Introduction by Damiano Consilvio
Scalar as a Digital Tool
The software used to compose this digital edition was designed at the University of Southern California as a media-rich writing platform. Similar to Word-Press, a writer can establish a text on an open-access webpage that readers can view and access through a simple URL.
Using Scalar as opposed to other digital platforms has its own implications that enhance the practice of scholarly editing. This digital edition is different than extant e-books. Here, media and images are imbedded in the margin alongside the text, complementing important moments of the story. In this edition media annotation was used to preserve the illustrations by Etheldred B. Barry done in the 1903 version of the two stories “A Child’s Story” and “A Child’s Dream of a Star.”
Textual annotation is an important concern for editors of literary text, because one is often torn striking a balance between brevity and conciseness when writing annotations. Many print-based scholarly editions for example pose a considerable problem when it comes to readability of the primary text. The 2004 Norton Critical Edition of the Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, to name one, annotates far too heavily, sometimes having entire pages of poetry overshadowed by an elongated footnote (see Ulalume in that volume for a detailed example).
It is the intention of this project to remedy that issue. Scalar allows a larger variety of information to be included in a note, such as images or video, while also being able to maintain the source material on a page neatly and without getting in the way of the display of the primary text. It will be seen in this edition how annotations are made to fit in the margin of the page rather than the bottom, and do not distort the shape or arrangement of the primary text, but instead stand to the side aloft and free.
Scalar also allows a variety of different formats for writing explanatory notes. A note of just written text can be composed in a hyperlinked drop-down page that is opened by selecting the highlighted text. This is effective if a user wants to have a page without the presence of other text or images along the margins. Instead the information is held in the link and can be accessed if the user chooses.
Media annotation offers two different ways of writing explanatory notes that hold images and other media. An editor can choose whether they want the media annotation to wrap the text, or stand separate in the margins. This edition utilizes both styles, mainly in instances where a landscape-sized image stretches across the page. It was my own editorial preference not to use media that directly altered the shape of the primary text on the page. I wanted to recreate a page that resembled what readers are used to in a print book, while comfortably arranging annotations along the right-hand margin.
The goal of any Scalar-based editorial project, for me, is to create a new readable space that can facilitate the interaction with and experience of a literary text. Treating new media as a method of study, this edition attempts to demonstrate other ways of curating writing that depart from a reliance on print technology. It is the suggestion of this project that a digitally based editorial practice is more organized, and has the ability to effectively manage more information, than what can be done in the present state of print-based textual editing.
Dickens as a Child Author
Knowing the fiction of Charles Dickens paints an image of the man’s creative mind, and the way he used his writing to ridicule the social institutions that he thought were threatening to human life. A deeper appreciation of his work however can be had when one learns about his professional life outside of fiction writing, and his direct involvement with the historical, intellectual, and scientific developments of his time. Along with being a compassionate author, Charles Dickens was also one of the first pioneers of specialized child health-care. In Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood, Katharina Boehm tells the story of the founding of the Great Ormond Street Hospital, and the central role that Dickens played in acquiring the funding that the project needed in order to properly thrive.
The story of the hospital, according to Boehm, begins with a man named Charles West. His monumental work Lectures on the Diseases of Infancy and Childhood was one of the very first medical perspectives on children that considered sympathy and compassion as essential to a child’s emotional well-being. “Both West and Dickens,” Boehm writes, “urged parents to respond sympathetically to night terrors, bad dreams, and distressful phantasms” (124). In “On the Mental Peculiarities and Mental Disorders of Childhood” West says that “the agony of terror with which the child calls for a light, or begs for its mother’s presence betrays an impression far too real to be explained away, or to be suitably met by hard words or by unkind treatment” (124). At the time, Dickens echoed West’s views in his “Uncommercial Traveller” essays, with his characteristic hint of ridicule and sarcasm: “force the child at such a time, be Spartan with it, send it to the dark against its will, leave it in a lonely bedroom against its will. and you had better murder it” [my emphasis] (124). Hyperbolizing the cruelty of a stern attitude towards a child’s needs, Dickens shared in the empathy that West wanted to point out. Dickens and West were among the first in Victorian England to advocate for childhood sentimentality, viewing the child as a primordial human vessel that needed to be nurtured in order to take form, rather than trained and instructed, and beaten into shape by harshness and authority. It would not take long before the opinions expressed dually in these writings would emerge in the form of direct community action.
Boehm continues to explain how in 1842 West worked as a physician at Waterloo Hospital and had always wanted a portion of it, or the building entirely, to be converted into a children’s hospital. Despite this West consistently lacked the funds and administrative support for such an endeavor. The truth, as Boehm notes, is that awareness of the needs of children psychologically and medically were only just becoming known. Boehm attributes several things directly to this, positing that “general hospitals admitted children on a very limited scale because they lacked the staff and resources to cater to the special needs of children” (80). She also suggests that “West’s initial difficulties in finding support for this scheme were heightened by the lack of centralized administrative organs for health and family matters” (80). A lack of intellectual nuance, coupled by an economic undervaluing of the work itself, made the progression towards a child-specific health-care system a slow and daunting one. West would find the funds and attention needed to open the hospital, but not eough to protect it from financial difficult that threatened the continuation of its existence.
Amid the center of this financial and intellectual difficulty is where Dickens emerged. Due to his already evident popularity as a writer, Boehm notes that a popular journal of the time, the Daily Telegraph, purposefully published an article on the institution titled “Tiny Tim in Hospital” that directly invoked the sentiments expressed in A Christmas Carol, a story of a man who finds compassion within himself and saves a young boy and his family from perpetual starvation. Whether directly a result of this article, or a combination of other causes, Dickens was found to have been deeply involved in the development of the hospital from that point onward. Boehm cites a large C.V. by Dickens in relation to his work for the hospital, the most noteworthy being an Honorary Governorship of the institution, and his many readings and benefits that crucially raised over three thousand pounds for the hospital during its beginning years. Dickens was so involved and so dedicated to the well-being and the progression of the children’s hospital, that in 1908 a letter published in the Times named Charles West and Charles Dickens as co-founders 0f the institution.
In introducing the stories of the present volume this brief anecdote should shed light on the mind-set and fictive-intentions of their author. Dickens was incredibly sensitive to the emotional and psychological needs of children, and he used his writing as a vehicle to advocate for social change in that regard. Jack Lindsay holds a strong opinion on Dickens as informing his work with autobiography more heavily than any other figure: “No important writer has drawn so continuously and directly on his person experience as Dickens. There is scarcely any gap between the experience and the creative image” (24). Dickens’ poverty as a child is widely known. His experience in the workhouse, begging on the streets, and losing touch with his family at various points because of the stipulations of poor-laws, all helped to shape the creative vision of Dickens as a child author. It is my suggestion that he used his life experience, his intellect, and his professional abilities to attempt to protect children from the horrors of poverty and neglect that he knew so well.
The first text of this volume, “A Child’s Story,” was originally published in 1852, just four years after Dickens lost his sister, Fanny, in 1848. The story attempts to educate the child reader about the life-cycle, and the changes that come with growth and age. It divides life into five essential parts: play, learning, love, work, and remembrance. The story focuses on a traveler, who walks through the woods and meets a child from each of these respective stages. As the traveler interacts with each of these children, he realizes that virtually all of them are fleeting, that they must move on to the next stage of life. While the traveler revels with the children, the text plays out the fictional scenario of the child willfully accepting the transition into the next stage of life. The story works to curb the fear of anticipation that comes with growth, while still encouraging one to enjoy the essence of each stage. That is, a child should, for a short time, enjoy playing and being young, but they should still be conscious of what comes afterward.
The initial stage of play imbibes a sense of Wordsworthian tranquility in the life of the young child. The text highlights the surrounding pastoral scene to heighten the calm happiness of early childhood: “So, he played with that child, the whole day long, and they were very merry. The sky was so blue, the sun was so bright, the water was so sparkling, the leaves were so green, the flowers were so lovely, and they heard such singing-birds and saw so many butteries, that everything was beautiful” (35). The traveler and the child are very much “bound each by each to natural piety” (“My Heart Leaps Up” 9) in the same way Wordsworth talks about careless revelry in the beauty of nature. The stage of play, or the beginning stage of childhood, should be filled with play. This is a push against the traditional Victorian notion of children merely being underdeveloped adults who need to be bred for the world as quickly as possible. In this version, play is encouraged. A child ought to spend time being young and carefree.
The next stages, learning and love, decentralize the child’s world view from being solely vested in themselves, and teaches that as a person one must interact with others for various reasons. The text stresses the importance of education in a child’s growth by the presentation of the next child met by the traveler. The child says “‘I am always learning. Come and learn with me’” (37-8). Here the traveler plays with the learning child, having “the merriest games that were ever played” (38), only this time does not last indefinitely. For another important aspect of life, love, must be embraced next. The child who loves represents a gradual movement away from whimsical fun and merriment and into more adult-like concerns.
The one who loves shows what other earthly concerns a growing person will encounter once they grow past the simple needs of a child mind. A person will naturally yearn for a companion, for a loved one. The story goes on talking about the child and his lover: “they made it up, and sat in the dark, and wrote letters every day, and never were happy asunder, and were always looking out for one another and pretending not to, and were engaged at Christmas-time, and sat close to one another by the fire, and were going to be married very soon” (41). Each stage is arranged purposefully after the preceding one, and before the succeeding one, in order to construct a sense of normalcy in the child’s mind for what to expect in life. So far it is trying to show that a child moves onward as they age to greater concerns, from play, to learning, to love, and then to work.
Probably the closest semblance in the story representing adulthood, the stage of work also, subliminally, tries to introduce the occurrence of loss with the onset of the need to work. Like in each section, the traveler moves on and leaves the child, and meets a new one, only this time it is an older gentleman, and no longer a child. They perform labor tasks together, “they all went on together through the wood, cutting down the trees, and making a path through the branches and the fallen leaves, and carrying burdens, and working hard” (43-4). A mind comfortable and knowledgeable of the importance of work in life would have been important to highlight in a didactic child-work. In this text, it is seemingly placed as the preeminent stage of adulthood, because it comes just before the final stage of remembrance, which attempts to teach the reader to anticipate death and loss.
In the final stage, the traveler observes a man parting ways with his children, who are going to different parts of the world to pursue a living. It says, “‘Father, I am going to India," and another, ‘Father, I am going to seek my fortune where I can,’ and another, ‘Father, I am going to Heaven!’ So, with many tears at parting, they went, solitary, down those avenues, each child upon its way” (45). Death and loss are synonymized almost, to teach the child a tolerance for worldly transience, not to cling to loved objects. Liz Thiel, I believe, sheds interesting light on why Dickens would have included a section on death in one of his children’s stories: “the prematurely mature child … is devoid of the innocence that may characterize less worldly wise children. It is an attitude that hints at authorial and social concern for the precocious development of the child and/or at a yearning for preservation of the childlike state” (143). “A Child’s Story” attempts to establish a middle-ground between childhood and adulthood upon which a child can safely and comfortably traverse the years of their life. That middle ground is the didactic explanation of these essences of life, rendered in a way that a child would understand, and not feel threatened by.
This community with the movement of age and life is stressed so much so, that the man at the end is not grieved by these things, he rather embraces them. The story depicts the leaving of the man’s children, and even the death of his wife, but the traveler sees that the man is not stricken with grief or even heartbroken. The man instead seems to emanate a “bliss of solitude” (“Daffodils” 24) similar to that described by Wordsworth while sitting among his daffodils: “So the traveler sat down by the side of that old man, face to face with the serene sunset; and all his friends came softly back and stood around him. The beautiful child, the handsome boy, the young man in love, the father, mother, and children: every one of them was there, and he had lost nothing” (49-50). As in the mourning process described by Freud (1917) the man overcomes the earthly loss by expecting to meet again with these loved ones in the afterlife. The story teaches the child to overcome loss, not dread it, because of the promise of reunion in death. The entire story, it seems, works to build up towards, and to that end impede, the child’s anxiety towards death and loss.
The second story of this volume, “A Child’s Dream of a Star,” teaches awareness of death through a similarly Wordsworthian concept of community with one’s environment. The opening of the story of framed by a question posed by the children in their “wondering.” “Supposing all children on earth were to die,” it says, “would the flowers, and the water, and the sky be sorry? They believed they would be sorry. For the buds, said they, were the children of the flowers” (15). As a text written for the child, this one demonstrates an attempt to prepare children to expect earthly loss, and it does this by embracing romantic ideals about death and the afterlife.
Dickens seems to attempt to create a cosmic metaphor when referring to the afterlife; or, what comes after death. Perhaps more appealable to children, vesting this metaphor about death in something plainly observable—like stars in the sky—must have seemed like good fodder to use in constructing the story in a way that it could have influence on the reader afterwards. The story goes on to talk about the stars, using them to represent children that have passed on to heaven: “the smallest bright specks playing at hide and seek in the sky all night, must surely be the children of the stars” (15). It is my suggestion that Dickens uses the night sky and its imagery for this story more-so than others so he can render a philosophy of death in terms that a child would understand. Conceptually, it draws a metaphorical connection between the lost-object, and the afterlife, suggesting that the lost can be seen in the stars of the night’s sky.
This story, too, shows a main child character growing up progressing through stages of life, only this story focuses on death primarily. At various points the child grows and loses a loved one, first his sister, then his mother, one of his children when he is a man, and finally his own life, when it comes time for him to die. Throughout it all however, the child looks to “the star” as a symbol of hope. The part on the death of his child towards the end reads: “the man who had been the child saw his daughter, newly lost to him, a celestial creature among those three, and he said, ‘My daughter’s head is on my sister’s bosom … and I can bear the parting from her, God be praised!’ And the star was shining.” Like the previous story, this one also suggests a promise of reunion with lost loved ones in the afterlife. It is a way of counteracting earthly transience by anticipating another higher form of existence that is eternal and unchanging, while everything in this world is subject to decay. The story attempts to supersede the death anxiety by re-conceptualizing it not as an ending but as a departure towards something else.
“A Child’s Story” and “A Child’s Dream of a Star” are reflective of an author—and a culture—with great existential anxiety about death. There was considerable effort on part of the text to describe the stages of life in a non-foreboding way that paints death to be just as natural as growth from childhood to adolescence; from play, to learning, to work, to love, to loss. It attempts to dismantle a fear of separation through death, by suggesting that all will be reunited in the final stage of remembrance. The book describes death with an ethos attuned to childhood sensibility. Contrary to the cruel adults that Dickens depicts in his adult fiction, he constructs an adult narrator to impart these life messages onto a child audience compassionately, in a way meant to curb fear, rather than enforce it.
