Striving For Superiority--On Charles Dickens' Feelings Of Inferiority

It is believed that Charles Dickens'painful experience of working in a blacking factory at 12 prompted his creativity in his literary career. However, throughout his life, Charles Dickens only shared his dark and humiliating experience with his close friend and autobiographer, John Forster. On the one hand, it seemed that Charles Dickens was unwilling and reluctant to tell the tragic episode and bitter memories of suffering that had been torturing him all over his life; on the other hand, he was quite open about it. Charles Dickens continuingly presented the unhappy experience under the disguise of his boy protagonists. Charles Dickens'ambivalent attitudes of keeping it as a secret in public while presenting it in his novels provoke many scholars to do research on the question of his trauma. How Charles Dickens managed to transfer his childhood trauma into his literary creativity is a subject that is worth academic value.The aim of this thesis is to find out that process by means of Adlerian psychoanalysis. With a thorough exploration of Charles Dickens'reactions towards this traumatic incident during and after, the thesis shows the true nature of the trauma and explains how compensation and striving for perfection function to rescue and comfort Charles Dickens and maintain his mental health. By further exploring the features shared by his children protagonists:Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip, the thesis shows that writing serves primarily as a mental compensation for Charles Dickens to fight against his feelings of inferiority.