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In helping his patient understand his psychodynamics and their origin, a psychoanalyst would wish to have the patient thoroughly explore his earliest childhood memories and fantasies. The literary critic is not always so fortunate as to have an author's often highly significant memories of childhood available for analysis, since not all writers have had the opportunity or the desire to comply with the demand of Dr. Anschauung in The Pooh Perplex that the author he is studying, A. A. Milne, appear directly and present himself for treatment of his “honey-balloon complex.”1
In the case of Charles Dickens, however, psychoanalytic literary criticism is fortunate in possessing not only a partially autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, and the autobiographical fragment written as a preparatory exercise for that novel and published by John Forster in his biography of Dickens, but also the virtually unexplored tales which Dickens apparently recalled having heard in infancy and which he recounted in an essay in one of the periodicals he edited, All the Year Round.2 These “Nurse's Stories” are supposedly all nighttime tales told him by his nurse, Mary Weller, “before I was six years old,” and the novelist insists both before and after relating them how passive and unwilling a participant he was at these bedtime ordeals. All the tales are essentially horror stories, designed to terrify, but they also display bizarre and humorous touches which serve to distance their threatening content, and which are certainly evidence of Dickens' skillful journalistic reworking of Mary Weller's original tales.
Two tales are fully elaborated. The first is about a Captain Murderer, whose “mission was matrimony and the gratification of a cannibal appetite with tender brides,” whom he murders and eats.3 He