‘The malady of thought’ Embodied memory in Victorian psychology and the novel

In his Christmas book for 1848, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, Dickens takes as his protagonist a chemist, a man who has the destructive power to ‘uncombine’ things ‘and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour’. ¹ Redlaw is a man haunted by memories, a man for whom Christmas constitutes only ‘More figures in the lengthening sum of recollection that we work and work at to our torment’ (p. 255). He is offered release from the torment of memory by a Phantom who holds before him the power to cancel remembrance. He will lose ‘No knowledge; no result of study; nothing but the intertwisted chain of feelings and associations, each in its turn dependent on, and nourished by, the banished recollections’ (p. 270). In addition, he will be granted the power to destroy memory in all individuals with whom he comes into contact.