone as a 39-year-old married man, remains extremely guarded about what constitutes the substance of his dreams of his past life, and, indeed, he kept the details of his now famously difficult childhood a secret throughout his lifetime. It was not until John Forster published some fragments of Dickens's autobiography in the first volume of his biography of his friend in 1876 that the British public, as well as Dickens's own children, learned of the Dickens family's incarceration in the Marshalsea Debtors Prison in London in 1824, while a 12-year-old Charles was housed nearby in Little College Street, Camden Town. Soon, he was sent to work at Warren's Blacking Warehouse by the Thames for six shillings a week. In his narrative to Forster, as in his dreams, this experience cannot be relegated to the past, but is drawn vividly into the present, as Dickens notes that the rotten floors and staircase and the dirt and decay of this rat-ridden warehouse ‘rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again’ [6, p. 31]. The profound emotional distress Dickens associates with this place is also revived and re-lived, as he struggles to express the ‘secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship’ and ‘felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast’, while at the same time testifying to the ‘deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless' [6, p. 33]. The suffering child's sense of abandonment is further compounded by the adult writer's knowledge that his employment at the warehouse did not end when his father received a legacy which enabled him to clear all his debts and leave the Marshalsea after three months.

Dickens could only speculate as to what finally prompted his father's decision to remove him from the Blacking Warehouse. He writes of the oppressive weight of his family's subsequent collective silence about the experience, which did not allow for any explanations or admissions, and served to enforce his own self-censorship and systematic repression of the bewildering experience:

From that hour, until this at which I write, no word of that part of my childhood which I have now gladly brought to a close, has passed my lips to any human being. […] From that hour, until this, my father and mother have been stricken dumb upon it. I have never heard the least allusion to it, however far off and remote, from either of them. I have never, until I now impart it to this paper, in any burst of confidence with any one, my own wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then dropped, thank God. [6, p. 49]

Dickens's determination to bring this period of his young life ‘to a close’, figured here in theatrical terms as the raising and dropping of a stage curtain, signifies an attempt not only to exert some control over this sequence of events, but to bring them to a satisfying resolution. It is a very material metaphor for his attempt to close off that part of his mind which holds the experience. That experience, however, could not be so neatly contained, and nor could the emotions associated with it be so easily forgotten. Trauma, writes Cathy Caruth, ‘does not simply serve as a record of the past, but precisely registers the force of an experience’ [7, p. 151], an experience so overwhelming and so shocking that it ‘cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge’ [7, p. 153] and is ‘not yet fully owned’ [7, p. 151]. Not only is the original traumatic experience intrinsically bound up with horror, stress and distress, but, Caruth notes, because the event cannot be ‘assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it’ [7, p. 4], the subject is forced repeatedly to relive that horror in their dreams, thoughts and hallucinations.

Later, writing autobiographically to Forster, Dickens struggled to express and to convert his early traumatic experience into a coherent narrative. In her analysis of Dickens's childhood memories, Rosemarie Bodenheimer has written of the ‘internal split between memory writing and trauma writing’ which is evident in these passages as Dickens, ‘just as concerned to defend his feelings now as then’ [8, p. 71], seeks ‘rhetorical command of those memories and the feelings that had attached to them over the course of twenty-four years' [8, p. 69]. It is this search for control, she suggests, which led Dickens to re-work the experience in fiction. Certainly, his representation of the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit (1855–1857), the struggles of young David Copperfield at a warehouse in London and Wilkins Micawber's arrest and incarceration for debt in David Copperfield (1849–1850) offer fictionalized explorations of his personal past, within narrative frames and contexts that Dickens might invent, manipulate and satisfactorily resolve. More than this, as Steven Marcus has proposed, Dickens's career as a writer becomes an attempt not only to ‘digest these early shocks and hardships, to explain them to himself, to justify himself in relation to them’, but also to ‘give an intelligible and tolerable picture of a world where such things could occur’ [9, p. 7]. In his ghost stories, too, as Jill Matus has observed in her detailed reading of Dickens's short story ‘The Signal-Man’ (1866) in light of the 1865 Staplehurst train crash, the author could offer ‘a powerful articulation of the psychic effects of aftermath’ [10, p. 98]. Within the generic frame of the ghost story, which, Matus observes, has much in common with the trauma narrative, ‘since to be traumatized is arguably to be haunted, to be living a ghost story’, Dickens was able to ‘give play to the phantoms or specters that intruded as hallucinations to demand that the possessed subject revisit areas of experience not fully assimilated’ [10, p. 98]. Nonetheless, while the fictional realm offered a very controlled exploration of the past, that same command and self-regulation derived from the status of an author directing his own narrative were not possible in the alternate space and time of dreaming. Throughout his adult life, Dickens the dreamer repeatedly found himself, through the suspension of his conscious self, utterly immersed in the traumatic experiences and sensations of his childhood:

My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life. [6, p. 33]

In his dreams, unconstrained by the emotional and mental restraints ordinarily imposed by his waking mind, Dickens reverts to his earlier, repressed self, and becomes again a child in Warren's Blacking factory, lacking agency and any sense of control over his situation. The sense of collapse, or disintegration, in the falling away of his present-day life and relationships seems to recapitulate the intense vulnerability of the child, for whom all familiar emotional, social and domestic structures have also dissolved. The recurring dream dramatizes his sense of powerlessness, and the persistence of associated feelings of bafflement and frustration.

Dreams, to extend Dickens's own theatrical metaphor, provided a stage for the conflicts of his childhood to be played out, and it is the recurrence of this nightmare that speaks most profoundly to the indelible impression of these events on his adult mind. It was an experience woven into his daily life, as he moved, unwillingly, in and out of this traumatic childhood event, unable to establish a resolution. Recurring dreams, ‘which come back almost as certainly as the night’, are, Dickens writes in his letter to Dr Stone, ‘an unhealthy and morbid species of these visions' and ‘should be particularly noticed’ [2, p. 277]. Their import to him, presumably, derives from their potential significance as intimations of the struggles and sufferings that continue to occupy his mind, beneath the threshold of consciousness. Dickens regarded childhood experience as critical to the formation of the adult's identity and sense of self. His use of the word ‘morbid’ here is telling, as it emphasizes his own sense of an unhealthy attachment to the disturbing materials of his childhood. Such an attachment is consistent with contemporary theories regarding dreaming in traumatized patients [11,12]; the dream repeats because the experience remains both unresolved and, as Dickens himself goes on to observe, unacknowledged: ‘Secrecy on the part of the dreamer, as to these illusions, has a remarkable tendency to perpetuate them’ [2, p. 277].

Throughout his oeuvre, Dickens is deeply concerned with childhood innocence, and with the terrible damage that might be inflicted upon the helpless. His fragmentary confession to John Forster detailing his own childhood terrors, as well as the adult sense of guilt and shame that accompanied them, was perhaps anticipated by the fictional revelations of the troubled young man known as Smike in his third novel, Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839). Smike, a pupil at Dotheboys Hall, a Yorkshire boarding school for unwanted children, offers a striking psychological portrait of an ill-treated and traumatized child. Having suffered years of brutal treatment, periods of starvation and vicious beatings at the hands of the schoolmaster, Wackford Squeers, Smike's mental capacities have been distorted and his memory is irreparably damaged. Sadly, he believes that he had a good memory once, ‘because I could remember when I was a child’, but ‘it's all gone now – all gone’, and ‘I was always confused and giddy at [Dotheboys Hall] and could never remember’ [13, p. 267]. When Nicholas gently poses a series of questions intended to draw Smike back to his infancy, he reveals that he does remember something of that past life, and an earlier trauma is disclosed:

I remember I slept in a room, a large lonesome room at the top of a house, where there was a trap-door in the ceiling. I have covered my head with the clothes often, not to see it, for it frightened me, a young child with no one near at night, and I used to wonder what was on the other side. […] I have never forgotten that room, for when I have terrible dreams, it comes back just as it was. I see things and people in it that I had never seen then, but there is the room just as it used to be; that never changes. [13, p. 268]

Smike's distressing dreams serve as a form of narrative foreshadowing, anticipating the discovery that he is, in fact, Nicholas's cousin, and that his father is the vindictive Ralph Nickleby, who imprisoned him in the attic-room during his infancy. However, they are also a means of insight into Smike's damaged psyche. Smike's repeated return in his dreams to the room in which he was trapped as a child reveals an ever-present sense of terror, guilt and rejection derived from the experience. His afflicted mind struggles to make sense of the scene, suggesting possible people and things, connections and relations, which might render the episode meaningful. He nonetheless remains bewildered, burdened with a deep sense of entrapment within a larger system that he cannot possibly understand.

Even that much neglected orphan Oliver Twist, in Dickens's second novel, despite his seemingly incorruptible innocence and undamaged character, reveals traces of trauma through his dreams. In his study, Sleep and the Novel, Michael Greaney has approached acts of sleep in Dickens's oeuvre as a form of absence, or ‘banal oblivion’ [14, p. 101], when the sleeper's mind retreats from its material and social environment. This removal can, Greaney shows, harbour subversive political energies, and it can lend itself to an array of comic possibilities, but it also renders the sleeper's body extremely vulnerable to the wakeful observer. Sleepers in Dickens's novels are, Greaney notes, unable to lie or to manipulate others. Their body language becomes unguarded, and they provide a ‘physical corroboration’ of ‘such nebulously inward matters as personality or character’ [14, p. 89]. Thus, Rose Maylie becomes assured of Oliver's innocence and innate goodness as she watches his angelic form while he is sleeping. When consciousness is suspended, according to Greaney, an authentic version of the self materializes. I would suggest, however, that from the perspective of the Dickensian sleeper themselves, for whom the suspension of consciousness is not necessarily experienced as mere absence, authentic, earlier, or perhaps other, versions of the self may also manifest. Although Oliver may physically embody the truth of his goodness while he slumbers, his own mind is working to express and explore the rather more painful truths of his situation, truths that his waking self endeavours to avoid. Oliver, as Jenny Bourne Taylor has argued, frequently operates ‘like a figure in a dream’ [15, p. 137], whose persistently ‘blank or dream-like consciousness' enables him not only to ‘move through the contrasting social worlds of the novel’ seemingly unscathed, but also to ‘subjectively resist his early childhood of appalling neglect and abuse’ [15, p. 159]. Oliver's frequently blank disposition is then, for Taylor, evidence of his mind's active struggle to avoid processing any troubling or traumatic experiences. This does not mean, however, that Oliver lacks interiority; rather, it points to the kind of pre-Freudian, ‘“deep” complicated self’ that Taylor has shown was developing in the nineteenth century as ‘an implicit dialogue between different layers, currents or sections of the mind’ [15, p. 141]. That dialogue is, I would argue, rendered explicit in this instance through the narrative's exploration of Oliver's dreams.

One evening, as Oliver falls asleep by the window of the Maylies' summer house, his mind returns to Fagin's lair in the heart of London's criminal underworld:

Oliver knew perfectly well that he was in his own little room, that his books were lying on the table before him, and that the sweet air was stirring among the creeping plants outside, – and yet he was asleep. Suddenly the scene changed, the air became close and confined, and he thought with a glow of terror that he was in the Jew's house again. There sat the hideous old man in his accustomed corner pointing at him, and whispering to another man with his face averted, who sat beside him. [16, pp. 281–283]

Through this dream, Dickens again endows a troubled child with psychological complexity, and raises the possibility that any future sense of happiness or security has been profoundly undermined by early trauma. As with Smike, Oliver's unconscious mind returns to a room, the scene of his greatest distress, and populates it with figures and connections. Oliver's dream, however, takes on even greater levels of mystery, as the young boy wakes in terror, only to behold, for ‘but an instant, a glance, a flash before his eyes' [16, p. 283], the two men of his dream standing at the window, peering in at him.

This extraordinary scene might, as Rosemarie Bodenheimer claims, be ‘a textbook case of flashback’, or a ‘memory-hallucination of events' [8, p. 75]. Certainly, the notion that Oliver's anxious mind blurs his past terrors with his present anxieties as he emerges from sleep is supported by the fact that the adults who search the grounds are convinced that the men could not possibly have been there. However, beyond its staging of Oliver's fear of re-capture by Fagin, his dream seems also to be pointing to the kind of interaction, or, to use Taylor's phrase, the ‘clashes and correspondences within a fissured, multiple consciousness' [15, p. 141], taking place between the various layers of his mind and the external world. There is, the narrator explains at the opening of this scene, ‘a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it’ [16, p. 281]. In this moment, he notes, we experience ‘overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion’, and, yet,

we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us, and even if we dream, words which are really spoken or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibility to separate the two. [16, p. 281]

This liminal state, between waking and sleeping, is, as Alison Winter has pointed out, strikingly reminiscent of magnetic slumber, in which the subject appears to sleep but is, in fact, entranced and responding to the cues of the mesmerist, with whom an extraordinary kind of communion is established. Dickens, himself an enthusiastic and proficient mesmerist, Winter argues, uses Oliver's dream to posit an intense psychological connection between Oliver, Fagin and Monks, which enables Oliver to see the ‘activities of the novel's villains, even though they take place several miles away’ [17, p. 58]. Such a connection, I would add, is not only facilitated in this instance by the child's terror and sense of vulnerability, but it also represents an insidious attempt on the part of Fagin to infiltrate and corrupt the child's mind. Rendered prostrate and unable to control his thoughts or movements, both the body and mind of the sleeping child are alarmingly open to manipulation.

Dickens deliberately raises other possibilities, too, as to the nature of Oliver's dream. His confident exposition on this particular kind of trance-like sleep recalls Robert Macnish's study, The Philosophy of Sleep, which describes a state of light or incomplete sleep ‘when slumber is not very profound’ and the sleeper ‘may hear music or conversation’ and ‘although not awakened by such circumstances, may recollect them afterwards' [18, p. 28]. These impressions, Macnish writes, ‘often give rise to the most extraordinary mental combinations, and form the groundwork of the most elaborate dreams’ [18, p. 28]. George Henry Lewes recorded similar experiments on sleeping subjects, who either responded to external stimuli through what he believed was an automatic impulse, or found that the stimuli became merged in the general stream of consciousness, and modified the dreams [19, pp. 62–64]. Thomas Stone, too, in his published article in Dickens's Household Words, noted that ‘during sleep the mind may not be wholly under eclipse’, for while ‘perception, comparison, judgement, and especially the will, may be suspended’, other faculties like memory and the imagination are often more active than in the waking state [20, p. 566]. In his state of partial slumber, Oliver's senses are alert to his present surroundings ‘in his own little room’, as he sees the books on the table, smells the sweet air and hears the rustling leaves outside. His imagination, however, possibly transforms those sensations into a vivid drama informed by his own fears and anxieties. At the threshold between sleeping and waking, what the psychical researcher Frederic Myers (1843–1901) would later designate the hypnopompic state [21, pp. 124–125], these two scenes seem to bleed into each other, as dreams and reality briefly interpenetrate one another.

In the context of the novel, the precise nature of Oliver's dream remains deliberately ambiguous. Later, there is even a suggestion that Fagin and Monks had in reality been standing at the window that evening, as Mr Brownlow relates their scheme and notes that ‘a dispute on this head had led to their visit to the country house for the purpose of identifying him’ [16, p. 434]. Ultimately, while the novel actively invites these various readings, there is insufficient evidence to affirm or discard any of these possibilities. It is through this sense of indeterminacy that Dickens exposes the fundamentally mysterious nature of the human mind, by raising the possibility of crossing between different states of being, and of seeing and hearing beyond the usual sensory thresholds, and by positing the kinds of repressed, traumatic materials that may exist beyond or beneath the conscious mind. Sleep emerges from this narrative as a place where memories might be re-lived and re-worked, where grief might be articulated and, as I want now to suggest, where emotional and psychological connections with the dead might be maintained.

3. A ghostly time

In his third volume of the Life of Charles Dickens, John Forster wrote of Dickens's seemingly irresistible attraction to strange and unusual phenomena. ‘Among his good things’, Forster observes, ‘should not be omitted his telling of a ghost story’; he had, in fact, ‘something of a hankering after them, as the readers of his briefer pieces will know’ [22, p. 383]. That Dickens harboured a lifelong attraction to the occult and the supernatural is evidenced by his adolescent fondness for the Terrific Register, a penny weekly magazine filled with gruesome tales and graphic illustrations, as well as the later recurrence of ghostly figures throughout much of his own fiction [23, pp. 37–53]. It is well documented that Dickens attended séances, experimented with table-turning, practised mesmerism, and in the 1860s joined the London Ghost Club, which was founded in 1863 to promote organized research into the potential nature and existence of ghosts [24, p. 113]. However, despite his eagerness, even desire, to believe in ghosts, Dickens consistently rejected supernatural explanations in favour of sensory, bodily and neurological phenomena. He insisted that, through their role as intermediaries between the self and its environment, the senses and the nervous system were frequent causes of individual disease, distress and disorientation and gave rise to experiences of the eerie, the uncanny and the grotesque. Such, of course, is the famous complaint put forward in A Christmas Carol (1843) by Ebenezer Scrooge, who, in the semi-conscious state between waking and sleeping, doubts the evidence of his senses because he knows that ‘a little thing affects them’ and that ‘a slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats' [25, p. 20]. Sleep, and the series of fluctuating states that comprise sleep, were often fundamental to the spectral visions and other ghostly experiences that he believed emerged from altered, or troubled, states of mind. ‘We all’, in our dreams, Dickens insisted to Dr Stone, ‘confound the living with the dead, and we all frequently have a knowledge or suspicion that we are doing it’ [2, p. 279]. In such moments, the unconscious provides a connection not only to the past, but to the dead, which raises the possibility of an ongoing spiritual or intellectual communion with lost loved ones.

In the 1859 Christmas number of his weekly literary magazine, All the Year Round, Dickens's opening story, ‘The Mortals in the House’, included a declaration that the early morning, just before daybreak, was the narrator's ‘most ghostly time’ [26, p. 3]. ‘Any house’, he writes, ‘would be more or less haunted, to me, in the early morning; and a haunted house could scarcely address me to greater advantage than then’ [26, p. 3]. This transitional moment between night and day, coupled with that semi-conscious state between sleeping and waking, the ‘stillness and solitude’ of the early morning, the ‘colour and chill’ and ‘even a certain air that familiar household objects take upon them when they first emerge from the shadows of the night into the morning’, call forth mental associations of death and mortality [26, p. 2]. ‘The tranquillity of the hour’, the speaker claims, ‘is the tranquillity of death’ [26, p. 2], as the spectres of the mind are given free rein, and that which has been repressed is allowed to surface. It was at this hour, the narrator writes, that he once saw an apparition of his dead father:

He was alive and well […] sitting with his back towards me, on a seat that stood beside my bed. His head was resting on his hand, and whether he was slumbering or grieving, I could not discern. Amazed to see him there, I sat up, moved my position, leaned out of bed, and watched him. […] As he did not move then, I became alarmed and laid my hand upon his shoulder, as I thought – and there was no such thing. [26, pp. 2–3]

Louise Henson cites this moment as one that combines ‘the traditional haunted house story with more recent theories about expectant attention’, whereby the mind ‘provokes a physiological response and the individual's own unconscious agency is taken for that of a supernatural power’ [27, p. 57]. In other words, this vision has its origins, Dickens is clear, within the operations of the mind. The confusion here between slumbering and grieving is also significant, for it is his semi-conscious state, heightened by grief and the stillness of the morning, which allows the image to surface. This is not only a psychological experience, but a very emotional one, as dreams provide a means of maintaining some form of communion with the dead.

When Dickens's beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, died in his arms when she was only 17, he ‘underwent great affliction’ [2, p. 277]. He wrote in his letter to Dr Stone, ‘for a year, I dreamed of her, every night – sometimes as living, sometimes as dead, never in any terrible or shocking aspect’ [2, p. 277]. His grief, coupled with a sense of guilt, apparently fuelled these recurring dreams, as he ‘forebore to allude to these dreams – kept them wholly to myself’ [2, p. 277]. Subsumed by the anguish of his loss, he found, as he later confided to the critic and scientist George Henry Lewes, that Mary's image not only visited his dreams, but ‘haunted him by day’ [28, p. 153]. Many years after Mary's death, while Dickens was living in Italy, the sounds of the city invaded his unconscious mind as he lay sleeping, triggering memories of the past and furnishing a further intense encounter with his loved one:

It was All Souls’ Night, and people were going about with Bells, calling on the Inhabitants to pray for the dead.—Which I have no doubt I had some sense of, in my sleep; and so flew back to the Dead. [2, p. 277]

Unlike the feeling of constriction and entrapment experienced by the mind's repeated return to scenes of earlier trauma, the language of flight here speaks to the sense of liberation which has been facilitated by the sounds of the bells that filter through his unconscious mind. Recurring dreams, then, were not always unwelcome reminders of a troubled childhood, and, in the case of Dickens's relationship with Mary Hogarth, he discovered that they offered a space to explore the past in ways that seem almost therapeutic. Guilt and grief are somewhat assuaged, as the trauma of Mary's early death gives way in this moment to a more forward-looking vision of spiritual reunion.

Later, in the 1855 Christmas number of Household Words, Dickens provided further details of this early morning spectral encounter in his story of ‘The Holly Tree’. Here, the young male narrator, who, as Michael Slater claims, is clearly Dickens himself ‘under the thinnest of fictional disguises' [29, p. 401], refers to the death of a ‘very near and dear friend’, whom he encounters through a strange experience one morning in Italy:

I was in Italy, and awoke, (or seemed to awake), the well-remembered voice distinctly in my ears, conversing with it. I entreated it, as it rose above my bed and soared up to the vaulted roof of the old room, to answer me a question I had asked, touching the future life. My hands were still outstretched towards it as it vanished, when I heard a bell ringing by the garden wall, and a voice, in the deep stillness of the night, calling on all good Christians to pray for the souls of the dead, it being All Souls' Eve. [30, p. 38]

The tolling of the church bell, so long associated with death and mourning, turns Dickens's mind to thoughts of the deceased, as the sounds reverberating in his ears seem to merge with the memory of Mary's voice. It is an example of the potential influence of external sensory stimuli upon the sleeping mind, a phenomenon acknowledged by Dickens in his letter to Dr Stone, and investigated in some detail by John Abercrombie in his Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and Investigation of Truth (1843). Bells, Dickens wrote in Sketches by Boz, force such reflections of death and mortality upon the mind, for ‘there is something awful in the sound’, which serves to warn the listener that ‘we have passed another of the land marks that stand between us and the grave’ [31, pp. 139–140]. It is an almost instinctive association that Dickens would play upon throughout his writing, as, for example, the tolling of the bells announce the arrival of each of the spirits in A Christmas Carol (1843), while the pealing bells in The Chimes (1884) infiltrate the mind of Trotty Veck to induce his visions.

Dickens was, like many Victorians, frequently exposed to the illnesses and often extremely painful deaths of loved ones throughout his life. As a boy, he witnessed the deaths of two of his siblings: when he was only 2, his six-month-old brother Alfred reportedly died of ‘water on the brain’, and when he was 10, his sister Harriet died from smallpox (a disease featured in some detail in Bleak House (1853)). Later, as a father of 10, he beheld his own children endure very serious bouts of disease, and his ninth child, Dora Annie, died unexpectedly of convulsions when she was only eight months old. His frail invalid nephew, Henry (Harry) Augustus Burnett, who is often taken to be the inspiration for Tiny Tim, died at the age of 9, only a few months after the death of his 38-year-old mother, Dickens's beloved older sister Fanny (from tuberculosis). It is not surprising, therefore, that such intense and distressing encounters with premature death would prompt Dickens not only to reflect upon his own mortality, but also to seek to retain some kind of continuing connection with his loved ones. Grief for Fanny's death, as Lynn Cain has argued, was ‘instrumental in the process of recapturing in writing the childhood memories that would inform [David] Copperfield’ [32, p. 113]. The production of such fiction seemingly proffered a kind of controlled dreaming, in which Dickens's own memories might be revisited and negotiated within a carefully constructed and safe imaginative frame. This was not the only writing infused with childhood memories that he penned during that year of grief and nostalgia. His essay, ‘A Christmas Tree’, which appeared in Household Words in December 1850, also evokes a sentimentalized world of recollected childhood. In this case, witnessing a ‘merry company of children’ playing around a Christmas tree prompts the writer's psychological return to his own childhood Christmases [33].

‘A Child's Dream of a Star’, published earlier in April 1850, also represented a return to the child psyche through both story-telling and dreaming, while exploring the role of dreams in maintaining an intimate emotional and psychological bond with the dearly departed. It is the story of an intense childhood companionship between a brother and sister, who often wondered together at the beauty of the ‘one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves' [34, p. 25]. When his increasingly frail sister—‘still very young, oh very very young’—succumbs to death, the grief-stricken boy maintains a connection with her memory through the nightly appearance of that same star, which becomes a tangible reminder of his sister and their time together. In his dreams, that connection is literalised as the star is transformed into a kind of portal to the infinite, spirit realm where he believes his sister now resides:

Now, these rays were so bright, and they seemed to make a shining way from earth to Heaven, that when the child went to his solitary bed, he dreamed about the star; and dreamed that, lying where he was, he saw a train of people taken up that sparkling road by angels. And the star, opening, showed him a great world of light, where many more such angels waited to receive them. [34, pp. 25–26]

The simple poetic fantasy of the young boy posits the psychological notion of dreaming as a change of consciousness, in which the emotions and sensations of the present interact with the imagination and with memories of the past to stimulate intense ideational visions.

Interestingly, Louise Henson has offered a similar reading of the spectral visions of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1843), arguing that his ‘visionary sequence revolves around Scrooge's memories of Marley on Christmas Eve, the anniversary of his death’ and ‘the ideas and emotions triggered by the Christmas season’ [27, pp. 46–47]. Scrooge's altered state of consciousness, dozing by the fire, allows a temporary absence of his volitional control, through which repressed guilt as to his past, and repressed anxiety as to his future salvation, might manifest. It is important to recognize, however, that Scrooge's newly awakened sense of guilt relates not only to his own miserly behaviour, but also to the long-repressed memories of his childhood suffering, which are likewise freed as he sits by the fire. Through his series of spectral visions, we learn that Scrooge, like Dickens himself, was a traumatized child neglected by a seemingly capricious, absent father. When the Ghost of Christmas Past returns Scrooge to his childhood, we behold ‘a solitary child, neglected by his friends', who has been left in a ‘long, bare, melancholy room’ with a ‘feeble fire’ over the Christmas season, and Scrooge weeps in grief for the ‘poor forgotten self as he used to be’ [25, p. 31]. Scrooge beholds his childhood self ‘walking up and down despairingly’ [25, p. 32] as each Christmas passes, until his sister arrives unexpectedly to fetch him home with the simple explanation that ‘Father is so much kinder than he used to be’ [25, p. 33]. In an altered state of consciousness, figured here as the infiltration and possession of his normal self by a sequence of ghosts, Scrooge finds himself forced to confront his memories of a troubled childhood and to recognize his kinship with his fellow Londoners.

While Scrooge's dreaming/haunting is closely tied to his sense of guilt and shame, in ‘A Child's Dream of a Star’, the unconscious mind possesses extraordinary powers not to alarm but to comfort the bereaved, as the young boy believes that he has both seen and heard the voice of his sister's angel. Unlike the ghosts of past, present and future, this astral spirit is not a manifestation of guilt, but, like Dickens's own encounter with the deceased Mary Hogarth, it is evidence of an ongoing, and potentially nourishing, connection with the dead. The boy's childhood vision is transformative, and it becomes a source of solace and spiritual development throughout the successive domestic bereavements that he must endure in his progression to adulthood. Finally, at the moment of his own passing, the now aged and wrinkled man claims that he can see the star from his death-bed, and expresses a profound gratitude that ‘it has so often opened, to receive those dear ones who await me’ [34, p. 26]. In this brief moment, he seems to have established a sensory connection that traverses material and spiritual worlds, which reinforces his conviction that heaven exists and that he will soon be re-united with his loved ones.

Dickens captured this moment of passing from life into death several times throughout his fiction. In his study of child deaths in the nineteenth century, Laurence Lerner has claimed that ‘there is more child death in Dickens than in any other novelist’ [35, p. 82]. At such moments, Dickens often employs the trope of divine revelation through dreams, which seemingly allows a brief sensory engagement with the afterlife and with friends and family who have gone before. Having heard the voices in the waves throughout his young life, little Paul Dombey's dying visons in Dombey and Son (1846–1848) are of the waves carrying him forwards in a boat while his mother beckons to him in an aureole of light. In Nicholas Nickleby, the young Smike describes the similarly ecstatic death of a young boy who died at Wackford Squeers' Academy, when he ‘began to see faces around his bed that came from home’ and ‘he said they smiled and talked to him; and he died at last, lifting his head to kiss them’ [13, p. 97]. In The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), the mind of Little Nell, too, begins to wander on her death bed. She dreams of her past journeys with her grandfather and the friends who have helped her, and hears beautiful music in the air. At Nell's burial, it is explicitly suggested that she had a sensory connection to the afterlife, as ‘a whisper went about among the oldest, that she had seen and talked with angels; and when they called to mind how she had looked, and spoken, and her early death, some thought it might be so, indeed’ [36, p. 542]. Just before their deaths, it seems, these young children are comforted by vivid dreams of earlier, happier days, while they attain a glimpse into the paradise that awaits them. This dreamscape, populated by phantoms of the mind, remains tightly bound up with past selves, past opportunities and lost opportunities, but it also looks forward to future possibilities.

In his famous essay, ‘Night Walks’, first published in All the Year Round in 1860, Dickens details his habit of walking the streets of London at night in an attempt to overcome a bout of temporary insomnia. His inability to sleep was, he noted, ‘referable to a distressing impression’ [37, p. 348], and it seems that he sought the physical movement of walking as a means of allaying the mental restlessness that prevented sleep. Dickens was, as Matthew Beaumont has demonstrated, ‘a manic – not just an energetic – walker for decades' [38, p. 352], whose compulsive perambulations of the streets of London at night comprised a desperate search for emotional and psychological relief, and an escape from the stresses and strains of his daily life. The nightwalker's ambition, Beaumont argues, ‘is to lose and find himself in the labyrinth of the city at nighttime’, and ‘every nightwalk is thus a fugue or psychogenic flight – an escape from the self and, at the same time, a plunge into its depths' [38, p. 397]. Nightwalking, then, as a psychological break from the conscious self, becomes a substitute not only for sleeping, but also for dreaming, as the shadowy streets seem to liberate the darker recesses of the human psyche. It was in such a state that Dickens indulged in a ‘night-fancy’ one evening, as he stood outside the walls of Bethlehem Hospital:

Are not the sane and insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives? […] Do we not nightly jumble events and personages and times and places, as these do daily? Are we not sometimes troubled by our own sleeping inconsistencies, and do we not vexedly try to account for them or excuse them, just as these do sometimes in respect of their waking delusions? [37, p. 350]

The insane of Bethlehem appear to Dickens's restless mind as akin to perpetual dreamers. They are the inhabitants of an illogical and at times terrifying dream realm that they cannot escape. Within that paradigmatic space of dreaming, where reason is suspended and time, motion and logic follow different rules, the relations between past and present, and between the living and dead, are unstable, and frequently confused. The sane, who live outside the dream realm, merely visit it but, as Dickens reflects, dreams constitute ‘the insanity of each day's sanity’ [37, p. 350], and are equivalent to a temporary mental derangement in the waking mind. It is perhaps for this reason that the young Richard Carstone, in Dickens's Bleak House (1853), who has been obsessed with the interminable chancery lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, eagerly questions his guardian, ‘It was all a troubled dream?’ as he lies on his death-bed [39, p. 979]. By equating his unhappy life with the illogical and unstable world of a dream, Richard thus recognizes the folly, indeed the madness, of his actions, and seeks his family's forgiveness.

In raising the possibility that the dreamer might be mad, albeit only temporarily, Dickens is gesturing towards the potentially damaging psychological consequences of stress, grief and trauma as they repeat in dreams. The boundaries between dream worlds and realities, like those between the psychic layers of the mind, are, Dickens senses, both fragile and extremely porous, and they are easily disrupted by the recurrence of morbid dreams and the playing out of unresolved psychological dramas. Such non-causal dream sequences are beyond the dreamer's control and they trouble the conscious self, for they are inconsistencies. They disrupt the usual temporal, social and material structures of daily life in deeply personal and affective ways—ways that informed Dickens's own narrative structures and methods while prompting his sentimentalized visions of death and a shared afterlife. In dreams, boundaries are crossed and binaries are disrupted, as the past refuses to remain fixed, and erupts instead into the present in order to expose the repressed fears, desires and longings of the sleeping subject.

Data accessibility

This article has no additional data.

Competing interests

I declare I have no competing interests.

Funding

The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme ERC Grant Agreement no. 340121.