Me and Charles Dickens: Does Writing About Violence and Homicide Make One A Potential Criminal?

The short answer is No!

Murder and soul murder are recurrent motifs in Charles Dickens's works. Humor and sentimentality are suddenly mixed with violence. There is a persistent repetition of murder in all his novels: from The Pickwick Papers (where it appears in the melodramatic, interpolated stories) to his last, unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. Edmund Wilson points out how acute Dickens can be in revealing the psychology of the murderer, like Jonas Chuzzlewit in Martin Chuzzlewit: "For example, after the murder when Jonas is 'not only fearful for himself but of himself' and half-expects, when he returns to his bedroom, to find himself asleep in the bed."

The themes of abandoned and neglected children, and unfeeling and negligent parents and institutions, appear as obsessive interests during Dickens's life and recur throughout his fiction. The great novelist has created a gallery of monstrous parents and parental substitutes, as well as some who are good--more often unbelievably good. Dickens portrays in so many of his novels a human characteristic that was called "the undeveloped heart" by E.M. Forster (who felt it was especially applicable to the English). Forster was describing the inability to care enough about another person, a deficiency of the capacity for love, joy, and empathy. This impoverishment of the soul is both the result and the cause of soul murder; it can evoke in the deprived and frustrated child a terrible intensity of rage that can burst out into actual murder if it is not frozen by isolating defenses. And the parent's undeveloped heart can of course be expressed not only by indifference to the child but also by hatred and cruelty.

Leonard L. Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Neglect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

The psychoanalyst Alice Miller once made the following observation about Adolf Hitler: "If Hitler had been a talented writer, there would have been no Holocaust."