SOURCE: Hutter, Albert D. “Reconstructive Autobiography: The Experience at Warren's Blacking.” Dickens Studies Annual 6 (1977): 1-14.

In the following essay, Hutter discusses distortions of the accounts of Dicken's childhood labor at Warren's Blacking Factory in the author's own narrative and in various versions of his biographers and critics.

Any autobiographical statement is a fabrication. Facts are distorted, relationships colored, not necessarily to deceive or persuade an audience, but rather because of the individual's desire to make sense out of the past as he understands it—and always incompletely understands it—in the present. I hope to clarify and redefine the central issues in the autobiographical account to Forster of Dickens' childhood experience at Warren's Blacking Factory. I have, in fact, three aims: to outline the significant approaches taken by critics and biographers toward the period at Warren's; to describe the limitations of these earlier approaches; and to suggest further...