Why Did Dickens Write about the Warrens Episode When He Did?
The psychoanalytic critic Albert D. Hutter makes the crucial point that we should not take the blacking-warehouse episode in isolation but place it within the developmental framework of the writer’s life and career. In other words, it is not the traumatic evens by themselves that count; it is what Dickens the writer did with them. Following Hutter, Welsh therefore asks the crucial questions • Why did Dickens choose to reveal events that he considered simultaneously shaming and traumatic; • Why he did he do so when he did do. As it turns out, Dickens wrote his account of abandonment when he was working on Dombey and Son and David Copperfield, and Welsh argues convincingly, At this time of life, Dickens wanted someone to know about the blacking warehouse, because from his current point of view the episode did him some credit. . . . There was almost a boast in Dickens’s complaint that, “but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been for, for all the the care that was taken of me, a li
