Charles Dickens, Charles Babbage, Richard Babley: Material Memory in David Copperfield

Abstract

This article argues that Dickens's David Copperfield (1850) elaborates a remarkable theory of individual and collective memory. On the one hand, Dickens embraces the idea, conventional in early Victorian psychology and philosophy, of the mind as a palimpsest that contains a permanent record of an individual's experiences. On the other, he extends this belief in the indelibility of memory to matter, proposing that the material world functions as a palimpsest of collective history that interacts in uncanny ways with individual recollection. I propose that Dickens's account of material memory adapts mathematician Charles Babbage's hypothesis that the totality of human speech and action is encoded as atomic vibrations in the earth, air, and ocean. In Copperfield, Dickens uses Mr. Dick to explore the implications of Babbage's theory for realist fiction, which, in representing the contemporary world, bears an overwhelming responsibility for the collective history that pervades it.