c Charles Dickens, Dullborough Town, The Uncommercial
Traveller, All the Year Round 1860, 30 June,
d PE. vol.1, pp.112,118,119,125,137,139,143; vol.IV, p.158.
A.Naef-Hinderling, The Search of the Culprit, p.19/20.
a ANaef-Hinderling, The Search for the Culprit, p.21-22.
steps from the street, I remember to have waited on a lady who had four children (I am
afraid to write five, though I fully believed it was five) at a birth. This meritorious
woman held quite a reception in her room on the morning when I was introduced there,
and the sight of the house (when visiting the town in later years) brought vividly to my
mind how the four (five) deceased young people lay, side by side, on a clean cloth on a
chest of drawers; reminding me by an homely association which I suspect their
complexion to have assisted, of pigs' feet as they are usually displayed at a neat tripe-
shop, (c)
Naef-Hinderling merkt hierbij op:
Again there is the comparison of babies with pigs and again the similarity of their
complexions is stressed. We may suspect that Dickens was also reminded of the many
"lyings-in" of his own mother, who had six more children after Charles. And we may
also ask ourselves whether it is a coincidence that later, in his courtship of Catherine
Hogarth, he used to call her "dearest Pig" and "darling Pig", an expression he then
playfully changed to "Wig", and that later still, he used the same term of endearment for
his own children, (d)
Naef-Hinderling gaat uitvoerig in op de gevolgen van twee babbelzieke ouders op de baby:
With parents such as Elizabeth and John Dickens there may not be much room for a
child. How can a child, for example, who is learning to talk, be quick enough to get a
word or two before the parents rattle again? How can he display himself if the parents
need all the stage to themselves? Dickens's life story suggests that he experienced a
serious lack of sufficient mirroring in that important early developmental phase when
the child needs to be seen by his mother in order to find himself... If the baby does not
see himself in his mother's face he cannot gradually get to know the various facets of his
self and eventually integrate them... In our society the mirroring self-object is usually the
mother, whereas the idealized self-object is very often the father. The mother's failure
can, in this case, be compensated for by the father's sympathy or vice versa...
It seems that Charles Dickens experienced faulty mirroring on the part of both
his parents, and we have already tried to account for this by describing the personalities
of John and Elizabeth Dickens.(a)
In mijn artikel in The Dutch Dickensian van maart 2001 liet ik op bladzz.22/3 zien, hoe er een
zeker vertrouwen ontstond tussen Dickens en zijn vader en hoe dit vertrouwen plotseling
wegzakte. In David Copperfield lezen wij de volgende scène:
One dirty-faced man, I think he was a boot-maker, used to edge himself into the passage
as early as seven o'clock in the morning, and call up the stairs to Mr.Micawber - 'Come!
You ain't out yet, you know. Pay us, will you? don't hide, you know, that's mean. I
wouldn't be mean if I was you. Pay us, will you? You just pay us, d'ye hear? Come!'
Receiving no answer to these taunts, he would mount in his wrath to the words
