What the Dickens is Happening in Dreams?

"Dickens' Dream" by Robert William Buss (1875)

Cigar in hand, Charles Dickens is sitting comfortably in his writing chair, eyes closed. Through the tobacco smoke, pictures of characters and scenes from his books appear in every direction. Some – like the picture of Little Nell on her deathbed from The Old Curiosity Shop – are in vivid color. Others are only black-and-white sketches. We don’t know whether the painter, Robert William Buss, left his watercolor unfinished or made it this way by design, to show stories rising into full color and form from the author’s imagination - or asserting themselves as characters demanding a place in his books.  Buss made the painting after Dickens’ death and called it “Dickens’ dream”. [1]

     Dreams feature throughout Dickens’ work, across the whole gamut from dreams caused by fever or dyspepsia to the famous visitation dream in A Christmas Carol where Scooge tries to dismiss Marley’s ghost ass “a bad bit of beef” or “a blot of mustard”. We know that Dickens paid close attention to his own dreams and made a study of the contemporary literature on dreams, from research suggesting that dreams are the result of physiology to accounts of dreams as divine guidance or supernatural phenomena.[2]
     Dickens’ fullest account of his personal opinions about dreams was expressed in a letter he wrote, as editor of the magazine Household Words, to one of his contributors on February 2,1851. The contributor, Dr Thomas Stone, had submitted an article of “Dreams” that Dickens did not much like; he wrote eleven pages – some 1500 words, an astonishingly copious response from an editor - to Dr Stone explaining how the essay on dreams should be expanded and reframed. [3]
    Dickens starts by informing the author of the article on dreams that “I have read something on the subject and have long observed it with the greatest attention and interest”.  He then shares the disappointing news that when he has been frustrated in developing a plot, his dreams have not helped him. Instead of providing a solution to a creative problem, they have rather reflected it.

If I have been perplexed during the day in bringing out the incidents of a story as I wish, I find that I dream at night, never by any chance of the story itself, but perhaps of trying to shut a door that will fly open, or to screw something tight that will be loose, or to drive a horse upon some very important journey, who unaccountably becomes a dog and can't be urged along, or to find my way out of a series of chambers that appears to have no end.  [4]

       Dickens expounds amusingly on the “sameness” of certain dreams, for example, of appearing in your “nightdress” in public (as an eminent Victorian, he does not speak of appearing naked in public).

How many dreams are common to us all, from the queen to the costermonger! We all fall off that Tower, we all skim above the ground at a great pace and can't keep on it… we all take unheard of trouble to go to a Theatre and never get in, or to go to a Feast which can't be eaten or drunk, or to read letters, placards or books, that no study will render legible, or to break some thralldom or other, from which we can't escape, we all confound the living with the dead, and all frequently have a knowledge or suspicion that we are doing it…we all go to public places in our night dresses and are horribly disconcerted lest the company should observe it. [5]

    Dickens’ epistolary essay plunges to greater depths as he talks about the importance of paying attention to recurring dreams. He writes openly about his many dreams of Mary Hogarth, his wife’s sister, after her premature death aged seventeen. Dickens modeled many female characters in his novels on Mary, even including similar death scenes. Mary died in his arms in the family’s London house on May 7, 1837, after a visit to the theater. The doctors thought the cause of death was a heart attack. There was no prior warning.       
      Dickens was devastated. He declared “I have lost the dearest friend I ever had." [6]  Perhaps for the only time in his life, he found himslef unable to meet deadlines; he postponed instalments of  Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist that he owed his publishers and public. He held on to mementoes of Mary - a dress, a locket, a ring. He told Mary's mother months at the end of that year  that  "I have never had her ring off my finger by day or by night"[7] In 1869, as he neared his own death, he could still say,  “She is so much in my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful, and have greatly prospered in anything, that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is. [8]
     With all this depth of emotion, it would be surprising if Mary had not figured in his dreams. Dickens reported that "for a year, I dreamed of her, every night - sometimes as living, sometimes as dead, never in any terrible or shocking aspect. As she had been my wife's sister, and had died suddenly in our house, I forebore to allude to these dreams - kept them wholly to myself." [9]
    We may wonder whether his discretion was motivated by an element of erotic fantasy playing through the dream encounters, though in his thoroughly researched book Dickens and Women Michael Slater contends that Dickens' relations with Mary were entirely proper before she died in his arms. [10]
    A year after Mary's death, Dickens recalled, "I lay down to sleep, in an Inn on a wild Yorkshire Moor, covered with snow. As I looked out of the window on the bleak winter prospect before I undressed, I wondered within myself whether the subject would follow me here. It did." [11]

Mary’s appearance on a Yorkshire moor made Dickens decide to break his silence. He reported the dream to his wife Catherine. After this his dreams of Mary ceased for many years, which led him to suggest that “secrecy” may foster recurring dreams.
     He dreamed of Mary again years later, in a rented palazzo in Genoa in Italy. She appeared mantled in blue like Raphael’s Madonna He tried to discount the dream visitation as the effect of external circumstances. “It was All Souls' Night, and people were going about with Bells, calling on the Inhabitants to pray for the dead. -Which I have no doubt I had some sense of, in my sleep; and so flew back to the Dead.”  [12]
     Dickens reported that in the dream he spoke to “Spirit”, asking, “What is true religion?” He was told that “Roman Catholicism is best for you.” This must have been intensely displeasing for Dickens, who throughout his life was a virulent anti-Catholic. Some scholars have suggested that the dream may have prompted Dickens to look more closely at the role of religion in the lives of the ordinary Italians he chronicled in his later book Pictures from Italy, from the peasant who delighted in making the sound of the rooster Peter heard crow to the dancing and feasting at festivals.[13]
    Dickens professed to be skeptical about the utility of dream incubation on any theme. However, he allowed that we often find we have solved something in our sleep, with or without dream recall. He ascribed this to “the result of a sudden vigorous effect of the refreshed intellect, in waking”.  
   At the end of his letter to Dr Stone, we are finally given the clue to the central role of dreams in his immense literary productivity. He writes that “on waking, the head is usually full of words”. We can picture him now, rising from reverie in the writing chair in the picture, to fill page after page with his long, looping , remarkably legible script.

Dickens letter to Stone,1851

References

1. Leon Litvack,“Dickens's Dream and the Conception of Character” The Dickensian, no. 103 (2007) pp. 5-36

2. For a brief survey of what Dickens read about dreams see  Jonathan C. Glance,  “Revelation,  Nonsense  or  Dyspepsia,”  Mercer  University,  2001, http://faculty.mercer.edu/glance_jc/files/academic_work/victorian_dream_theories.htm. On contemporary efforts to explain dreams by physiology, see Doris  Kaufmann,  “Dreams  and  Self-Consciousness,”  in  Lorraine Daston (ed) Biographies  of  Scientific  Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)

3. Full text of Dickens' Letter to Dr Thomas Stone, 2 February 1851 in Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson et. al (eds) Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) vol. 6, pp. 278-279. [Hereafter "Pilgrim"]
4. ibid

5. ibid

6. Pilgrim vol. 1 p. 263

7. Pilgrim vol. 1 p.323.

8.  John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens. ed. J. W. T. Ley. (London: Palmer, 1928) p.841 

9. Letter to Stone, 1851

10.  Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (London: J.M. Dent , 1986)

11. Letter to Stone, 1851

12. For a vivid description of Dicken's palatial life in 1844 in and around Genoa , where he dreamed of Mary Hogarth as a Madonna, see chapter 5, "Work in Genoa: Palazzo Peschiere" in volume 4 of John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens. Easily found online

13. David Parker, "Dickens and the Death of Mary Hogarth” Dickens Quarterly vol.13, no.2 (June 1996) pp. 67-75