ABSTRACT
Charles Dickens was a voracious writer and reader of stories. His lifelong indebtedness to and evocation of his childhood favourites, Tales of the Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe, is widely understood;2 the stories act as a magic lantern of inspiration throughout his life. However, the way in which Dickens maintains memories of childhood reading by actively supplementing them in his adult reading with stories of travel and adventure remains relatively unexplored. Thus, the extent to which these adult stories and the memories of his childhood reading combine to shape both Dickens’s fictional and non-fictional writing is an area ripe for exploration. It is possible to trace in Dickens’s notorious essay “The Noble Savage,” published in Household Words on 11 June 1853, the active influence of memory, specifically the memory of childhood and adult reading.
