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IN THE EXTENSIVE LITERATURE ON DICKENS, ONE THEME IS OFTEN dominant: in the course of his life, his novels became increasingly gloomy. In all of his work his preoccupation with social abuse is strong, but there is an enormous difference between Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist and the sinister atmosphere in Edwin Drood. I see this development not only as a result of his disappointment in life but far more as a result of a progressive neurosis. It is this topic which I shall use to show where sublimations become autonomous and where they remain vulnerable. Why Dickens? In the first place, because he had such an enormous capacity for sublimation. In the second place, I have been acquainted with him through his novels for some 60 years, which is longer than I have known any of my patients. His biography was written shortly after his death by his friend John Forster (1872–74), and what the delicacy of the friend omitted was later supplied, e.g., by Pope-Hennessy (1946) and Angus Wilson (1970), to name only two of the very numerous writers about Dickens.
Dickens wrote only about what he had seen himself. He also wrote a great deal about himself in his letters to Forster. In this way we can often recognize the link between his own experiences and specific figures in his novels. For example, he wrote to a friend, "Mrs. Nickleby herself, sitting bodily before me in a solid