Charles I: The Historical and Political Incursion of the Personal in Dickens’ Later Works

Lucy Morrison

While David Copperfield’s Mr. Dick has been pinpointed as a representation of Charles Dickens the author, little has been affirmed about the other character most closely associated with Dick: the political and historical Charles I. The former king makes no appearance in Dickens’ early work but emerges fully in the novel begun almost exactly two hundred years after the king’s death and then lurks in Dickens’s subsequent fiction (making, for example, the Ghost Walk of Chesney Wold a historical ghost story). In his A Child’s History of England (1851-53), Dickens notes, that “it would have been better for [Charles] had [his wife] never been born,” and the parallel with Dick and his sister (and Miss Betsey and her husband in the parallel gender reversal) seems obvious (292). But fully mining Dickens’ writing about Charles I is a rich vein that has yet to be explored. “The King, who never could be straightforward and plain, through one single day or one single sheet of paper” (300), becomes Dickens’ Person from Porlock, and his contemporary political and historical struggles and reappearance in Dickens’ later works reveal Dickens’ own subconscious concerns about his writing career and enjoyment of the fame it brings him—as well as the personal toll it takes on his life and the political impossibility of conveying ‘his-story.’