ABSTRACT
This paper is conceived as a two-fold experim ent, in biography and in applying ideas from colonial discourse to a canonical writer who is no t usually associated w ith this field.
The year I have chosen for this experim ent in biography is 1860 and my appendix highlights some of the key events in Dickens’s life to w hich I shall be referring. The year begins and ends satisfactorily, w ith the first appearance of The Uncommercial Traveller in All the Year Round in January and the start of the serialization of Great Expectations in December. I shall seek to dem onstrate th a t narratives are suppressed, fruitfully, in both of these works, as they are in Dickens’s personal and social life in 1860, and a good place to begin is w ith the crucial role played by The Uncommercial Traveller in the gestation of Great Expecta tions. It was a sketch for the Traveller w hich provided the ‘germ of the idea’ for Dickens’s novel, bu t this was suppressed because he began ‘to doubt w hether I had not better cancel the little paper, and reserve the no tion for a new b o o k . . . it so opens out before me th a t I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a m ost singular and comic m anner’ (To Forster, September 1860, 9.310). But suppression of another kind th en took place. Dickens was contem plating a return to the massive m onth ly serial form of Bleak House and Little Dorrit after the relative brevity of A Tale o f Two Cities (1859) in All the Year Round. Practical con siderations intervened, however, in a way characteristic of Dickens the literary producer. For the first time sales of All the Year Round fell as a result of the failure of Charles Lever’s A Day’s Ride, and this led, in lan guage w hich is w orth noticing, to ‘a council of w ar’ at the m agazine’s offices, at which ‘it was perfectly clear th a t the one th ing to be done
was, for me to strike in ’ (To Forster, 4 October 1860, 9.319). Strike Dickens did and in providing for the commercial success of his publication wrote one of the greatest works of art in the history of the novel.
