are not equal at night, as the sane lie a-dreaming?" In dreams we are usually insane, but, once in a way, we are persons of genius, and the sleeping outruns, in creative power, the waking mind, or, as in the experience of Dickens's own, slips the limits of space and time.[1]
In "Nurse's Stories," Dickens proves that he had a useful, though at the time uncomfortable, attendant for an imaginative child. Probably the young woman, with her variants of popular tales (so interesting to the FolkLorist), could not guess that she was narrating to a babe whose fancy made her legends into pictures hardly to be discerned from reality. "Captain Murderer" occurs in Grimm, and in other collections; but he is much more appalling here, whether because the nurse had a good version, or because Dickens had a marvellous imagination. Terque quaterque beati must the boys have been, the Steerforths and Traddleses, to whom the young Dickens told stories at Wellington House Academy. The legend of Chips is worthy of Poe, and, indeed, Miss Mercy, the nurse, had obviously a true genius as a narrator. Her habit of localising all the romances in her own family was like the method of De Foe. A man who, like Dickens, confesses to a hankering after the Morgue, has no locus standi when he complains of the ingenious Mercy.
Dickens wanders through his memories, as he wandered through country and town; he revisits his past, as he revisited Dullborough; and, in "Medicine Men of Civilisation," the Italian anecdote concerns his dead friend, Angus Fletcher, who appears as the benevolent Englishman in "The Italian Prisoner." Dickens hits at his old enemies, his old abuses—
- ↑ The anecdote is in Mr. Forster's chapter of "Personal Characteristics; it is the story "Miss Napier," and might with a struggle, be explained as retrospective hallucination of memory
