The Dream of Charles Dickens

The traumatic vicissitudes in the early life of Charles Dickens left him with a specific narcissistic vulnerability which he attempted to master by a tendency to idealize a certain kind of ethereal young girl. When his adored young sister-in-law died

suddenly, he fell into a protracted mourning in which he secretly dreamed of her every night for nine months. When he finally told his wife of it, the dream disappeared, but recurred seven years later in Genoa under circumstances which again represented the loss of an idealized object. At this time Dickens suffered a temporary depression and for the first time was creatively blocked. His detailed report of the dream in a letter to his friend Forster may have been instrumental in freeing this block. Eleven years later a traumatic episode revived the conflict. Dickens then wrote The Holly Tree Inn, in which he "fictionally" described the original episode and, with some alterations, recounted the Genoa dream. Using the material of this story as free associations, an attempt is made to analyze the Genoa dream. It is postulated that this analysis helps to illuminate the deep frustration of Dickens's love life and the tragic tendency in his final years to turn from writing to public readings that progressively sapped his health.