¹ The first quotation is from Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), p. 303. The second is from Dickens. Letter to John Forster, 9 Sept. 1839, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey, I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 581. Hereafter cited as the Pilgrim Letters.

² I am indebted in this discussion of the relationship among plots in the multiple-plotted novel to J. Hillis Miller's talks in a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar held at Yale University in 1977.

³ Peter K. Garrett. “Double Plots and Dialogical Form in Victorian Fiction,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 32 (1977), 1–17, also makes this observation about Bleak House in his application of Mikhail Bakhtin's terminology to multiple-plotted Victorian novels.

⁴ For a longer discussion of genealogy and narrative structure, see Patricia Drechsel Tobin, Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. 1978). Applying Edward Said's structural-anthropological terminology to narrative structure, temporality, and genealogy. Tobin chronicles the breakdown of such narrative assumptions in the modern and postmodern novel. She believes that, aside from a few quirky exceptions, Victorian fiction fails to interrogate its own genealogical structures and ideologies; my essay fundamentally disagrees with Tobin's assumptions about Victorian narrative.

⁵ Eliot. Middlemarch, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Houghton, 1956), p. 607.

⁶ Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), pp. 10. 47. Barthes's paradigm, of course, valorizes masculine aesthetics; his perspective of the son-as-writer is the one from which I view Dickens here.

⁷ David Copperfield (New York: Random. 1950), p. xv.

⁸ Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. John Holloway (Baltimore: Penguin, 1976). p. 59. All page references in the text of the essay are to this edition.

⁹ Albert D. Hutter, “Reconstructive Autobiography: The Experience at Warren's Blacking,” Dickens Studies Annual, 6 (1977), 1–14. believes the reason the blacking warehouse factory scarred Dickens so deeply was just this childish fantasy of replacing the father and the seeming confirmation of the fantasied replacement when his family lived in prison while Dickens worked and lived outside. In Little Dorrit. of course, Dickens re-creates this “scene” from his experience by making himself female and submissive, turning violent emotions toward the self.

¹⁰ Welsh, The City of Dickens (Oxford:'Clarendon, 1971), pp. 134–35.

¹¹ Paul D. Herring, “Dickens's Monthly Number Plans for Little Dorrit,” Modern Philology, 64 (1966). 38.

¹² See, in addition to Hutter, “Reconstructive Autobiography,” Leonard Manheim, “The Law as Father: An Aspect of the Dickens Pattern,” American Imago, 12 (1955), 17–23, and “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” American Imago, 9 (1952), 21–43 (rpt. in The Practice of Psychoanalytic Criticism, ed. Leonard Tennenhouse [Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press. 1976], pp. 75–94); Steven Marcus. “Who Is Fagin?” in Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Simon. 1968). pp. 358–78; Albert D. Hutter, “Crime and Fantasy in Great Expectations.” in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ed. Frederick Crews (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1970), pp. 25–65; Pearl Chesler Solomon, Dickens and Melville in Their Time (New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1975); Lawrence Jay Dessner, “Great Expectations: ‘the ghost of a man's own father,‘ ” PMLA, 91 (1976). 436–49; Branwen Bailey Pratt, “Dickens and Father: Notes on the Family Romance,” Hartford Studies in Literature, 8 (1976), 4–22. Randolph Splitter, “Guilt and the Trappings of Melodrama in Little Dorrit,” Dickens Studies Annual. 6 (1977), 119–33. mentions the father with regard to Clennam's guilt but blames primarily the mother for the hero's guilt and self-repression. Welsh, however, says. “In Little Dorrit the supplanting of the father is … thorough” (p. 153); William Myers. “The Radicalism of Little Dorrit,” in Literature and Politics in the Nine-teenth Century, ed. John Lucas (London: Methuen, 1971). claims that “the middle-class paterfamilias penetrates the novel at every level” (p. 80).

¹³ See Barry Westburg. The Confessional Fictions of Charles Dickens (Urbana: Northern Illinois Univ. Press. 1977), for a definition of the difference between autobiography and confessional fiction.

¹⁴ J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 1958). believes Little Dorrit's “voluntary refusal to will” makes her a “human incarnation of divine goodness” (p. 246). This providential view of Amy and of the novel in general, a view with which I strongly disagree, is also articulated by Avrom Fleishman. “Master and Servant in Little Dorrit,” Studies in English Literature. 14 (1974). 575–86. and Jerome Beaty. “The ‘Soothing Songs’ of Little Dorrit.” in Nineteenth-Century Literary Perspectives: Essays in Honor of Lionel Stevenson, ed. Clyde deL. Ryals (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1974). pp. 219–36. In contrast, Janice M. Carlisle, “Little Dorrit: Necessary Fictions,” Studies in the Novel, 7 (1975), 195–214, presents Amy as a figure of practical deception and fictionalizing.

¹⁵ For an extended discussion of Freud's evasions of culture in his early theories of the Oedipus complex, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 194–211.

¹⁶ Welsh, pp. 153–54 and 172–73, also discusses the relationship between father and lover in Little Dorrit, and my discussion of this issue is indebted to his.

¹⁷ Albert D. Hutter applies Freud's mechanism, splitting of the ego, to Dickens' narrative technique in “Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities,” PMLA, 93 (1978), 448–62; “ ‘The High Tower of His Mind’: Psychoanalysis and the Reader of Bleak House,” Criticism, 19 (1977), 296–316; and other articles. See also Elaine Showalter, “Guilt, Authority, and the Shadows of Little Dorrit,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 34 (1979), 20–40.

¹⁸ See Jacques Lacan's analysis of Judge Schreber's case as resulting from lack of paternal metaphor, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 179–225.

¹⁹ For an examination of Oedipus' guilt from the perspective of René Girard's theories of scapegoating, see Sandor Goodheart, “Oedipus and Laius' Many Murderers,” Diacritics, 8 (1978), 55–71. See also Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), Chs. vii and viii, and Cynthia Chase, “Oedipal Textuality: Reading Freud's Reading of Oedipus,” Diacritics, 9 (1979), 54–68.

²⁰ Bogel, “Fables of Knowing: Melodrama and Related Forms,” Genre, 11 (1978), 97–98.

²¹ See J. Hillis Miller's short meditation on the metaphor of knots and narrative closure, “The Problematic of Ending in Narrative,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 33 (1978), 3–7. See also Alistair M. Duckworth's attempt to wed deconstructive criticism to humanism, “Little Dorrit and the Question of Closure,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 33 (1978), 110–30. Duckworth's article fails to confront its ambivalent response to its theoretical material; its Derridean terms are in quotes throughout the text and so become attenuated and tentative: “This essay has attempted both to attest to the power of Derrida's deconstructive mode and to restate the merits of a thematic criticism that is willing to become, to an extent, ‘grammatological’ ” (p. 130).