Hamlet y Freud

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Lawrence Frank
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 52, Number 4,

Autumn 2012, pp. 861-896 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/sel.2012.0036
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SEL 52, 4 (Autumn
Lawrence Frank2012): 861896 861
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2012 Rice University
In Hamlets Shadow: Mourning

and Melancholia in Little Dorrit
LAWRENCE FRANK
Theres something in his soul

Oer which his melancholy sits on brood,
And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger.
Claudius, in Shakespeares Hamlet (1603)1
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and

empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
Sigmund Freud, Mourning and
Melancholia (1917)2
It was at a propitious moment in March 1855 that Charles

Dickens (181270)writing and planning and making notes
turned to the novel that was to become Little Dorrit (185557) with
its story of a character, Arthur Clennam, mysteriously impelled
to seek out an unnecessary imprisonment in the Marshalsea
debtors prison.3 By 1855, both phrenology and mesmerism
had been discredited, phrenology because of its dubious claims
about the localization of activities of the brain, and mesmer-
Lawrence Frank, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Okla-

homa, is the author of Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self (1984) and
Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Inves-
tigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (2003). He is at work on a book-length
project, The Specter of Hamlet: Charles Dickens and the Darwinian Moment.
862 In Hamlets Shadow: Mourning and Melancholia in Little Dorrit
ism as the province of charlatans. Nonetheless, figures such as

George Combe (17881858) and John Elliotson (17911868),
whom Dickens knew as a friend and as physician to his family,
bequeathed a legacy to nineteenth-century medicine.4 Rejecting
traditional dualism, they pointed to a naturalistic psychology to
be investigated not only by men of science, but also by a novel-
ist such as Dickens, asaccording to his memoranda noteshe
followed Clennam falling into difficulty and himself imprisoned
in the Marshalsea. Then Little Dorrit comes back in her old
dress, and devotes herself in the old way.5 As Little Dorrit moves
to an ambiguous conclusion in the marriage of Arthur Clennam
and Amy Dorrit, it represents Arthur Clennam as a Victorian
Hamlet, perceived within the context of an emerging psychiatry
freed of old dualist assumptions.
In his The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to Exter-
nal Objects (1828), Combe had dismissed traditional metaphysics,
arguing that [w]e are physical, organic, and moral beings, acting
under the sanction of general laws, a position endorsed in the
first issue of Elliotsons The Zoist in April 1843, a journal commit-
ted to the promotion of two sciencesCEREBRAL PHYSIOLOGY
and MESMERISMin a refusal to cloak our ignorance [about
the mind] by the assumption of an air of mystery and the parade
of unintelligible theories.6 Later, Elliotson proceeded to defend
mesmerism with the claim that it is simply an artificial method of
producing certain phenomena, among them a condition similar
to sleeping and dreaming that revealed the reality of a double
consciousness, a twofold existence in every man and woman.7
The double consciousness of a suspect mesmerism was to
be legitimized by William B. Carpenter (181385) in the fourth
edition of his Principles of Human Physiology (1853) as he wrote
of the activity that he identified as unconscious cerebration:
it is a most curious phenomenon, one scarcely recognized
by Metaphysical inquirers, that [after] the attempt to bring a
particular idea to the mind has been abandoned as useless, it
will often occur spontaneously a little while afterwards, suddenly
flashing (as it were) before the consciousness; and this although
the mind has been engrossed in the mean time by some entirely
different subject of contemplation.8 Ever the physiologist, Car-
penter returned to unconscious cerebration as a function of the
brain, although he went on to observe that emotional states, or
rather states which constitute emotions when we become con-
scious of them, may be developed by the same process; so that
our feelings towards persons and objects, may undergo most
Lawrence Frank 863
important changes, without our being in the least degree aware,

until we have our attention directed to our own mental state, of
the alteration which has taken place in them.9
Here, Carpenter indulged in positing the parallelism that was
supposedly to replace a Cartesian or Lockean dualism, a meta-
physics repugnant to men (and men they were) of Victorian psy-
chiatry.10 But, his words were suggestive. Robert Brudenell Carter
(18281918) was to invoke the double consciousness of Elliotson
as he offered a thorough-going psychological understanding of
hysteria. In On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria (1853),
appearing in the same year as the fourth edition of Carpenters
Human Physiology, Carter wrote of hysteria in men and women,
breaking with a centuries-old vision of hysteria based upon medi-
cal misrepresentations of the female anatomy. Instead, he argued
that hysteria was the consequence of sensations aroused
by objects, either perceived, or remembered, or imagined, or by
(the remembrance of) other prior emotions.11 Such sensations
are associated with a sexual passion that is repressed only
to seek out other channels for release in the form of hysterical
symptoms, among them tics, paroxysms, and paralysis (pp. 6,
22, and 25).
While [t]here does not appear to be any priori reason for
supposing that any individual, whether male or female, is totally
exempt from liability to hysteria, caused by some shock of a
secret character, Carter turned his attention to female patients
(pp. 32 and 31). In a society in which the double standard prevails,
the woman is more often under the necessity of endeavouring to
conceal her feelings, while a man has facilities for [the] grati-
fication of the erotic passion in ways that Carter chose not to
discuss (p. 33). So Carter turned from male hysteria to concentrate
upon the cases of women for whom the recollection of a certain
event, or train of thought, is usually followed by [a] fit (p. 42).
His particular preoccupation, perhaps obsession, became tertiary
hysteria, its symptoms excited through the instrumentality of
the memory, by a direct effort of the will as the patient, now
seen as a malingerer, perpetuates her condition (pp. 41 and 46).
According to Carter, such women exhibit Elliotsons double con-
sciousness, perhaps even Carpenters unconscious cerebration,
as they become quite ignorant of the self-imposed character of
their maladies (Carter, pp. 48 and 76). It is the physicians duty
to outface such women, to use all [his] endeavours for discover-
ing [their] secret[s], even to resort, if all else fails, to threats of
exposure to family and friends (p. 102).12
Those familiar with Little Dorrit have recognized in Mrs. Clen-

nam a study in Carters tertiary hysteria, as she maintains her
paralysis by keeping Little Dorrit at her side, deliberately recalling
to herself past injuries, all the while profess[ing] great religious
zeal (Carter, p. 142).13 In turning from Mrs. Clennams physical
paralysis to Arthur Clennams paralysis of the will, Dickens fol-
lowed Carterwho became a contributor to Household Words
rejecting somatic causes for a morbid condition of the nervous
system, characterized by the essential versatility of [a] disease
that would be variously identified in the nineteenth century as
melancholia, depression, and, later, neurasthenia (Carter, pp. 82
and 72). Like Carter, Dickens grasped the effects produced by
emotional excitement (Carter, p. 22). But, unlike Carter, he did
not avert his gaze from the way in which Carters sexual passion
could, directly or indirectly, produce male hysteria.14
By turning in his book to female patients, Carter contributed,
in Mark S. Micales words, to The Great Victorian Eclipse in the
understanding of male hysteria in its various forms.15 Although
Carters volume may well be the single most intriguing text on
hysteria in British medical history, it was at once forward-
looking and backward-looking in its neglect of male hysteria.16
In effect, male hysteria was to become a subject in search of an
author.17 Ironically, that author would be Shakespeare, whose
plays, particularly Hamlet, offered to the Romantics and, later, to
the Victorians a prism, as Jonathan Arac has argued in writing
about Little Dorrit. Through this prism, someone such as Dickens
would engage in the production of the subjectof bourgeois sub-
jectivity itselfthrough a complex process of intertextuality.18
Such an engagement with the character of Hamlet, particularly
by Romantic writers, had been sanctioned by Johann Wolfgang
von Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (179596), but more
particularly by August Wilhelm von Schlegels ber dramatische
Kunst und Litteratur (180911), translated in 1815 by John Black
(17831855), editor of the Morning Chronicle under whom Dickens
worked in the 1830s as a reporter.19 In Blacks translation, Schle-
gels A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature offered a
touchstone both to men and women of letters and to physicians,
especially in the claim, Of all poets, perhaps, [Shakespeare]
alone has portrayed the mental diseases, melancholy, delirium,
lunacy, with such inexpressible and, in every respect, definite
truth, [so] that the physician may enrich his observations from
them in the same manner as from real cases: among the plays,
Hamlet [becomes] the profound master-piece of the philosophi-
Lawrence Frank 865
cal poet.20 The Romantics, as Jonathan Bate has written, seized

upon these words, engaging in an act of appropriation [that] may
suggest that Shakespeare is not a man who lived from 1564 to
1616 but a body of work that is refashioned by each subsequent
age in the image of itself.21
During his lectures on Shakespeare in the fall and winter of
181112, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (17721834) responded to the
as yet untranslated Schlegel, speaking of Hamlets habit of brood-
ing over the world within him, producing a morbid excess that
leads to the loss of his natural power of action.22 For his part,
William Hazlitt (17781830) could turn to the Black translation,
quoting Schlegels claim that Shakespeare gives us the history of
minds as he went on to pronounce, It is we who are Hamlet.23
Later, John Charles Bucknill (181797)asylum superintendent,
promoter of psychiatry as a medical discipline, and self-styled
man of letterswould perpetuate the appropriation of Hamlet
for his own age.24 Gathering earlier essays on Shakespeare from
the Quarterly Journal of Mental Science, Bucknill published The
Psychology of Shakespeare in 1859. Like Hazlitt, he used the Black
translation, quoting Schlegel on Hamlets preoccupation with the
possible consequences of a deed that cripples the power of act-
ing.25 He proceeded to argue that [a]ll study of Hamlet must
be psychological: Hamlet is human nature (Bucknill, p. 40,
emphasis added). Taking Hamlet as a study in melancholic self-
depreciation, we arrive at the conviction that Hamlet is morbidly
melancholic (pp. 58 and 101). But, let us guard ourselves from
conveying the erroneous impression that he is a veritable lunatic.
He is a reasoning melancholiac, morbidly changed from his former
state of thought, feeling, and conduct (p. 101). In fact, Hamlet is
in a state which thousands pass through without becoming truly
insane, but which in hundreds does pass into actual madness.
It is the state of incubation of disease, in which his melancholy
sits on brood, and which, according to the turn of events, or the
constitution of the brain, may hatch insanity, or terminate in
restored health (p. 102).
In quoting Claudius, Bucknill contributed to the ongoing
appropriation of an inaccessible Shakespeare that, according to
Stephen Greenblatt, had produced the startling Shakespearean
shift from vengeance to remembrance.26 Contemporaneously with
Bucknill, Dickens participated in the shift through the character
of Arthur Clennam, his own Hamlet, who suffers from a malady
noted, as Carter had observed, for its essential versatility. In
doing so, Dickens anticipated A. C. Bradley (18511935) in his
reading of Hamlet in Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Ham-

let, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (1904) and, yes, Sigmund Freuds
Mourning and Melancholia (1917), his late-Romantic interpre-
tation of Hamlet, one culmination of the tradition initiated by
Goethes Wilhelm Meister. In his book, Bradley acknowledged the
influence of the Schlegel-Coleridge theory by dissenting from
its interpretations, yet followed the theory, and Bucknill, by reaf-
firming Shakespeares psychological subtletyhis grasp of the
tragic hero as a figure torn by an inward struggle, dramatized
in soliloquies seen as Romantic lyrics: It will be agreed that in
listening to a soliloquy we ought never to feel that we are being
addressed.27 In the case of Hamlet, the soliloquies reveal that so
far as his explicit consciousness went, [he] was sure that he ought
to obey the Ghost; but in the depths of his nature, and unknown
to himself, there was a moral repulsion to the deed.28
In his reading of Hamlet, Bradley returned to the double
consciousness of Elliotson and Carter, perhaps even to Carpen-
ters unconscious cerebration, and to Bucknills substratum of
morbid feeling (p. 58). For Bradleys Hamlet, a deeper conscience
remains below the surface as he fails to recognise it.29 He falls
victim, not to Hazlitts pretence[s], but to unconscious excuses
that produce a melancholic paralysis indicative of a conflict
between [a] melancholic disgust and apathy and those healthy
motives that rapidly sink back into a mass of diseased feel-
ing and lose the name of action.30 Thus Hamlet engages in an
unconscious weaving of pretexts for inaction, aimless tossings on a
sick bed, [with] symptoms of melancholy[,] which only increase[s] it
by deepening self-contempt.31 All of this follows inexorably from
a violent shock to [Hamlets] moral being, a shock due not to
the death of the father, but to the sudden ghastly disclosure of
his mothers true nature in an eruption of coarse sensuality,
rank and gross, speeding post-haste to its horrible delight.32
Hamlets fear that he would give some utterance to the load that
presse[s] on his heart and brain engenders a melancholy that
many readers of the play would understand if they read an
account of melancholia in a work on mental diseases.33 Like any
melancholic, Hamlet becomes rivet[ed] in a figurative prison of
self-contempt: [t]he energy of resolve is dissipated in an endless
brooding that produces, if not insanity, a longing for death.34
With his observation that [i]t would be absurdly unjust to
call Hamlet a study of melancholy, but it contains such a study,
Bradley returned to Bucknills vision of Hamlet as morbidly
melancholic without becoming truly insane, even as he an-
ticipated Freuds Mourning and Melancholia, which is now, if
Lawrence Frank 867
only in retrospect, a coda to a century of Romantic and Victorian

readings of the play (Bucknill, pp. 1012).35 At the start, Freud
acknowledged that he lacked the clinical evidence to prove the
speculations that he was about to offer: Our material, apart
from such impressions as are open to every observer [and every
reader of texts?], is limited to a small number of cases We
shall, therefore, from the outset drop all claim to general validity
for our conclusions (14:243). Later, with an allusion to Hamlet
buried in a footnoteUse every man after his desert, and who
shall scape whipping?Freud indirectly acknowledged his debt
to those scholars and critics who had preceded him: he was writ-
ing as a literary figure within a received tradition (Shakespeare,
II.ii.5245, qtd. in Freud, 14:246n1). The degree to which this
was the case is suggested by the way in which Bradleys violent
shock to [Hamlets] moral being had become Freuds trauma.
Bradleys unconscious excuses made their return in the form of
an unconscious ambivalence that led from a normal mourning in
which the world has become poor and empty to a melancholia
in which it is the ego itself that is experienced as worthless,
incapable of any achievement and morally despicable (Freud,
14:246). Either condition, according to Freud, can be precipitated
by a real or an imagined loss of someone loved. But, in melan-
cholia, an unacknowledged, or unacknowledgeable, ambivalence
toward someone whom the patient loves or has loved or should
love persists unresolved (14:248, emphasis added). Unable to
speak, to give utterance to the ambivalence that is denied, the
melancholic identifies with the abandoned [or abandoning?]
object: Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and
the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as
though it were an object, the forsaken object (14:249). Sup-
pressed criticism, even rage, felt for the one who should be loved
is directed against the self, producing a cleavage that leads to
self-punishment, even to thoughts of suicide (14:249 and 252).
With such observations, Freud had produced a reading of Hamlet
in which the shadow of the dead fatherIll call thee Hamlet,/
King, father, royal Danecasts itself upon the son who has been
driven to consider selfslaughter even before the ghost appears
to him (I.iv.445 and I.ii.132).
II
In his concluding remarks, Freud acknowledged his aware-

ness of what he had offered in Mourning and Melancholia. The
phenomena of melancholia and the mania that often accompa-

nied it, however elusive, reveal unconscious conflict: it is not
difficult to perceive an essential analogy between the work of
melancholia and of mourning (14:257). Yet, the interdependence
of the complicated problems of the mind forces us to break off
every enquiry before it is completedtill the outcome of some
other enquiry can come to its assistance (14:258).36 But in one
sense, such an enquiry already existedin Dickenss Little
Dorrit. Early on in the novel, Arthur Clennam becomes identified
with the Romantic and, now, the Victorian Hamlet. During their
shared quarantine in Marseilles harbor, Clennam remarks to Mr.
and Mrs. Meagles, I have no will.37 His words suggest Goethes
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, as Wilhelm speaks of a great action
laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it, a pure, noble
and most moral nature that sinks beneath a burden which it
cannot bear and must not cast away.38 There are even echoes of
Coleridge on Hamlets loss of his natural power of action. But,
in speaking of the fact that he has no will that [he] can put in
action now, Clennam turns to his childhood: Trained by main
force; broken, not bent; heavily ironed with an object on which I
was never consulted and which was never mine what is to be
expected from me in middle life? Will, purpose, hope? All those
lights were extinguished before I could sound the words (p. 20).
Here, Clennams complaint suggests not Goethe or Coleridge, but
Hazlitt in his Characters of Shakespears Plays (1817): Whoever
has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps
or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded
brow of reflection [whoever] could find in the world before him
only a dull blank he who has felt his mind sink within him,
and sadness cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his
hopes blighted and his youth staggered by apparitions of strange
things this is the true Hamlet.39 Hazlitts Hamlet, a character
incapable of deliberate action remain[ing] puzzled, undecided,
and sceptical, dall[ying] with his purposes, till the occasion is
lost, anticipated Dickenss Clennam.40 Moved by current[s] of
thought unavailable to his consciousness, Clennam turns to his
preoccupation with Little Dorrit or loses himself in the Circumlo-
cution Office, laboring on behalf of Daniel Doyce.41
Yet later in the novel, as Clennam succumbs to the fever
of speculation, a curious transformation occurs. In the act of
contaminating Clennam, Mr. Pancks occupie[s] his hands in
so erecting the loops and hooks of hair all over his head, that
he look[s] like a journeyman Hamlet in conversation with his
Lawrence Frank 869
fathers spirit (p. 584). In that moment, the novel alludes to the
perturbed spirit (I.v.190) who appears to Hamlet, saying,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand an end.
(I.v.159)
The allusion to Hamlet elides the preceding words of [t]he

apparition (I.ii.211): I am thy fathers spirit, / forbid / To
tell the secrets of my prison-house (I.v. 9, 134), but released
to tell a tale of adultery, murder, and incest in the kingdom of
Denmark. The tale to be told in Little Dorrit becomes a Victorian
one, a family romance rivaling that of Freuds Family Romances
(1909), that Arthur Clennam bears within him in the form of
half-forgotten voices from his childhood before he could sound
[certain] words.42 In failing to act upon the dying fathers words
as he indistinctly [said] to [him], your mother, or to pursue the
significance of the letters D.N.F. that someone has worked in
beads in the old silk watch paper in his fathers timepieceper-
haps as a memorandumClennam incurs a debt that shadows
and informs his life as he fails to honor the plea, Do not forget
(Dickens, pp. 345, 355, and 35; Shakespeare, III.iv.110).43
At the age of forty, after a twenty-year exile in China, Ar-
thur Clennam returns to London, the city of his youth, whose
[m]elancholy streets reverberate with doleful bell[s] throb-
bing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city (p. 28). As
he negotiates the crooked and descending streets that lead to
his mothers house, he passes a Congregationless Church that
seem[s] to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it out
and discover its history (p. 31, emphasis added). The reference
to Giovanni Battista Belzoni (17781823) is telling: Belzoni, the
Italian strongman turned collector of antiquities for the British
Museum, became famous for his rediscovery in 1817 of the long-
buried temple of Abu Simbel and for his penetration in 1818 into
the hidden burial chamber in the second pyramid of Giza, built by
the pharaoh Cheops.44 Anyone who had read his Narrative of the
Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples,
Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia (1820) would have
seen him as a self-promoting grave robber, a man without any
archaeological appreciation of the past.45
For Dickens, if not for his readers, the name Belzoni would
suggest that of Austen Henry Layard (181794) with whom he had
rendezvoused on a return visit to Italy in the autumn of 1853.
In Naples, [Dickens] found Layardwith whom [he] ascended
Vesuvius in the Sunlight, and came down in the Moonlight, very
merrily.46 Before turning to politics as a radical and, later, to a
career as a diplomat, Layard had made his mark as the excavator
of sites near Mosul (in present-day Iraq) that he identified as the
lost Assyrian cities of Nineveh and Nimrod. Dickens owned a copy
of Layards A Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh (1854), a
condensed version of his earlier, hugely successful, two-volume
Nineveh and Its Remains (1849).47 In the popular account Layard
recounted, verbatim, the episode in which he invited the reader to
join him in an imaginary descent into the ruins of Nimroud [sic]
to examine the subterraneous labyrinth of the excavation.48 As
he passes through a portal formed by a pair of colossal lions,
winged and human-headed, Layard comes upon other colossal
winged figures: some with the heads of eagles, others entirely hu-
man, and carrying mysterious symbols in their hands.49 There
are other portals beyond which he finds scattered monuments
of ancient history and art.50 In other halls and galleries, with-
out an acquaintance with the intricacies of the place, we should
soon lose ourselves in this labyrinth examining the marvelous
sculptures, or the numerous inscriptions that surround us.51 At
last, Layard returns to the platform from which, with the reader,
he has descended: We look around in vain for any traces of the
wonderful remains we have just seen, and are half inclined to
believe that we have dreamed a dream, or have been listening to
some tale of Eastern romance.52
Layards tour de force, his dreamlike Eastern romance, not
unlike a vision, suggests the exotic dreamscapes of the Confes-
sions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) with Thomas De Quinceys
proclamation that there is no such thing as forgetting possible
to the mind; a thousand accidents may, and will interpose a veil
between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions
on the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this
veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains
for ever.53 Two decades later, in Blackwoods Magazine for June
1845, De Quincey returned to the same themes, appropriating the
palimpsest, by now a commonplace for the archaeological record,
as a metaphor for the mind.54 According to De Quincey, What
else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?
Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon
Lawrence Frank 871
[the] brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury

all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extin-
guished. Rather, there remains the possibility of resurrection
for what had so long slept in the dust: Yes, reader, countless are
the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy which have inscribed
themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain; and,
like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the undissolving
snows on the Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the endless
strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness, but [t]hey
are not dead, but sleeping.55 In the reference to Belzoni, with the
attendant allusionshowever privateto Layard and De Quincey,
Little Dorrit has invoked an archaeological figure of speech like
that in Bucknills discussion of Hamlets response to the awful
underground voice of the Ghost that has worked its way into
the subsoil of his mind, establishing a substratum of morbid
feeling (pp. 50, 55, and 58). In this way the novel emphasizes
the psychological imperative to excavate a past, not dead, but
sleeping, within the consciousness of Arthur Clennam.56
As he crosses the portal to his mothers house, Clennam is
confronted by Layards mysterious symbols, awakening memo-
ries of his childhood that will frustrate the obligation to remember.
He sees old articles of furniture [still] in their old places; the
Plagues of Egypt framed and glazed upon the walls (pp. 323).
There is the old dark closet of which he had been many a time
the sole contents, in days of punishment, when he had regarded
it as the veritable entrance to that bourne to which [a] tract had
found him galloping (p. 33). But, it was not, and is not, only the
bourne of some evangelical perdition to which the novel in its
irony alludes, but rather that undiscoverd country, from whose
bourn / No traveler returns (III.i.7980): the unvisited realm of
memory buried within him.
The next day, standing in [t]he room [his] deceased father
had occupied for business purposes, Clennam communes with
the fathers ghost in the form of his portrait: that room is so
unaltered that he might have been imagined still to keep it invis-
ibly His picture, dark and gloomy, earnestly speechless on the
wall, with the eyes intently looking at his son as they had looked
when life departed from them, seemed to urge him awfully to the
task [Clennam] had attempted (p. 54, emphasis added). But the
task remains obscure, the fathers words and gestures ambigu-
ous, demanding interpretation. Already the gorgon presence of
his mother has balked Clennam: as to any yielding on the part of
his mother, he had now no hope (p. 54). Characteristically, Clen-
nam turns away, a dreamer, after all, resorting to fantasies not

only of Flora Cosby, his old sweetheart, but also of Pet Meagles
whose face [has] had an unusual interest for him because
of some resemblance, real or imagined, to yet another face that
he cannot quite place (p. 40, emphasis added).57
So, as is his wont, Arthur Clennam beg[ins] to dream, becom-
ing a figurative Somnambulis[t], living a two-fold existence, as
the controlling power of the Will over the current of thought is
entirely suspended, and all the actions are directly prompted
by the [unconscious] ideas which possess the mind (Dickens, p.
40).58 But, the condition of the puzzled will is common to ev-
ery man and every woman, even to the prosaic Affery, now Mrs.
Flintwinch (III.i.80). However, [w]hen Mrs. Flintwinch dream[s],
she usually dream[s], unlike the son of her old mistress, with
her eyes shut, or so she is led to believe by her bullying husband
(p. 41). On the night of Clennams return, she has a curiously
vivid dream: In fact it was not at all like a dream, it was so very
real in every respect (p. 41). Of course, in seeing Jeremiah Flint-
winchs twin brother, his Double, she does not dream (p. 42).
Rather, her husband resorts to a time-honored ruse, useful to
him and to others in positions of authority. As he shakes Affery,
he invalidates her all-too-real experience: What have you been
dreaming of? Wake up, wake up! if you ever have a dream of
this sort again, itll be a sign of your being in want of physic. And
Ill give you such a dose, old womansuch a dose! (pp. 434).
The episode, comic as it is, reveals the way in which Clennam,
too, has been violated throughout his childhood by his incarcera-
tion in the old dark closet in [his] days of punishment (p. 33).
Thrust into the dreaded closet as a child, Clennam would have
heard the recriminations exchanged by his parents, the charges
and countercharges that Affery has heard repeated over the years
as Flintwinch and Mrs. Clennam go at each other in their un-
canny repetition of those earlier marital arguments. Later, in the
climactic scene in which a buried past begins to emerge, Affery
remembers, Ive heerd in my dreams that Arthurs father was
a poor, irresolute, frightened chap, who had everything but his
orphan life scared out of him when he was young, and that he
had no voice in the choice of his wife even, but his uncle chose
her (pp. 7712). But she has been told that they was dreams,
in one of which she has heard Flintwinch tell Mrs. Clennam that
she oughtnt to have let Arthur suspect his father only It
was in the same dream where [Flintwinch] said to her that she
was notnot something, but I dont know what, for she burst out
Lawrence Frank 873
tremendous and stopped [him]: just as she had in the past in the
time of the father (pp. 772 and 773, emphasis added).59
Words, even those no longer spoken, resonate through the
years. The noises in which Flintwinch wouldnt believe become
the ghostly echoes of those recriminations to which the husband
and the wife resorted in their estrangement (p. 773). But, such
noises are not specific to the Clennam house. For, as our friend
Mr. Meagles observes in his search for Tattycoram, he has an
addled jumble of a notion of her whereabouts: There is one of
those odd impressions in my house, which do mysteriously get
into houses sometimes, which nobody seems to have picked up
in a distant form from anybody, and yet which everybody seems
to have got hold of loosely from somebody that Tattycoram is to
be found in the Grosvenor region, near Park Lane (p. 324). In
his own way, Meagles has revealed how every house speaks to its
inhabitants, how a Tattycoram or a Miss Wade, ever alert to the
spoken and the unspoken slight, has become a self-tormentor.
Even his seemingly compassionate asideHeaven knows what
[Tattycorams] mothers story must have beenspeaks to an
Arthur Clennam, brooding over what his mothers story must
have been (p. 323).
Even Mrs. Tickit (the Meagles housekeeper) muses upon the
odd impressions that insinuate themselves into houses, and into
the minds of those who inhabit them. Left in possession of their
cottage after Mr. and Mrs. Meagles depart for Rome to join their
newly married daughter, Pet, Mrs. Tickit observes to a visiting
Arthur Clennam that she may have seen the vanished Tattycoram:
I was not sleeping, nor what a person would term correctly, doz-
ing. I was more what a person would strictly call watching with
my eyes closed, for a persons thoughts however they may
stray, will go more or less on what is uppermost in their minds.
They will do it, sir, and a person cant prevent them (p. 529).
Mrs. Tickit has been thinking very much of the family. Not of
the family in the present times only, but in the past times too (p.
529, emphasis added). Her words call up those of Mr. Meagles in
Marseilles when he spoke to Clennam of the death of Pets twin
sister[,] who died when we could just see her eyesexactly like
Petsabove the table, as she stood on tiptoe holding by it (p.
19). The sister has died just at the moment when she could begin
to see and appreciate all that was going on about her. In bringing
the illegitimate Harriet Beadle, now Tattycoram, into their home,
the Meagles, according to their lights, befriend someone equally
capable of knowing more than she should as the abandoned child
of some wretched mother looking into young faces, wondering

which is the poor child she brought into this forlorn world, never
through all its life to know her love, her kiss, her face, her voice,
even her name! (p. 18). With her argumentative and philosophic
air, Mrs. Tickit continues: all times seem[ed] to be present as
she quivered [her] eyes again to glimpse a now spectral Tatty-
coram (pp. 52930).
No less spectral is the episode that immediately follows.
[P]assing at nightfall along the Strand walking quickly, and
going with some current of thought, Arthur Clennam happens
upon Tattycoram and a strange man of a remarkable appearance:
a swaggering man, with a high nose, and a black moustache as
false in its colour as his eyes were false in their expression (p.
530, emphasis added). Clennam follows Tattycoram and the man,
with the air of a foreigner, whom we recognize as the former
inmate of a Marseille prison (p. 530). On the Terrace before the
Adelphi they are joined by Miss Wade, forming a moment when
all times seem to be presenta person cant prevent them:
a tableau conjured up from the past, constituting the father,
the putative mother, and another woman, perhaps the guilty
creature of whom Affery has heard Mrs. Clennam speak in her
exchanges with Flintwinch (p. 775). Dwelling upon the family of
his imaginings, not in the present times only, but in the past
times too, Clennam has been returned to the old dark closet
in [the] days of punishment when the father, not Flintwinch,
said to his wife that she was notnot something.
This phantasmagorical meeting upon which Arthur Clennam
has chanced suggests a state of intellectual and emotional conflict
perfectly consistent with [his] character and [his] circumstances
(Bucknill, p. 66). In the meeting on the Terrace before the Adel-
phi of the four Adams brothers, the novel alludes to the Greek
Adelphoi, asserting a fraternal relationship between Arthur Clen-
nam and the man of many names who will set out to blackmail
Mrs. Clennam (Dickens, p. 531).60 In his aversion to the man whom
he will know as Blandois, Clennam disavows the unvoiced memo-
ries that he bears within himself. He remains loyal, in his way,
to the man of whom Mr. Casby speaks as Clennams respected
father and to the no-less respected mother [who] was rather
jealous of her son in days past (p. 147). The patriarchal Casby
has spoken of those whom Arthur Clennam loves or has loved
or should love, for [i]f one listens patiently to a melancholics
many and various self-accusations, one cannot in the end avoid
the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly at
Lawrence Frank 875
all applicable to the [sufferer] [but] they do fit someone else

(14:248). In his loyalty to his parents, Clennam forgoes the work
of reparation and of mourning through remembering: the shadow
of the object [falls] upon the ego, producing a cleavage as he
distances himself from the protean foreigner and identifies with
the picture of the dead father, earnestly speechless [his] eyes
intently looking at his son as they had looked when life departed
from them (Dickens, p. 54).61
In his situation, Arthur Clennam has seized upon the loss
of Pet Meagles to Henry Gowan to bec[ome] in his own eyes,
as to any [romantic] hope or prospect, a very much older man
who ha[s] done with that part of life (p. 334).62 Now, he engages
in a repetition of the past. Haunted by the words he must have
heard as a child as his mother assailed a Frederick Dorrit the
beginning of it all, the patron to a graceless orphan, training
to be a singing girl, Clennam has sought out yet another girl
almost hidden in [a] dark corner of his mothers room, a girl
whose pale transparent face has not [been] easy to make out
(pp. 779, 3940, and 53, emphasis added). The girls face sum-
mons up other facesthose of Pet Meagles, of Flora Finching,
of someone else. Clennam follows yet another spectral figure to
the walls of the Marshalsea, coming upon Frederick Dorrit in a
shabby coat that sports the pale ghost of a velvet collar as he
speaks of himself as merely passing on, like the shadow over
the sun-dial (pp. 79 and 80). As another ghost from the past,
he conducts Clennam down a narrow entry and through two
doors into the debtors prison, the repository of those with unpaid
financial, and emotional, debts (p. 81). As in the past, Frederick
Dorrit becomes the intermediary between a Clennamperhaps
another Arthur Clennam?and scenes of squalor and sexuality.
Now jeeringly referred to as Dirty Dick, Frederick Dorrit cur-
rently presides over Fanny Dorrits theatrical career as he once
had that of another girl (p. 92). Later, in offering to befriend Little
Dorrit, Clennam may even use the words his father had once
spoken: feeling that he [is] an older man, he can say, I am the
better fitted for your friend and adviser the more easily to be
trusted (pp. 381 and 382).63
Ultimately, every significant character in Little Dorrit is ac-
companied by a ghost, a visitant from the haunted house of
the past over which a gorgons spell has been cast: To stop the
clock of busy existence, at the hour when we were personally
sequestered from it; to suppose mankind stricken motionless,
when we were brought to a stand-still; to be unable to measure
the changes beyond our view is the infirmity of many invalids,

and the mental unhealthiness of almost all recluses (pp. 417, 343,
and 339). The observation made of the paralyzed Mrs. Clennam
applies as well to her son: stricken motionless by two strong
desires, so equally poised that the result [would] be complete
neutralization of each other, and a state of inaction from [the]
equipoise of desire (Bucknill, p. 104). The shadow of the dead
father has fallen upon Clennam, immobilized by a conflict due
to [unconscious] ambivalence, now fixated to a particular por-
tion of [his] past, alienated from the present and the future
(Freud, 14:251).64
Involving the double consciousness of nineteenth-century
psychiatry, the conflict within Arthur Clennam elicits the recourse
to the Romantic Doppelgnger. [J]ust landed from the packet
boatlike Clennam a self-announced stranger in LondonMon-
sieur Blandois proclaims himself a statue as he stands upon
the threshold to the Clennam house (pp. 3456). From the start,
he insinuates that he is in possession of a certain knowledge.
After a few ghostly moments, he inquires about the gold watch
lying before [Mrs. Clennam] as it always [does], examining its
two cases and the old silk watch-lining, worked with beads
(pp. 3545). He encourages Mrs. Clennam to explain its motto
as Do Not Forget! (pp. 355 and 6). Like Clennam upon his
return, Blandois tours the house, ascend[ing] to the great gar-
ret bed-room, which Arthur ha[s] occupied on the night of his
return (p. 358). He, too, stands before the portrait of the dead
father, observing to Flintwinch, Looks as if he were saying what
is itDo Not Forgetdoes he not (p. 360). Alert to the haunted
noises in the house, Blandois speaks of the secrets in all fami-
lies, materializing as the disloyal son, potentially the patricide,
even the matricide, ready to bring down the house of Clennam
(pp. 359 and 360).
All the while, Arthur Clennam labors to no avail at the appro-
priately named Circumlocution Office. Acting on behalf of Daniel
Doyce, he diverts himself from the task set for him by the dying
father in the unspoken plea, Do Not Forget. At the same time,
he broods upon the nameless figure whom he has seen in the
Adelphi with Miss Wade and Tattycoram. For the past will assert
itself: it is impossible, as William Dorrit desires, altogether to
obliterate [it], to eradicate [its] marks (pp. 478 and 479). One
night, Clennam nears his mothers house, his mind teeming
with [the] thoughts of the melancholy room which his father
had once occupied, haunted by the appealing face he had himself
Lawrence Frank 877
seen fade away with him when there was no other watcher by the
bed (pp. 543 and 5423). Suddenly, he is jostled to the wall by
the man who [has] been so much in his mind during the last few
days (p. 543, emphasis added). The ambiguity of his response
It was the man; the man he had followed in company with the
girl, and whom he had overheard talking to Miss Wadeis never
resolved (p. 543, emphasis added). But the site of the rendezvous
with Miss Wade, the Adelphi, marks this nocturnal encounter
with the nameless man as a moment out of the fantastic tales of
E. T. A. Hoffmann or Fyodor Dostoevskys The Double (1846).65
In the scene that follows, Arthur Clennam watches helplessly,
struck dumb, as Blandois conducts his business with his
mother who never remove[s] her eyes from [him] (p. 547). Pro-
foundly disturbed by the sinister intruder, Clennam is reduced to
whispering, For Heavens sake, Affery what is going on here?
(p. 549). In the days that follow, he finds himself depressed and
made uneasy by the late occurrence at his mothers: two sub-
jects l[ie] heavy on his lonely mind the one, [Daniel Doyces]
long-deferred hope for some kind of justice; the other, what he
[has] seen and heard at his mothers (pp. 578 and 583). The two
subjects reveal the cleavage within Clennam, juxtaposing Doyce
as a figurative father with a Blandois in possession of unsettling
facts about the dead Mr. Clennam and the son who has survived
him.66
Following Blandoiss disappearance, with the suspicions that
it engenders, Arthur Clennam begins his search for the self-pro-
claimed man of no country who will later be identified by John
Baptist Cavalletto as an Assassin! (pp. 354 and 677). He seeks
out Miss Wade in Calais, landing at low tide: There had been no
more water on the bar than had sufficed to float the packet in; and
now the bar itself, with a shallow break of sea over it, looked like
a lazy marine monster just risen to the surface, whose form was
indistinctly shown as it lay asleep (p. 653). The passage prepares
for Clennams appearance at the door to Miss Wades house: he
announces himself as Monsieur Blandois, the person to whom
she will refer as that creature (pp. 654 and 658). In asking her
if she can tell [him] something of [Blandoiss] antecedents, Clen-
nam seeks knowledge of his own past, lying dormant beneath the
current of [his] thought[s] (pp. 657 and 530).
The journey to Calais emphasizes that Arthur Clennam has
remained true to the anagrammatic meaning of his name, mana-
cled to the mysteries of the past. He loses the capacity to control
his attention or train of thought; rather, it rode at anchor by
the haunting topic, and would hold to no other idea. As though a

criminal should be chained in a stationary boat on a deep clear
river, condemned, whatever countless leagues of water flowed past
him, always to see the body of the fellow-creature he had drowned
lying at the bottom, immovable, and unchangeable (p. 679, em-
phasis added). The passage further illuminates the implications
of the landing at Calais as the submerged marine monster is
metamorphosed into the drowned victim whose terrible linea-
ments that Clennam now glimpses become his own (p. 679).67
Lost in the oppression of a dream, Clennam helplessly con-
templates the shame and exposure [that are] impending over
[his mothers] and his fathers memory (p. 679). He is paralyzed,
[h]is advice, energy, activity, money, credit, all his resources
whatsoever made useless (p. 680). Like Freuds melancholic,
he is psychologically bankrupt. In succumbing to the Merdle in-
fection and investing in speculative ventures, Clennam courts a
literal bankruptcy that will lead to his incarceration in the Mar-
shalsea. In fact, he embraces his situation, ignoring the pruden-
tial advice of Pancks and Mr. Rugg. His dreaded arrest delivers
him to debtors prison and to the old, familiar room, his eyes
fixed on the floor, recalling the past, brooding over the present,
and not attending to either (pp. 720 and 719, emphasis added).
Fully identified with the dead father, he remains forbid[den] /
To tell the secrets of [his] prison-house, giving himself over to
the dangers of introspection: the state of incubation of disease,
in which his melancholy sits on brood, and which may hatch
insanity, or terminate in restored health (I.v.134).
In the imprisonment that follows his arrest, Arthur Clennam
consoles himself with thoughts of Little Dorrit and her loyalty
to an undeserving father: If I, a man, with a mans advantages
and means and energies, had slighted the whisper in my heart,
that if my father had erred, it was my first duty to conceal the
fault and to repair it, what youthful figure would have stood
before me to put me to shame? (p. 721). In concealing the fa-
thers fault, whatever it may be, Clennam has failed to unearth
his own antecedents and to grasp the wrong done to the woman
who had borne him and to himself, for the old legal tag: paternity
is always uncertain, maternity is most certain no longer holds
true.68 In the morbid state of his nerves, Clennam fears that,
in fulfilling the dying fathers ambiguous plea, he would become
Blandois, the assassin, who materializes before him in the Mar-
shalsea, greeting him as brother-bird, as my small boy, even
asmy son (pp. 754, 742, 744, and 745). Blandois sneeringly
refers to the Marshalsea as [a] hospital for imbeciles!a figu-
Lawrence Frank 879
rative Bedlam for someone such as Clennam who, in Blandoiss

words, mellow[s]losing body and colour, ever more obviously
the fathers ghost (pp. 749 and 745).69
Now, Clennam wills a return to the past. He summons up the
figure of Little Dorrit, remembering their exchange on the Iron
Bridge when he commented on the spirit and influence with
which she cheer[s] her father (p. 260). She had responded with
a question that has become for him a cherished promise: If you
were in prison, could I bring such comfort to you? (p. 260). Nor
in his imprisonment has he forgotten her words upon William
Dorrits release from the MarshalseaIt seems to me hard that
he should pay in life and money bothas she, as Freud would
do later, associates energy and wealth (p. 422). With her words
in mind, [d]ozing and dreaming, without the power of reckoning
time, Clennam sees a quiet figure seem[ing] to stand there, with
a black mantle on it: It seemed to draw the mantle off and drop
it on the ground, and then it seemed to be his Little Dorrit in her
old, worn dress (pp. 755 and 776, emphasis added). No longer
shrouded, he sees in the loving, pitying, sorrowing, dear face,
as in a mirror, how changed he [is], seeking in it a long-sought
face from an earlier time (p. 756).
It is the codicil to the will of Gilbert Clennam, the uncle of
Arthur Clennams father, that establishes the figurative signifi-
cance of Little Dorrit in the novel. But the will is to be understood
within the context of a story that has not been fully told before,
of facts of which Gilbert Clennam was never fully aware. It is
Blandois, now identified as Rigaud, Cavallettos Assassin, who
finally forces Mrs. Clennam to respond to his insistent ques-
tion, What was it you were not? (p. 773). He has become the
unrelenting son of Mrs. Clennams fearsassertive, dismissive,
accusatoryall that Arthur Clennam and his father before him
were not. She must respond to the refrain What was it you were
not? with the words that Affery has never heard before: Not
Arthurs mother! (p. 773). Now Mrs. Clennam goes on to tell her
story in her own words as her paralysis loosens its hold upon her.
Once she had discovered her husbands liaison with the girl who
was Clennams mother, within a twelvemonth of [the] marriage,
she wrenched the baby boy from the pleading girl who was then
free to bear her load of guilt in secret, and to break her heart in
secret (pp. 775 and 777). At last, the girl drooped away into
melancholy and withdrawal, then into madness, to be delivered
into the hands of Flintwinchs twin brother, the lunatic-keeper,
until her death at the time of Arthur Clennams departure for
China (pp. 778 and 783).
According to Mrs. Clennam, the suppressed codicil was

dictated to her when Gilbert Clennam had been reduced to
imbecility, at the point of death, and labouring under the delu-
sion of some imaginary relenting towards a girl, of whom he had
heard that his nephew had once had a fancy for her, which he
had crushed out of him (p. 778). Mrs. Clennam sees the codicil
as a rebuke to her as wife, mother, woman, a counternarrative
to her own self-justifying story. Appropriately, it is Rigaud who
recites the terms of the codicil: One thousand guineas to the
little beauty you slowly hunted to death. One thousand guineas
to the youngest daughter her patron [Frederick Dorrit] might have
at fifty, or (if he had none) [his] brothers youngest daughter, on
her coming of age (p. 779). Here, he quotes from memory: the
bequest exists as the remembrance of [Frederick Dorrits] pro-
tection of a friendless young orphan girl (p. 779). The terms are
convoluted, difficult to decipher, yet another voice from the past,
pleading, Remember me, as I wish to be remembered (I.v.91).
Finally, the codicil generates a metonymic chain that links the
little beauty to Little Dorrit, always Maggys Little Mother
(p. 101). If only in his imaginings, Arthur Clennam has returned
to an earlier time, either vaguely remembered or Devoutly to be
wishd [for] (Shakespeare, III.i.64).70
Through the elaborate terms of the codicil to Gilbert Clennams
will, the novel figuratively establishes Little Dorrit as the lost
mother. The face that she presents to the eyes of Arthur Clennam,
the loving, pitying, sorrowing, dear face, mirrors back to him a
version of himselfworthy of being loved, capable of lovingthat
has been denied to him by his parents. In his childhood, he has
[sat] speechless in the midst of rigid silence, glancing in dread
from the one averted face to the other, seeing in the demoralized
fathers face a future self, while the woman he has known as his
mother looks away with an unrelenting resentment, even aversion,
to the child whom she will claim always to have loved (p. 33). In
Little Dorrits face, Clennam seeks to find an affirmation of his
worth, even of his self, that he has never experienced or that he
knew once, long ago, all too briefly through the young girl from
whom he was separated by the willfulness of Mrs. Clennam.71
III
It becomes ironic, then, that Arthur Clennams marriage to

Little Dorrit violates the imperative to excavate the past that has
been established in the reference to the Congregationless Church
Lawrence Frank 881
that seem[s] to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it

out and discover its history (p. 31). Instead, Mrs. Clennam, now
a ghostly figure as if a dead woman ha[s] risen, seeks out
Little Dorrit in the Marshalsea (p. 784). She has her read Rigauds
copies of the letters written by Clennams distraught mother that
reveal the truth of his birth, as well as a copy of the codicil to the
will, again in the hand of Rigaud. Mrs. Clennam pleads that Little
Dorrit not disclose [the facts] to Arthur until [she is] dead: I
have seen him, with his mothers face, looking up at me in awe
trying to soften me with his mothers ways: I would not have
him in a moment, however blindly, throw me down from the sta-
tion I have held before him all his life Let me never feel, while
I am still alive, that I die before his face, and utterly perish away
from him, like one consumed by lightning and swallowed by an
earthquake (pp. 7901).
In acquiescing to Mrs. Clennams plea, Little Dorrit denies
to Arthur Clennam for the time being, perhaps forever, the
knowledge of a past that has haunted him in the form of those
spectral figures that have confronted him throughout the novel.
More disturbingly, she comes into the possession of the iron box
containing the original documents that Rigaud, as Monsieur
Blandois, has left with Miss Wade in Calais. In his interview with
Miss Wade, Clennam has once again been in the presence of the
written evidence that would reveal his history, just as he was
upon the night of his return to his mothers house. Delivered by
a repentant Tattycoram into the hands of Mr. Meagles and Little
Dorrit, the iron box becomes a figurative Pandoras box, only to
disappear from the narrative, along with the copies of the revela-
tory writings from the past that Rigaud has addressed both to
Clennam and to Little Dorrit. In her role as Little Dorrit. Never
any other name, she holds the key to Clennams birth, even as
on the day of their wedding she asks him to burn a folded paper
with [his] own hand, surely the original codicil written in Mrs.
Clennams hand (pp. 822 and 825). In this way, she suppresses
both the injustice done to her and her family and her figurative
connection to the little beauty to whom Gilbert Clennam had
reached out with a bequest meant as a recompense to her for
[her] supposed unmerited suffering (p. 778).
In the Marshalsea interview between Mrs. Clennam and
Little Dorrit, Arthur Clennams past is sealed off to him within
the novel as we have it. Then, the two women make their way
through London to confront Rigaud. As they enter the gateway
to the Clennam house, they watch it collapse before their eyes
into a heap of ruin, as if every tumbling fragment were intent on

burying the potential blackmailer (p. 794). Like one of Carters
hysterics, Mrs. Clennam seizes upon the occasion, relapsing into
the paralysis that she has years before chosen for herself: [S]he
never from that hour moved so much as a finger again, or had
the power to speak one word (p. 794). In the rigid silence [that]
she ha[s] so long held, she live[s] and die[s] a statue, a mute
memorial to a past that seems to have been swallowed up as if
by the figurative earthquake of which she has spoken (p. 794).
As parties of diggers work away at the ruins in a vain search
for the foreigner and Mr. Flintwinch, the past would seem to be
buried away in the depths of the earth, in Bucknills subsoil
of [the] mind (Dickens, pp. 794 and 795). The diggers work by
night and by day, only to come upon the dirty heap of rubbish
that ha[s] been the foreigner (p. 794). Of Flintwinch, there is no
trace. Folk persist in believing that he must be dead in spite of
repeated intelligence which [comes] over in course of time, that
an old man, who [wears] the tie of his neckcloth under one ear,
and who [is] very well known to be an Englishman, consort[s]
with the Dutchmen at the Hague, and in the drinking-shops
of Amsterdam, under the style and designation of Mynheer von
Flyntevynge (p. 795). The past lives on in this curious appari-
tion who does not forget. In his cups Flintwinch follows his twin
in telling the story of the House of Clennam to anyone indulging
him in his taste for spirits.
The fruitless digging of the excavators among the London
geological formations returns the novel to Belzoni, to Layard
and his archaeological endeavors to recover the past, to William
Dorrit returning to Rome after his visit to London to consolidate
the family reputation and fortune (p. 795). As his coach nears
Rome, Dorrit looks out upon fragments of ruinous enclosure,
yawning window gap and crazy wall, deserted houses, leaking
wells, broken water-tanks, spectral cypress-trees, all suggesting
an archaeological dreamscape (p. 637). Soon Dorrit comes upon a
funeral procession with an indistinct show of dirty vestments,
lurid torches, swinging censers, and a great cross borne before
an ugly priest by torchlight (p. 638). The moment, infused
by a Protestant distaste for things Roman Catholic, ends as the
coach passengers disperse, carrying with them their coach-load
of luxuries from the two great capitals of Europe: they were (like
the Goths reversed) beating at the gates of Rome (p. 638).
William Dorrits return to Rome summons up Pictures from
Italy (1846) in which Dickens describes his adventures on the
Lawrence Frank 883
Continent in 184445, including his experience of Paris, Genoa,

and Rome. On his own journey to Rome in the late winter of 1845,
Dickens and his company crossed the Campagna, beg[inning],
in a perfect fever, to strain our eyes for Rome; and when the
Eternal City appeared, at length, in the distance; it looked like
I am half afraid to write the wordlike LONDON!!! There it lay,
under a thick cloud, with innumerable towers, and steeples, and
roofs of houses, rising up into the sky, and high above them all,
one Dome.72 The uncanniness of it all struck home: it was so
like London, at that distance, that if you could have shown it me,
in a glass, I should have taken it for nothing else.73 Later, once
again after crossing the Campagna, Dickens comes on Rome, by
moonlight, to find himself in a broad square before some haughty
church: in the centre of which, a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk,
brought from Egypt in the days of the Emperors, looks strangely
on the foreign scene about it; or perhaps an ancient pillar, with its
honoured statue overthrown, supports a Christian saint: Marcus
Aurelius giving place to Paul, and Trajan to St. Peter.74
The enduring past evoked in Dickenss present-tense descrip-
tion of Rome points, if only in retrospect, to Civilization and Its
Discontents (1930) and to the memorable analogy to which Freud
turned in illustrating the Romantic conviction that in mental life
nothing which has once been formed can perishthat everything
is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances it can
once more be brought to light.75 For Freud, as for De Quincey
and Dickens, there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the
mind. In the history of the Eternal City, Freud, like Dickens
before him, finds an apt metaphor: Now let us, by a flight of
imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a
psychical entity with a similarly long and copious pastan entity,
that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence
will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development
continue to exist alongside the latest one.76 Freud goes on: Where
the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Neros
vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should
find not only the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us
by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by
Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting
the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple
over which it was built.77
Finally, Freud concludes, There is clearly no point in spin-
ning our phantasy any further, for it leads to things that are
unimaginable and even absurd. Contrasting Rome with London,
he concedes that [a] city is thus a priori unsuited for a compari-

son of this sort with a mental organism.78 But the lure of the
archaeological analogy would prove irresistible. As early as The
Aetiology of Hysteria (1896), in which he set forth the seduction
theory that he would soon abandon, Freud discussed the mind as
a figurative site of excavation. He asked his readers to [i]magine
that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his inter-
est is aroused by an expanse of ruins to which he turns with
picks, shovels and spades clear[ing] away the rubbish [to]
uncover what is buried: If his work is crowned with success,
the discoveries are self-explanatory.79 He finds the ramparts
of a palace or a treasure-house; perhaps the fragments of col-
umns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous inscriptions,
which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a
language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated,
yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote
past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa
loquuntur!80
But, like Mrs. Clennamin her rigid silence a mute stat-
uethe stones may not speak. Perhaps worse than silence is the
story the stones might tell if they could speak, a story akin to Mrs.
Clennams as she confesses that she is Not Arthurs mother,
pointing to complexities that Freud, writing in Family Romances
in 1909, had not quite foreseen. In the controversial Female Sexu-
ality of 1931, Freud set out to anticipate the heterodox claims
about the mother and the child that Melanie Klein (18821960)
was soon to publicize in her Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932).81
Once again, Freud turned to an archaeological figure of speech,
confronting a time prior to the phase of the normal Oedipus
complex, an early, pre-Oedipus, phase in girlsas well as in
boys?82 Freud could only observe that it comes to us as a sur-
prise, like the discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenean
civilization behind the civilization of Greece.83
In her own way, Klein had come upon an undiscoverd coun-
try that had been touched upon, however obliquely, by Bradley in
his discussion of Hamlet: a study of melancholy in which Hamlet
succumbs to the moral shock of the sudden ghastly disclosure
of his mothers true nature in an eruption of coarse sensual-
ity, rank and gross, speeding [her] post-haste to its horrible
delight.84 There is something hyperbolic, even shrill, in Bradleys
language. Yet he had pointed to an ambivalence existing before
the fathers ghost appears to Hamlet: the widely experienced am-
bivalence toward the mother, and the mothers body, that was at
Lawrence Frank 885
the center of Kleins representation of the early years in a childs

life, an ambivalence that became the buried foundation of the
later mental life.85
This was the terrain that De Quincey had visited in his Confes-
sions, the terrain to which Dickens returned three decades later
in Little Dorrit. De Quinceys Ann of Oxford Street, whose surname
is never to be known, prostitutes herself to succor the stricken
De Quincey with a glass of port wine and spices, that act[s] upon
[his] empty stomach, (which at that time would have rejected all
solid food) with an instantaneous power of restoration.86 After
providing this powerful and reviving stimulus, the generous
girl, his poor orphan companion, not yet sixteen, disappears
forever, perhaps into the central darkness of a London brothel,
preferably into the darkness of the grave.87 Ann, loved by De
Quincey as affectionately as if she had been [his] sister, is lost
to him in the mighty labyrinths of London, the city awaiting its
figurative transformation in Little Dorrit and in Civilization and Its
Discontents.88 Ann is not unlike another child-woman, another
Magdalene, who gives birth to an illegitimate child; nurtures him
until he is wrested away from her to become Arthur Clennam;
and is delivered over to a melancholy that hatch[es] insanity
and death.89
In her challenges to psychoanalytic orthodoxies over the years,
Klein prepared for Julia Kristevas Black Sun: Depression and
Melancholia (1987/1989), yet another contribution to Romantic,
now post-Romantic, preoccupations with the self that can be
traced back to Schlegels Lectures, perhaps to the observation
that Shakespeare give[s] us the history of minds in the same
manner as [in] real cases (2:1323). In her Lacanian account of
infantile and adult ambivalence, Kristeva even hearkens back to
Bradleys reading of Hamletand to Little Dorrit. She writes of
an unfulfilled mourning for the maternal object that can lead
to depression and even to suicide, a merging with sadness and,
beyond it, with that impossible love, never reached, always else-
where, such as the promises of nothingness, of death.90 Kristeva
presses on where Freud once had left off, in his refusal to pur-
sue the logic of an archaeological figure of speech that suggests
a De Quincean palimpsest, layers upon layers, depths beneath
depths, those endless strata [that] have covered up each other in
forgetfulness.91 She engages in the recovery of an unimaginable
past: For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biologi-
cal and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming
autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity.92 It leads perhaps
to a consummation devoutly to be wished, the turning to [a]n

imagined partner able to dissolve the mother imprisoned within
myself by giving me what she could and above all what she could
not give me a new life.93
In following Klein, Kristeva has ventured into that Minoan-
Mycenean time that Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia and
elsewhere, had refused to visit. It is a region that Dickens had
already imagined in Little Dorrit as the novel insistently points to
a time before the father, a time to which Arthur Clennam from the
start has sought to return. As early as his first chance meeting
with Pet Meagles, he has responded to [a] lovely girl, with a frank
face, and wonderful eyes; so large, so soft, so bright, initiating
a train of associations leading to a face long lost to him (p. 16).
Finally, Little DorritKristevas imagined partnerappears be-
fore him in the Marshalsea, her loving, pitying, sorrowing, dear
face mirroring back to him the promise of a new life. Like Mr.
Meagles, the novel has brooded upon what [the] mothers story
must have been without resolving its mystery. Throughout, Little
Dorrit echoes, not with the fathers, but with the mothers plea, a
subversive rendering of the motto, Do Not Forget!94
NOTES
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, Arden Shakespeare

1
(London and New York: Methuen, 1982), III.i.1669. All further references
are to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by act, scene,
and line numbers.
2
Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, in The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and general
ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 195374), 14:24358,
246. All further references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in
the text by volume and page number.
3
C[harles] D[ickens] to [Wilkie] Collins, Tavistock House, 4 March
1855, The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey,
and Kathleen Tillotson, Pilgrim Edition, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
19652002), 7:555.
4
For discussions of the status of phrenology and mesmerism, see Michael
J. Clark, The Rejection of Psychological Approaches to Mental Disorder in
Late Nineteenth-Century British Psychiatry, in Madhouses, Mad-Doctors,
and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era, ed. An-
drew Scull (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), pp. 27883; L.
S. Hearnshaw, The Shaping of Modern Psychology (London and New York:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 1502; and Janet Oppenheim, Shat-
tered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New
York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), esp. pp. 556 and 298300.
Lawrence Frank 887
5
Dickens, Charles Dickens Book of Memoranda: A Photographic and Ty-
pographic Facsimile of the Notebook Begun in January 1855, transcribed and
annotated by Fred Kaplan (New York: New York Public Library, 1981), p. 12.
6
George Combe, The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External
Objects, 7th edn. (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, and John Anderson,
Jr., 1836), p. xi; [John Elliotson], Prospectus, The Zoist: A Journal of Cere-
bral Physiology and Mesmerism, and Their Applications to Human Welfare 1,
1 (April 1843): 14, 1; and Elliotson, Cerebral Physiology: 525 17.
7
Elliotson, Instances of Double States of Consciousness Independent
of Mesmerism, The Zoist 4, 14 (July 1846): 15187, 157 and 187. For a
discussion of Dickens and Elliotson, see Kaplan, The Mesmeric Mania, in
Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 333; and Kaplan, A Believer, in Dickens and Mes-
merism, pp. 5573.
8
William B. Carpenter, Principles of Human Physiology with Their Chief
Applications to Psychology, Pathology, Therapeutics, Hygine, and Forensic
Medicine, 4th edn. (London: John Churchill, 1853), p. 811.
9
Carpenter, p. 819.
10
Throughout Shattered Nerves, Oppenheim deals with the commit-
ment to a so-called parallelism in Victorian neurology and physiology that
sought not to be identified with a traditional dualism. For her comments on
Carpenter, see pp. 70, 301, and 303.
11
Robert Brudenell Carter, On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria
(London: John Churchill, 1853), p. 4. All further references to On the Pathology
and Treatment of Hysteria are from this edition and will be cited parentheti-
cally in the text by page number.
12
For an early discussion of Carter on hysteria, see Ilza Veith, The Vic-
torian Era, in Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago and London: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 199220, 199209. Also, see Scull, Hysteria:
The Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 6671 and 171. It is
an intriguing coincidence that in 1853, John Churchill published not only
the fourth edition of Carpenters Human Physiology and Carters Hysteria,
but also the tenth edition of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, in
which the aggressive language about the human mind in the 1844 edition
Its old metaphysical character vanishes in a moment, and the distinction
usually taken between physical and moral is annulled, as only an error in
termshad been muted through the deletion of the phrasing, the distinc-
tion between physical and moral [is] only an error in terms, into [The]
old metaphysical character [of mind] vanishes[,] [a] view agree[ing] with what
all observation teaches, that mental phenomena flow directly from the brain
([London: John Churchill, 1844], pp. 3312; and Vestiges, 10th edn. [London:
John Churchill, 1853] p. 290). Carpenter had a hand in the revision of the
tenth edition that avoided the dogmatic rejection of a traditional dualism.
The story of Dickenss relationship to the Carpenter circle, including William
Henry Wills and his wife, Janetthe younger sister of Robert Chambers (Mr.
Vestiges)has yet to be told. See Pietro Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden
Powell and the Anglican Debate, 18001860 (Cambridge, New York, and Syd-
ney: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), p. 274n4; and James A. Secord, Victorian
Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship
of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago and London: Univ.

of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 143 and 493.
13
See Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 518.
14
For the articles that Carter contributed to Household Words, see Anne
Lohrli, ed., Household Words: A Weekly Journal, 18501859, Conducted
by Charles Dickens (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 2234. In
Shattered Nerves, Oppenheim offers an extensive survey of the vagaries
of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century terminology in the attempt to
identify, some would say to construct, a condition involving the paralysis of
the will: see pp. 144, 2101, and 255.
15
Mark S. Micale, The Great Victorian Eclipse, in Hysterical Men: The
Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press,
2008), pp. 49116.
16
Micale, p. 89.
17
Micale, p. 116.
18
Jonathan Arac, Hamlet, Little Dorrit, and the History of Character, in
Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel (New York:
Fordham Univ. Press, 2011), pp. 3446, 35.
19
See Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vols.
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 1:935. Upon John Blacks death in
1855, Dickens wrote to John Forster, Dear old Black! My first hearty out-and-
out appreciator (Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols. [Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott, 1874], 1:106, qtd. in Johnson, 1:182).
20
Black, trans., A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, by
Augustus William Schlegel [sic], 2 vols. (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy;
Edinburgh: William Blackwood; and Dublin: John Cumming, 1815), 2:133
and 106, emphasis added.
21
Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criti-
cism, 17301830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 3. For a discussion
of productions of Hamlet in the nineteenth century, see David Bevington,
Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages, The Very Torrent, Tempest,
and Whirlwind of Your Passion: Hamlet in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), pp. 10840.
22
Henry Nelson Coleridge, ed. The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, 4 vols. (London: William Pickering, 183639; rprt., New York:
AMS Press, 1967), 2:216, 205, and 204, emphasis added. Also, see Richard
Holmes, Hamlet in Fleet Street, in Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 18041834
(London: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 22187.
23
Schlegel, 2:132, qtd. in William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespears
Plays, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, Centenary
edn., 21 vols. (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 193034), 4:172
and 232. Hazlitt silently corrects a typographical error in Blacks translation,
which actually reads give us the history of minds.
24
For a discussion of John Charles Bucknills career, see Scull, Char-
lotte MacKenzie, and Nicholas Hervey, From Disciple to Critic: Sir John
Charles Bucknill (18171897), in Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation
of the Mad-Doctoring Trade (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996), pp.
187225. Also, see Ekbert Faas, Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and
Lawrence Frank 889
the Rise of Psychiatry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988), esp. pp. 34,
10911, and 113.
25
Schlegel, 2:194, qtd. in Bucknill, The Psychology of Shakespeare
(London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859), p. 66.
All further references to The Psychology of Shakespeare are from this edition
and appear parenthetically in the text by page number.
26
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 2001), p. 229.
27
A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello,
King Lear, Macbeth (London and New York: Macmillan, 1904), pp. 123, 56,
18, and 72, emphasis added.
28
Bradley, p. 99, emphasis added.
29
Ibid., emphasis added.
30
Hazlitt, 4:234; Bradley, pp. 106, 135, and 123; and Shakespeare,
III.i.88, qtd. in Bradley, p. 123.
31
Bradley, p. 123, emphasis added.
32
Bradley, pp. 116 and 118; and Shakespeare, I.ii.136, qtd. in Bradley,
p. 118.
33
Bradley, p. 121.
34
Bradley, pp. 120, 106, and 121, emphasis added.
35
Bradley, p. 121.
36
For a sampling of opinions on Freud, see Bate: Freud would have been
the first to admit that the Romantic Hamlet helped him to invent psycho-
analysis (p. 201); Harold Bloom, interview by Imre Salusinszky, in Criticism
in Society: Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom,
Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank
Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller, by Salusinszky, New Accents (New York and
London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 4473: My interest in Freud comes from the
increasing realization that Freud is a kind of codifier or abstractor of Wil-
liam Shakespeare It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian psychology (p.
55); and Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, from the
Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989): Freud
himself was, above all, a literary critic. He constructed his entire system by
interpreting verbal narratives: all [are] stories, all axiomatically cryptic,
their real meaning teeming beneath the crust of an ostensible narrative
(p. 263, emphasis added). I would agree with Francis Barker in his The Tremu-
lous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen,
1984): Hamlet is a contradictory, transitional text, and one not yet fully as-
similated into the discursive order which has claimed it: the promise of essen-
tial subjectivity remains unfulfilled (p. 38). For Barker, Romantic conceptions
of character are imposed upon the play, leading to the discourse of bourgeois
subjectivity that is Freuds historical starting place and object (p. 57).
37
Dickens, Little Dorrit, Oxford Illustrated Dickens (Oxford, New York,
and Toronto: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 20. All further references are to
this edition and appear parenthetically in the text by page number.
38
I quote Thomas Carlyles 1824 translation, Wilhelm Meisters Appren-
ticeship and Travels, [by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe], vols. 23 and 24 of
The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, 30 vols. (London: Chapman
and Hall, 18971901; rprt. New York: AMS Press, 1969), 23:2812.
Hazlitt, 4:2323, emphasis added.

39
Hazlitt, 4:234.
40
41
Carpenter, p. 809.
42
Freud, Family Romances, in Standard Edition, 9:23541.
43
In Shakespearean Constitutions, Bate quotes Cobbetts Weekly Politi-
cal Register of 30 January 1811 to demonstrat[e] that the context of a
Shakespearean quotation would be in every mans mind and that [a] politi-
cal allusion works by a sophisticated kind of inference which sometimes
depends on a movement from text to context (pp. 845, emphasis added;
William Cobbett, Summary of Politics. The Regency, Cobbetts Weekly Po-
litical Register 19, 9:22547, 231; qtd. in Bate, p. 85). In Shakespeare and
Dickens: The Dynamics of Influence, Valerie L. Gager observes, If any one
of Shakespeares plays was known by an individual living during the Victo-
rian era that play was Hamlet ([Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996],
p. 58). She goes on to explore how literary allusion functions, quoting John
Hollanders definition of allusion [that] supposes a portable library shared
by the author and his ideal audience (p. 162; Hollander, The Figure of Echo:
A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After [Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:
Univ. of California Press], p. 65). In Reinventing Shakespeare, Taylor argues
that in the late eighteenth century and after writers could expect readers to
recognize quotations from Shakespeare and relish the aptness of an allusion
or the novelty of an interpretation (p. 107).
44
Stanley Mayes, The Great Belzoni (London: Putnam, 1959): for Abu
Simbel, see pp. 1419 and 16571; for the pyramids at Giza, see pp. 925,
197207, and 2613.
45
See G[iovanni Battista] Belzoni, Narrative of the Operations and Recent
Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations in Egypt
and Nubia, and of a Journey to the Coast of the Red Sea, in Search of the
Ancient Berenice; and Another to the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon (London: John
Murray, 1820).
46
Dickens to Miss Burdett Coutts, Rome, 13 November 1853, in Letters
of Charles Dickens, 7:1889, 189.
47
Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains: With an Account of a
Visit to the Chaldean Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-Wor-
shippers; and an Enquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians,
2 vols., 3d edn. (London: John Murray, 1849).
48
Layard, A Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1854), pp. 305 and 307. For a life of Layard, see Gordon Water-
field, Layard of Nineveh (London: John Murray, 1963). For a list of Layards
books owned by Dickens, see J. H. Stonehouse, ed., Catalogue of the Library
of Charles Dickens from Gadshill: Reprinted from Sotherans Price Current of
Literature Nos. CLXXIV and CLXXV; Catalogue of His Pictures and Objects of
Art: Sold by Messrs. Christie, Manson, and Woods, July 9, 1870; Catalogue of
the Library of W. M. Thackeray: Sold by Messrs. Christie, Manson, and Woods,
March 18, 1864; and Relics from His Library Comprising Books Enriched with
His Characteristic Drawings: Reprinted from Sotherans Price Current of
Literature No. CLXXVII (London: Piccadilly Fountain Press, 1935), facsimile
of the first edition, republished by Takashi Terauchi (Japan: 2003), p. 71.
49
Layard, A Popular Account, p. 307.
Lawrence Frank 891
50
51
52
53
Layard, A Popular Account, p. 311; Thomas De Quincey, Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater Together with Selections from the Autobiography
of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Edward Sackville-West (London: Cresset Press,
1950), p. 328.
54
[De Quincey], The Palimpsest, in Suspiria de Profundis: Being a Se-
quel to the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Blackwoods Edinburgh
Magazine 57 (JanuaryJune 1845): 73943.
55
De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis: Being a Sequel to The Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater, in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey,
ed. David Masson, 14 vols. (London: A. and C. Black, 189697), 13:346 and
348, emphasis added. In using the Masson edition, I have turned to a more
readily available reprint that accurately uses the original text.
56
Dickens owned a presentation copy of The Psychology of Shakespeare
(Stonehouse, p. 101). It is tempting to think that in reading Little Dorrit, if
indeed he had, Bucknill would have recognized a vision of the mind and
a figurative language akin to his own. For the theoretical issues such a
speculation raises, see Dominick LaCapra, History and Psychoanalysis, in
Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989),
pp. 3066, especially pp. 545.
57
The interpretation that follows is indebted to Derridas Specters of
Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International,
trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). In the book,
Derrida writes of sons unable to break with the ancestor: A docile son
listens to his father, he mimes him but does not understand him at all
(p. 122, emphasis added). In Hamlet in Purgatory, in a chapter entitled Re-
member Me, Greenblatt observes that Hamlet submits to an uncanny and
yet actual link between himself and his dead father, a link manifested in
the inescapable obligation to remember (pp. 20557, 218). Later he observes,
in the context of the play as a whole, the reiterated expression I am dead
has an odd resonance: these are words that are most appropriately spoken
by a ghost. It is as if the spirit of Hamlets father has not disappeared; it
has been incorporated by his son (p. 229). For a recent discussion of re-
membering and autobiographical writing in Dickenss novels, see Rosemarie
Bodenheimer, Memory, in Knowing Dickens (Ithaca and London: Cornell
Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 5589.
58
Carpenter, p. 829; David Skae, Case of Intermittent Mental Disorder
of the Tertian Type, with Double Consciousness, Northern Journal of Medi-
cine 14 (June 1845): 103, 12, qtd. in Elliotson, Instances, p. 187; and
Carpenter, p. 829.
59
In pursuing the implications of the previous episode for Little Dorrit
as a whole, I am indebted to V. N. Voloinov, Freudianism: A Critical Sketch,
trans. I. R. Titunik, ed. Neal H. Bruss (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
Univ. Press, 1987), especially The Dynamics of the Psyche as a Struggle of
Ideological Motives and Not of Natural Forces, pp. 7583.
60
See Adelphi, in The London Encyclopdia, ed. Ben Weinreb and
Christopher Hibbert (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 67.
I find it interesting that Freud had read Little Dorrit. In April 1884,
61
during a time of personal and professional distress, he wrote to his fiance,

Martha Bernays, to inform her of an unexpected loan from his friend, Josef
Paneth: it seems that we have started on the second volume of our highly
interesting family chronicle (Riches). Just listenit really sounds like a
chapter out of Dickens (Freud to Martha Bernays, Vienna, 15 April 1884,
in Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania and James
Stern [New York: Basic Books, 1975], p. 103). For the context in which Freud
alluded to Book the Second: Riches of Little Dorrit, see Ernest Jones, Per-
sonal Life (18801890), in The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries:
18561900, vol. 1 of The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (New York:
Basic Books, 195357), pp. 15497. With this letter in mind, it is possible to
see that just as Bucknill saw Hamlet through the prism of Alfred, Lord Ten-
nysons In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850), Freud saw Hamlet through the prism
of Little Dorrit as he wrote Mourning and Melancholia (Bucknill, pp. 1067;
and Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks [New York:
W. W. Norton 1969], pp. 853988). As Taylor writes, Freud himself was,
above all, a literary critic construct[ing] his entire system by interpreting
verbal narratives (p. 263). Also, see Alexander Welshs Hamlet in His Modern
Guises (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001) and his discus-
sion of Hamlet as the dramatization of the indefinite duration of mourning
(p. 63). Turning to Mourning and Melancholia, Welsh dwells upon loss,
grief, and revenge in dealing with Hamlets Mourning and Revenge Tragedy
(pp. 2670, especially 512 and 56).
62
Various scholars and critics have looked at the autobiographical nature
of Little Dorrit, pointing to the death of Dickenss father, John Dickens, on 31
March 1851; to his disillusionment in meeting the former Maria Beadnell, now
Mrs. Winter, in the early months of 1855; and to his deepening unhappiness
in his marriage. See Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (New York: HarperCollins, 1990),
pp. 6236; Johnson, Nobodys Fault, in Triumph and Tragedy, 2:84062;
Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press,
2009), pp. 31939, 3878, and 4013; and Claire Tomalin, Little Dorrit and
Friends, 18531857, in Charles Dickens: A Life (New York: Penguin Press,
2011), pp. 25286. Robert Newsom has written of mourning and melancho-
lia in Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: Bleak House and
the Novel Tradition (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1977), especially pp.
10513. Dickens apparently first conceived of the novel that was to become
Bleak House before his fathers death. He wrote to Mary Boyle of the first
shadows of a new story hovering in a ghostly way about me (as they usu-
ally begin to do, when I have finished an old one) (Devonshire Terrace,
21 February 1851, in Letters of Charles Dickens, 6:2978, 298, emphasis
added). According to the psychoanalytic model, the mourning that Dickens
experienced at the death of his father would have become only later the
melancholia of Schlegel, Hazlitt, Bucknill, and Freud. For Derrida, all of life
becomes an act of mourning: see Miller, Absolute Mourning: It Is Jacques
You Mourn For, in For Derrida (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2009), pp.
30626, 307 and 320.
63
For a suggestive reading of Jacques Lacan and transference that is
relevant both to Hamlet and Little Dorrit, see Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques
Lawrence Frank 893
Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard

Univ. Press, 1983), esp. pp. 5864 and 12956. Also, see Janice Carlisle,
Little Dorrit: Necessary Fictions, in The Sense of an Audience: Dickens,
Thackeray, and George Eliot at Mid-Century (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press
1981), pp. 96118.
64
Freud, Fixation to Traumasthe Unconscious, in Standard Edition,
16:27385, 273. In Hamlet in Purgatory, Greenblatt states, Aristotlewho
observes that the moving force of recollection is particularly powerful in
persons of melancholic temperament comes closest to the central is-
sue immediately raised by the ghost in Hamlet, an issue inseparable from
the ghost as memory and memory as ghost: the perception of likeness. For
Aristotle this perception is the way one knows[:] when one is contemplating
a mental image or phantasm it is in fact a memorythe remembrance
of something that belongs irrevocably to the pastand not something that
fully exists in the present (p. 215; Aristotle, On Memory, in The Complete
Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. [Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1984], 1:714).
65
See Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double: A Poem of St. Petersburg, trans.
George Bird, A Midland Book (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958); and
E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Doubles, in Tales of Hoffmann, ed. Christopher
Lazare (New York: Grove Press, 1946), pp. 21865. For discussions of the
double as a literary convention, see Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic
Study, trans. and ed. Harry Tucker Jr. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina
Press, 1971), pp. viiviii: Ranks Der Doppelgnger, the earliest version of
The Double, was published in 1914, the year before the first draft of Mourn-
ing and Melancholia, written in February 1915 (Strachey, Editors Note, in
Standard Edition, 14:23942, 239). For a further discussion of the conven-
tion of the double, see Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double
in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1970), especially The Mirror
Image, pp. 1839; and Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach
to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland and London: Press of
Case Western Reserve Univ., 1973), esp. pp. 10739. In The City of Dickens,
Welsh writes of Rigaud/Blandois as Clennams double, so that the plot
of Little Dorrit makes a little more sense ([Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971],
p. 135). Also see Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study
of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol (Cambridge MA:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 15962.
66
In Specters of Marx, Derrida observes, My feeling, then, is that Marx
scares himself [as] he himself pursues relentlessly someone who almost
resembles him to the point that we could mistake [the] one for the other: a
brother, a double, thus a diabolical image. A kind of ghost of himself. Whom
he would like to distance, distinguish: to oppose. He has recognized someone
who, like him, appears obsessed by ghosts (p. 139).
67
In pursuing Blandois, Clennam is engaged in an act of conjuration
and exorcism: Come so that I may chase you! You hear! I chase you. I pursue
you. I run after you to chase you away from here. I will not leave you alone.
And the ghost does not leave its prey, namely, its hunter. It has understood
instantly that one is hunting it just to hunt it, chasing it away only so as to
chase after it (Derrida, p. 140). Also, see Dianne F. Sadoff, Monsters of Affec-
tion: Dickens, Eliot, and Bronte on Fatherhood (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982) pp. 14 and 189; and Elaine Showalter, Guilt,
Authority, and the Shadows of Little Dorrit, NCF 34, 1 (June 1979): 2040.
68
Freud, Family Romances, 9:239n1. Freud does not cite his source
for the quotation.
69
For a humanistic reading of Little Dorrit, see Charlotte Rotkin, Decep-
tion: In Society, Characterization, and Narrative Strategy, in Deception in
Dickens Little Dorrit, American University Studies, English Language and
Literature, 80 (New York, Bern, and Paris: Peter Lang, 1989), pp. 4772. Also,
see Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance, in Parentage and Inheritance
in the Novels of Charles Dickens, European Studies in English Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 617; and Nobodys Fault
or the Inheritance of Guilt, pp. 7494. In Common Scents: Comparative
Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction, Carlisle does not deal specifically with
Little Dorrit, concentrating instead on the male melancholic in Our Mutual
Friend (186465) in the characters of John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn;
she writes of Harmon who, having repudiated the father tainted by trade,
is given birth by his wife a consummation devoutly to be wished
[even as the novel] suggests the extent to which manhood may depend on
forms of support beyond those offered by a woman ([Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2004], p. 114).
70
See John Holloway, The Dnouement of Little Dorrit, in Little Dorrit, by
Charles Dickens (Middlesex, UK; Baltimore; and Victoria, Australia: Penguin
Books, 1967), pp. 8967, for a suggestive summary of the circumstances
surrounding the codicil to Gilbert Clennams will.
71
My interpretation has been informed by D. W. Winnicott, Mirror-Role
of Mother and Family in Child Development, in Playing and Reality (New
York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 1118. Winnicott argues, In individual emo-
tional development the precursor of the mirror is the mothers face (p. 111).
He later continues, What does the baby see when he or she looks at the
mothers face? I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself
or herself Many babies, however, do have to have a long experience of not
getting back what they are giving. They look and they do not see themselves
(p. 112). Winnicott himself refers to Lacans Le Stade du Miroir (p. 117).
My reading of this episode parallels LaCapras discussion of the repetitions
involved in acting out a loss, as opposed to working through it, to transform
melancholia into a mourning that may resolve the response to a traumatic
historical experience (Trauma, Absence, Loss, in Writing History, Writing
Trauma, Re-Visions of Culture and Society [Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001], pp. 4385, 47).
72
Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy, Oxford Illustrated
Dickens (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 364. Also, see Lawrence Frank,
Pictures from Italy: Dickens, Rome, and the Eternal City of the Mind, in
Dickens, Europe, and the New Worlds, ed. Sadrin (Basingstoke UK: Macmil-
lan; New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), pp. 4764.
73
Dickens, Pictures from Italy, p. 364.
74
Dickens, Pictures from Italy, p. 397.
75
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in Standard Edition, 21:57146,
69.
Lawrence Frank 895
76
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, pp. 6970.
77
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 70.
78
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, pp. 70 and 71.
79
Freud, The Aetiology of Hysteria, in Standard Edition, 3:187222, 192.
80
Freud, Aetiology of Hysteria, p. 192. For accounts of Freuds aban-
donment of the seduction theory, see Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), esp. pp. 4556; Jeffrey Moussaieff Mas-
son, Freud, Fliess, and Emma Eckstein, in The Assault on Truth: Freuds
Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
1984), pp. 55106; and Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying (New York: Inter-
national Universities Press, 1972), pp. 63222. Also, see Frank, Freud and
Dora: Blindness and Insight, in Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender,
Representation, and Rhetoric, ed. Dianne Hunter (Urbana and Chicago: Univ.
of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 11032.
81
Melanie Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 1932). See pp. 567 where Klein wrote of a patients anxiety attacks
[in part] a result of [being] afraid of being abandoned by [the mother] for
ever or of never seeing her alive again, or of finding, in place of the kind and
tender mother a bad mother who would attack in the night.
82
Freud, Female Sexuality, in Standard Edition, 21:22144, 225 and
226.
83
Freud, Female Sexuality, p. 226.
84
Bradley, pp. 121 and 118.
85
See, esp., Klein, Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive
States, (1940), in Contributions to Psycho-Analysis: 19211945, ed. Ernest
Jones, International Psycho-Analytical Library, no. 34 (London: Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1950), pp. 31138; and The
Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties,(1945), pp. 33990. For a
biography of Klein, see Phyllis Gross-Kurth, Melanie Klein: Her World and
Her Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), esp. pp. 2501 and 267. Also,
see Meira Likierman, Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context (London and New
York: Continuum, 2001), pp. 1007 and 12633.
86
De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Together with Se-
lections from the Autobiography of Thomas De Quincey, p. 276.
87
De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Together with Selec-
tions from the Autobiography of Thomas De Quincey, pp. 2767.
88
De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Together with
Selections from the Autobiography of Thomas De Quincey, pp. 281 and 289.
89
De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Together with Selec-
tions from the Autobiography of Thomas De Quincey, p. 289. During the serial
publication of Little Dorrit from December 1855 to June 1857, De Quincey
published a new, enlarged edition of his Confessions of an English Opium-
Eater in which the dynamics to which I have pointed are even more clearly
established than in the 182122 edition (London: Hogg and Son, 1856). For
those episodes in the 1856 edition establishing the connection between the
mother and Ann of Oxford Street, see De Quincey, The Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater (Dent: London; New York: Dutton, 1967), pp. 23, 734,
78, 91, and 15660.
90
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon
S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 61 and 123. Also,
see Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, Kristevas Death-Bearing Mother, in

From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the Good
Enough Mother (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 5380.
91
De Quincey, Suspiria, p. 348.
92
Kristeva, p. 27.
93
Kristeva, p. 78, emphasis added.
94
Throughout, my reading has been informed by Garrett Stewarts Dick-
ens and the Narratography of Closure, CritI 34, 3 (Spring 2008): 50942; and
his Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (Chicago and London:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009), especially, Introduction: Narrative Intension,
pp. 1330, and The Omitted Person Plot: Little Dorrits Fault, pp. 3160.
Stewart returned me to Holloways The Dnouement of Little Dorrit in the
Penguin edition of Little Dorrit. Most significantly, I am indebted to Stewarts
discussion of narratography and the ways in which attention to the lexical,
syntactic, and figurative terrain of fictional prose enables readers to resist
the designs that plot seeks to impose on us, especially the designs seemingly
intrinsic to the detective prototype and the courtship novel (Novel, pp. 49
and 53). While both of us respond to Kristevas Black Sun, Stewart proceeds
to argue that, in Little Dorrit, the son has become [the mother] in an act of
identification, while I argue that through the language of the codicil to Gil-
bert Clennams will, Little Dorrit becomes metonymically connected to the
lost mother whose story is never to be told in her own words (Novel, p. 49).
Finally, Stewarts discussion of narratography has clarified for me my own
approach. I find that attention to allusion as a form of figuration may well
provide a way to resist the impetus of plot to a seeming closure (Dickens
and the Narratography of Closure, p. 541). Here, I follow M. M. Bakhtins
The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences:
An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis, in Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist,
Univ. of Texas Press Slavic Series, no. 8 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1986),
pp. 10331. See, esp., p. 124: Each large and creative verbal whole is a very
complex and multifaceted system of relations [T]here are no voiceless
words that belong to no one. Each word contains voices that are sometimes
infinitely distant, unnamed, almost impersonal almost undetectable, and
voices resounding nearby and simultaneously.

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SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 52, Number 4,

For additional information about this article

In Hamlets Shadow: Mourning

Theres something in his soul

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and

It was at a propitious moment in March 1855 that Charles

Lawrence Frank, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Okla-

ism as the province of charlatans. Nonetheless, figures such as

important changes, without our being in the least degree aware,

Those familiar with Little Dorrit have recognized in Mrs. Clen-

cal poet.20 The Romantics, as Jonathan Bate has written, seized

reading of Hamlet in Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Ham-

only in retrospect, a coda to a century of Romantic and Victorian

In his concluding remarks, Freud acknowledged his aware-

phenomena of melancholia and the mania that often accompa-

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

The allusion to Hamlet elides the preceding words of [t]he

[the] brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury

nam turns away, a dreamer, after all, resorting to fantasies not

of some wretched mother looking into young faces, wondering

all applicable to the [sufferer] [but] they do fit someone else

the changes beyond our view is the infirmity of many invalids,

the haunting topic, and would hold to no other idea. As though a

rative Bedlam for someone such as Clennam who, in Blandoiss

According to Mrs. Clennam, the suppressed codicil was

It becomes ironic, then, that Arthur Clennams marriage to

that seem[s] to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it

into a heap of ruin, as if every tumbling fragment were intent on

Continent in 184445, including his experience of Paris, Genoa,

he concedes that [a] city is thus a priori unsuited for a compari-

the center of Kleins representation of the early years in a childs

to a consummation devoutly to be wished, the turning to [a]n

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, Arden Shakespeare

of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago and London: Univ.

Hazlitt, 4:2323, emphasis added.

during a time of personal and professional distress, he wrote to his fiance,

Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard

see Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, Kristevas Death-Bearing Mother, in

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