Dickens and his German relatives

Abstract

In his comprehensive two-volume biography of Dickens, Edgar Johnson has printed the pedigrees of both Dickens' father and mother, and even the most suspicious scrutiny cannot detect any foreign flaw in the long list of ancestors going back to John Dickins of Hazelwood and to Richard Warde, Cofferer to Queen Elizabeth. There are no indications of family members intermarrying with people of foreign extraction. So I have to disappoint those who might expect some sensational discovery or divulgence of family connections of the Dickens family in Germany, by immediately stating that what I mean by German relatives must be taken as a metaphorical hint at relations of a purely literary kind, whether these relations be definite influences of Dickens on German writers (or even vice versa), or whether they are just strange and striking analogies and similarities due to analogous or similar personal dispositions and social circumstances. I wish to confess - knowing that Germans are given to personal confessions - that I am more interested in analogies and similarities, in types and patterns of attitude and artistic expression, than in source hunting and influence tracing.