"I lost courage and burned the rest": biofiction, legacy, and the hero-protagonist split in Charles Dickens’s life-writing novels

Abstract

Charles Dickens sought to control the narratives of everyone he encountered, both in life and on the page. He even edited his own identity by burning both his correspondence and an early attempt at autobiography. Dickens’s reputation has since become public domain, however, and neo-Victorian authors are re-imagining the Dickensian. Scholarship has previously examined Dickens’s notorious fusing of fact and fiction, his angst about legacy, and his shifting authorial identity. However, what has not been made explicit is how these concerns manifest in a curious pattern, wherein Dickens’s professed protagonists—the ostensible hero/ine/s of their respective texts—are often deposed; overshadowed, as it were, in their own life histories. I trace this trend through Dickens’s novels self-consciously exhibiting the tenets of life-writing—which I refer to as his life-writing novels—including David Copperfield’s (fictional) autobiography, the memoirs of Mr. Pickwick and Oliver Twist, and Little Dorrit’s biography. Such a focus privileges the life-writing of Dickens’s most famous characters, through whom he asked to be remembered. Invoking Dickens’s early anxieties about his authorial identity, and his later anxieties over his “lost [autobiographical] courage,” I analyse the implications of this Dickensian hero-protagonist split. Dickens enlisted these life-writing novels as sites to rehearse composing a successful life story—thereby engaging in “biographilia”—but bizarrely, his central characters are continually compromised. I subsequently probe the tension between Dickens’s fixation upon legacy, and the ongoing neo-Victorian penchant for biofictionally re-constituting the eminent Victorian author; he could not retain narrative control forever. Nonetheless, Dickens was captivated by the consequences of being (or not being) “the hero of my own life,” to quote David Copperfield. These (thesis) pages must therefore show the complexities inherent in this examination, which expands our understanding both of an anxious Dickens, and of his characters—through whom he attempted to construct and control his legacy.