ABSTRACT
Redlaw is portrayed in this static passage as a scientist whose consider able intellectual powers to illuminate and inspire have turned inward, taking the form of a self-destructive melancholia that threatens to
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“uncom bine” his own psyche just as the chemical elements may be induced to uncombine, “to give back their com ponent parts to fire and vapour.” Alienated from social responsibility, he exists in a delusional state where everyday objects take on uncanny forms, dark doubles of their prosaic functions as tools of his trade. In this state, Redlaw does not recognize the hum anizing function of memory that the tale insists upon. While the story “gives voice to one of the central tenets of midVictorian social, psychological, and fictional discourse,” namely, that “memory, with its assurance of a continuous identity through time, functions as the grounding for social and personal morality” (Shuttleworth 47), here memory is precisely what has plunged Redlaw into despair. Dickens’s association of memory with melancholy reflects a
growing awareness on the part of the author and Victorians more generally that the continuous self might be an illusion produced by a fallible memory’s creative reinvention of the past. W hat the respected physician Henry Holland term ed “double-consciousness” (9) and later materialist psychologists such as G. H. Lewes and William C arpenter would speak of as “streams of consciousness” (Lewes 2: 62-65) and “unconscious cerebration” (Carpenter 541) suggested that memories of which one was normally aware might conceal a chaos of unconscious thoughts, dreams, and desires. This obscured knowledge, having carved deep grooves into the individual psyche, could make itself manifest in the right context.
