Abstract
When Dickens returned home from his six-month tour of America in 1842, his eldest son Charley, aged five, nearly died of joy at being reunited with his parents. Focusing on Dickens’s complex emotions as a father, this article considers his response to the wild emotionalism of partings and reunions, first within his own family, as he dispatched his young sons to careers in the colonies, and then in his treatment of parent–child separations in some of his novels. As a father who frequently played down the drama of ‘real life’ partings in his family, it considers the gap, in <em>Dombey and Son</em> and <em>Bleak House</em>, between the child’s impulse for reconciliation, and the parent’s shame or silence. The family reunion that segues unstoppably into another parting becomes a way of confronting failed elements that in terms of Dickens’s domestic ideology cannot be subsumed invisibly into a new and improved version of the family. With fathers, however, the outlook is more hopeful than with mothers, and Dickens shows how the prospects of reunion between errant daughters and unforgiving fathers are ultimately more positive than those between errant mothers and forgiving daughters.
Highlights
In the summer of 1842 when Dickens returned home from his six-month tour of America, his eldest son Charley, aged five, told his mother he was ‘too glad’ to be reunited with his parents, and promptly fell into convulsions
‘Dr Elliotson told us afterwards that the sudden joy had perfectly turned his brain and overthrown his system, and that he had never seen the like in a child’, Dickens reported, citing his friend, the eminent mesmerist John Elliotson (1791–1868), who acted occasionally as the family doctor.[1]
The story even found its way into the Boston Daily Evening Transcript of 1 August 1842, where, under the heading ‘Return of Boz: Dangerous Excess of Joy’, the paper reported Charley’s ‘transport of delight’, his ‘delirium’, and the calling in of ‘several physicians [...] almost despairing of his recovery’
Summary
In the summer of 1842 when Dickens returned home from his six-month tour of America, his eldest son Charley, aged five, told his mother he was ‘too glad’ to be reunited with his parents, and promptly fell into convulsions. As a father his own feelings are so difficult to articulate that, as in the episode of Charley’s convulsions, they fade into the background, displaced by the phenomenon of the Valerie Sanders, ‘Joyful convulsions’: Dickens’s Comings and Goings 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 14 (2012)
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