ABSTRACT
Despite the many children in Charles Dickens’s fiction and his “deep remembrance”1 of his own childhood that colours their creation, one is hardpressed to find the same imaginative involvement and connection with his own many children. His correspondence attests to his concern for his ten children: Charley, Mary (Mamie), Katey, Walter, Frank, Alfred, Sydney, Henry, Dora (who died in infancy) and Edward (Plorn) and his delight in them when they were young; but there are few records, even in his writing, that suggest he was able to identify with their teenage selves or the alienating situations he created for them in life. His own sons, however, note that he was a thrilling father in their early years, not least because of what we might call his performative creativity, his ability to reimagine a fictitious (even a child) persona and play with his children. He called this imaginative process “assumption” and seems to have meant the adoption or the action of taking upon oneself an assumed character. For Dickens this was no mechanical process; it was a magical transformation he had practised since childhood. It delighted and entertained his children, but despite their participation in amateur theatre they could never emulate such productive creative activity. There is one recorded example, however, in which father and sons were united in a creative enterprise not orchestrated by Dickens himself: the Gad’s Hill Gazette. This family journal with its foundation in “assumption” and the energy required to produce it delighted Dickens and set a precedent for his son Henry Fielding Dickens’s later success in life. This essay draws on Henry’s recollections and on the surviving issues of the Gad’s Hill Gazette to explore the single recorded literary instance of performative creativity initiated chiefly by Dickens’s sons, in imitation of their famous literary father.
