Jonathan C. Glance
Mercer University
Presented at NVSA Conference (Northeast Victorian Studies Association)
29 April, 2001
Upon reading a dream episode in a novel by Dickens, or the Brontes, or Wilkie Collins, we might pause and ask, What did the Victorians consider dreams to be? This simple question leads to others: are literary dreams the same as real dreams? should we interpret them as such? perhaps even, what do we believe dreams to be? If we distinguish real dreams from those in novels—that is, in conventionalized, artificial forms—then the interpretation of these literary dreams presents certain problems for the cautious critic. We assume a character's dreams contain some significance, of course. We can consult various psychoanalytic methodologies for interpretive guidelines, and these will often produce fascinating readings, yet we may experience a certain intellectual dissatisfaction with interpretations which must be so alien to what the author and original audience of a text might have imagined the dream to have meant. Warnings against the intentional fallacy notwithstanding, an author's apprehensions of what dreams are, how they may be used in literature, and how readers will respond to them clearly matter in the process of composing a dream episode. These considerations suggest a cultural and historical approach, rather than a psychanalytic one. Perhaps no better test case for this approach exists than in the works of Charles Dickens, so let us ask, What did Dickens believe dreams to be?
Dickens composed a vast quantity of literary dreams throughout his career. They appear in his earliest writings—Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers—and in his last, unfinished novel: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In between, they proliferate in Dickens's novels (for example, in David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times and Great Expectations), and create the essential structure for shorter prose fiction, like A Christmas Carol and The Chimes. Dickens depicts dreams and dreaming not only in his manifestly fictional works, but also in his ostensibly nonfictional ones: examples include "An Italian Dream" in Pictures From Italy, and "Night Walks" in The Uncommercial Traveler. Furthermore, he published numerous articles on dreams in his magazines Household Words and All the Year Round, and speaks of them in his letters.
This wealth of material has received surprisingly little critical attention. Catherine Bernard has one of the most focused discussions of Dickens and Victorian theories of dreaming, published in 1981 in the collection Victorian Science and Victorian Values. She posits Dickens as a proto-Freudian, however, claiming for example that "Dickens anticipated Freud's idea of day residues and the distinction between latent and manifest content" and further that he "intuitively perceived the autobiographical origins of dreams" (205). Ronald R. Thomas continues the interweaving of Freud and Dickens in his discussions of Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol in Dream s of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious (1990).
Such an approach is understandable. Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (published one hundred years ago) revolutionized the scientific study of dreams, and provided a framework for the interpretation of these phenomena. We are all familiar with Freud's model of the unconscious and with his theories of the underlying causes of dreams, and so our tendency may be to apply these notions to the dreams we find in novels written before 1900 as well as to those written after. By doing so we assume that authors such as Dickens somehow had a modern understanding of the unconscious and an intuitively Freudian notion of dreaming. We also assume that literary dreams operate in the same manner as actual dreams (Freud himself proposes this approach in "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva"). These assumptions require careful scrutiny, however, if literary dreams are not real dreams (that is,artifacts of the unconscious), but consciously created imitations of them. This paper argues that literary dreams arise from a historical and cultural context, and reflect not just their author's insights into the human mind, but also contemporary theories about dreams (from both scientific and popular sources), as well as conventional literary representations of dreams and visions. To attribute to Dickens a modern understanding of the unconscious or an intuitively Freudian notion of dreaming is to wrench him from his historical context. To do so is also to ignore the complications of the textual evidence, for Dickens's own writings on dreams reveal complex assumptions about the causes and meanings of dreams. This complexity stems from the conflicting theories of dreaming in the Victorian period.
In order to understand how Dickens used dreams, then, we must return to the question: What would he consider dreams to be? Dickens grew up under the dual influence of the Romantic movement's fascination with states of marginal consciousness, and neuroscience's new theories and advances in the study of the brain. The change in long accepted paradigms of the structure of the nervous system, and the well-publicized and revolutionary work in organology and phrenology of Franz Joseph Gall and Caspar Spurzheim, "all helped to focus the attention of the layman as well as the scientist on the nervous system and, in particular, on the brain" (Clarke and Jacyna 5). Roger Cooter notes, "Gall's doctrine beckoned into its orbit every one of the social, psychological, intellectual, political and religious concerns that had been aggravated and heightened by the conditions of rapid and pervasive social and economic change" (6). The operation of the sleeping mind became an important focal point for supporters and opponents of Gall, and this attention encouraged widespread speculation on the mysterious nature and meaning of dreams.
That speculation manifested itself in two broad paradigms: the scientific and the spiritual. Perhaps the next step to answering our initial question, then, is to ask, "What would Dickens have been reading about dreams?" Scientific studies, or at least studies which assumed the prestige and authority (if not the pure methods) of science, proliferated in the early nineteenth century. But these studies coexisted in the book stalls and the magazines with works of oneirocriticism (or dream interpretation guides) and spiritual accounts of revelatory dreams.
The foundation for most scientific studies of mental activity was associationism, which David Hartley popularized in his Observations on Man (1749). Hartley deduces three causes for dreams: the residue of daily impressions, the physical state of the dreamer's stomach and brain, and, most importantly, the associations of thoughts and images which always go on in the mind, but which are more vivid and less controlled during sleep. Most later scientific studies accept Hartley's associationist paradigm; a partial list of those published during Dicken's life includes William Newnham's Essays on Superstition (1830); John Abercrombie's Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth (1831); Walter C. Dendy's On the Phenomena of Dreams and Other Transient Illusions (1832); Robert Macnish's The Philosophy of Sleep (1834); Alexander Grant's The Literature and Curiosities of Dreams (1865); and William Hammond's Sleep and Its Derangements (1869). Although these works differ in terminology and emphasis, their similarities are striking. The authors, all physicians or surgeons, employ little scientific rigor to support their claims. More frequently, they rely on second-hand anecdotal evidence, classical sources (usually Pliny, Plutarch and Suetonius) or literature (often Sir Walter Scott's The Antiquary). We can follow the trail of one anecdote as a typical example: to illustrate how sensory impressions shape our dreams, Abercrombie describes how his friend, James Gregory, gave him a manuscript by his father, Dr. Gregory, which relates that the doctor had gone to bed with a hot water bottle at his feet, and had dreamed he was walking on Mt. Aetna (260). Abercrombie makes no apparent effort to check this story's veracity or to duplicate it. Macnish repeats the anecdote of Dr. Gregory's dream, and thirty-seven years later, Hammond continues its use in this fairly effaced form: "Instances are given of persons sleeping with bottles of hot water applied to their feet dreaming of walking on burning lava, or some other hot substance" (133). A scientific methodology to study whether the same stimulus will produce similar dreams did not appear until Alfred Maury's Le Sommeil et le Reves (1865), which pioneered the role of stimulation and suggestion in shaping dreams.
Certain general assumptions about dreams recur in these scientific studies. One often repeated point is that dreams only occur in imperfect sleep. Newnham states, "There are no dreams in natural sleep—that is, in sound and quiet sleep—the body being healthy, and the mind at ease." Dreams occur only in a "morbid" state, when the brain is disordered by certain irritants, such as strong emotions, prolonged study, approaching sickness, dyspepsia or other states which impair sleeping (163). Macnish employs a phrenological model, stating that in "perfect sleep" all the brain's organs are at rest; but if one or more of the organs remain awake while the others sleep, dreaming results (43). The rationale seems to be that dreaming has to occur in an aberrant state of mind, because of the irrational nature of dreams. Another general feature of these studies is the analogy between dreaming and insanity. Abercrombie compares how in both dreaming and madness the mind acts without volition, and follows whatever "chain of thought" or associated images are present at the moment (256). Macnish calls a dream a "transient delirium," which resembles insanity in the absence of the mental faculty of judgement (45). All the studies assert that dreams originate in both previous mental associations and existing sensory impressions. Macnish speaks at greater length than the others on the effect of diet on the content of dreams. He contends that "a disordered state of the stomach and liver will often produce dreams," and that as a general rule dyspepsia produces bad dreams (53). A final and crucial point of agreement in these various scientific studies is their denial of prophetic powers in dreams. Dendy states that although the notion of revelatory dreams is "entertained generally," we no longer live in "days of special inspiration"; therefore, he cannot rationally accept "the visions of slumbers as revelations or prognostics" (70). Macnish advances the same argument, and comments that the idea "is so singularly unphilosophical, that I would not have noticed it, were it not advocated even by persons of good sense and education" (102). This last remark is important, for it indicates that the scientific view of dreams had strong competition for popular acceptance.
We find that competition in dream books and spiritual accounts of revelatory dreams. Dream books, inexpensive handbooks for the most general and least educated audiences, contain encyclopedic lists of objects or actions, and provide instructions on how to interpret any of them if they appear in the reader's dreams. These books invariably claim that an understanding of dreams will help the reader prosper, or will warn of coming trouble. Stemming in principle from the second-century dream book the Oneirocriticon (or The Interpretation of Dreams) of Artemidorus (first translated into English in 1643), nineteenth-century dream books are often anonymous works plagiarized heavily from previous dream books, sometimes only altering the title page in hopes of attracting new buyers. One such work I have examined is the anonymous, undated Nocturnal Revels: or, Universal Interpreter of Dreams and Visions. This text presents "the Nature, Causes, and Uses of various kinds of Dreams and Representations," and lists various objects and actions in dreams, with their meanings. Another widely read type of dream book, more spiritual and less pragmatic, catalogues narratives of revelatory dreams and other mysterious phenomena. Some of these works insist on a divine or supernatural origin for this capacity, while others claim it is a natural human power. For example, Mrs. Blair's Dreams and Dreaming (1843) contains narratives of premonitory dreams drawn from the Bible and contemporary accounts, and the author treats these dreams as divine revelations that God offers as moral directives. She asks, "Does it not savour of infidelity to say, that the Divine Being has neither the will nor the ability to instruct his creatures asleep as well as awake?" (114). Similarly, an anonymous article in the Baptist Magazine in 1828 asserts, "Insignificant as dreams in general are, there are doubtless two classes of agents that have access to our minds when sleep has impaired our own agency"—those classes are good angels (or "ministering spirits") and evil angels (who tempt the weak to wickedness) (qtd. in Grant 160-62). In contrast to such religious theories are those who assert a natural origin. Thomas De Quincey speaks in Suspiria de Profundis (1845) of "the machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain" as "a dreaming organ" analogous to other sensory organs (88), and "the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy" (88). Catherine Crowe's The Night Side of Nature (1850), provides many anecdotal examples of presentiments and prophetic dreams, and explains that "The soul, which is designed as the mirror of a superior spiritual order (to which it belongs), still receives, in dreams, some rays from above, and enjoys a foretaste of its future condition" (47). Yet Crowe asserts that "the faculty of presentiment [is] a natural one, though only imperfectly and capriciously developed" (47). Some few studies tried to link the spiritual and scientific theories. Joseph Haven, in Mental Philosophy: including the Intellect, Sensibilities, and Will (1857), tenatively asserts, "A dream may be prophetic, yet not supernatural. Some law, not fully known to us, may exist, by virtue of which the nervous system, when in a highly excited state, becomes susceptible of impressions not ordinarily received ... so as to become strangely cognizant of the coming future. Can anyone show that this is impossible? Is it more improbable than that the cases recorded are mere chance coincidences?" (qtd. in Grant 165).
This survey of the competing discussions of dreams suggests the real diversity of theories and explanations which coexisted. The two broad streams of scientific and spiritual dream theories, each with subcurrents of disputes over method or essence, run parallel and in continual debate throughout the nineteenth century. These debates mirror Victorian cultural tensions and uncertainties; dreams become a focus for discussions of the nature of the mind and the soul, matter and spirit, science and religion. Most Victorians, immersed in this debate, aware of both channels of thought, considered dreams to be meaningless and meaningful, mere physiological artifacts and messages from the great beyond.
Dickens was not only aware of but also keenly interested in this topic. George Henry Lewes reports that dreams were "a subject which always interested him, and on which he had stored many striking anecdotes" (72). Dickens owned several of the major studies of dreams, including ones by Macnish and Abercrombie (Bernard 202). Determining Dickens's actual view of dreams, however, is problematic, because his comments in letters and essays often appear at odds with his practice in the novels. Selecting representative examples from his letters, essays and novels, we can better see the diversity of his views.
Outside of his fiction, Dickens tends on the whole to favor the scientific view over the supernatural. He parodies popular dreambooks in the essay "Dictionary Dreams," published in All the Year Round (31 August, 1861), which sarcastically refutes the accuracy of The Ladies' Own Dreambook and ridicules popular oneirocriticism (549-552). For instance, the narrator of the essay reads that "To dream of cucumbers denotes recovery to the sick, and you will fall speedily in love; . . . also moderate success in trade." The narrator, a believer in modern associationist theories, sarcastically conjectures whether it would not be possible to cultivate such an auspicious dream by contemplating and then devouring an enormous cucumber before bedtime (551).
Dickens also tends to explore the workings of the sleeping mind as Macnish and Abercrombie do, emphasizing the chaotic whirl of thoughts freed from the control of waking reason. In "Early Coaches," which appears in Sketches by Boz (1836), he depicts the fitful sleep of a man awaiting a predawn call to wake him for a business trip. In this passage he exhibits a classic scientific paradigm of dreams-caused by imperfect sleep, shaped by associated thoughts and external auditory sensations, and perceived half-incredulously by the half-conscious mind:
You left strict orders, overnight, to be called at half-past four, and you have done nothing all night but doze for five minutes at a time, and start up suddenly from a terrific dream of a large church-clock with the small hand running round, with astonishing rapidity, to every figure on the dial-plate. At last, completely exhausted, you fall gradually into a refreshing sleep—your thoughts grow confused—the stage-coaches, which have been 'going off' before your eyes all night, become less and less distinct, until they go off altogether; one moment you are driving with all the skill and smartness of an experienced whip—the next...you are closely muffled up, inside, and have just recognised in the person of the guard an old schoolfellow, whose funeral, even in your dream, you remember to have attended eighteen years ago. At last you fall into a state of complete oblivion, from which you are aroused, as if into a new state of existence, by a singular illusion. You are apprenticed to a trunk-maker; how, or why, or when, or wherefore, you don't take the trouble to inquire; but there you are, pasting the lining in the lid of a portmanteau. Confound that other apprentice in the back shop, how he is hammering!—rap, rap, rap— what an industrious fellow he must be! you have heard him at work for half an hour past, and he has been hammering incessantly the whole time. Rap, rap, rap, again—he's talking now—what's that he said? Five o'clock! You make a violent exertion, and start up in bed.
This passage seems well informed by scientific studies: the dreams occur only before and after the period of sound sleep (or "oblivion"), not during it; the perception of time is warped during the dream, so that a brief moment of dreaming seems to contain an immense span of time; and the mind creates a dream to explain the sounds perceived during sleep. The second-person narration of this dream emphasizes its familiarity; this is the sort of dream, Dickens suggests, that anyone would have under these conditions-even the reader.
Dickens interpreted his own dreams from this scientific standpoint as well. In a letter to John Forster in September of 1844, he describes a vivid dream he had while in Italy with his family: the spirit of Mary Hogarth appears to him, veiled in blue like the Madonna but nevertheless recognizable. He pleads for a sign that the visit is real, asking for the comfort of her mother, and also for the answer to the question, "What is the True religion?" Dickens relates,
As it paused without replying, I said—Good God, in such an agony of haste, lest it should go away!— 'You think, as I do, that the Form of religion does not so greatly matter, if we try to do good?—or,' I said, observing that it still hesitated, and was moved with the greatest compassion for me, 'perhaps the Roman Catholic is the best?'....'For you,' said the Spirit, full of such heavenly tenderness for me, that I felt as if my heart would break; 'for you, it is the best!' Then I awoke, with the tears running down my face. (4.196)
This experience would seem to epitomize a revelatory vision: the spirit of a woman he idolized comes to him from the other world and answers one of the profound questions of his life. Yet rather than musing on any serious significance in the dream (or converting to Catholicism), Dickens instead explains it away. He speculates on "the fragments of reality...which helped to make it up," including a painful recurrence of rheumatism which upset his sleep, the near drowning of his son Fred the week before which directed his thoughts toward death, the presence in the room of an altar with a missing religious picture (which had caused Dickens to wonder what the face in the picture had looked like), and the nearby convent bells which had supplied the "thought, no doubt, of Roman Catholic services" (4.196). This letter suggests Dickens was not only familiar with the standard scientific explanations of dreams, but tended to accept them and apply them to his own dreams.
Dreams were a recurring topic in his magazines, suggesting that the topic interested a general audience. Dickens' published the essays "Dreams" in Household Words (8 March 1851), and "A Physician's Dreams," in two parts in All the Year Round (26 November and 3 December 1859). Both tend to reflect the accepted scientific explanations of the causes, types and meaning of dreams. The Household Words essayis more interesting because it provided Dickens with an opportunity to discuss his observations on the topic. In a letter he instructed Dr. Thomas Stone, the author, to revise the article, stating, "If I venture to say I think it may be made a little more original, and a little less recapitulative of the usual stories in the books, it is because I have read something on the subject, and have long observed it with the greatest attention and interest" (Letters 6:276). Dickens's views, while informed by scientific explanations and literary conventions of dreams, accept neither fully. In contrast to most scientific views of the day, Dickens opposes the idea that a residue of the day's events chiefly makes up our nightly dreams: "I would suggest that the influence of the day's occurrences, and of recent events, is by no means so great (generally speaking) as is usually supposed....When dreams can be directly traced to any incidents of recent occurrence, it appears to me that the incidents are usually of the most insignificant character-such as made no impression, of which we were conscious, at the time" (6.276-277). His own dreams, he states, are more often scenes from his youth, and he marvels that although he had been married fourteen years and had nine children, he never dreamed of them. He argues that his experience is more common than not, based on many conversations on the subject. He also asserts that there is "a remarkable sameness" in our dreams, which are not, as Stone supposed, "very various and different" (6.278). He adds,
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 the Theatre and never get in—or to go to a Feast, which can't be eaten or drunk-or to read letters, or placards, or books, that no study will render legible—or to break some Thraldom or other, from which we can't escape—or we all confound the living with the dead, and all frequently have a knowledge or suspicion that we are doing it—we all astonish ourselves by telling ourselves, in a dialogue with ourselves, the most astonishing and terrific secrets—we all go to public places in our night dresses, and are horribly disconcerted, lest the company should discern it. (6.278-279)
Stone's article makes use of Dickens' suggestions-even to the extent of paraphrasing and quoting his examples.
Besides establishing Dickens' fascination with and expertise in the study of dreams, the letter also provides two interesting statements about his theory of dreams in literature. One suggests that dreams can contain a hidden but discernible meaning: "I should say the chances were a thousand to one against anybody's dreaming of the subject closely occupying the waking mind—except—and this I wish particularly to suggest to you—in a sort of allegorical manner" (276). He also discusses the use of dreams as a plot device: "The obvious convenience and effect of making the dreams of heroes and heroines bear on the great themes of a story as illustrated by their late experiences, seem to me to have led the Poets away from the truth, on this head-and to have established the conventional beliefs from which I differ" (277). He may have discounted the conventions, but he also found them too convenient and effective not to use in his own novels.
There is a tension between what Dickens in his letters asserts real dreams are, and what he creates in his fiction to represent a dream. That tension between scientific and supernatural poles varies in different episodes from different novels. We might plot a line, with the fever dreams which arise as recognizable medical symptoms in Bleak House and Great Expectations on one end, and the overtly supernatural dream visions in A Christmas Carol and The Chimes on the other; in between we might place revelatory dreams which exist in a more or less psychologically believable milieu: Montague Tigg's nightmare in Martin Chuzzlewit, or Stephen Blackpool's vision in Hard Times. Such an organizing principle helps to suggest the variety of Dickens' literary dreams. Despite the useful metaphor of a line between two opposite points, though, even the scientifically explicable fever dreams contain true revelations, and even the supernatural visions are accompanied by rational dismissals within the text. Both paradigms coexist in the dream episode. Dickens takes pains to construct around his dream episodes a rational frame which explains it away as originating within the dreamer. In Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance, Montague Tigg has a nightmare of a door that he cannot keep closed, and of a dangerous man named J. His dream may be a result of his waking thoughts and restless mind (Tigg worries about the door in his room he cannot lock, and "his fears or evil conscience reproduced this door in all his dreams" (651)), or imperfect slumber (Tigg sleeps in a strange bed, during a thunderstorm), or dim awareness of external sensations (Tigg wakes to find Jonas Chuzzlewit "standing at his bedside watching him. And that very door wide open" (651)). Other common explanations are incipient illness (Esther Summerson's smallpox) or indigestion (as Scrooge exclaims to Marley's ghost, "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"(12)). The dream itself, however, follows the (conventionally literary) tradition that dreams are true revelations. Tigg's own ghost appears in the dream as "a man with a bloody smear upon his head" to reveal his fate: Jonas will kill him with a blow to the head five chapters later.
The tension between a suspicion of and a faith in the revelatory power of dreams is, of course, quite ancient, but the ambivalence continues throughout the nineteenth century and directly shapes Dickens's discussion of and attitude toward dreams. Further exploration of how popular theories of dreams—which exist on the smudged boundaries of science, religion and folklore-influenced Dickens's creation of literary dreams would form an important contribution to the study of his works. In her essay "Against Tradition: The Case for a Particularized Historical Method," Marilyn Butler emphasizes that, "A genuinely historical perspective discourages dogmatism, by obliging us to foreground the differences between our circumstances, aims, and language, and those of the past" (44). Only by recognizing those differences, and the original contexts which produced Dickens's novels, can we hope to understand the meaning of the literary dreams, rather than project meaning upon them.
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