DAVID COPPERFIELD is a long novel, uneven in quality and more complicated than it may seem; snap judgements on it are certain to be not merely inadequate but falsifying. Therefore there seems to me an interesting point which must be raised before anyone can begin to discuss it at all: What novel is it? For evidently, for Tolstoy it was a very different novel from what it was for its English contemporaneous admirers or equally from what (quite other) it is for its latter-day denigrators – I note that in the opinion of the more recent trans-Atlantic thesis-writers (there is always a smart Dickens book in vogue with the academics and literary journalists, and those favoured at the moment seem to be Garis1 and Dabney2) the valuation of David Copperfield should be low indeed. The view of it held from the moment of its publication in 1850 and till modern Dickens criticism ousted that, was shown in its being bracketed invariably in esteem with Pickwick Papers, the pair being accepted as the high-water mark of Dickens’s achievement (with The Christmas Carol often thrown in) – David Copperfield was ‘second only to Pickwick in immediate and lasting popularity’, wrote Forster, Dickens’s biographer and business confidant. This was the valuation not only of the average uncritical intellectual men of the age, who thus made it clear that they saw Dickens only as a writer to relax with. ‘I was told by Lord Morley’, wrote Harold Laski in his Introduction to Mill’s Autobiography, ‘that few people enjoyed more, or read more often, Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield’ than – John Stuart Mill. Lord Acton, I note, wrote in 1880 in a letter: ‘It is beginning at the wrong end to read David Copperfield first, but he [Dickens] is worth anything to busy men, because his fun is so hearty and so easy, and he rouses the emotions by such direct and simple methods. I am ashamed to think how much more often I return to Dickens than to George Eliot.’ Perhaps comment is unnecessary, but my deduction that he thought Dickens, at what Acton took to be his best, could serve only for the relaxation of serious citizens, and rather shamingly at that, is borne out by another statement in his letters: ‘Dickens is far below Thackeray in his characters’, and it appears that he didn’t think much of Thackeray either.3
Quite logically, from this reading of and valuation of Copperfield, Forster saw Dickens’s subsequent novels as a steady falling-off, increasingly less amusing and more ‘unpleasant’ (for instance, he complains that Skimpole is a very disagreeable successor to Micawber), while the only drawback to Copperfield’s perfection he finds is the insertion of the unnecessarily ‘unpleasant’ Rosa Dartle. An acceptance of this reading of Copperfield is implied in Henry James’s low opinion of Dickens generally, as in this comment in his non-fictional book English Hours: ‘You go on liking David Copperfield – I don’t say you go on reading it, which is a very different matter – because it is Dickens.’ Supporting this view of Dickens we have James’s statement in his essay on Turgeniev in 1884 expressing surprise that ‘Turgeniev should have rated Dickens so high’ and explaining that it must have been ‘merely that Dickens diverted him, as well he might’.
Tolstoy on the contrary did go on reading it, having singled out David Copperfield from his first encountering the Russian translation4 and then grappling with it in English with the aid of a dictionary in order to do it justice.5 We know from numerous independent sources of Tolstoy’s conversation throughout his long life, as well as from his own written tributes, that David Copperfield was a serious and indeed fundamental influence on his work as a novelist. In 1905 he told Makovitsky: ‘How good Dickens is! I should have liked to write about him.’ Though he seems never to have done so directly, I think by examining his novels we can see what he would have written about Dickens if he had been able, from the use he makes of Dickens and the understanding of Dickens’s themes and intentions that he shows in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Recalling in conversation with friends in 1905 the influence Dickens had on him when he began writing he said that it was second only to Stendhal’s; but in general he placed Dickens above all other novelists and Copperfield above all his other novels: his family quoted him as saying: ‘If you sift the world’s prose literature, Dickens will remain; sift Dickens, David Copperfield will remain.’ He also said: ‘Dickens was a genius such as is met with but once in a century’ and ‘on me he had a great influence’. Between this admiration for Dickens in his youth and his old age there are also similar references to his frequenting Dickens’s novels – e.g. in 1886: ‘Dickens interests me more and more’, and he used to read Dickens to his visitors. While to us it may on reflection seem surprising that a young Russian aristocrat with a wild youth and an army officer’s experiences, living as a privileged member of an archaic society which had an autocrat at one end of the social scale and serfs at the other, accustomed to only a monastic form of Christianity and generally being as remote as a European can be imagined from industrialized Victorian England – that such a member of such a society should be so excited and stimulated by the wholly alien fictions of a self-made member of a Protestant English lower-middle-class – yet it is only because of an overall likeness to Dickens’s of Tolstoy’s two great novels that we do not register as improbable this surely remarkable state of affairs. Would Tolstoy’s novels have been as they are and what they are but for their author’s having encountered the translation of David Copperfield at the formative phase of his writing life? Even Tolstoy’s autobiography Childhood, Boyhood and Youth has been found by Russian critics to contain ‘evident traces of David Copperfield’ in ‘the characteristics of conduct and even the grouping of characters and the selection of facts’. It was in fact this novel that Tolstoy again and again specified as for him the most important work of the greatest of novelists. And not only as a novel: when in 1896 he drew up a list of the books which had made a strong impression on him in his youth, in the highest category he placed Copperfield (along with Rousseau and the Gospel of St Matthew); at the age of 80 he told his doctor that the English book he thought the highest of was David Copperfield.
This surely gives us something to think about. It is not lessened but made clearer by the remark I notice Gorky recorded that Tolstoy made to him in his old age, that ‘On the whole Dickens was a sentimental, loquacious and not very clever writer, but he knew how to construct a novel a no one else did’ (Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Maxim Gorky). Tolstoy was evidently not a blind worshipper of Dickens, he saw his faults and weaknesses just as Henry James did, but to Tolstoy these seemed negligible (and ‘clever’ may well convey a contempt for novelistic arts as such) – negligible compared with what Dickens had to offer him as a great genius whose insights and preoccupations inspired his own and who was a master of the art of composition, for this is what he must have meant by constructing a novel. And as we now, unlike Henry James, see that Tolstoy himself was the creator of miracles of construction and meaningfu complexity, a master of the art of the novel whose opinion of a novelist’s achievement must be respected, we must take it that Tolstoy’s consistently high valuation of David Copperfield must mean that Dickens’s intentions and achievements there, in some fundamental way (below the superficial level of the social, linguistic, economic, religious and historical differences in the two novelists’ habitats), were perceived by Tolstoy to have an immediate relevance to his own creative problems, in helping him to formulate what he, through Dickens’s eyes, saw as the essential difficulties of living that pressed on him.6 Now if Dickens in Copperfield were merely providing the kind of entertaining fiction his contemporaries, as we’ve seen, saw it as being, indeed, if Dickens were merely (or at all) the kind of novelist assumed by H. House7 or were Garis’s Dickens (the compulsively theatrical and factitious entertainer) or Dabney’s victim of the Victorian relation between Love and Property, then he could not have been of use to Tolstoy at all, still less held by Tolstoy for over half a century in the highest esteem. Nor if Edmund Wilson’s view of his novel was just: ‘Copperfield is not one of Dickens’s deepest books; it is something in the nature of a holiday’ (The Wound and the Bow).
Yet what a novelist thinks of another novelist is best deduced not from what he says critically but from what he says creatively, in the use he makes of the other’s art, and it is in War and Peace and Anna Karenina that we must look for the proofs of what David Copperfield meant to Tolstoy.
Tolstoy, who, as we’ve seen, actually translated his pre-adult experiences into the forms of David Copperfield’s in writing his own autobiography, must have therefore felt the power and essential truth of its representative selection of experience as a child’s, boy’s and youth’s in 19th-century society, or in the parts of that common to Dickens’s England and Tolstoy’s Russia. Forster, who was by no means so stupid as he often seems to be in his criticism of Dickens’s novels, was shrewd enough to note that one of the reasons for the great popularity of Copperfield was that ‘it can hardly have had a reader, man or lad, who did not discover that he was something of a Copperfield himself’, thus bearing witness to its relevance for Englishmen of that age. The parts of Tolstoy’s first major fiction, War and Peace, which he wrote nearly twenty years after first reading Copperfield, that struck me as so interestingly like parts of Copperfield that I started looking for extra-fictional evidence of Tolstoy’s interest in this novel, with what astonishing results and confirmation I have described – these parts, though not integrated into War and Peace nor really prepared and accounted for there, show that Tolstoy had grasped the importance of Dickens’s theme in Copperfield and the nature of Dickens’s use of symbolic action and dialogue in isolating for examination psychological truths of radical importance to the young man of his own time even, it appears, in Russia too. Before I give my account of what I take to be Dickens’s theme and the nature and technical means of his presentation of it, I had better distinguish the parts of War and Peace I have in mind. To begin with, consider the married life of Prince Andrew which Tolstoy chose to open the novel with so abruptly, though we know he took immense trouble with this and that Prince Andrew went through numerous changes of character and appearance before becoming the protagonist he is. The stress this episode gets seems out of proportion to its relevance to the plot of the novel, though after studying its origin in Copperfield I think we can understand why for Tolstoy it had this importance.
Tolstoy’s curtain rises on a drawing-room in the highest society where Lisa, beautiful, gay and childlike, but already married long enough to be visibly pregnant, is the centre of admiration, engaged on an empty-headed flirtatious conversation with the gentlemen. Her husband alone is unresponsive to her charm, treating her with a cold and insulting politeness that we soon see covers the exasperation of a clever and sensitive man who finds he has fallen in love with and married a silly trivial creature; she is however a loving child, who has enough feeling to sense that her relation with her husband has gone wrong and to complain that his present indifference (to her unaccountable) is cruel. He then tells his friend Pierre that he has nothing to accuse his wife of except that he is disappointed with marriage, even though he had chosen as wife a girl who is the type approved by his society. He has decided to solve his matrimonial difficulties by leaving his wife to bear their child at his father’s country home and going off to the war, in the likelihood of being killed. He takes her there and his sister Mary, a tender-hearted and spiritually-minded girl, tries to make the best of what she sees as a wrong to poor little Lisa, by persuading her brother to look at his wife in a more compassionate light:
‘She was so tired that she has fallen asleep on the sofa in my room. Oh, Andrew! What a treasure of a wife you have,’ said she, seating herself on the sofa opposite her brother. ‘She is quite a child: such a dear, merry child. I have grown so fond of her!’
Prince Andrew was silent, but the princess noticed the ironical and contemptuous look that showed itself on his face.
‘One should be indulgent to little weaknesses; who is without them, Andrew? Don’t forget that she was educated and brought up in society. Besides, her position now is not a rosy one. We should enter into every one’s situation. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. Think what it means to her, poor thing, after what she has been used to, to be parted from her husband and to remain alone in the country, in her condition! It is very hard.’
Prince Andrew smiled as he looked at his sister, as we smile at those we think we thoroughly understand.
As his sister tells him, ‘You are good in every way, Andrew, but there is a kind of intellectual pride in you, and that is a great sin’.
She tries again:
‘As I was saying to you, Andrew, be kind and generous as you always were. Don’t judge Lisa harshly,’ she began. ‘She is so sweet, so kind, and her position now is a very trying one.’
‘I do not think I have blamed my wife to you, Masha, or complained of her. Why do you say all this to me?’
Red patches appeared on Princess Mary’s face and she was silent, as if she felt guilty …
‘Know this, Masha: that there is nothing I can reproach my wife with; I have not reproached and never shall reproach her, and I cannot reproach myself with anything in regard to her … But if you want to know the truth, if you want to know whether I am happy? No! Whether she is? No! But why this is so, I don’t know.’
But his father, the eccentric Prince Nicholas, says to him, by way of showing his sympathy:
‘It’s a bad look-out, eh?’
‘What is, father?’
‘The wife!’ said the old prince, shortly and significantly.
‘I don’t understand!’ said Prince Andrew.
‘Yes, it can’t be helped, lad,’ said the prince. ‘They’re all alike; one can’t unmarry. Don’t be afraid! I’ll tell no one, but you know it yourself.’
The son sighed, thus admitting that his father had understood him.
Neither father nor son seems to see any other attitude to Lisa as possible, but the son is to learn more about himself when, seriously wounded on the battlefield, he has some kind of mystical experience that softens what his sister has called his ‘intellectual pride’. He now realizes ‘the unimportance of everything I understand and the greatness of something incomprehensible but most important’, so that he returns able to feel sorry for his wife as well as himself, and contrite towards her. We return in advance of him to the household where false news of Andrew’s death has been received just as Lisa is expecting the birth, but though when he comes home at last he is anxious to show her he has had a change of heart towards her (‘“My darling!” he said – a word he had never used to her before. “God is merciful …”’) she is too far gone in labour ever to recognize him before she dies.
She lay dead in the same position he had seen her in five minutes before, and despite the fixity of the eyes and the pallor of the cheeks, the same expression was on her charming, childlike face. ‘I love you all, and never did any one any harm; and what have you done to me?’ – said her lovely pathetic dead face … And there in the coffin was the same face, though with closed eyes. ‘Ah, what have you done to me?’ it still seemed to say, and Prince Andrew felt that something gave way in his soul; that he was guilty of a sin he could neither remedy nor forget. He could not weep.
Later he puts up a white marble statue of an angel over his wife’s tomb and the angel’s short upper lip seems raised in the childlike smile that characterized his wife; in consequence he feels the angel’s expression is one of mild reproach like that he saw on her dying and then her dead face: ‘Oh, why have you done this to me?’ Of course this expresses his sense of guilt towards her, now inexpugnable.
Yet in spite of the brilliant and moving delineation of a typical situation, which is of course that of David and Dora in Copperfield translated into Russian terms, with Princess Mary as Agnes, it has no before or after in War and Peace; it merely fixes a subject that Tolstoy, it seems to me, had been struck with in making the acquaintance of a Dickens masterpiece. It has no apparent bearing on Andrew’s subsequent second love for Natasha, though I suppose it may be seen as a trailer for the many-stranded subject of love and marriage and the achievement of happiness that determines the ‘Peace’ section of the novel and which is also the subject-matter and theme of David Copperfield. But it inevitably raises questions in the reader’s mind that Tolstoy has not provided for, such as: How comes it that so intelligent and sophisticated a man as Andrew should accept a Lisa, who is merely the incarnation of a frivolous society’s ideal, as suitable to pass his life with, since he despises the drawing-room world that is her only existence? Neither his father nor his sister both of whom he loves and respects, has any difficulty in seeing what Lisa is. We can’t on Tolstoy’s showing accept Andrew’s marriage as plausible,8 though the detailing of his disenchantment and unhappiness is; and the indications of Andrew’s moral growth and the creation in him of a sense of guilt, though minimal, are remarkable imaginative feats, proofs of Tolstoy’s genius for the novel. We can’t but wonder whether, in these circumstances if Lisa had survived, Andrew’s remorse would have withstood the trials of her social habits and her conversation for long and whether his new-found spirituality would have been able to survive prolonged contact with her triviality and egotism. While we are bound to feel that Tolstoy’s handling of Dickens’s subject is wholly serious and so really painful, we also perceive, I hope, that Tolstoy has not such an unquestionable advantage over Dickens as critics generally assume (e.g. ‘Dickens was not a Tolstoy: it was quite beyond his range to show in fiction a great man’s struggles towards new moral forms’ – H. House, The Dickens World). There is something to be said, surely, for Dickens’s lighter hand which with humour relieving, and at the same time heightening, the dilemma, allows shades of feeling and complexities of meaning and subtleties of attitude that have no equivalent in the tragic affair of Prince Andrew’s marriage, where the situation is quite barely stated instead of, as in Copperfield, comprehended in its whole social and psychological context and implications. For Dickens does not leave us rebellious because of unanswered or rather unanswerable questions, like Tolstoy in his rendering of the same theme, questions which we can’t help positing. We don’t need to know that Dickens wrote during the composition of Copperfield: ‘I feel the story to its minutest point.’ This is evident from the start, not only in the imaginative understanding of how a child feels9 and thinks and acquires ideas – for instance, in David’s confused feelings about his unknown father outside in his grave shown in his immediate fear, on being told he has a new father, that the dead man has come out of it, or his wondering whether the sundial misses the sun – and of the next stage when he has left behind the infant’s egocentric universe and become self-conscious in his awareness of the community he is part of, so that he inevitably imagines how he appears to others in his (genuine) grief for his mother’s death and how it affects his status.10 No, it is most evident in the construction which required Dickens, as he had realized, to start before David’s birth with establishing the nature of his parents’ relation to each other in a typical Victorian marriage, and where the presence of Miss Trotwood is necessary not, as it is now fashionable to assert, as the bad fairy at the christening, but in order that she may provide the astringent comment of an unromantic adult wisdom on those aspects of the Copperfield parents’ marriage which need such exposure, since they are to form the unborn child’s attitudes in important matters.
The masterly construction of Copperfield is the more surprising when one reflects that its only predecessor as an integrally conceived novel was Dombey, and that that broke down, changing direction and mode, with the death of little Paul, losing its previous steady focus on the theme. Copperfield is only a year later but what an advance it shows in planning, complexity of conception and consistency from the first chapter right through to the schematic ending! (leaving out the last chapter, which provides a pantomime transformation scene – a concession to the reading-public which Dickens never again makes. There are no happy endings after Copperfield).11
Unlike Tolstoy in War and Peace Dickens has pondered his theme so as to provide an answer for the question raised by the why of Prince Andrew’s marriage, and which Tolstoy avoids by opening with it as a fait accompli. David is not a Prince Andrew who should have known better. He is an innocent, by the circumstances of his childhood and upbringing, simply passive in being imprinted with the age’s ‘best’ ideals of love, marriage, conduct of life and what is desirable in a woman. He is deliberately chosen to be representative, in order to examine current ideas; we should note that he is otherwise colourless, and impossible to visualize physically in any respect – seeing how gifted Dickens is at communicating personal characteristics and how naturally this comes to him, only concentration on this conception of his protagonist could have stopped Dickens from providing David with a full, vivid individuality (the same is true of Pip in Great Expectations, for the same reason). It follows that David’s relation to Dickens is nothing like what it has generally been alleged to be.12 I have already quoted Forster’s witness to the universality of Copperfield in his age, and the passage in his life of Dickens that ends thus should have been enough to warn critics off confusing a novel written in autobiographical form with an autobiography or, as Mr Cockshut calls it, a fake autobiography. Forster wrote:
‘Too much has been assumed, from those revelations [of facts of Dickens’s experience] of a full identity of Dickens with his hero, and of a supposed intention that his own character as well as parts of his career should be expressed in the narrative. It is right to warn the reader as to this … it would be the greatest mistake to imagine anything like a complete identity of the fictitious novelist with the real one, beyond the Hungerford scenes; or to suppose that the youth, who then received his first harsh schooling in life, came out of it as little harmed or hardened as David did … The character of the hero of the novel finds indeed his right place in the story he is supposed to tell, rather by unlikeness than by likeness to Dickens, even where intentional resemblances might seem to be prominent.
Forster is correct, but the key to all this has escaped his notice, since he was deaf and blind to Dickens’s art,13 though invaluable in the insights he gives us into Dickens the man. We ought to reflect that D. C. could not possibly have written C. D.’s novels, even if some of Charles Dickens’s experiences were made use of – in the usual manner of writers – in the history of his hero, though apart from the episode in boyhood in the wine-business and London low life, David Copperfield does not get mixed up in Dickens’s own history. The other parts of Dickens’s feelings and adventures drawn on are there, deliberately chosen, because they are typical, such as his adolescent love-affair with Maria Beadnell. Whoever David is, he isn’t his author, and very obviously less so even than Levin is Tolstoy. David incarnates the kind of youth the age demanded – sensitive, modest, upright, affectionate, but also resourcefully industrious and successful in rising in the world. Now whatever Dickens was he was not a Daisy, and his habit of referring to himself as ‘The Inimitable’ does not sound at all like David either. While Dickens was a colourful personality David is colourless and intentionally uninteresting in himself – only a type. I doubt if Dickens admired David as unreservedly as his public did, or endorsed him fully as writers even now assume – David is necessarily sensitive and lacking in guile, the evidence for this exists in the text of the novel itself, but I will return to this later – just as Pip is later explicitly constructed to be ‘morally timid and very sensitive’, both being shown to be the product of childhood conditioning and therefore, for the purposes of each novel, typically significant. As also is Little Dorrit’s Arthur Clennam, though a fully human and characterized exponent of a Victorian disease, however, being in a novel of a different kind from Oliver Twist, David Copperfield or Great Expectations. We can therefore dismiss the kind of charge of dishonesty now brought against Dickens, represented characteristically by Cockshut’s assertion that Dickens wrote David Copperfield in order to present his past and himself in a favourable light – ‘the self-criticism has no sting’. Not only is David’s life not Dickens’s past, but even though, as Forster noted, the young male reader of his time naturally identified himself with David, there is no compulsion to identify with him uncritically as there is, for instance, for the reader of Jane Eyre to do so with the heroine. In fact, those critics who do identify C. D. with D. C. and complain that Dickens didn’t realize that David was stupid not to see through Dora, or reprehensible not to blame himself, merely expose their inability to read what Dickens has offered them. Dickens had started to write his autobiography, it is true, and abandoned the project when he decided to write the novel instead; but this must have been because he did want to examine impersonally the experience of growing up in the first half of the 19th century, with the problems that a young man of that generation incurred, an examination needing the kind of objectivity that inheres in the novelist’s art, but still one best exposed through the autobiographical form. [David Copperfield was his first novel in this form and it is interesting that in his next novel, Bleak House, he decided to combine the advantages of the fictional autobiography with the freer possibilities available to the writer of narrative, so that this novel is divided into halves technically, with alternations of each form sandwiched together. Whatever advantage he found in this, it was presumably not successful enough to be worth repeating, and when he needed a first-person narrative again, he re-read David Copperfield, as we know, before writing Great Expectations in the Copperfield form.] David’s relation to Charles Dickens is even less close than Levin’s to Tolstoy – who is Tolstoy not only without the genius but without being Vronsky either (as Tolstoy was or had been). What Tolstoy evidently saw in David Copperfield was that real issues were raised in it that were not personal to Dickens.
The questions Dickens was asking himself more or less consciously before writing David Copperfield must have been similar to and often identical with those we can see Tolstoy, alerted to them by Dickens, asking himself in the Peace sections of War and Peace; Tolstoy’s fiction is formed to state and explore these questions by dramatizing them, and we may well ask whether Tolstoy’s answers would have been worked out on Dickensian lines, or even if he would have been conscious of such questions, if he had not come on Dickens’s novel in his wild youth. Yet Dickens’s questions arise from a painful if not yet bitter feeling (as later in Great Expectations) that a young man is misled by taking the new Victorian pilgrim’s path to the Promised Land. David’s history is a model one in that buoyant era which believed or held that every man had the prospect of achieving comfort and respectability, even riches and distinction, at any rate happiness, if he would choose the path of thrift, austerity, perseverance in hard work, and self-improvement. This David does, and he accepts the reward that his society had given him to understand would then make him happy: domestic bliss which would be guaranteed by marriage with the incarnation of a feminine ideal he had been conditioned to accept as lovable. Dickens had done so too, and evidently had now reached the point of asking himself: Why then am I not contented? If society is right, what went wrong? Or was it the wrong prescription? What should it have been? These questions are explored through the history of David Copperfield, but there is no such uncontrollable passionate identification of the author with the protagonist as we resent at times in Jane Eyre or find embarrassing in The Mill on the Floss, for not being David, Dickens is not concerned to make a hero of him.
The theme is preluded before David’s birth, in his mother’s typical marriage. Clara Copperfield is the girl-wife whom her son registers as the ideal woman because, fatherless, and isolated with her in a male infant’s paradise of having his mother entirely to himself, turned in on her, surrounded with love and tenderness till a suitor appears, he inevitably associates love of woman with her personally, with her curls, gaiety, vanity, her pettishness even, and extreme youthfulness. These were in fact generally considered winning feminine characteristics then, though David as an uncritical child sees them ideally without recognizing his mother’s weaknesses, of course. Dickens’s note for Clara in the original plan for the first number14 was ‘Young mother – tendency to weakness and vanity’; the phrase ‘Brooks of Sheffield’ also occurs there, showing that Dickens intended David’s innocence to be exploited from the start, thus launching the two themes together15. This innocence is shown to be the result of David’s sheltered life among women combined with his need for affection. The innocent trustfulness which makes him ridiculous so often as well as unhappy in the event is inherited, we must note. In the opening chapter, before David’s birth, Miss Trotwood extracts from Mrs Copperfield the admission that the house was called The Rookery by David’s father (of the same name) under a mistake. ‘“David Copperfield all over!” cried Miss Betsey. “David Copperfield from head to foot! Calls a house a rookery when there’s not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust, because he sees the nests!”’ This striking and suggestive generalization applies to both Davids and is to alert us to later events. Dickens wrote Why Rookery and underlined it in his plan for chapter I, showing the significance he attached to the point. We have this heritage revived for us when David’s reception into Miss Betsey’s home is marked by constant references to ‘David’s son’ and ‘David’s son David’. The mistakes David makes, we are to understand then, are inherent in the upbringing and heredity of such a child; the cloistered infancy is virtually repeated in his second existence as the sheltered schoolboy fostered by Miss Trotwood and Agnes and the guileless Dr Strong, though a different kind of idealism is provided by them. Miss Trotwood and Agnes are very different and – to us – superior to his mother, but how can they supplant her in his imagination since her early death in peculiarly painful circumstances has stamped her image on his memory as she was before a stepfather came between them? (Owing to whose advent, he remembers, he was turned out of his mother’s room where he had slept in a closet – whether the stepfather was actually ‘a Murderer’ or not he would of course have seemed one to the child as murderer of his happiness, in coming between him and his mother.)
The woman who fulfils the maternal function in practice for David, his real mother, is also a Clara, and David tells us that he loved her (Clara Peggotty) equally but in a different way from his mother; he loved her because he recognized that she loved him truly (unselfishly) and was indispensable – he says he could never have borne to lose her (though he bore the loss of the other Clara). It is evident that for his purpose of examining the role of woman Dickens has split the dual nature of it into separate identities, the two Claras.
The Plan for chapter IX that Dickens made says: ‘close with the idea of his mother as she was, with him as he was, in her arms’ – surely the most striking proof of the seriousness of Dickens’s commitment to this novel as an impersonal work of art. It is impossible to imagine this major theme – the relation of mother and son – handled with more delicacy, insight and firm control in its understanding of the dilemma involved. The idea is psychologically true in conception and richly and interestingly rendered. Underlying it is Dickens’s strikingly intelligent apprehension of the need for both romantic tenderness and devoted services to sustain the male ego in its struggle with the conditions of living in such a world as the Dickens world, in a competitive society; and the impossibility of combining these qualities in a single personality. The emotional complexity of David’s situation as the boy-child who, as a posthumous son, had been from birth in sole possession of his mother, until her remarriage banished him from her, is made tolerable for him when, returning from school, he finds his mother with a new baby boy at her breast and instead of feeling jealous identifies with him because of his overwhelming desire to be that babe again. David has first heard Clara’s voice singing in the tone he remembered from his infancy before he saw the baby, and this predisposes him to the identification, of course, though we are left to deduce this16 for ourselves. The accompanying illustration (and we know Dickens kept a tight hand on his illustrators, often specifying the illustration or criticizing the drawing to get it right) shows a worn-looking Clara suckling the infant with David opening the parlour door; on his face is a curious mixture of surprise and perplexity, over the head of the nursing mother is a portrait of her as the girlish mother of his earliest memories, flanked by two Biblical pictures chosen in the Hogarth tradition for the symbolic nature, of their content: they are the infant Moses being taken from the bulrushes, and the Prodigal Son being embraced by his father again. The lovely idyll of the evening David then spends, encircled in the love of the two Claras, is completed when he returns next time from school to his mother’s funeral and hears Peggotty’s account of her ‘sweet girl’s’ pining and death-bed; it has the effect of wiping out the intervening period for David, and establishing forever their old relation of being all in all to each other and of Clara as eternally girlish, for Peggotty had mothered them both, and this I conclude is why Dickens forbore to have a direct death-bed scene, witnessed by David:
From the moment of my knowledge of the death of my mother, the idea of her as she had been of late vanished from me. I remembered her, from that instant, only as the young mother of my earliest impressions, who had been used to wind her bright curls round and round her finger, and to dance with me at twilight in the parlour. What Peggotty had told me now, was so far from bringing me back to the later period, that it rooted the earlier image in my mind. It may be curious, but it is true. In her death she winged her way back to her calm untroubled youth, and cancelled all the rest.
The mother who lay in her grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.
There is nothing finer in Tolstoy’s novels, and it is ‘Tolstoyan’ before Tolstoy. The whole conception and treatment is perfectly free from sentimentality. It is a supreme example of Dickens’s ‘feeling the story in its minutest point’, as he truly said, for it is an insight which can owe nothing to Dickens’s personal experience. It is the understanding of the way we deal with the deepest human feelings which only a great genius could arrive at, and it is made the basis and starting-point of a typical male history in that age. Dickens was as far as possible from having a Freudian attachment to his mother. But – a proof of genius – he had observed that the other was the more usual condition of man, and had pondered, and worked out, its implications. This passage presages David’s escape from a second phase of misery in order to find a substitute home and mother, which he does at Dover with his great-aunt, where he is reborn as Trotwood, goes to school all over again, is launched into the world of London on his own a second time, where he – in a dreamlike or Alice-in-Wonderland world – strays into the previous dimension inhabited by the figures of his previous state – Steerforth, Micawber, Traddles, the boat household at Yarmouth, and meets the double of his mother, Dora. Dora is naturally to repeat his mother’s history, in fading away for the same reason. Dickens’s original idea seems to have been to keep Dora alive, but it was a sound instinct that made him, however reluctantly, (and only deciding at the last possible instalment) kill off Dora (as he put it) – not, as has been alleged by those who do not grasp the theme and structure of the novel, because he wanted the spurious pathos of a death-bed scene.
That David’s love of his mother is the love of Woman, and that he is always looking for her image, a pettish, wilful, childish, loving playmate, is shown as the pattern of his emotional life. He has first encountered in childhood Little Em’ly, whom he was thrown with both at the time of first being separated from his mother and again when he is desolate after her funeral. These two episodes give prominence to this part of the theme and indicate its nature very delicately. David is impressed by Emily’s being loving, tender-hearted, spoiled, pretty and gay, she even has the necessary curls (characterized as running over her uncle’s hand like water) so that David goes to sleep praying that he ‘might grow up to marry little Em’ly’. Emily also prefigures Dora (and echoes his mother whose manner he had recognized – but only after her remarriage – as ‘pettish and wilful’) in her response to David’s juvenile courtship, calling him ‘a silly boy’ as she ‘laughed so charmingly’, in fact she has all the marks by which he recognizes the feminine character. He then thinks of their marriage as one where they would ‘never grow older, never grow wiser, [be] children ever’ etc. Growing older and wiser is associated with the Murdstones’ programme of educating Clara which was to denature her. When David meets Agnes he notices at once that what characterizes her is that though a child she is her father’s housekeeper with the household keys at her side. The charge of the housekeeping keys was an issue between David’s mother and Miss Murdstone, marking the victory of the latter. This therefore becomes a symbol for David, and is picked up in Dora’s case when her response to David’s request to her to take charge of the household is to ‘tie the key-basket to her slender waist’ but use the keys only ‘as a plaything for Jip. She was quite satisfied that a good deal was effected by this mode of make-belief of housekeeping’. David identifies Agnes with her dead mother’s portrait, as Agnes’s father does – she is to both of them not a child but a little woman. Agnes isn’t gay and girlish but calm, staid and responsible, so David realizes that: ‘I love little Em’ly, and I don’t love Agnes – no, not at all in that way’, so she can be only loved as a sister. Maturity in a woman is chilling to him.
Of course this was a typical Victorian dilemma, and at the centre of Dickens’s theme as he understands it. Idealizing immaturity stabilized it and inhibited maturity in women, but this was not the product of a morbid or irrational desire in the man since the qualities that Dickens shows as being associated with feminine immaturity of the Clara-Em’ly-Dora kind represented a real emotional need for men living in the world that the 19th century became. (George Eliot’s observation, that the serious, intellectual Dorothea Brooke was unnattractive to the average man in her social sphere, who recognized the ‘infantile fairness’ of Rosamund Vincy as being the right idea in a woman, conveys the contempt of a superior woman for the weakness of the male of her time.) Of course the dilemma was that the qualities needed in a satisfactory wife (as efficient household manager and mother) were of a conflicting kind with the other need. Dickens made two attempts to resolve this dilemma, in his creative experiments. The first was with Mrs Peerybingle in The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), the gay young wife of a much older and very staid man; her name is Mary but her husband calls her Dot, she has a baby and is represented as the goddess of the hearth, where the chirping cricket typifies the spirit of Home, but she combines the housewife’s virtues with girlish disclaimers of efficiency, calling herself ‘little woman’ and ‘your foolish little wife’ like Dora, and ultimately explaining to her husband: ‘And when I speak of people being middle-aged, and steady, John, and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot sort of way, it’s only because I’m such a silly little thing, John, that I like, sometimes, to act a kind of Play with Baby, and all that: and make believe.’ In short, maturity is only tolerable if disguised as a children’s game. The other attempt came at the end of Dickens’s work, showing that he never got much beyond this point in his thinking. Bella Wilfer, the heroine of Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel, is a resolute effort on the novelist’s part to take a winning type of girl into womanhood by the disciplines of misfortune, good fortune, a sacrifice of her prospects by a marriage to a poor man, and motherhood. Bella, for all her curls, coquettry, follies and charms, has capabilities beyond those of a ‘little woman’, and indeed aspires to be something more. In her own words, ‘I want to be something so much worthier than the doll in the doll’s house.’ This is promising, but once married she is described in exactly those terms, playing at housekeeping in a fascinating way and, when she has a baby, ‘acting a kind of Play with Baby’ just like Dot Peerybingle, having rehearsed for it with her father beforehand; afterwards, so that we shall be under no misconception, her father ‘justly remarked to her husband that the baby seemed to make her younger than before, reminding him of the days when she had a pet doll and used to talk to it as she carried it about’. Bella (a name in the Clara–Dora tradition of course) is shown using the baby Bella as a toy and as an instrument for flirting with her husband in an embarrassing way. By this time Dickens had had ten children and must have known that a baby is no joke. The obstinate unreality of his image of a charming wife, from Dot and Dora to Bella, would of itself suggest that he would be unlikely to achieve marital happiness in the form of husband to the mother of many children.
A historical example of how the dilemma could be made tolerable in practice is available in the case of Disraeli’s marriage. He was remarkably intelligent in knowing that he (also a novelist) needed the same qualities as David Copperfield for his domestic happiness and in being prepared to put up with the concomitants. He wrote to his future wife that he needed to be surrounded with love; it was tenderness and sympathy at home that made his political life possible. Though much his senior in age and previously a widow, Mrs Disraeli was juvenile in manner, gay, overflowing with affection, and adored her husband, so that she made him happy in spite of being generally considered by his society a silly woman, ‘foolish and at times even ridiculous’, noted Lady Battersea. Disraeli minded this not at all, and seems not to have repined at her accompanying childlessness either; he seems positively to have enjoyed her ‘not knowing who came first, the Greeks or the Romans’, and the similar examples of her Dora-like conversation. She was in fact widely loved, though Disraeli was commiserated for having a wife whose conversational follies made her a joke, and respected for his stoicism in ignoring this. He snubbed a friend who questioned his indifference to his wife’s shortcomings by saying that unlike other men he could feel gratitude (he did not mean for his wife’s very moderate private income). Mrs Disraeli however was unlike Dora in being, or being able to afford, a good housekeeper, and also in being unselfishly devoted to her husband; she did not merely hold his pens but corrected his proofs (or thought she did). Dizzy’s undoubtedly sincere love for his wife lasted into her old age and her death left him desolate.
It is inevitable, then, that at the next phase of a man’s life, as adolescent, David meets his mother’s image again, in Dora Spenlow. (Dickens himself had fallen seriously in love at 17 with Maria Beadnell who provided Jip as well as typical features of Dora and David’s courtship, though Dora seems to have assimilated as well – very naturally since the point of Dora is her typicality – relevant qualities of Catherine Hogarth’s, whom Dickens subsequently married since Maria was denied him.) Dickens is in firm control of his theme here as throughout the novel, beautifully indicating David’s conditioned helplessness by his becoming ‘a captive’ at first sight of the curls etc. A less predictable factor is David’s complete lack of surprise at finding Miss Murdstone in command of the household; as she was his mother’s jailer it is natural she should be Dora’s and he reveals his unconscious train of thought by regarding Miss Murdstone not as Dora’s protector but more like a life-protector which is ‘a weapon of assault’. Her presence, together with her subsequently forcing a breach between David and the object of his love, made the parallel between Clara Copperfield and Dora Spenlow inescapable for the original readers, who might well have forgotten the earliest instalments of the novel by now. ‘Phiz’ the illustrator helped bring out Dickens’s idea (as so often) by showing Clara-like portraits of Dora over the mantelpiece in every interior Dora figures in. This girlish portrait of Dora appears finally in the central position of the sitting-room where David and Agnes sit surrounded by their children, pointing the contrast with the matronly Agnes.
As Dora on further acquaintance shows herself an exact replica of Clara, David’s heart is satisfied in spite of the occasional misgivings of his intelligence, so that when Traddles tells him about his useful, Agnes-like fiancée Sophie, and David says, ‘I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction’ – our irritation at his fatuity is tempered by our having been put in command of the reasons why he can’t help it. A dazzling piece of supplementary insight into the situation is shown by providing Dora with Jip as a pet’s pet and playmate, who is more important than David to her and whose death coincides with hers not merely on the plane of sentimental effectiveness, and about whom David can be more explicit – he has to tolerate Jip though Jip is an insufferable nuisance, irrational, and cannot be trained, like his mistress, and parodies Dora in using the cookery-book as a plaything; after their marriage he lives in a doll’s-house in the form of a pagoda which is always in the way.17 Dora is rightly felt to be pathetic – as a pet is, of its very nature – as well as exasperating, and Dickens has been so successful in showing that her charm for David is potent in spite of her folly and rejection of reality, that not only in the Victorian Age but even in our own sophisticated literary world Dora has found masculine defenders on both sides of the Atlantic, who see her through David’s eyes instead of through Dickens’s or an intelligent reader’s. Alternatively, some ungallant (English) critics reproach David for his stupidity in not recognizing Dora for what she was, repeating Miss Trotwood’s refrain of ‘Blind, blind, blind!’ as though Dickens himself had not taken so much trouble to provide for this by the earlier part of his history.
That Dickens put an immense amount of work and thought into the theme of this novel is seen in the numerous tendrils of associations between the Clara and Dora sections. Another line of association is that between David and his mother and father; he is shown to have inherited from the former ‘her affectionate nature’ and from his father the ‘blind’ trustfulness that gets him into so many disasters (both are of course characteristic Victorian features and values). That his case-history is a repetition of his father’s is brought out for us by Miss Trotwood’s description of David Copperfield senior as one ‘who was always running after wax dolls from his cradle’, a ‘wax doll’ being her contemptuous comment on the masculine weakness for a woman as a pet and plaything. She also says of the boy: ‘“He’s as like his father as it’s possible to be if he wasn’t so like his mother too”’, the likeness to his father being stressed by their having identical names18 and by Mr Dick’s repeatedly calling him ‘David’s son David’. Behind this of course is the new scientific interest in heredity characteristic of Victorian literature and a corresponding new interest in what determines conduct, which superseded the previous such interest that was based on the teachings of theology.19 Forster writes, very appositely: ‘The question of hereditary transmission had a curious attraction for him, and considerations connected with it were frequently present to his mind. Of a youth who had fallen into a father’s weaknesses without the possibility of having himself observed them for imitation, he thus wrote on one occasion: “It suggests the strangest consideration as to which of our failings we are really responsible, and as to which of them we cannot quite reasonably hold ourselves to be so. What A. evidently derives from his father cannot in his case be derived from association and observation, but must be in the very principles of his individuality as a living creature”’ (Life, Bk. VIII, § II, footnote).
The problem represented by the marriages of the two David Copperfields is both more profound and more representative than seems commonly realized, and Dickens investigates it with concern since it was a problem that necessarily involved himself as an insoluble one. David the elder is reported by his widow as having tried to train her, but the demands the middle-aged man had made on his young wife are represented by her only as a pedantic insistence on accuracy, though he had eventually recognized that ‘a loving heart was better and stronger than wisdom and that he was a happy man in hers’. We are told this by Clara when she is justifying herself on her death-bed against the killing demands to change her character that her second husband has made on her, and we are therefore to take it very seriously. David the second comes to the same conclusion in due course as his father had done, but David’s demands on Dora were not pedantic or inhuman: he wanted to share his thoughts and interests with her and find support in his troubles, a natural claim. Her refusal to accept responsibility for managing the household is only a symptom of what he has to complain of, and not the main complaint he makes to himself, as Dabney and others allege.
Yet David repeats his father’s experience in deciding that tenderness is, in the marital relation, better than a wife’s being ‘wise’ or sensible even, though the terms in which David describes his decision are revealingly different from the confident expression of a truism that his mother had offered us. David explains: ‘I could not endure my own solitary wisdom: I could not reconcile it with her former appeal to me as my child-wife.’ Yet we can’t help questioning – are obliged to question, by the novelist’s art – the quality of this freely available affectionateness in a wife which is seen not only as making up for the absence of almost everything else but also as justifying an obstinate selfishness. Both Clara and Dora justify themselves thus, Clara repeating:
‘Whatever I am, I am affectionate. I know I am affectionate. I wouldn’t say it, if I wasn’t certain that I am. Ask Peggotty. I am sure she’ll tell you I’m affectionate.’
– which Dickens has put in such a form that it sounds more like an obsession than a testimonial. We therefore immediately reflect that it is ‘affectionateness’ without ‘wisdom’ – without enough affection for David to consider her child’s welfare20 – which had made her sacrifice him by a re-marriage that ignored Peggotty’s warnings against Mr Murdstone. David himself notices her ‘wilful, pettish manner’ after his disillusionment following the marriage. And Dora’s ‘loving’ nature is repeatedly seen to be immune to David’s appeals to her alleged affection. ‘“I am sure I am very affectionate”’ Dora asserts in response to David’s asking her to behave more considerately.21 At an almost surface level therefore Dickens was making it evident to the reader that there are awkward questions involved in his age’s easy assumptions as to the superiority and adequacy of ‘a loving heart’, suggesting that it may be a cloak for a selfish will, for Dora’s callousness and Clara’s cowardice (in leaving David to suffer for her mistake and not interfering to protect him against his stepfather). Miss Trotwood, whose insights are never deflected by sentimental considerations, significantly characterises Clara’s ‘affectionateness’ as ‘the best part of her weakness’ when accusing Mr Murdstone of having played on it.
Yet there is no doubt Dickens had arrived at a really important truth – important most of all to him – in spite of the perplexities it involved. David, who is a novelist, even if not a very impressive one, is shown to need, as Dickens himself supremely did – and recognized that it was a more than personal need – gaiety, and tenderness, and companionship in the fantasies of nonsense, that were the soil from which his creativeness sprang. [In life Dickens himself seems to have got them not from his wife (who was not, or soon ceased to be, a Dora) but from his children and circle of friends, and no doubt that is why he was such a splendid father to his children when they were small but lost interest in them when they were growing up.22] Dora the child-wife is these things and nothing else; to appeal to her reason is to alarm her and insult her – ‘“I didn’t marry to be reasoned with”’ she sobs; she expects to be talked nonsense to and refuses to live by the rules of common sense, balancing the wholly rational Miss Trotwood in the scheme of things. David’s recognition of the supreme value to him of such a personality made even more poignant the insoluble problem of how to reconcile this need with the other need of a housekeeping, child-bearing and burden-sharing wife, though all these functions except that of actual child-bearing could be delegated. And it seems that Dickens had intended to keep Dora alive, probably supplementing her by Agnes as the Peggotty of this next generation – Agnes having been described as ‘the real heroine’ in Dickens’s notes for Number V. Forster quotes a letter as late as 7 May 1850 (the novel having been first discussed early in 1849, and possibly conceived in the previous year) where Dickens, then writing Number XIV, says: ‘Still undecided about Dora but MUST decide today’ – and he decided only reluctantly to ‘kill’ her. But her premature death makes the parallel with Clara complete: the Little Blossom withers away in the unsuccessful attempt to become a mother – an excellent piece of symbolic thought. [The deep impression made on Dickens in July 1848 by the death-bed of his sister Fanny, resigned to her ‘early decay’, as he wrote, was heightened by the death soon after of her little child, whose pining away and other characteristics had been embodied in little Paul Dombey. Fanny had played an important part in Dickens’s childhood (even as Florence did to little Paul) and her death contributed to the genuine feeling conveyed in the death of David’s mother.] That Dora’s death from pregnancy was felt to represent a psychological truth is implied by George Eliot’s endorsement in using the same situation and image (even if an unconscious borrowing) in her tale ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ (1856) where her childlike tiny heroine ‘Tina’ comes to a similar end: ‘the prospect of her becoming a mother was a new ground for hoping the best. But the delicate plant had been too deeply bruised, and in the struggle to put forth a blossom it died.’
The detailing of David’s difficulties with Dora after their marriage has been anticipated by his uneasiness during their engagement, when he had found his first attempts to enter on a more satisfactory relation with her invariably frustrated. He could not risk losing her, so postponed facing the problem until after the honeymoon, when it at once surfaces in his realization of what the irresponsibility of romantic courtship had landed him in: after ‘the romance of our engagement’ now, he finds, they have ‘no one to please but one another – one another to please for life’, where the possibility of happiness has evidently turned into the realization that it is in fact a sentence of imprisonment for life. Marriage after all was a most serious matter when divorce was impossible and separation not respectable; but neither of such alternatives would have touched the trouble here. David’s problem is eternal. David is helpless in the face of Dora’s refusal to listen to reason, and his patient efforts to make her meet him on other than playmate terms are really touching though seen with humour which precludes any sentimental stressing. He tries to share his thoughts and interests with her and ‘to “form her mind”’; Miss Trotwood when appealed to makes him see that she cannot consent to take the part Miss Murdstone did in his mother’s second marriage, and that he is in danger of repeating that situation. He then tries alternative tactics in the hope of getting Dora to grow up; these are in the line of those adopted by his father in his mother’s first marriage. Eventually it dawns on him that Dora is immutable, and he must, as his aunt had pointed out, enjoy the qualities she has, for which he fell in love with her, and put up with their drawbacks. Realizing that he risks losing everything that made her precious to him by frightening her, he gives up, seeing that he would otherwise be in the position of ‘always playing spider to Dora’s fly’. ‘I had been unhappy in trying it; I could not endure my own solitary wisdom; I could not reconcile it with her former appeal to me as my child-wife.’ He has learned the folly of ‘trying to be wise’, for after all, like Disraeli, it was not ‘wisdom’ that he ultimately needed from a wife but the relief and the stimulus of relaxing from ‘wisdom’, and it is this instinctive wisdom that Dora has, always characterizing herself as ‘stupid’, ‘foolish’, ‘silly’, ‘a poor little thing’ and so on, and taking it as a compliment and a testimonial when her husband calls her a Mouse, which is a tiny, helpless, timid, scampering, amusing little creature [Dickens used this as a term of endearment in his own courtship of his wife. It was a traditional English term of endearment in love-play – cf. Hamlet’s instructing his mother not to let his uncle call her his mouse – and still current in the early 19th century, but Dickens undoubtedly reactivated its implications that made Dora insist on identifying herself with it in her character of being a creature for love-play only. In a similar context it recurs in Our Mutual Friend when Bella’s father says to her, in loving praise on her wedding-day, when she behaves ‘as if she had never grown up’: ‘What a silly little Mouse it is.’] And Dora therefore feels that she must be a failure when he is ‘cruel’ enough to reason with her. David is then convincing when he says: ‘I told her I feared … the fault was mine. Which I sincerely felt, and which indeed it was.’ The whole detailed investigation of David’s courtship and married life strikes me as a marvel of delicate insight and moreover as exhibiting the impersonality of true genius. The case is completed by David’s attempt to imagine a self who had not known Dora and what she represents: ‘Sometimes the speculation came into my thoughts, What might have happened, if Dora and I had never known each other? But she was so incorporated with my existence, that it was the idlest of all fancies, and would soon rise out of my reach and sight, like gossamer floating in the air.’ We see that this is associated with the fact, of which he is vaguely aware, that Dora’s identification with his mother is what makes her ‘incorporated with his existence’. We remember that during David’s ordeal in his journey, the flight from the warehouse-Micawber-Murdstone phase of his life to start afresh at Dover, he understood the source of his dogged persistence in trying to reach a home and happiness: ‘I seemed to be sustained’, he noted, ‘and led on by my fanciful picture of my mother in her youth, before I came into the world. It always kept me company.’ Surely this is a remarkable aspect of the theme so imaginatively created for us here.
It is in consonance with these perceptions that Miss Trotwood was created, to play the complex and inevitably ridiculous part of Reason or systematic rationality; but she is not left as a Blakean idea, Dickens worked very hard on her, one sees, and she does not eventually figure as a concept for ridicule but as a very human case-history who is sympathetic because she can admit she has been misguided. This is seen in her ultimate distress at her share in Clara’s tragedy which makes her show her contrition by her very different attitude to Clara’s successor Dora, whom she not only tolerates but humours, forcing herself to show her exactly the same forbearance as she does Jip. Her uncompromising rationality in the first chapter is meant to be felt as inhuman because it is unfeeling. This is embodied in the grimness of her aspect, her ‘fell rigidity’ and her ‘stalking’ movements, her gruff voice, and the unforgettable image of her peering in at the window (this was chosen very rightly for the frontispiece to the novel) which terrifies poor Clara into hiding in a corner, only to be driven out by the clockwork movement of the eyes following her round the room, a metaphor implying an automaton (‘like the Saracen’s Head in a Dutch clock’, Dickens writes) – Reason, as the unnatural and life-threatening machine, horrible in its relentlessness. There is an essential humour in bringing her up at once against that basic mystery of Nature, childbirth, with its human suffering (against which she stops her ears with cotton-wool in an attempt – unsuccessful – to protect herself from feeling in sympathy) and unpredictability (her assurance of getting the girl baby her egotism demands is thwarted, to her indignation, which she vents on the doctor as a failure at his job). We are here invited to enjoy the spectacle of the defeat of rationality by Nature – we note however that even she cannot completely subdue her own humanity, for she can’t bear the sight of tears23 in spite of their being an illogical weakness: she softens to Clara when she cries, and immediately takes in the vagabond David when he breaks down in tears though she has started, characteristically, by ‘making a chop in the air with her knife’24 at him and declaring ‘“No boys here!”’ This is taken up to show, after her gradual humanizing, her complete yielding to natural sensibility when, on learning of David’s engagement to Agnes that she had long desired, ‘she immediately went into hysterics, for the first and only time’; she has previously been reconciled to Peggotty, her very opposite, and is last seen sharing with Peggotty the nurse’s role for David’s children and, having got the long-desired namesake, ‘spoiling’ her.
When David is introduced into the Dover household he finds there the deranged Mr Dick, through whom Miss Betsey demonstrates her refusal to admit that final defeat of reason, madness: constantly ‘triumphant’ when she has elicited dubious proofs of his having sense (‘“That man mad!”’ etc.) Similarly she refuses to admit the fact of sexual attraction instead of accepting it as inevitable, employing maids ‘expressly to educate (them) in a renouncement of mankind, and who generally completed their abjuration by marrying the baker’, having herself consistently protested against the conditions of marriage by reverting to the status and mode of living of a spinster.25 We are made to wince at her harshness in relegating people into categories – Clara is always and from the first sight a Baby to her, and the most she can do in sympathy for her after her death is to prefix it with ‘poor’ or ‘poor dear’; Dora she classifies as something subhuman as ‘Little Blossom’. Yet she had recognized that reason alone is inadequate to live by; as she later admits rather pathetically to David: ‘“It was a gleam of light upon me, Trot, when I formed the resolution of being godmother to your sister Betsey Trotwood,”’ for her yearning for a human link was defeated: ‘“Where was this child’s sister, Betsey Trotwood? Not forthcoming. Don’t tell me!”’ It was after this, we learn, that she took Mr Dick into her care, as a substitute. The shortcomings of rationality in furnishing self-knowledge are beautifully implied in the dialogue with Mr Dick (where, as so often in David Copperfield, humour not merely reinforces serious insights but is a mode of presenting them effectively):
‘Ah! his sister, Betsey Trotwood, never would have run away.’ My aunt shook her head firmly, confident in the character and behaviour of the girl who never was born.
‘Oh! you think she wouldn’t have run away?’ said Mr Dick.
His innocent question undermines for the reader in advance the assurance of her over-emphatic answer to the seeds of doubt thus sown in her own mind as well as ours.
Dickens also allows for the real usefulness of sharp unsentimental good sense, as in her enlightened treatment of Mr Dick, her understanding of what the Murdstones are, her upbringing of David, her immediate ‘placing’ of the Old Soldier and Mrs Crupp, – but undoubtedly another and important function is to show, in her devastating comments which do not allow for the feelings of others,26 and the unanswerable conclusions she draws in opposition to the facts of experience, that there is something to be said for the illogical, irrational, tender-hearted female accepted then as the norm. As is the mode of David Copperfield, she is offered, it seems, playfully and apparently for our entertainment, but this should not disguise the serious uses Dickens makes of her, and the importance of her contribution to the meaning of the novel, as one of its conflicting possibilities. We must surely recognize the inventiveness and spontaneous ingenuity with which Dickens brings this about. I must say that I used personally to resent his apparently unworthy tactic of saddling Miss Betsey with what I took to be a gratuitous trait of agressive mania – the donkeys whose intrusion on to the green which she claims to own, that she spends so much time in resenting, and her banging the donkey-boys’ heads against the wall, as rather too suggestive of the vulgar Victorian idea of a strong-minded woman, as though Dickens felt obliged to make a concession to vulgar prejudice. But on second thoughts one sees it is psychologically right: the aggressiveness belongs to her condition and the touch of mania against the opposite sex sees the donkey-drivers as suitable objects for her animus against mankind, just as she saw in the helpless and victimized child-man, Mr Dick, a suitable object for her protection and sympathy. Again we see Dickens combining the roles of entertainer and serious novelist.
At this point I will return to the comparison with Tolstoy. We have seen that Dickens has rooted the David-Dora marriage into the psychological as well as the sociological context of his age, as Tolstoy has not – what evidently struck Tolstoy in reading David Copperfield was mainly the fact of such a marriage and its bearings on a man’s happiness. So Tolstoy, unlike Dickens, leaves us rebellious against his fait accompli. Did Prince Andrew’s courtship give him no doubts about the wisdom of his choice of a wife, we ask, especially since he is not shown as having such need for childlike gaiety as David Copperfield had? And we note that nevertheless Dickens does show, with the greatest delicacy, that in David’s prolonged courtship he has misgivings in the many causes for uneasiness which he registers more or less consciously, particularly in the way Dora takes the news of his loss of Miss Trotwood’s fortune and her response to his consequent demands on her for support and co-operation. He does try to cope with her, but he is very young, and inexperienced, and as he cannot do without her his doubts have to be suppressed: we see that he can only allow himself to admit the truth about Dora in his dreams – Dickens’s intelligent interest in the underlying factors of consciousness make dreams and delirious states an important means of exploring experience in his novels. For instance, David dreams he is at ‘an imaginary party where the people were dancing the hours away, and I heard the music incessantly playing one tune, and saw Dora incessantly dancing one dance, without taking the least notice of me.’ And again, his waking self had bravely seen his future in this sanctioned form: ‘What I had to do, was, to take my woodman’s axe in my hand, and clear my own way through the forest of difficulty, by cutting down the trees until I came to Dora’ (the suggestion of a fairy-tale hero implies a consciousness of this activity’s being unrealistic in his very different circumstances, also that he sees that his Dora belongs to a fairy-tale world). Yet when dozing over the fire this recurs in a hopeless recognition of the actuality as ‘thinking how I could best make my way with a guitar-case through the forest of difficulty, until I used to fancy my head was turning quite grey’.
Tolstoy’s very rationality and his consistently logical use of language seem to put him at a disadvantage compared to Dickens in such a complex matter. Thus Andrew’s guilt is for having deserted his wife and been dead to her appeals for affection, but that does not prevent his forming a satisfactory attachment later to Natasha, who though undisciplined, spoilt and girlish is shown to be capable of maturing through her love for him. Andrew’s penitence after his experience of suffering (virtually death) on the battlefield, had no basis in genuine feeling for Lisa, it is only a new consciousness of the moral claims of others instead of the hard superiority, the egoism, of his father. Yet Tolstoy in giving his own version of Dickens’s theme in War and Peace does take it to a more satisfactory issue. We all feel – though the Victorian public didn’t for the most part – that the schematic marriage to Agnes, theoretically the right wife, is hollow and unconvincing, that all the reality is in David’s feelings for Dora. Of course Dickens had no experience of a satisfactory marriage and his sister-in-law Georgina, who carried out so successfully the housekeeping and child-rearing functions in his home, did not arouse feelings of love or romantic tenderness in him: this kind of woman seems to have evoked in him only gratitude plus some irritation (he wished she would marry though he knew he could hardly spare her). Agnes is only a willed concession to the Victorian ideal – seen always as the angel on the hearth, in the light from a stained glass window, ‘pointing upward’, or with her ‘patient smile’. Moreover, she has been established as in essence a sister-figure to David, and there is an unpleasant suggestion in the Sister-and-wife combination corresponding to the ‘O my father and my husband’ of the Strongs’ marriage, neither of which Dickens at bottom found appealing, we can see, for he can’t make them either attractive or plausible.
But what about Dickens’s other models for a happy marriage – are they any more satisfactory? He has tried hard with the Traddleses, and with some success. Sophie, ‘the dearest girl in the world’, is a convincing presence; for one thing, she isn’t envisaged as forever static with a holy smile on her face like Agnes, and she has the playfulness and vivacity that for Dickens was the essential feminine allure without having also Dora’s or Clara’s folly and selfishness. But she also is essentially schematic, and too much of her consists of turning Dora upside down without sacrificing Dora’s desirable qualities. Sophie, says Traddles, ‘is quite as much a mother to her mother, as she is to the other nine [sisters]’; she is older than Traddles and used to narrow means, so altogether she can take the burden of marriage to a struggling professional man and train herself to be a helpmeet. Dora can only hold the pens for her overworked husband in, as usual, a make-believe of wifely duty (actually this makes her a hindrance to David’s writing but he acquiesces in the fiction, having enough imagination to realize, Dickens shows, that she needs to believe that the marriage is thus put on a more equal footing – David was not a Prince Andrew). But Sophie really uses the pens herself to serve Traddles as the necessary copying-clerk he can’t afford, and disciplines herself to write a stiff masculine law-hand. Yet Sophie is also a source of unfailing gaiety and youthful feelings – to establish this we are shown her romping with ‘the girls’ in Traddles’s legal chambers, singing innumerable children’s songs from memory, and so forth; so she is satisfactory on every score. Yet is the Traddles marriage any more than a daydream? We can’t help noting that their private life is that of grown-up children, and the novel ends with further illustrations of this fact though Traddles has somehow, very improbably, developed legal maturity to the degree required for becoming a Judge.27 There is a similar absence of realism in the Micawber marriage, where, though the attachment of husband and wife to each other is in itself convincing enough, yet in Mrs Micawber’s theme-song, that she will never desert Mr Micawber, and in his, about the comfort of mutual confidence, Dickens seems to be using the couple as a means of making fun of the clichés of the Victorian marriage theory,28 and almost to make it impossible to take seriously the mutual explanations of the Strongs in chapter XLV, which the Micawbers unconsciously burlesque subsequently in their comic scene in chapter LII.
For the other couple Dickens has worked hard to produce as a model is a very surprising one indeed, almost shockingly perverse, and calls for some investigation. Their symbolic name of Strong suggests that it has Dickens’s full endorsement – but at what level? Annie, we learn, was only 17 when she was persuaded into marriage with the learned classical scholar and headmaster aged 60 who had been her father’s old friend and her own teacher from childhood, and whom she has continued to think of as a father-figure. He provides all the wisdom while she contributes girlish gaiety, singing, and relaxation for him; she is always seen symbolically kneeling at his feet, first buttoning up his gaiters and later in reverence towards him, or else contentedly but uncomprehendingly listening to him reading from his projected dictionary. In spite of Dickens’s efforts in making the Doctor chivalrous and kind-hearted, it has an inescapable grisly likeness to that later marriage of the kind, Dorothea Casaubon’s, and Dickens throws in, perhaps involuntarily, some features that support this view (e.g. the marriage is childless, the Doctor’s life’s work is represented as rather ridiculous pedantry and unreal, not being even remotely possible of completion in his lifetime, and so on). Worse still, the marriage has to us inevitably a really unpleasant morbid aspect which Dickens seems to reveal in spite of his conscious intentions, as in Annie’s ‘O my father and my husband’ speeches and attitudes – isn’t there something very wrong in her contentedness with this situation? we ask. Dr Strong, ‘the old scholar’, needs youth and gaiety and tenderness, too, – in Dickens’s eyes they are, as we saw, indispensable to a man’s happiness; but we can’t be satisfied seeing the price Annie has to pay that he may enjoy them, and note with disapproval Dickens’s determination to believe that Annie is really fulfilled in such a marriage.29 Here I think we must not impute dishonesty to Dickens but recognize the Balaam prophetic vein at work that is a part of every true artist’s endowment and that must surface at the right time. In fact, the Strongs are so presented that they posit these doubts inevitably. The technique here is that which characterizes David Copperfield – not ambiguity but a novel that can be read at two levels, a popular one (humorous, sentimental and moralistic) and that of art, complex, serious, poignant, subtly suggestive, though devious in presentation and its argument subterranean.
As a pendant to Dickens’s attempt to cover the matrimonial possibilities in his age, he gives us Miss Trotwood who, having made an unhappy choice and finding herself deceived in her husband’s character, follows the voice of Reason in separating herself from her husband and quite logically reverting to spinster status. But a rational solution to the problem of an unhappy marriage, a legal separation, can’t make happiness. She is shown living a rigidly monotonous existence in which her tending of Mr Dick is (till David enters her life) her substitute for husband and child and the natural instincts for intimate human relations – she has to vindicate her own judgement against society’s. But by giving her a thoroughly bad man for a husband Dickens has spoilt his argument, for it was necessary to show that it was her inflexibility in the face of the process of readjustment and mutual concession that marriage demands, that caused the breakdown of her marriage. I imagine this was his original intention, since it fits the part Miss Trotwood enacts in the schematic novel, but that getting fond of Miss Trotwood as a person, as the novel progressed, he could not bring himself to treat her afterwards with the impartiality required. Otherwise we might have had a parallel to the Murdstone marriage with the sexes reversed, which would have completed the schematic argument.
We must admit therefore that Dickens in David Copperfield is not able to provide an adequate answer to the question of Victorian man’s happiness that he set out to tackle. He has, however, shown us very fully, delicately and seriously what is involved in that question, and has refused to simplify the issues. We may recollect that Chekhov defended Anna Karenina against critics by saying that we must not demand that a novelist solves our problems for us; that all we are entitled to require of him is that he should state the problems correctly. This Dickens has certainly done, to the best of his ability, in David Copperfield, and we need not, I suggest, think less of his novel if we compare it with the comparable art of Tolstoy’s work that he inspired. However we must note that Tolstoy was in fact able to take further steps towards suggesting helpful answers to the problems Dickens first raised and that Tolstoy in his turn undertook to dramatize in his first large-scale novel. Dickens makes David, after the long enchanted courtship, during which, through no fault of his own, he has failed to make of Dora anything but a pet, feel alarm once the marriage has taken place and he must live with her in the everyday world. Dickens shows him, in one masterly phrase, realizing that the courtship has turned into a prison sentence: they have now, David reflects, ‘no one to please but one another – one another to please for life’. And their married life continues to the end unchanged, in the chapters called ‘Our Housekeeping’ and ‘Domestic’, which explore the marriage between the lines, as it were, as a hopeless dilemma, while maintaining a sufficient appearance, in its humorous tone, of being the stock joke about a young couple’s housekeeping troubles and little quarrels, that Dickens’s reading public would not find disturbing. Tolstoy was able to show through his Natasha the growth into maturity of the delightful girlish creature who has revived in the despondent Prince Andrew a desire for life and happiness. Unlike his dead child-wife Lisa, Natasha is potentially a woman. In the proposal scene we learn that both of the lovers realise that they are now responsible for each other:
Prince Andrew held her hands, looked into her eyes, and did not find in his heart his former love for her. Something in him had suddenly changed; there was no longer the former poetic and mystic charm of longing, but there was pity for her womanly and childish weakness, fear in face of her devotion and trustfulness, and an oppressive yet joyful sense of the duty that now bound him to her for ever. The actual feeling, though it was not so bright and poetic as the former, was stronger and more serious.
‘Is it possible that I – the chit of a girl, as everybody called me.’ thought Natasha, ‘is it possible that I am now to be the wife, the equal of this strange, dear clever man, whom even my father respects? Can it be true? Can it be true that I can no longer play with life, that now I am grown up, that on me now lies a responsibility for every word and deed of mine?’
And after this and its development we see Natasha pass through a succession of painful experiences (which include nursing Andrew to his death) and finding happiness in a marriage with Pierre, who has progressed to that marriage by his own self-discoveries which started with the disastrous mistake of letting himself be seduced into marrying a vicious society beauty. Pierre and Natasha’s happiness is shown to be founded on domestic tastes and mutual respect, so that Natasha is able to discard her girlish personality altogether without risking losing her husband’s love:
Natasha did not follow that golden rule, advocated by clever folk, especially the French, which says that a girl … must be more careful of her appearance, and must fascinate her husband as much as she did before he became her husband. Natasha, on the contrary, at once abandoned all her witchery … She gave it up just because it was so powerfully seductive … She felt that the allurements instinct had taught her formerly to use would now be merely ridiculous in the eyes of her husband, to whom she had from the first given herself entirely – that is, with her whole soul, leaving no corner of it hidden from him. She felt that her unity with her husband was not maintained by the poetic feelings that had attracted him to her, but by something else – something indefinite, but as firm as the bond between her own body and soul. To fluff out her curls, put on fashionable dresses, and sing romantic songs, to fascinate her husband, would have seemed as strange to her as to adorn herself to attract herself.
Dickens does not write and could not write such things, but we cannot but recognize that they are implied in his analyses of what was wrong with the society that formed David’s ideal for him and that formed Dora.
At the same time, while Tolstoy was able to formulate and dramatize convincing positives of Dickens’s negatives, and successes to correct Dickens’s failures, we note that he is in Dickens’s debt for the idea of the good marriage. It may have struck some of Tolstoy’s other readers, as it has always done me, that the Victorian bourgeois ideal of marriage is unexpected, almost disconcertingly so, in its context in War and Peace and from the pen of a Russian aristocrat. The marriage of Nicholas Rostov with Princess Mary, the alternative happy marriage to Pierre’s and its complement, is a realistic version of David’s second marriage, and Nicholas Rostov’s feelings for his wife – also an angel-wife – are those of David for his Agnes.
This is what had attracted Nicholas Rostov to Princess Mary originally:
Nicholas was struck by the peculiar beauty he observed in her at this time. That pale, sad, refined face, that radiant look, those gentle graceful gestures, and especially that deep and tender sorrow expressed by all her features, agitated him and evoked his sympathy. In men Rostov hated to see an expression of lofty spirituality (that was why he did not like Prince Andrew) and he spoke of it contemptuously as philosophy and dreaminess, but in Princess Mary, just in that sorrow which revealed the depth of a whole spiritual world foreign to him, he felt an irresistible attraction. ‘She must be a wonderful woman! A real angel!’ he said to himself.
Tolstoy’s society and Dickens’s are evidently similar in a need to localize in woman-as-wife the spiritual values which the man cannot afford to accept in his own life of manly aggressiveness and struggle – even though Tolstoy’s had a powerful aristocracy and court and only an insignificant bourgeoisie. Tolstoy as novelist incarnates the Victorian ideal of Woman, the Victorian ideal of marriage, and in his novels as in our own Victorian novels a culture based on the family, the countryside, the farm and the great house still counts for more than the city; there is no question as yet of the emancipation of woman either from domesticity or from male dominance. But Agnes is seen pictorially and her inside never examined, she has no life of her own like Princess Mary, in consequence Agnes’s spiritual attributes are little more than uplift. But even though this is not so with his Mary, Tolstoy does not, like Dickens, accept the idealisation as sound. He makes the point quite clearly that an average man like Nicholas Rostov sequestrated spirituality, which he knew he lacked but needed, as a right and desirable quality in Woman, feeling that these same qualities were in practice a weakness in a man because incompatible with his own duties as provider for a family:
… this untiring mental effort, of which the aim was the children’s moral welfare, delighted him. If Nicholas could have analysed his feelings he would have discovered that his steady proud love for his wife was founded on wonder at her spirituality and at the lofty moral world almost beyond his reach – in which she had her being … Countess Mary’s soul always strove towards the infinite, the eternal, and the absolute, and therefore could never be at peace. A stern expression of secret lofty suffering, of a soul burdened by the body, appeared on her face. Nicholas glanced at her. ‘Oh God! What will become of us if she dies, as I always fear when her face is like that?’ he thought.
It is because Tolstoy rejected the position of the man’s placing the responsibility for moral goodness on his wife that he ends his novel with the state of mind of ‘little Nicholas’, Prince Andrew’s son and Nicholas Rostov’s nephew. The boy turns away with dislike from his practically minded uncle and takes as his hero Pierre who was his dead father’s friend and whom he identifies in his dreams with his father, the two together being the inspiration for the boy’s idealism; he determines to do something glorious in life that they would approve of. For Pierre, we are shown, the source of values is not a Victorian idealization of Woman but for him it exists in the disinterested life of the spirit, shown in the artist’s, scientist’s and philosopher’s spheres of mind and vocation. And it is for this, we are told, that Natasha respects as well as loves him. Here Tolstoy has made it very clear that he sees a better alternative than Dickens’s idea for David Copperfield of a satisfactory ideal of marriage, where Agnes is described by her husband as ‘the source of every worthy aspiration I had ever had; the centre of myself, the circle of my life’, though Tolstoy’s ideal of married life is equally founded in the life of hearth and home. And yet we note also that Tolstoy in Natasha has provided a thoroughly Victorian conception of the right and proper relation of wife to husband, one that is neither aristocratic nor enlightened but decidedly bourgeois. Natasha cannot comprehend or share, is often irritated by and even jealous of, Pierre’s preoccupation with what is outside the scope of her wholly domestic life, yet she knows he must have this life in the outside world of the mind and spirit to make him the man she can look up to. [Kitty, Levin’s wife in Anna Karenina, is placed in exactly the same relation to her husband, showing that this was a part of Tolstoy’s beliefs that he saw no reason to abandon on second thoughts.] We may well feel that Tolstoy took over from Dickens everything in this respect and changed nothing in essentials. There is nothing in these fundamental attitudes about men and women’s relations in marriage that he has in common with Stendhal or Balzac, his other extra-Russian novelist influences.
If part of Dickens’s theme in David Copperfield is an enquiry into the Victorian assumption that in a woman a loving heart is better than wisdom, another is an investigation into the other Romantic-Victorian belief, the value of innocence – that is, moral simplicity and ignorance of what people are really like. It is David’s ‘innocence’ that makes him a victim of the idea of love that has been inculcated along with other idealisms. The romantic tradition has given him to understand that love at first sight is right and proper, and accordingly his relations with Dora are conducted entirely in the conventional idiom of romantic courtship which is seen as ridiculous, and this point made inescapable by Miss Mills’s soulful version of it, which brings out its essential absurdity by caricaturing it (not, as Cockshut asserts, to make David look sensible in comparison with Miss Mills – Dickens was not a thimble-rigger but an artist and he is not manipulating the reader here but directing him to what he himself feels to be the right position for seeing adolescent romantic passion justly). The dilemma of innocence is even more agonizing to Dickens than the question of affectionateness as an ultimate, since the idealization of innocence represented a menace to childhood; yet Innocence is what the heirs of the Romantic poets felt to be the true characteristic of the child. The child David’s innocent trustfulness is constantly being taken advantage of, the paradigm being when he is made at the very beginning to drink ‘Confusion to Brooks of Sheffield!’ (himself) by the heartless plotters against his mother and himself. A later episode, in chapter V, with the waiter at the inn, is more involved and more painful showing not only the manifold meanness of the waiter (whose idea of humour consists of jeering at the unprotected little boy whom he has cheated and duped by exploiting his innocence) but also the stupidity and hatefulness of a variety of adults who take part against the child automatically. Dickens’s comment, through the medium of grown-up David as he looks back at this episode in his moral history, brings out interestingly the dilemma I mean:
If I had any doubt of him [the waiter], I suppose this half awakened it; but I am inclined to believe that with the simple confidence of a child, and the natural reliance of a child upon superior years (qualities I am very sorry any children should prematurely change for worldly wisdom), I had no serious mistrust of him on the whole, even then.
Ideally, Victorian adults were to be thought of as parents, natural protectors, and trustfully accepted as guides; and even if the actuality often failed to match the theory, children were still to be taught that it is true, even though this left them to be exploited, hurt and morally bewildered.30 Yet at some point or other in growing up they must learn the probability of the theory’s being humbug and in fact dangerous to trust in. The whole question therefore hinged on how ‘prematurely’ is to be interpreted. David would not be so attractive as a child if he had not had this simple confidence in his seniors and at this stage we can only remark, ‘The more shame to them for abusing it!’ (This is particularly painful in the journey to Dover.) But by the time he gets to Mr Creakle’s and accepts Steerforth, against a good deal of evidence, as a noble character and the father-figure he needs as protector, we should find David lacking in acumen if Dickens had not shown that public opinion at the school supported David’s supposition (except for Mr Mell and Traddles – but both were without status); and he is still a little boy, at this stage. There is certainly a deliberate and delicate demonstration here as to the difficulty of an innocent’s arriving at a true judgement in the face of public opinion, and David’s moral bewilderment and unhappiness about the Mell episode, and the impossibility for him of understanding it, is finally conveyed to us as well as, which makes it more painful, the delicacy and decency of Mr Mell in trying to assure David that he doesn’t blame him. But the same pattern is repeated when David is introduced into the Steerforth home by his friend (to feed Mrs Steerforth’s maternal egoism): Miss Dartle with her ironic questions and sinister intimations is putting him into a position to draw the right conclusions about Steerforth, but David is again fortified by Mrs Steerforth’s unshakeable belief in her son and by what he believes to be Steerforth’s affection for him (which is really only Steerforth’s self-indulgent habit of patronage, and which contains a hateful element of contempt). David thus unsuspectingly introduces a seducer into the virtuous Noah’s Ark on the Yarmouth beach, launching Little Em’ly into misery and disgrace. I think we are now undoubtedly meant to feel impatient with David over his failure to ‘change his simple confidence for worldly wisdom’, for it would now clearly not be ‘premature’ but timely. We surely feel at this stage that David is no longer simply very young but very young for his age,31 that he is in danger of growing up to be what Miss Trotwood had described his mother as being, in summing up her disastrous second marriage: ‘a most unworldly, most unfortunate baby’. We often enough have reason to echo his aunt’s ‘Blind! blind! blind!’ and are clearly meant to.32 We are also meant to reflect that his sheltered life and idealistic education at Dr Strong’s have put him in blinkers, for the period when his life was not sheltered, at the warehouse, occurred too early to do more for him than make him wretched and did not last long enough to turn him into an Artful Dodger. Here, in a variety of scenes and situations deliberately created for the purpose, Dickens must be recognized as consciously, persistently and with great subtlety, intimating a radical criticism of the theory of the Victorian moral code with its Romantic heritage. Dickens is no more than anyone else able to decide what is the right point of balance between being a grown-up Baby and a hardened young Artful Dodger (or in this case, a Steerforth with his sophistication derived from the ‘Varsity world instead of from the gutter), but Dickens certainly feels that while the good young man is handicapped by his innocence, it is better to be a David than a James Steerforth, the proof being that Steerforth at moments felt it too. One indication we are given of Dickens’s personal bias is that he likes to show that the intuitions of the innocent mind are a safer guide where feelings are concerned than worldly wisdom: the solicitor’s suspicions of Annie prove to be unjust and Dr Strong’s guileless trust in her justified; Jack Maldon’s attitude of sneering at the delightful simplicity of the old Doctor is not only ugly in its ingratitude but stupid, since it prevents him from understanding his cousin Annie’s feelings, and we register here the truth of Dickens’s argument that it is better to be even ridiculously unworldly than base, since moral stupidity (as George Eliot called it) defeats itself. (The parallel playing off of Mr Micawber against Littimer as an argument in favour of a spontaneity that ignores some virtues as against hypocritical respectability, is a different matter and has to be established in the novel dramatically.)
Here Dickens is early in the field examining Victorian values and assumptions. Clough began his dramatic poem ‘Dipsychus’ the year after David Copperfield, and in a prose Epilogue to his poem makes his fictional uncle complain that the younger generation have been made dangerously high-minded by Dr Arnold’s schooling: ‘as for my own nephews’, says the worldly old gentleman who had grown up in a pre-Victorian England, ‘they seem to me a sort of hobbadi-hoy cherub, too big to be innocent and too simple for anything else’, adding that at ‘about the age of 18 or 19’ the poet himself was ‘a great goose’. Clough therefore must have felt that this was so and that it was not an advantage. This is Dickens’s point too, though he himself certainly didn’t suffer like Clough from this Victorian disability.33 Trollope, another writer formed before Victorian idealism was current orthodoxy, sensed likewise that something had gone wrong, though his contribution was confined to showing the dangers of innocence and the sheltered life to young ladies. In one of his novels (Mr Scarborough’s Family), he tells us that his heroine ‘attempted to live by grand rules’ – ‘Nor did she know it’, and he goes on to make the interesting general point that reproduces Dickens’s earlier inquiry in David Copperfield:
Unselfishness may become want of character; generosity essentially unjust; confidence may be weakness, and purity insipid.
He actually devoted a whole, though short, novel (Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite) to dramatizing this insight, showing a family tragically ruined and their only child, a daughter, literally killed by these Victorian idealisms, the disaster entirely due to her insistence on putting into practice the Christian and sentimental beliefs she had been taught as proper for a young lady and which she would have known to be impracticable if she had not been kept in such innocence of the nature of things. The idea is interesting, but Trollope was not the novelist to do it justice. His heroine is without individuality and makes no imaginative impact as Rosa Dartle, for instance, does, while Trollope’s pedestrian style and no-nonsense mode of operation as a novelist deprive the subject of that sensitive notation and appropriately original presentation which it requires. We cannot but feel the advantage Dickens had in not being addicted to that logical-discursive use of language, and rational treatment of a theme, that characterizes the novels of Trollope, Thackeray, Mrs Gaskell and all other Victorian writers of fiction not of the first order. In this Dickens stands apart with Charlotte and Emily Brontë and George Eliot.
I have shown in the development of the theme of David’s typical relation to his mother and its effect on his emotional life, in the function of Miss Trotwood, in the delicate intimations of parallels between father and son, and in the whole elaborate structure of meanings expressed through such techniques, that in David Copperfield Dickens has triumphantly arrived at mastery of a new, his own, art of the novel. Of course, as Tolstoy said, Dickens was liable to be (in patches) ‘a sentimental and loquacious writer’, and (as is not the case with Middlemarch or Tolstoy’s novels), areas, (insignificant generally) of many of his novels have to be written off. As David Copperfield is early in his progress, which started in Dombey, from willy-nilly entertainer to a free artist, we must admit that some of its parts exist on different levels of seriousness. Dickens was perfectly sincere when he told Miss Coutts that he wanted to make people more humane about prostitutes and ‘fallen women’ by his presentation of Martha and Emily, but Martha is, like the similar character in Dombey, Good Mrs Brown’s daughter, a figure drastically edited for the purpose from the originals he knew and had helped in real life. Emily is another matter. Just as Tolstoy made the conditions of Anna’s marriage to Karenin so demanding of sympathy that her ‘fall’ seems a matter for compassion, or even more positive support, so Emily is framed as orphan, childishly innocent, very young in fact, over-sheltered and indulged by her family in the boat, and moreover given to understand by Steerforth that he will ‘make her a lady’ and he, so to speak, vouched for as to character by being David’s old friend and hero; and in addition there is her intolerable position of being about to marry her dull cousin Ham, having yielded to pressure to engage herself to him to please her uncle. All these points are piled up to amount to a demand for a verdict of Not Guilty, even from strict Victorian moralists, presumably. In consonance with this, the blame is firmly laid at Mrs Steerforth’s door, David accompanying the outraged father-uncle to Highgate who is to shame the seducer’s mother with his simple working-man’s nobility of soul and expose the false values of the upper classes. The theatrical demonstrations of Rosa Dartle against Emily are to show the cruelty of conventional morality even further, since – a nice touch – Miss Dartle is personally jealous of her as a successful rival, suggesting a class as well as a personal jealousy since the whole Steerforth-Emily episode is treated by Dickens as a class matter.34
That the whole Yarmouth affair is a moralistic exercise is given away finally by the artificial use of dialect. We have only to observe – to feel – the living nature of the dialect that plays its essential part in Adam Bede, Wuthering Heights or The Heart of Midlothian, for instance, to see that Dickens’s use of East Anglian coastal speech is self-conscious, and irritating in its patronizing exhibition of the quaintness of the humble – a matter of vocabulary and grammar only, with none of the vitality of Sam Weller’s, Mr Guppy’s or the Kenwigs’ Cockney or Mrs Gamp’s vernacular that Dickens has successfully made an expression of character. We do not need to know that Dickens in fact got Suffolk dialect up from a book, Suffolk Words and Phrases.35 The series of framed interiors in which Daniel and Ham Peggotty are posed make them as artificial as Victorian academy pictures; this is especially notable in the scene when Ham tells David of his noble feelings towards Emily after her return, David instructing us in the right admiring response. Rebelliously we ask, if Ham was so admirable why couldn’t he insist on marrying Emily on her return home and emigrating with her, instead of only forgiving her like a Christian? – one mistake of a very young girl with Emily’s excuses can’t be supposed to entail ruin for life in the eyes of any right-minded person! Dickens knew this was so, for he helped Miss Coutts in her rescue-work, which equipped fallen women to go to Australia to start afresh and marry there, as Martha indeed is allowed to. But Emily, who has not been a prostitute like Martha, is not allowed to forgive herself for her one false step, but must hang her head in guilt eternally. Mr Peggotty is brought home from the colony in order to assure us, in nauseating detail, that Emily has been polluted once for all:
‘She might have married well a mort of times, “but, uncle” she says to me, “that’s gone for ever.” Cheerful along with me; retired when others is by; fond of going any distance fur to teach a child, or fur to tend a sick person, or fur to do some kindness tow’rds a young girl’s wedding (and she’s done a many, but has never seen one); patient; sowt out by all that has any trouble. That’s Em’ly!’
One would like to be able to believe that Dickens here is satirizing the unco’ guid by holding up in caricature the doom of the fallen woman, and there does seem to me at bottom a trace of such a state of mind. Yet it seems inescapable that he was apparently endorsing the prejudices of his reading-public at this point, for though so humane a man could not at heart endorse such an attitude, and we know that in fact he did not, he is scarcely challenging it effectively. Here writing at two levels at once has muddled the message.
But the artist – the truthteller, the psychological realist – is visible without any possibility of denial or conjecture in another aspect of the Emily episode – in the morbidity Dickens shows as powering the intense affection Daniel Peggotty has for his niece – another critical comment on what could pass as ‘affection’ and thus as admirable – though that might be acceptable to the Victorian reader as the touching devotion of one who stood in the relation of adopted father to Little Em’ly. But while Mr Peggotty seems at first sight to offer the pattern of disinterested devotion to the winning child he had fostered, what emerges is a horribly possessive love that is expressed characteristically in heat, violence and fantasies, impressing us as maniacal. And Dickens doesn’t attempt to disguise this; on the contrary, it is hammered home. Mr Peggotty had no objection to his niece’s marrying her cousin Ham, whom she doesn’t love as much as her uncle and who, while not being a rival in her affections, will keep her in the family; but her elopement with Steerforth, even though marriage is what she intended, makes him aware of what he cannot face, that she loves Steerforth enough to leave home and uncle for him. Daniel Peggotty is shown driven by uncontrollable passion through Europe on foot to search for Emily, though without any clue as to her whereabouts, determined to find Emily and bring her home, ignoring the very relevant fact that she had preferred to give up that home in order to share Steerforth’s life because she can do without her uncle. The Victorian reader understood that he was acting in the interests of Morality in rescuing Emily from a life of shame, but Dickens’s attention is elsewhere, on putting into Daniel Peggotty’s mouth words of a truly astonishing import:
‘I’m a-going to seek my niece through the wureld. I’m a-going to find my poor niece in her shame and bring her back…. I’m a-going to seek her, fur and wide…. I began to think within my own self “What shall I do when I see her?” I never doubted her. On’y let her see my face – on’y let her heer my voice – on’y let my stanning afore her bring to her thoughts the home she had fled away from, and the child she had been – and if she had growed to be a royal lady, she’d have fell down at my feet, I know’d it well! Many a time in my sleep had I heerd her cry out, “Uncle!” and seen her fall like death afore me. Many a time in my sleep had I raised her up and whispered to her “Em’ly, my dear, I am come fur to bring forgiveness, and to take you home!” He was nowt to me now, Em’ly was all. I bought a country dress to put upon her; and I know’d that, once found, she would walk beside me over them stony roads, go wheer I would, and never, never, leave me more.’
It is this genius, which cannot stop at the moralistic and sentimental but which burrows down below the superficial to find an underlying psychological veracity, that is characteristic of Dickens’s development as a novelist. We may ask, How does Dickens know these truths? The awful conviction, the terrifying possessive passion Daniel Peggotty’s words reveal, could hardly have been expected to pass even with unsophisticated readers as natural feelings creditable to a worthy uncle. Dickens’s interest in morbid states and the strange self-deceptions of human nature, shown here in the compulsive fantasying, can never before have been so nakedly displayed. And Daniel Peggotty’s dream is actually realized – the artist has caught the spirit of the episode in the illustration called, like the chapter, ‘Mr Peggotty’s dream comes true’ – and after this Daniel Peggotty tells David of the aftermath: ‘“All night long we have been together, Em’ly and me. All night long, her arms has been about my neck; and her head has laid heer; and we knows full well, as we can put our trust in one another ever more.”’
There is no need to say: Perhaps Dickens did not see the purport of all this, for there is not merely the remarkable consistency to point to, but in the same novel he has deliberately embarked on, though not in the end done more than outline, another morbid father-love, in Mr Wickfield’s substitution of his daughter Agnes for the beloved wife who died soon after Agnes’s birth. ‘“My love for my dear child,”’ said Mr Wickfield to David, at the end, ‘“was a diseased love, but my mind was all unhealthy then.”’ The fear that his Agnes would tire of him or leave him drove him to drink and professional ruin: this, like Mr Peggotty’s relation to Emily and Miss Dartle’s to Steerforth and Uriah Heep’s lust to possess Agnes against her will (not only in order to keep her father in his power, for he has trapped the father in order to be able to blackmail Agnes into marrying him) are some of the more sombre undercurrents in the novel that has been described by Mr Edmund Wilson as Dickens’s ‘holiday’. The scene where Uriah Heep, compensating himself for compulsory ’umbleness in his youth, parades his power over Mr Wickfield, who is degraded into his puppet, is more unpleasant than his plots against Agnes, which the reader doesn’t mind as much as David does because Agnes is too good to be true.
The submerged drama of Steerforth and Rosa Dartle is more interesting and we may well complain that Dickens has not given it more prominence and fuller attention. Its positive phase is already over when we first see them together, when we learn that there had been some kind of love relation between them that had been so stormy that he had flung a hammer at her, ruining her looks for life and her prospects of marriage – the sinister implications are recognizable in spite of the devious symbolism imposed on a Victorian novelist. [We meet a comparable instance in Middlemarch in the superb prolonged and involved metaphor composed to register Dorothea’s moral shock at encountering on her honeymoon the unimagined spectacle of the concrete history of Rome and its alien civilizations, a projection of her shock at finding out what marriage is, and marriage to a Casaubon.]
Early on we hear the ambiguous statement Steerforth makes in reply to ‘Daisy’s’ innocent question about his relation to the alarming Miss Dartle:
‘And I have no doubt she loves you like a brother?’ said I.
‘Humph!’ retorted Steerforth. looking at the fire. ‘Some brothers are not loved over much; and some love –.’
We must finish the sentence for ourselves, but even the implications of ‘looking at the fire’ move us in the right direction. Rosa’s version to David later is that Steerforth’s interest in her proved to be of a kind she could not tolerate: ‘“I descended into a doll”’ for him, she says, and therefore broke with him without herself ceasing to love him resentfully. The refusal to be his ‘doll’ puts her in opposion to the Clara–Dora–Emily ‘wax doll’ notion of the role of woman in love that the David Copperfields and Steerforths equally look for or impose on women,36 but Dickens didn’t develop this interesting idea. Rosa Dartle is not, except in connection with Emily, melodramatic like Edith Dombey and shows an immense advance on such a characterization. Rosa’s personality and behaviour are exceptionally interesting in a Victorian novel. The total situation between them surfaces in the remarkable scene detailed in chapter XXIX, where we are shown Steerforth with cruel perversity (‘with a curious smile’ is all that David notices) placating and charming her against her will in order to subdue her. He seduces her into playing the harp she had long laid aside and singing him a love-song to its accompaniment:
She stood beside it for some little while, in a curious way, going through the motion of playing it with her right hand, but not sounding it. At length she sat down and drew it to her with one sudden action, and played and sang.
I don’t know what it was, in her touch or voice, that made that song the most unearthly I have ever heard in my life, or can imagine. There was something fearful in the reality of it. It was as if it had never been written, or set to music, but sprung out of the passion within her; which found imperfect utterance in the low sounds of her voice, and crouched again when all was still. I was dumb when she leaned beside the harp again, playing it, but not sounding it, with her right hand.
Steerforth makes a laughing gesture of affection by way of thanking her, ‘And she had struck him, and thrown him off with the fury of a wild cat’.
Realizing he is only playing with her and that she has again ‘descended into a doll’ for him in spite of her will not to, she strikes him (such a violent action, in a drawing-room, and from a lady, would be excessively shocking to the reader of the day). The painfulness of the scene is enhanced by being conveyed to us through the medium of the blind and stupidly innocent David who thinks that Rosa is ‘jaundiced and perverse’ for struggling – as he notes she does – against Steerforth’s ‘delightful art’ and ‘delightful nature’.
Now this is not melodrama, nor, though it is distinctly enacted, is it at all theatrical. It is memorable because it has the stamp of comprehended truth, like Rosa’s habit of undermining people by ironical questioning which allows her, a dependant, the relief of expressing her contempt for them indirectly. This and the other passages of arms between Steerforth and Rosa cannot be dismissed or relegated as theatrical and rhetorical: if such scenes, thus written, had appeared in a tale by D. H. Lawrence, who would have failed to recognize them as in the genuine mode and style of Lawrence, and as exhibiting his characteristic insight into the relations between a man and a woman in such a case? It is Dickens who is the pioneer here – himself accompanied in such insights and their uses by Charlotte and Emily Brontë – and it is he who is to be seen in so much of Dombey and Copperfield taking the novel in conception and idiom out of melodrama and the language of stage rhetoric, just as in these two novels he takes the novel constructively out of the two inherited traditions of composing it (the picaresque and the sentimental moralistic), takes it in fact into the realm of psychological truth in depth that was demanded by Charlotte Brontë in a letter to her publisher, where she rejects the novel of Jane Austen, saying:
The passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood … What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death – this Miss Austen ignores. She no more, with her mind’s eye, beholds the heart of her race, than each man, with bodily vision, sees the heart in his heaving breast.
As this was written in 1850, and David Copperfield was published in parts from 1849–50, she is recognizing a change in the conception of the novelist’s function and the possibilities of the novel that had already taken place and been actualized by Dickens as well as by herself and her sister in writing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
Steerforth himself though not sufficiently explored is potentially more interesting than any other specimen of his class in Dickens until we get to Eugene in Our Mutual Friend. Steerforth’s momentary regrets for not having David’s clear conscience and his awareness that if David understood him he would lose David’s admiring affection, feelings which are yet not sufficient to prevent him indulging his passing fancy for a little Em’ly, – and his sense of guilt about ruining Rosa Dartle’s looks and her chances of marriage, seem to require the fuller treatment that Tolstoy gives to his similar types, such as Anatole Kuragin and Dolokhov. But Taine’s complaint, that in the seduction of Emily we are shown only the consequences and not the passion, is hardly relevant, since Steerforth’s feelings, such as they are in this respect, are of no interest, while Emily’s can be deduced and to enlarge on them would be to expose her folly and lose our sympathy for her (as George Eliot does for her seduced maiden by showing us the inside of Hetty Sorrel’s feather head). As it is, we get the benefit of sharing David’s shock on learning of the elopement. The scene in chapter XXIX showing Steerforth’s irresistible effect on Miss Dartle, being set immediately preceding the elopement with little Em’ly (and, as we then reflect, the imminent triumph over the one woman being the stimulus and prompting for Steerforth’s ‘curious’ impulse to prove he retains his seductive powers over a previous victim too), this makes any demonstration by Dickens of Steerforth’s similar effect on the altogether inferior Little Em’ly quite unnecessary. Dickens had actually cut out of his proofs a piece he had originally written to show Steerforth beguiling Mrs Gummidge into cheerfulness in spite of herself, but this was inevitably a poor thing and Dickens showed his judgement in excising it.37
Thus from such strikingly forceful and absolutely original episodes in Copperfield alone as I have been examining here, and those comparable in the case of Dombey (such as Mr Carker’s sinister relations with Edith Dombey, as well as wholly other aspects of the originality there which are given critical exposition in the essay devoted to Dombey above), we can see that to Dickens it was the meanings of his mature novels which were important to him and the reason for his undertakings. The force of the language and the originality of conception and execution of such parts (in characterization, action and technique) prove that they were infinitely more the concern of the creative writer than the parts of these novels emanating from his concern (genuine though it was) for social welfare and ordinary morality. And Copperfield in addition discovers and explores psychological truths which are to bear fruit in Little Dorrit and Great Expectations. We have Agnes as victimized daughter shown mothering her consciously disgraced father who is morally dependent on her, and mutely aware that reproach or criticism would make her services in sustaining him useless – the first sketch for the function of the Little Dorrit who in the masterly scene in Book the First, chapter XIX is shown as not merely the embodiment of Christian virtue but as comprehending instinctively the psychological truth behind its conception, in the silent delicacy and forbearance which she brings to bear on the painful situation her father places her in, making it possible, while defending her own integrity, for him to hold up his head and survive in the only role open to him (‘Father of the Marshalsea’). This is what we understand by the term ‘Tolstoyan’, while the episodes of Daniel Peggotty in his relation with his niece, and Steerforth’s with Rosa Dartle, make the transference from the ‘Tolstoyan’ core of Copperfield to the Dostoievskian Bleak House comprehensible, just as the history of Paul and Florence Dombey’s childhood, though embedded in Hogarthian satiric scenes as to the adult world, took us out of the Hogarthian mode into the Tolstoyan conception of the whole novel Copperfield.
This makes my point, that cannot too strongly be insisted on, that Dickens was writing about real life in the sense that ‘real’ means essential experience, what Charlotte Brontë called ‘the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death’, ‘what the blood rushes through’. Dickens above all in Copperfield gives proof of his understanding that Love as a reality, not a Victorian convention, did inevitably exist; and that it could not be ignored, suppressed or channelled into the decorous forms the age conventionally considered acceptable, without peril to the psyche, thus fulfilling the challenge, not in Charlotte Brontë’s opinion met by Jane Austen or Fielding, to understand ‘the heart of her race’.
Miss Mowcher is disappointing. The specimen of her in action (chapter XXII) is superb in its suggestions and undertones of a depravity shared with Steerforth from which David the Daisy is excluded, in which his being an amusement to both meanwhile, and still more an additional source of secret amusement to Steerforth since he is using David to mislead Miss Mowcher about which of them is after Emily, plays its part. But Dickens had made too free with the recognizable characteristics of a real woman in endowing Miss Mowcher with a suitable physical deformity; to avoid threatened trouble from the indignant original he had to turn Mowcher suddenly into a ‘good’ character, thus depriving her of further usefulness in any serious sense. A less forgivable thing, is to have kept the reader on edge throughout most of the novel by intimations that Annie is going to elope with, or will be found to have been seduced by, her cousin Jack Maldon, merely as a means of retaining the readership, the Strong marriage being evidently so unsuitable that an expectation of Annie’s ‘fall’ is plausible. It was evidently very difficult for Dickens, with so disparate a reading-public, to manage to hold it – or believe he could – without some such interest (hence his care to know the sales of each number – and David Copperfield’s were disappointing compared with Dombey’s at first). Tolstoy could write for an audience of peers, that is, for himself. But Dickens was already in David Copperfield discovering tactics for saying what he meant or felt indirectly or beneath a surface less likely to arouse hostility in a readership of Meagleses, Podsnaps, Chillips and Agneses.38 A successful piece of such delicacy is represented by the scenes in chapter XVI, reported by the schoolboy David who, as was inevitable, could not interpret them. The appearance is that Annie is distraught and faints either merely at the departure of her cousin (loss of her old playmate) or because she is in love with him; the deduction, made not by David but the reader, that Maldon may have already become her lover, is supported by the loss David reports of one of the cherry-coloured ribbons from her white gown (the symbolism is stressed) which her mother officiously makes public, and which the artist has confirmed by showing her afterwards at the Doctor’s feet with a face full of remorse and shame and her dress, only described by David as ‘disordered from the loss of the bow’, open, showing her breasts. The reality, which we can deduce when the éclaircissement comes, is that Jack Maldon had snatched the bow when making his dishonourable intentions clear to his cousin, obviously in a physical assault, that though resisted by her filled her with horror and humiliation. What could only have been melodramatic if enacted straight, and would then have struck a note of violence out of keeping with the tone of the novel, is successfully left to the reader’s imagination, and leaves him with no way of coming to any certainty of interpretation for a good while. The credit side of this drama is that subsequently the painful nature of Annie’s awareness of her false position, an innocence agonizingly unable to defend itself (against her mother’s use of her, her cousin’s ill intention and the insulting conclusions of Mr Wickfield) adds very notably to the points made elsewhere in the novel about the vulnerability of Victorian youth.
Though it is easily seen that Mr Micawber has really no place in the plot or in the action (he is perfunctorily worked in first as David’s landlord and then Traddles’s, and sent to Canterbury to be employed most improbably by Heep, still more improbably made the agent of Heep’s downfall), the fact that everyone remembers him as a leading feature of the novel is proof of his importance in it: we all feel that somehow he is a major contributor to the meaning of the book. Whenever he is present, even in prison or miserably in debt in mean lodgings, there is life, joy, and a defiance of the rules of Victorian good citizenship. When, as in the little party in David’s rooms at Mrs Crupp’s, he is for once deflated, it is not by his real troubles but by the ethos surrounding the ‘respectable’ Littimer who makes everyone uncomfortable by his high standards of behaviour and ultimately turns out, ironically, to be a villainous hypocrite, thus making plain the kind of meaning Dickens had in mind. We know that once David’s boyhood got mixed up temporarily with Dickens’s, through the warehouse phase of it, Mr Micawber had to be there, for Micawber is Dickens’s tribute to the life-style of his father: no doubt Dickens was aware that he had inherited some of the Micawber qualities himself and was grateful for it. [Another set of John Dickens’s characteristics contributed a good deal later to William Dorrit, and Dickens took another – a disenchanted – look at even some of the Micawber features in his next novel, in Mr Skimpole.] But Dickens created Micawber to register the reasons for his affection for his father rather than his grievances, which time had softened in his memory as Dickens, as he wrote, grew to value increasingly his father’s disposition and to appreciate, as a comic artist himself, John Dickens’s high-handed treatment of reality.39 It is therefore irrelevant to complain, as an undergraduate pupil of mine did, that Dickens ought to have shown realistically the misery of a family with such an improvident father and husband, as Dostoievsky does with the Marmaladov household. Dickens was not writing Crime and Punishment or a tract or even a naturalistic novel. The significance of Micawber is his Micawberism – he represents an essential truth of experience and one that a creative artist in such a society as mid-19th century England needed to point to and maintain. Had Dickens made Micawber a writer or artist he would not only have been completely plausible but even recognizable as an archetype: Joyce, for instance, had the swagger, the shameless assurance in drawing on the resources of others, and the eternal impecuniosity, as well as the gift for language,40 and Oliver Goldsmith was another of the Micawber tribe. Contempt for the morrow, faith in the future and enjoyment of the present are essential attributes of the creative mind.
By an association we can easily make out, Mr Micawber bears witness to a pre-Victorian enjoyment of living that Dickens indignantly saw being destroyed by the Murdstones and Littimers. (No one hates Micawber, not even his creditors,41 as in fact no one seems to have objected to being bled by James Joyce, and everyone but Boswell loved Goldsmith.) Most of the responsible Victorian novelists (not just the irresponsible like Wilkie Collins), who had of course been formed before the Victorian ethos was established, testify in their novels to their sense of what had been lost in human enjoyment by the advent of ‘respectability’, Evangelical domination, a stifling conventionality, and tastes imposed by a purse-proud and Philistine middle-class; but none does it so tellingly as Dickens.42 Micawber is so successful that I can’t help believing that he is ultimately responsible for the presence in Anna Karenina of Anna’s brother Steve, a more reprehensible Micawber to whom everything is forgiven, even by the serious and high-minded Levin, because he increased everyone’s enjoyment of life and was lovable. Would Steve have borne such improbable witness to the triumph of the debonaire in the face of morality if Tolstoy had not absorbed David Copperfield into his being? Tolstoy had comprehended and assented to Dickens’s meaning, so that while we always await the Nemesis we expect Steve to receive at the moral novelist’s hand, it never occurs: though Steve doesn’t, like the Micawber family, actually figure in a pantomime transformation scene at the end, he is last seen successful in winning over the new head of his office by a gift, like Mr Micawber’s, for making something like punch, and still floating buoyantly over his financial and family difficulties. It is interesting that the gloomy, conscience-ridden Levin thirsts for his society and sides with him in sympathy against poor Dolly, Steve’s virtuous and victimized wife, like Mrs Micawber too in being the mother of too many children and always in debt. Just as Tolstoy appreciated a Steve, Dickens registered enjoyment from an Artful Dodger, who though led off to prison at the end of Oliver Twist is quite unsubdued, still impudently talking down the magistrate as he swaggers out of the court.
Undeniably, though David Copperfield’s true end, at David’s vision in chapter LXII of the miracle his life had been, is perfect and logical, there is a twofold transformation scene tacked on, two scenes that are not, like the glimpses of the Traddles’ married life, necessary to the scheme of the novel. But together they serve splendidly the purpose of the closing satiric comedy of classical tradition. The bad are shown imprisoned in a hell of solitary confinement under Mr Creakle’s supervision – ironically, while as a headmaster he was a sadistic bully to little boys, as a magistrate and theorist on the punishment of criminals he is a bullying idealist. This is truly comic and yet not so improbable a combination as some critics seem to think. The good, who have been unsuccessful is this unjust world, are reported to have been transported to a comic paradise of success and happiness in the Antipodes. I don’t think this Classical ending is an argument for not taking seriously the serious parts of this novel or for relegating it as a whole to the category of fairy-tale, as is increasingly the tendency in Dickens criticism. ‘Everyone has noticed, I suppose, how close David Copperfield is to the traditional fairy story. Much of it is a daydream, where pieces of gigantic good or evil fortune happen without cause or consequence, where each incident seems detached from every other’, etc. (The Imagination of Charles Dickens, A. O. J. Cockshut, 1961); ‘In David Copperfield, Aunt Betsey Trotwood is clearly the good fairy godmother, and Uriah Heep the wicked genie’ (Edgar Johnson in Dickens Criticism: A Symposium, 1962) etc. By relegating some of the characters to fairy-tale types and failing to see that the novel has a theme, by alleging that the incidents in David Copperfield are ‘detached’ and are ‘without cause or consequence’, Cockshut – a biassed as well as a singularly impercipient reader – tries to deprive this novel of any claim to be taken seriously. [He also says that the book’s worst aspect is that it is a ‘fake autobiography’; if we could wipe out our perhaps unfortunate knowledge of Dickens’s life there would be fewer stumbling-blocks for critics.]
That David Copperfield can be, in any respect, described in outline as what is vulgarly called a fairy-tale is surely due to the fact that the story of Dickens’s life by 1850 did actually correspond to the idea of a fairy-tale rather than to an everyday success-story where rags to riches is achieved by climbing the industrial or commercial ladder; David’s life in this respect paralleled Dickens’s. So did Hans Andersen’s, and it is highly suggestive that these two men so greatly admired each other’s work, as also that Hans Andersen invented an art form of the fairy-tale to express his poignantly tragic and satiric insights.43 Both had gone from childhood misery to comfort and fame, as the Ugly Duckling who became a swan, solely through the fairy-tale gift of genius, and both had shameful memories in connexion with family and childhood.44 Dickens’s account of how he was saved, unlike and yet like Oliver Twist, from falling into the abyss of crime that seemed inevitably the fate of an unprotected child in London, is stamped with his wonder and thankfulness knowing as he did that it was not his own efforts but Providence alone that saved him. No wonder he believed that for all its dangers innocence had a considerable survival value. He wrote: ‘I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond … I prayed when I went to bed to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which I was … I do not write resentfully or angrily: for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am … The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless … cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life’ [Forster, Bk. I, §5 II]. This deeply-felt sense of the miracle that his life represented to him is the source of the passage that, I have suggested, really and very appropriately ends the novel, when having won Agnes David looks back in mind over ‘Long miles of road’, ‘and toiling on, I saw a ragged way-worn boy forsaken and neglected …’ – a passage not by any means sentimental but a sincere expression of the wonder Dickens felt at his own position, though he was strictly a self-made man, made by hard work, by ‘toiling on’. We might also reflect that ‘fairy-tales’ of this type are really folk-tales, embodying the folk’s experience of the truths of existence in allegoric forms. Dickens is not alone in his age with Hans Andersen. The folk-tale and fairy-story were very generally brought into the use of the novelist’s art, owing to the new life felt to rest in these forms once attention had been called to them as something else than diversions for children, by the translation early in the 19th century first of the collections of the Brothers Grimm and later of Hans Andersen’s tales. In Silas Marner, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre,45 as much as, or more than, in the moralistic use of the fairy-tale for children that Victorian writers tried their hands at (such as The Water Babies), elements of the fairy-tale were used for wholly serious purposes. They showed a basic indebtedness to the fairy-tale, but this does not entail escapism, only a recognition of a new vehicle for the novelist of 19th-century society. One of Hans Andersen’s best tales, ‘The Shadow’, works entirely by using traditional motifs of folk-and fairy-tale but is nonetheless a deeply serious and valid criticism of contemporary life, with a tragic end; the truths it enforces are a matter of experience.
What stylization of life – the typicality of Dickens’s experience in his age – Dickens makes in David Copperfield as a whole is not the fairy-tale but the myth. In the beginning of Dickens’s art, in Oliver Twist – whose hero is in many respects the prototype of David but is left at the point where David is being reared by his great-aunt – we have the essentials of a myth existing semi-consciously in Dickens’s mind, where was secreted, as we have seen, the truths he had learnt of experience in his own boyhood about the human family and society. The bastard orphan Oliver is cruelly used by circumstances in being born fatherless and unprotected by the adults in his world who should stand in a parental relation to him, and by society which has relegated him, rightfully a gentleman by birth and entitled to a fortune by his father’s will, to pauperhood and set him to degrading work in low company. Thrown on his own in London, he is set to work at underworld activities he cannot understand, and is in the greatest danger of being turned into a criminal and so lost forever to the upper world; but providentially he finds himself cast up on the threshold of relations who give him a fresh start under a new name, putting him in possession of respectability, education and love, the gifts he desires most. Yet two symbols of the horrors that had nearly engulfed him lurk outside his window and on the threshold of his consciousness – his elder brother, a heartless reprobate, and Fagin, an inexplicable monster of social and moral evil, who are working against him together. But now sustained by new hopes and moral courage, he is able to brace himself against them and so maintain his moral freedom and social respectability. The wholly impossible interview between Oliver and Fagin in the death-cell is to prove Oliver’s moral emancipation and show that his goodness of heart (e.g. in his being able to forgive Fagin and be sorry for him) has survived his ordeals.46 There is nothing of the fairy-tale in Oliver Twist and no one accuses Dickens of escapism in framing it. Perhaps the episode that most convincingly symbolizes the anguish of the child’s helplessness and horror is Oliver’s experience when he finds that, though he has been rescued, as he thinks, by kind middle-class Mr Brownlow, this cannot protect him: he is trapped by Nancy the prostitute, who passes herself off as his sister on the crowd of good citizens Oliver appeals to to save him, and forces him back with the aid of Bill Sikes (feminine guile plus brute force and savagery) into Fagin’s underground establishment for turning children into social and moral outcasts.
David’s history is more realistic, less nakedly symbolic that is, than Oliver’s; for instance, he is not passive and left by coincidence on the doorstep of his only though unknown relatives, but takes the initiative of running away from his dangers and making his own way to his great-aunt though penniless. Oliver’s experience of the unfeeling hostility and treachery in ordinary people and of evil lurking to drag him down are repeated in the adventures David has on the road: the young man to whom he has confided his trunk steals it and robs him of his money, then threatens him to his terror with the police so that, paradoxically, David has to run away from justice instead of getting redress from it. He then has to pawn his waistcoat as he is penniless, but the pawnbroker cheats him, and this is repeated in a nightmare variation with another pawnbroker, who is a drunken madman in addition. He registers the ‘vicious looks’ of the tramps, who stone him when he runs away from them, and he is attacked and robbed by a tinker who is on the way to murdering his woman companion (another Bill Sikes and Nancy) and who asserts the underworld’s anti-morality:
‘What lay are you upon?’ asked the tinker. ‘Are you a prig?’
‘N-no,’ I said.
‘Ain’t you, by G—? If you make a brag of your honesty to me,’ said the tinker, ‘I’ll knock your brains out.’
Even when he arrives at Dover the ordinary decent people torment instead of assisting him when he asks to be directed to his aunt’s house. Arrived there, his old clothes burnt and himself newly bathed, he lies motionless on the sofa and is then swaddled like a new-born babe in a suggestive representation of re-birth. He is indeed reborn, as Trotwood Copperfield, with a new pair of guardians as parents, Miss Trotwood representing inflexible rationality and Mr Dick, who lets David help him fly his home-made kites up into the skies, bearing his mind with them ‘out of its confusion. As he wound the string in, and it came lower and lower down out of the beautiful light, until it fluttered to the ground, and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed to wake gradually out of a dream; and I remember to have seen him take it up, and look about him in a lost way, as if they had both come down together.’ We don’t need any more direct hint that Mr Dick, whose sensitive feelings are not emanations from Reason, represents the supplementary fostering to Miss Trotwood’s common sense that Dickens believed essential to a healthy childhood – play, fantasy and poetic imagination; Mr Dick moreover lives intuitively by a better sense than common and, as Miss Trotwood liked to say with unconscious double meaning: ‘Mr Dick sets us all right’. The kite-flier relates to the novelist in more than name. There is a Blake-like feeling and intention about all this part of David’s history which shows also Dickens’s inexhaustible originality of inventiveness, since though quite different it relates to Walter Gay’s imaginative fostering in the home of the scientific instrument-dealer Sol Gills, who is supplemented by the simple-minded Captain Cuttle, unlearned like Old Glubb except in knowing the mysterious lore of the oceans which reason cannot compass.
Then can the Murdstones really be said, as they have been, to belong to a fairy-tale – are they ogre and Baba Yaga and defeated magically by Miss Betsey, an all-powerful fairy godmother? Surely this is a preposterous falsification. The facts are that the Murdstones, who go on existing throughout the book and are last seen doing very nicely in their own line, are merely discomfited in an impressively novelistic scene whose social drama is founded on psychological truth to life. We note that in it the elements of comedy – the boy David trussed up like a baby in shawls and Mr Dick’s trousers, and hemmed in by chairs, Mr Dick having to be kept up to company behaviour by Miss Trotwood’s awful eye, the ever-present anticipation of donkey-boys intruding again on the sacred green – keep under control the painful elements, notably David’s agonized fear that he will be delivered up to the Murdstones and the warehouse, Miss Trotwood’s own horror at the fate, only recently made known to her by David, of Poor Baby and at David’s experiences (horror that is heightened by some remorse at having abandoned Clara and David), and the sense we have conveyed to us that Mr Murdstone, unlike his sister, has enough feeling to have a bad conscience and to be made to wince at unpleasant memories (‘he seemed to breathe as if he had been running, though still with a smile on his face’). The duel that develops between Miss Trotwood and Mr Murdstone is not lessened in seriousness by Miss Murdstone’s ‘perfect agony at not being able to turn the current’ of Miss Trotwood’s address towards herself, but this is one further indication of the novelist’s full consciousness of the living nature of the material he works in, material that he is shaping with the responsibility of a great artist possessed by a theme he must develop.
Another denial of Dickens’s functioning as an artist in composing David Copperfield is represented by the amateur psychologizing of the school of Edmund Wilson. His wild travesties of Dickens’s novels and character in his crudely journalistic essay called ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’, has been one of the disastrous obstacles to getting Dickens’s novels read responsibly ever since; (his characterization of Dickens’s creative achievement as ‘the eternal masquerade of his fiction’ has been expanded by Garis into a theory that virtually relegates Dickens’s work as a whole). Thus it is asserted that Miss Murdstone was invented ‘to bear the weight of the childish resentment Dickens undoubtedly felt against his own mother’, though Dickens himself saw his mother as Mrs Nickleby (and was amused at her not being able to believe in such a woman) who is so like Mrs Micawber in her mental processes and other respects that we should be justified in claiming that it is Mrs Micawber who was created out of his feelings about his mother when she was actually in Mrs Micawber’s circumstances. Wherever we can check Dickens’s use as fictional characters of people who impinged on him in real life, even in his most painful phase, we have, it seems to me, to give him the credit of being an artist, a free creator, and not a victim of blind drives of passion he can neither control nor even recognize, as this line of critics assume.
Forster’s account of the relation between the autobiographical fragment and the novel David Copperfield corresponds much more convincingly to the account of the novel which, as I’ve suggested, a sensitive and unprejudiced reader finds himself to have in his possession after reading the book. He claims that the autobiographical manuscript and the conversations he had with Dickens about it ‘enable me to separate the fact from the fiction’ of David Copperfield; he concluded that Dickens had started to write an account of the blacking-factory period of his childhood but gave it up when the novel ‘began to take shape in his mind’ because ‘Those warehouse experiences fell then so aptly into the subject he had chosen, that he could not resist the temptation of immediately using them.’ Dickens had already used other appropriate parts of his memories of this period of his childhood in his novels, with the firm objectivity of the creative mind in control of its material: Mrs Pipchin and her home in which little Paul Dombey lodged Dickens said was drawn from ‘a reduced old lady who took children in to board, and had once done so at Brighton and who, with a few alterations and embellishments, unconsciously began to sit for Mrs Pipchin in Dombey when she took in me’, at the time John Dickens went to prison for debt. David was no more Dickens than was Paul Dombey, and Miss Murdstone no more a creation to bear his resentment against his mother than was Mrs Pipchin. After a while the boy Charles Dickens was transferred to a back-attic in the home of a kind family who were the originals for the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop, and Forster also tells us that the orphan servant-girl who was employed by the Dickens family in their Micawber phase was translated into the Marchioness in the same novel. All these characters have their roots equally in this unhappy period of his boyhood, yet they bear witness to an effortless impersonality – and so, it seems to me, does his use of his amatory experiences (where Maria Beadnell and Catherine Hogarth amalgamate to provide the essence of a Dora). There is, equally, no question of Dickens having undertaken David Copperfield to excuse himself or deceive the reading public as to his history, as some critics have amiably alleged; nor was it a piece of self-therapy. Dickens, it seems to me, gave up the idea of writing an autobiography, whether for publication or his own use, because he was a novelist and had a more satisfactory way of telling the truth (the essential truth) about his experience of life (he knew that what mattered in it was what was representative). He follows Coleridge’s rule instinctively, that there should be a wide difference between his own circumstances and that of his subject, and David, the typical boy-child in his relation to a mother, is the very opposite in this respect to Charles Dickens. Since, as I have said, it is Mrs Micawber who has a good deal in common with Mrs Nickleby, it is more likely that she is the figure in David Copperfield to whom he transferred his feelings about his mother in boyhood – one notices that in her multiple troubles poor Mrs Micawber forgot David was a boy and took him into her confidence as an adult, but that at parting ‘a mist cleared from her eyes and … with quite a new and motherly expression in her face, put her arm round my neck and gave me just such a kiss as she might have given to her own boy.’ There is a touching truth to life but no sentimentality here.
In fact, any reader of Dickens who has comprehended the way his creative thinking develops, will have noted that the Murdstones represent forces both religious and psychological, which were powerful in his society and by which his parents were untouched – the will to dominate, justified as religious righteousness, and the Evangelical and Methodist animus against the nature of childhood, together with the Puritan acquisitiveness; Dickens had already realized that these were the enemies of life as he valued it, and they coalesce and culminate in Mrs Clennam, the doom-maker of Little Dorrit, who combines in herself both Mr and Miss Murdstone. But whereas David the orphan had escaped from these forces, Arthur Clennam did not but was crushed by the Murdstone-type upbringing of his step-mother, with her gloomy religion, her sense of guilt, and her fear of love and art; in this respect Dickens evidently became less and less hopeful about the progress of the Victorian Age.
David Copperfield differs from Oliver Twist and Dombey, from both of which it follows on, in carrying the child who, in the case of Oliver and little Paul, is a victim merely, into a boy who is ultimately successful in conflict with the world. The innovation of the autobiographical method meant that a domestic and not directly satiric tone was required; it also demanded more subtlety of narration which allows the reader both to identify with the narrator for the most part and yet see that he is to be viewed in a way he can’t of course see or understand himself. And as Dickens is not now, as in Oliver Twist or Dombey, indicting his culture but only questioning it, irony and satire are not suitable techniques. One of the less obvious advantages of the autobiographical medium is that seeing David’s past from his present height of achieved happiness allows him to make out a pattern in it and show us the relatedness of events, as well as to recreate in all their poignancy his feelings at any given time. Thus the follow-through from his mother’s two marriages to his own first and second marriages is divided into smaller units, from his own birth to his own virtual death as the babe in her arms in the coffin, then his fresh start in another character as the warehouse boy with the Micawbers in London, which itself ends with his reception into his great-aunt’s home and is the beginning of his adolescence (not the real end of the novel, as John Bayley seemed to think when he declared that ‘the novel David Copperfield really finishes at this point; all the rest is another novel’); after, in his new existence as ‘Trotwood’, he has gone through the cycle of marriage to Dora which ends with her death and Steerforth’s, there follows yet another phase, of wandering through Europe to live out his mistakes, which brings him back to Agnes and the due culmination of the whole novel when, with Agnes in his arms, he looks up at the moon (‘Peaceful! Ain’t she!’ Uriah had said, identifying the unattainable moon with ‘his’ Agnes) and the miraculous nature of David’s life comes home to him:
Long miles of road then opened out before my mind; and toiling on, I saw a ragged way-worn boy forsaken and neglected, who should come to call even the heart now beating against mine, his own.
Life has consisted of fresh starts, but each phase is penetrated by characters from his pasts or related to the others by parallels in incident. Dickens wrote ‘Trotwood Copperfield’ underlined, in his Plan for chapter XIV, showing he mean the new name to be significant. But Dr Strong’s school replaces Mr Creakle’s, and Mr Micawber and Traddles come back into his life – it is now Traddles who lodges with the Micawbers, who is confided in and is the innocent victimized – and as soon as David starts out from Dover to find his feet Steerforth turns up in the old relation to him. Steerforth’s ruining Mr Mell in wanton cruelty, in the former phase, forecasts his heartless ruining of Little Em’ly in the later one; Mr Murdstone’s manœuvring to exercise power over David’s mother and David is replaced by Uriah’s machinations to secure Agnes and crush David, and so on. David himself notices this effect and stresses the cyclical nature of life when having been to Covent Garden Theatre he says: ‘it was in a manner, like a shining transparency, through which I saw my earlier life moving along’ – though what he had been seeing was ‘Julius Caesar and the new Pantomime’ and the particular relevance of this is obscure until he runs into Steerforth again in consequence.
A final evidence of the careful thinking-out of the ideas incarnated and the human truths explored in David Copperfield is that in chapter LVIII when David has gone abroad to recover from the two blows he has suffered – the loss of Dora his child-wife and the loss of Steerforth his father-friend – he realizes that the two blows are but one ‘wound’ with which he has to ‘strive’: they’re inextricably associated not only because they are the loss of first love and first friendship, but that he now faces the fact that he was misguided in both. The sequel, a Childe Harold wandering through Europe and a Wordsworthian healing at the hand of Great Nature, is only a prolonged cliché. David has really to come to terms with his two disillusions, which he apparently does by writing a story about them; a neat way of reminding us that David is a novelist, for, as Dickens knew, this is what novelists do. The return to the England of Gray’s Inn in the character of the old David is quite refreshing, his reunion with the real friend, Traddles, and the right wife, Agnes, round off the theme.
Yet except in the obviously moralistic episodes there is no obtrusive schematic intention. Dickens’s creativeness did not work at the level of full consciousness that Henry James or Conrad show in their letters and introductions (though I shall not be at all surprised if the complete edition of Dickens’s letters gives us plenty of interesting insights into his methods of composition). The notes we have of his plans for numbers of Copperfield look like random jottings until, having read the novel as a whole in the way I have suggested, we can see that most of them are keys to his profounder meanings – ‘Why Rookery’, ‘Brooks of Sheffield’ and such were shorthand notes to keep himself in touch with his themes, though no doubt he could not have written, or even provided the material for, an essay on his art and craft as a novelist. I have elsewhere47 cited as an example of the way the creative mind works Charlotte Brontë’s indecisions about the name of her heroine in Villette. After naming her Lucy Snowe she changed the name to Frost, but subsequently wrote to her publisher to change it back, saying ‘As to the name of the heroine, I can hardly express what subtlety of thought made me decide upon giving her a cold name, but a cold name she must have.’ The conscious choice was between hard and soft cold (frost and snow) but the feeling of rightness in the necessity of a cold name was spontaneous and never analysed. The Freudian puns I have noted below in the choice of names like Dora and Doady and Murdstone were not fully conscious either, I imagine, but they are only slighter signs of the wonderful genius that produced the end of chapter IX.
Do we feel that the actual writing of David Copperfield is less interesting than the prose of Dombey? There is here nothing comparable to the wonderful passage of time passing in the desolate Dombey home, or the description of the broker’s warehouse, or of the flow of the populace from the country into the city registered in the consciousness of Harriet Carker; nor scenes so fertile in satiric purpose as Mr Dombey’s second wedding or little Paul’s chirstening or the scene in Warwick Castle among the pictures, not even in the poignant episodes in David’s childhood is there any so strangely moving as Paul’s introduction into Dr Blimber’s establishment. Even the death-bed scene of Clara is inferior in imaginative impact to those of Paul or Paul’s mother. But granted that David Copperfield doesn’t offer us the richly impressive rewards of Dombey, there is, I claim, a verbal interest in the later novel that shows Dickens’s Shakespearian use of the language. Dickens is a master of words because they are more than mere words to him, they are feelings and associations and dark implications. For instance, the conflicting relations of Rosa Dartle and Steerforth tell us more about Steerforth than they do about her, and that Dickens meant this is seen in another insight into Steerforth’s attitude to others shown when David tells Steerforth, who has dropped in on him in London, that Traddles has been there:
‘Oh! That fellow!’ said Steerforth, beating a lump of coal on the top of the fire, with the poker. ‘Is he as soft as ever? And where the deuce did you pick him up?’
David is just sensitive enough to feel from this that ‘Steerforth rather slighted’ Traddles, but we recognize something more in the brutal ‘beating’ of the lump of coal with the poker to break it up and the accompanying description of Traddles as ‘soft’ (easily broken, and only fuel for his fire to Steerforth), together with the characteristic of Steerforth’s in behaving in David’s room as though it were his own, in managing the fire – we have conveyed to us, without having to analyse or intellectualize it, the selfish and arrogant and even cruel traits in Steerforth, such as his ready contempt of others, that point to his subsequent brutal treatment of Emily. We see Dickens evolving this habit of making symbolic actions convey character-traits yet which are so natural that we hardly notice the symbolism, though it affects us as much more meaningful somehow than an ordinary action. A similar but distinct example is when Henry Gowan, a stranger watched from behind by Arthur Clennam, is seen to be idly tossing stones into the water with his foot. ‘There was something in his way of spurning them out of their places with his heel, and getting them into the required position, that Clennam thought had an air of cruelty in it.’ In due course Clennam is ‘heeled’ like a stone out of Gowan’s path in their rivalry for Pet, cruelly, insolently and effectively. This loading of words is sometimes really witty in David Copperfield and reveals Dickens’s understanding of how the mind works by associations it could not consciously explain. As in the sequence when Miss Trotwood discusses with David Emily’s folly in eloping with Steerforth, ending: ‘“I am sorry for your early experience”’ (she had therefore sensed he had been in love with Emily as a child) and immediately continues: ‘“And so you fancy yourself in love! Do you?” “Fancy, aunt!” I exclaimed, as red as I could be. “I adore her with my whole soul!” “Dora, indeed!” returned my aunt’ – thus making the typicality of Dora’s name for the novel’s purpose apparent, and apparent at the same time that Miss Trotwood has deduced she will be another Little Em’ly. So Miss Trotwood adds that ‘“the little thing is very fascinating, I suppose?” “And not silly?” said my aunt. “Silly, aunt!” “Not lightheaded?” said my aunt.’ David says he was struck with these ideas as both new and absurd to him, but we see, without being told, that Miss Trotwood, who then mentions his likeness to his mother (‘poor Baby’) has realized that he is bound to fall in love with someone like his mother and that this will be a misfortune for him. She suggests that what his mother’s child ought to look for is ‘earnestness “to sustain and improve him,’” hinting delicately at Agnes of course, but without effect. Earnestness, the Victorian model virtue, was not what David wanted even if he needed it in an object for love. We pick up this train of thought again during the engagement, notably when David has begun to notice uneasily that everyone treats Dora as a child and that she expects to be petted. He suggests she ‘might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally’, but rightly sensing this is dissatisfaction with her as she is, she begins to sob.
What could I do but … tell her how I doted on her, after that!
‘I am sure I am very affectionate,’ said Dora; ‘you oughtn’t to be cruel to me, Doady?’
We now see, by its association in the previous line with ‘doted’, the point of her inventing ‘Doady’ as her pet name for him, which he has innocently explained as ‘a corruption of David’. It is her way of forcing him into sustaining the character of a doting lover towards her. There is a great deal of this kind of suggestive word-play in the novel, less obvious than the self-evident ‘Murdstone’ implying a stony-hearted murderer (‘their gloom and their austerity destroyed her’). But of course it is not only the associations revealed by words, but the similar underground currents that determine our actions, that the novelist traces for us and shows as decisive.48 I have always admired the train of psychological events that bring Steerforth back so fatally into David’s life. After his sheltered youth at Canterbury, Miss Trotwood sends him out to see the world in order ‘to have a reliance upon yourself and act for yourself’, she tells him, little knowing the tragic irony this contains. What more appropriate than that he should, as soon as he gets to London, go to the theatre to see Shakespeare (Julius Caesar) and feel it to be a romantic experience?
To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect. But the mingled reality and mystery of the whole show, the influence upon me of the poetry, the light, the music, the company, the smooth stupendous changes of glittering and brilliant scenery, were so dazzling and opened up such illimitable regions of delight, that when I came out into the rainy street, at twelve o’clock at night, I felt as if I had come from the clouds, where I had been leading a romantic life for ages, to a bawling, splashing, link-lighted, umbrella-struggling, hackney-coach-jostling, pattern-clinking, muddy, miserable world.
I had emerged by another door, and stood in the street for a little while, as if I really were a stranger upon earth; but the unceremonious pushing and hustling that I received, soon recalled me to myself, and put me in the road back to the hotel; whither I went, revolving the glorious vision all the way … I was so filled with the play, and with the past – for it was in a manner, like a shining transparency, through which I saw my earlier life moving along – that I don’t know when the figure of a handsome, well-formed young man, dressed with a tasteful easy negligence which I have reason to remember very well, became a real presence to me … In going towards the door, I passed the person who had come in, and saw him plainly. He did not know me, but I knew him in a moment.
At another time I might have wanted the confidence or the decision to speak to him, and might have lost him. But, in the then condition of my mind, where the play was still running high, his former protection of me appeared so deserving of my gratitude, and my old love for him overflowed my breast so freshly and spontaneously, that I went up to him at once, with a fast-beating heart, and said:
‘Steerforth! won’t you speak to me?’
This is as remarkably imagined as it is utterly convincing. To David, Steerforth was a heroic character in his unhappy schooldays, someone larger and nobler than life, seeming to belong with the historical Classical characters in the Shakespeare play by which he has just been so aroused – without the stimulus of which he would have been too timid to claim acquaintance with his former patron. The play is then used for another purpose: David is dashed by Steerforth’s expression of contempt for the performance which has so enchanted David, for by now Steerforth is at Oxford with the appropriate arrogant sophistication. In accordance with this he nicknames David ‘Daisy’, and uses him.
Dickens, I suggest, had a far better idea of how speech occurs and of the laws of association which direct thought than either George Eliot or Tolstoy, whose novels for the most part, though they are masterly in their understanding of behaviour, show over-rationalization in representing speech (though they never, admittedly, suffer from the attraction of the melodrama of the popular English stage which Dickens so often yields to before Bleak House, and which is seen forcing his conception of Martha into its mode of rhetorical utterance). Dickens is therefore particularly good at rendering the speech-habits of the illiterate and of the half-educated, and this is not a matter of masquerading himself and thus producing fat acting roles, as is alleged by one modern school of Dickens criticism; Dickens shows a sensitive and intelligent insight into the mysterious nature of speech as one expression of the unique idiom of each of us.
It is not then Dickens who is sometimes Tolstoyan but Tolstoy who is in origin Dickensian. As we have seen, brilliantly and feelingly as Tolstoy can present the facts of Andrew Bolkonski married to a Lisa, it remains a mere episode, however moving, whereas to Dickens his view of such a marriage is that it must be considered in a wider context altogether and with the assumption that it can be explained, accounted for, and therefore understood. The assumption made by so many recent critics that Dickens is concerned to excuse David, or that we can accuse David, or even thereby accuse Dickens, is to miss the achievement of the novel completely; it goes along with the fallacy of identifying Dickens with David, Dora with either his wife or his first sweetheart or both, of denying Dickens impersonality and wisdom as a novelist in this case. George Eliot made Mr Casaubon in quite a Copperfield way feel bewilderment and indignation at finding himself unhappy when married, for in choosing a beautiful young lady for a wife he had only done what his society sanctioned or even enjoined on a man, he knew. David might have argued the same, for this is Dickens’s point. David could not help being a child of his age, of his age’s best intentions indeed; and even more Nature’s victim of the archetypal situation in being his mother’s son. Steerforth is provided to show another fatherless son formed by a loving mother who differs from David in not being innocent and sensitive nor having had, what saved David, the discipline of having had to make his own way in the world – a part of the Victorian theory of life that Dickens thoroughly assented to, and which did not come within Tolstoy’s knowledge.
I hope I have at any rate made out a case for Tolstoy’s high opinion of David Copperfield and thereby of Dickens, and in doing so shown that the relation between them is not that of pigmy to giant or precursor to supercessor or entertainer to artist, but that they are two similar geniuses of the art of the novel of whom the earlier has the additional prestige of being the great original. And I have also, I hope, shown that there were grounds for Dickens’s feeling of injury that Forster indicates at the end of his Life by writing that Dickens ‘believed himself to be entitled to a higher tribute than he was always in the habit of receiving’. One thinks immediately of Henry James’s parable of ‘The Figure in the Carpet’.
Dickens has been scolded by critics for ‘not seeing David’s first marriage from the woman’s (Dora’s) point of view’, but, instead, solving David’s problem by the easy expedient of removing her by death and, even worse, exonerating David from guilt for it by representing her as willing to die in order not to be a burden. ‘It is better as it is’, she says, which is indeed more realistic and less selfish than anything that could have been expected from Dora – which are not however the grounds on which Dickens is blamed for her death-bed admissions. Tolstoy, who also frees the husband by the death of the wife, does seem to have a moral advantage in showing his Prince Andrew harrowed by a sense of guilt towards Lisa, but this is surely because Andrew had been as a husband singularly lacking in forbearance, imagination and tenderness, of which David cannot be accused. In view of all this it is interesting that we have the woman’s point of view on the same situation and that it rather surprisingly turns out to be essentially identical with Dickens’s, though the possibility of nowadays ending an unsuitable marriage by divorce has made it unnecessary for the wife to die in the flesh; yet she too volunteers to die in effect, to free her husband. In The Tortoise and the Hare (1954) an able woman novelist, Miss Elizabeth Jenkins, shows a romantic, incompetent and self-centred young wife, an acknowledged beauty and charmer, who is thoroughly in love with her much older husband and who has moreover a schoolboy son. She is oriented towards the arts, poetry and sentiment instead of turning outwards to play a part in the social life her barrister-husband now needs, for his earlier sympathy with his wife’s tastes, values and temperament (attractions for which he had originally fallen in love with her) has been replaced by desire for worldly success, money and what it will buy, and the gratifications of social life. A neighbour, neither young nor beautiful, who can provide these things, supersedes the increasingly unsatisfactory wife, Imogen, who gradually comes to realize this and that her inadequacies are irritating to her husband, that she is no longer a solace for and relief to his professional grind, that she can no longer charm him. She has always been out of sympathy with their boy, who prefers the other woman as a mother.
Recognizing all this, though still loving her husband, she feels obliged to yield her place to the neighbour, the Tortoise of the title, who corresponds to Agnes in being the woman the husband now realizes is the wife he needs and loves. Imogen doesn’t die but she suffers extinction as far as husband, home and child are concerned, and that voluntarily. This is in spite of the novelist’s sympathy with the heroine and refusal to endorse the domineering but adored husband. Imogen is last seen in a London flat (she is a country-lover) pining away on her own, though, unlike Dora, able to conceive turning herself into a useful woman: the novel ends with Imogen wiping away her tears as ‘She looked about the uncared-for room. ‘“I must improve,” she said half aloud. “There is a very great deal to be done.”’
Another woman’s point of view of a similar marriage is George Eliot’s of Lydgate’s. Rosamund Vincy is not loving, even in the sense that Dora may be said to be, but is like her in being extravagant, vain, unreasonable and a selfish egoist – all this being shown us through the unsympathetic woman novelist’s eyes. Though George Eliot makes Rosamund kill her husband, instead of freeing him by dying herself – which is shown as being the least likely step she would ever take – this is because the woman novelist feels that Lydgate should be punished for his mistake in accepting a drawing-room ornament as a wife. Dorothea, the Agnes of Middlemarch, makes a parallel mistake to Lydgate’s in her first choice of a partner but George Eliot finds her pardonable and arranges for her to be set free by death and find happiness in another mate.
Yet another woman’s attitude to the David–Dora situation is to be found in Jane Eyre, and that really is surprising. St John Rivers, who has decided to go to India as a missionary, also loves a Rosamond, a gay, frivolous, ‘child-like’ beauty who lets him see she is anxious to marry him, and is moreover an heiress. But the poor clergyman is an intellectual, a scholar and has a religious vocation; on all these grounds he sees that the undoubted sensuous and worldly happiness he would gain by letting his taste for a Rosamond conquer him would be followed by self-disgust and repentance. He refrains, and goes off to convert the heathen. But Charlotte Brontë makes Jane Eyre thoroughly scold her cousin for his perversity in rejecting a normal happy marriage. It has always seemed to me probable that George Eliot, who was greatly impressed by Jane Eyre (and Villette), arrived at the Lydgate-Rosamund marriage out of interest in what would have happened if a man with a vocation for a profession did thoughtlessly take the course rejected by the clear-sighted St John Rivers.
Though the underlying myth, the orphan’s tale, in David Copperfield is, as I have said, comparable with that of Oliver Twist‚ there is one great difference which must strike everyone. Oliver is almost entirely an object used for satiric diatribe against the Poor Laws (old and new) and the society that produced them, against a society that tolerated the underworld of Fagin and Bill Sikes and did nothing to protect children against being exploited by them as thieves and prostitutes, against a society which let justice be administered by a Mr Fang, and which ascribed to an illegitimate child inherited guilt; Oliver hardly exists as more than an innocent anonymous consciousness to register suffering and bewilderment engendered by these conditions. But David is recognizably a ‘real’ child and boy, with specific sufferings, in a realistic and not merely symbolic ambience; we have the impression of being taken into his confidence, that we understand his unique and not merely predictable feelings. It is true that Dickens produced little Paul Dombey in between Oliver and David, not to mention Little Nell and Smike, but Paul, like the rest of these until David, is also an object to look at from outside except for our less wholly external view of his desolation at being parted from Florence and entered into Dr Blimber’s forcing-house. It seems more to the point that Jane Eyre had intervened. Whatever it turns out that Dickens may or may not have said in his surviving letters about Currer Bell’s first novel, which rivalled Vanity Fair in the reception it received from both reviewers and reading-public, he, like everyone else in the literary world, must have read it with the kind of respect we know was accorded it by novelists as different as George Eliot, Thackeray and Lockhart. Dickens no doubt unconsciously noted its relevance to his own use of the child as recording consciousness and critic of adult attitudes.
I have elsewhere49 shown that the outlines of the orphan’s myth as created by Dickens in Oliver Twist are repeated in Jane Eyre, and that, while we have no other evidence for Charlotte Brontë’s having read Dickens’s first serious novel, it seems very probable that it would have got to Keighley, where the Brontë sisters used the lending library, in the nine years between the appearance of Oliver and the conception of Jane. But Charlotte Brontë invested that myth with a very different detail and ethos, and it is this detail which we find distinguishing the myth of David Copperfield from the form it had taken originally in Oliver Twist. Jane represents an immense advance on Oliver, Little Nell, Smike, or even Paul and Florence Dombey, being neither a typical nor idealized nor sentimentalized child and never used as a stalking-horse. She develops by the laws of her own being and in accordance with the pressures brought to bear on her, as David Copperfield does later (the first of Dickens’s children so to do); she has a child’s literal-mindedness, a child’s logic, a child’s pathetic cunning in self-protection and a child’s intuitions about the adults who arbitrate her fate; she is always passionate, violent and fierce if oppressed intolerably, and above all resentful of injustice and craving to be loved; she has a child’s terrors, as when, alone in the night after recovering from the ‘fit’ in the Red Room, she reports ‘ear, eye and mind were alike strained by dread: such dread as children only can feel’. We recognize most of these characteristics in the child David, and later in the child Pip too, though in none of Dickens’s earlier children. Jane’s virtual step-mother Mrs Reed, with ‘her stony eye, opaque to tenderness’, whose cruelty and injustice torture Jane, is clearly related to David’s step-father and Miss Murdstone. When Jane goes to Mr Brocklehurst’s boarding-school she finds she is saddled with the character of being a vicious child thanks to Mrs Reed, as David arriving at Mr Creakle’s finds Mr Murdstone has arranged for him to be. There David’s innocent and excellent friend Traddles is habitually discriminated against and punished unfairly by Mr Creakle, as Jane’s admirable school-friend Helen Burns had been by the sadistic teacher Miss Scatcherd. Under intolerable pressure later in life Jane runs away, losing her luggage and money at the outset, to wander penniless, starving and having to sleep on the ground in all weathers, rebuffed agonizingly by all she meets whose assistance she asks, until she collapses at the threshold of relatives who take her in out of charity and wash, tend and feed her, whereupon she is reborn as it were under a new name (Jane Elliott) and starts a new existence in family life. The same events in every detail take place in David’s life, who similarly becomes Trotwood Copperfield. It seems hard to reject the conclusion that David Copperfield inherits from Jane Eyre in these respects.
It might be mentioned here that Jane Eyre, like her creator, had the customary class feelings of her age, which Dickens has in ours been accused of snobbery for showing to exist in David Copperfield (e.g. for making David habitually called ‘Master David’ by Barkis the carrier and the fisherfolk of Yarmouth, and ‘Master Copperfield’ by Uriah Heep). No one accuses Charlotte Brontë of snobbery or social insecurity, so I will merely remark that Jane always reports herself as being called ‘Miss Jane’ by Bessie the nurse, by Abbott the lady’s-maid and by the apothecary, while she is still in the nursery (and a resented poor relation there at that), and that when she leaves Lowood School to go into a situation, as it was called, Bessie is called in (now a matron) solely to testify for us that ‘Miss Jane’ is ‘quite a lady’. This is the ethos in which David Copperfield was reared in rural Suffolk, and those critics who complain of Dickens for registering it correctly are simply showing their ignorance of the facts of social life in the England of the 19th century (and some of the twentieth), before the attitudes engendered by the democratic theory of equality had made an appearance. In her autobiography Lark Rise to Candleford (1943) Flora Thompson, writing of her childhood in an Oxfordshire village from the cottager’s angle, records as phenomenal the coming of a new type of Vicar when she grew up, who made it known that his children were to be called by their plain Christian names ‘at a time when other quality children were “Master” or “Miss” in their cradles’. The term ‘quality’ implies that deference to class distinctions was not servility but something subtler and not inherently undesirable. Those of us well read in writers of reminiscences of pre-1914 days will have noticed how frequently these illustrate this consciously or unconsciously– that manners and right attitudes for the ‘quality’ were instilled into them as children by the family servants and people on the estates, and a code of behaviour to be lived up to made plain; privilege implied responsibility. Cockshut ridiculing Dickens for class consciousness says that everyone in the novel’ is a little too conscious that David is a gentleman and confers honour by paying a visit’, but the same holds true of all comparable Victorian novels. George Eliot, a safe guide, amusingly illustrates these traditional attitudes in showing that Mrs Poyser, combatative by nature and equal when goaded to telling off her own landlord the Squire, was yet respectful to the gentry in general and felt honoured by their notice and visits. Class distinction in the form of deference to ladies and gentlemen and their children was on the whole a tribute to birth, education and breeding (not recognized by mere income, smart clothes or pretensions unsupported by manners, which villagers were quite prepared to criticize). Comparable with this is the deference shown to craftsmen by villagers in the days when every village had resident craftsmen: traditionally accorded the honourable title of ‘Master’ in recognition of their superior abilities, no servility being involved. Mrs Gaskell in her novel North and South (exactly contemporary with Hard Times) takes great care to show that her heroine, Margaret Hale a parson’s daughter from Hampshire, was accustomed to having her visits to the cottagers received with pleasure, and gets a shock on moving to Manchester to find a new, Industrial Age, proletariat, without manners and aggressively egalitarian, hostile equally to mill-owners and to educated professional people, who having no standards except ‘brass’ despise the Hales for being poor and therefore having no right to gentility. Whether this implies real progress or only Progress depends on one’s definition of civilization.
The exposure and denunciation, accompanied by bodily injury, of Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, following on the very similar exposure, denunciation and knocking down of Pecksniff by Martin Chuzzlewit in the earlier novel, has given rise to generalizations suggesting that these scenes are a characteristic of a Dickens novel and are psychologically revelatory as to their author, one recent Dickens critic observing not only that this is so but that he agrees with the self-evident conclusion drawn by someone else that these scenes are in the nature of sexual orgasms. Perhaps it would be as well therefore to take a closer look at them, to see whether they are as suggested, involuntary, or merely conventional and traditional, and how and why Dickens uses them.
The first form of such a scene is to be found in Pickwick Papers where Mr Pickwick does indeed discharge his bottled-up wrath, very naturally, at having to pay the costs in an action in which he has been victimized by the rascally lawyers Dodson and Fogg; the scene is brief and kept in a mildly comic context, and is without excitement except on the part of Mr Pickwick; it is obtrusively staged, so to speak, so that we are aware we are witnessing something comparable to a stage comedy, by the stage directions, and it is mixed in with other things proper to the conclusion of traditional comedy which have been continuously maintained from Classical comedy to the Victorian pantomime, that is, marriages and comic business. Even in Martin Chuzzlewit this is so, where old Martin’s pent-up indignation and his revelation to the company that he has only been affecting senility to entrap Pecksniff and test the others, gives the scene much more force than in the other cases I mention; the ridiculous side of Pecksniff is stressed, his intermixed speeches let down the tension, along with the barely-concealed amusement of the young men present, and the sense of our being not in a realistic novel but in the audience witnessing a traditional scene enacted on the boards is very strong. In David Copperfield Dickens can be felt to be staging this scene on similar lines, since Micawber is the agent through whom the exposure is made and his absurdities of behaviour and literary Micawberisms dominate the business and set the tone, the humour being underlined by Miss Trotwood’s attacking Uriah bodily to make him restore her fortune that he has embezzled. In each of these two later novels there is only one scene of this type, whereas we may note in the first novel, that was written only as entertainment, the exposure scene is recurrent, where the easily-roused Mr Pickwick exposes Mr Jingle to the magistrate and has another such scene when he and Wardle catch the eloping couple in the inn and Mr Pickwick denounces Mr Jingle.
Of course in all these cases such a scene is necessary to achieve a peripeteia, and in a manner indispensable to the loose form of the picaresque novel, whose only tension results from recurrent surprises or alarms in the plot. In the picaresque novel, a form which Dickens took over for the production of his early fictions, resolution was traditionally achieved by assembling most of the characters in prison, a destination most of them would very naturally find themselves at, and the rest by mischance or the machinations of the wicked; there an opportunity arose naturally for the éclaircissements that would clear up the plot and prepare for the happy ending with the vindication of the innocent, and we can see this occurs in Pickwick too. Dickens inherited this from his models and admired predecessors, Smollett, The Vicar of Wakefield and all the rest. But after Oliver Twist and Barnaby Rudge prison did not come naturally to the class of characters now employed. And as Dickens turned away from the picaresque novel as unsatisfactory for his now more serious purposes, he found the mode and techniques of the serious drama (not melodrama) could be adapted to the novelist’s needs. Here he could draw on Shakespeare, Molière and Ben Jonson, all of whom he admired and had seen performed, and assisted in producing or had acted in. His ambition to write an English Tartuffe which had produced Mr Pecksniff, the exponent of our national hypocrisy in its Early Victorian form, gave him also the scene of Tartuffe’s exposure, a scene inevitable with a dominant evil character of this type as we may see in the construction of Measure for Measure, Volpone, The School for Scandal and other such plays, all well known to Dickens, where the exposure of such a hypocrite as Volpone, Angelo or Joseph Surface necessitates the tense winding-up of expectation to a very dramatic and public exposure, before poetic justice can be achieved. Dickens made several versions of Tartuffe: Sampson Brass in The Old Curiosity Shop, Pecksniff himself, and two in David Copperfield – the ’umble Uriah and the respectable Littimer, where though Uriah gets the classical stage exposure Littimer is revealed, along with Uriah for a second exposure, (but this time purely satiric) in the picaresque novel’s prison set-up – an interesting mixture, while the villain who is not a hypocrite, Steerforth, doesn’t get ‘exposed’ at all. His punishment takes place off-stage, thus making very effectively the point that Dickens uses the stage exposure-scene only in connection with hypocrisy, where his models virtually imposed it on him. The scene in Copperfield which it genuinely excited Dickens to write, be it noted, was the storm scene with the shipwreck of Steerforth and the death of the heroic Ham. And the serious scene that balances the mainly comic one of Uriah’s exposure is the exposure scene in reverse where Annie vindicates her character to her husband and to the reader too, with a staged scene and supporting cast.
Dickens did always feel the need for a strong staged scene towards the end of his novel, but it is not necessarily or even generally the one where excitement on the author’s part is felt to inhere. In Dombey and Son the ‘strong’ scene is the exposure scene of a more complex kind, which has no supporting cast but is indisputably acted on the boards, being seen and directed as such by the novelist. This is the meeting at Dijon of Edith Dombey and Carker, where she denounces him as a villain and, like Annie Strong, vindicates her own character to the reader, which gives us the necessary surprise that makes the scene, since we know all about Carker’s villainy already. But the excitement in the novel is attached to Mr Dombey’s pursuit and hunting down of Carker, who is finally killed by the engine of Nemesis (and his blood, like Jezebel’s, licked up by the dogs, a nice implied Biblical reference). Florence Dombey’s return in the nick of time to stop her father from committing suicide is in comparison not in the least forceful or interesting.
So also in the later novels: Dickens’s increasing powers as an artist incline him away from the melodramatic and even the theatrical, so that in Bleak House the only excitement is Mr Bucket’s (played off against the stony absence of sympathetic reaction by Sir Leicester Dedlock) when he unfolds before Sir Leicester, and later before the French maid too, the true story behind Mr Tulkinghorn’s murder. This has involved the exposure of the truth about both the lawyer and Lady Dedlock to the unsuspecting husband and the thrilling incrimination and arrest of Hortense in front of our eyes – altogether a mode of winding up a mystery story which subsequently became a stock feature of the detective novel, in which Dickens was a pioneer. But the real excitement for the reader, and what shows the art of the novelist, is in what corresponds to Mr Dombey’s hunting down Carker – Mr Bucket’s and Esther’s chase up and down between St Alban’s and London after her fugitive mother, in the hope of saving, not punishing, her. The true surprise in the novel is a wholly novelistic one (not in the least theatrical or stagey but psychological and truly human), to which the scene of the murderess’s arrest is necessary but incidental: Sir Leicester’s unpredictable reaction to what affects his honour and his family’s standing. Here we have the opposite of an ex posure and denunciation scene as the climax of the novel since Sir Leicester steadily continues, throughout the chase that is going on outside, to demand our mounting sympathy, admiration and compassion, reversing the usual climax that we have been assured is characteristic of Dickens. Dickens has got way from his dramatic model again.
The next novel, Hard Times, shows a comic exposure of both Bounderby and Mrs Sparsit, with the disappointment and frustration of both, but these are perfectly controlled and nothing compared with the main scene with which the excitement is achieved, that of the pathetic and yet comic interview between Tom Gradgrind and his father in the circus ring and the concurrent exposure of Bitzer as the human machine constructed on the self-interest principle – and Bitzer’s frustration and defeat is also entirely and appropriately comedy, as reported by the ring-master. Mr Gradgrind’s crowning self-exposure in his admission of his fatal mistakes is painful and not theatrical in the least, nor, as we had known that he was mistaken all along, is it stimulating. Louisa’s escape from her lover and from the pursuing Mrs Sparsit is truly exciting too, and has clearly excited the novelist in the writing.
With Little Dorrit Dickens has found a wholly unexceptionable use of the exposure scene which, while retaining the original elements of dramatic surprise and éclaircissement, makes use of the psychological (non-theatrical) self-exposure and apologia shown in Mr Gradgrind’s case that lay at the root of Hard Times. The mysteries of the plot, of the Glennam house and of the household are all explained by Mrs Glennam herself, the prime mover, in the chapter, ‘Closing In’, when she takes the words out of the mouth of Blandois who is about to ‘expose’ her, on the grounds that she cannot bear to see herself ‘in such a glass as that’. Sitting in the wheel-chair to which she has doomed herself (‘like Fate in a go-cart’ as Flora had said with her usual aptness) she is driven to make her own apologia, and having confessed she is freed from her guilt-induced paralysis to stand on her feet and take steps to retrieve herself. An earlier opportunity for an exposure of the guilty, Miss Wade’s case, is similarly avoided as a theatrical occasion, this time by being delivered in manuscript to Arthur Clennam to read, not in the least improbably since Dickens makes us see that it is part of her case that she should find communication with others impossible and yet needs to explain herself to make manifest her grievances. In Arthur Clennam, unlike his kind ordinary friend Mr Meagles who is insufferable to her, she senses the appropriate person to whom to confide her apologia. The only traditional dramatic exposure in this novel is that of Mr Casby, when Pancks exposes him to his victims in Bleeding Heart Yard as no Patriarch but a heartless slum landlord and, by shearing his locks, shows him as not venerable but a figure of fun. Pancks then runs away from the shocking spectacle he has created, pursued by waves of laughter from the witnesses, in a staged scene that is wholly comedy and almost farce.
So that in the next novel, Great Expectations, where Dickens achieved the greatest mastery of his medium, the exposure scenes are, as we might anticipate, much more interesting than in any other of his novels. The only exposure in a serious sense can be of Pip the protagonist – of himself to himself, as with Mr Gradgrind and Mrs Clennam – and of the mysterious Orlick. Pip has to realize that his expectations were fallacious and to see himself for the first time squarely as contemptible (he has long suspected this, of course, as his recurrent uneasiness betrayed), and the two are made to follow inevitably on the return of Magwitch when he reveals himself to Pip. This occurs not towards the end, as a prelude to a happy ending, but exactly in the middle of the novel and is integral to the whole conception, not contrived for a scene, nor staged as one with witnesses. The scene is nonetheless dramatic and exciting on account of the peripeteia it achieves by the explanations of Magwitch which strip, layer by layer, all the illusions from Pip of what he is and where he stands now. This is to use the conventional exposure scene for the finest purposes of a novelist. Moreover it is completed by an even more remarkable exposure scene, also with two only present, which takes place not on any human stage but in a realm which is at once non-realistic and yet touches reality. Pip is lured to it and made to endure Orlick’s exposure of himself which is also an accusation of Pip, making Pip admit even more damaging truths about himself than he had found when reunited with Magwitch, and this scene is finally ended with Pip’s acceptance of his role of criminal. The chase that we have noted as also a feature of Dickens’s compositions is this time not, like Esther’s in the company of the detective, to rescue the guilty, but to help the guilty and yet innocent criminal Magwitch to escape the law by Pip’s aid. The public staged scene is when Pip stands trial along with Magwitch to be denounced by the Judge at the Assizes, and this is the finale of the denunciation and exposure – not of Pip but of his society by itself; and the reader of the novel finds himself automatically accused as part of the society that sanctions the Judge’s mass sentence of executions, a powerful and disturbing corollary.
Our Mutual Friend, which seems to me to show very decidedly the breaking-down of Dickens’s powers, has therefore as might be expected a reversion to the early type of exposure scene. Bella denounces Mr Boffin in the regular stage setting and this is followed by the appropriate features wedding and comedy; but we have all been taken in, for another finale is needed to show us that Bella like the reader has been kept in the dark: not only about her husband’s identity but that Mr Boffin has been only a sham miser, a piece of theatrical nonsense resolved with disgusting sentimentality and whimsicality. There is yet another exposure scene, dull and mechanical, where Silas Wegg, a poor apology for a villain, is exposed to his own circle with unnecessary seriousness by John Harmon and undergoes a comic Nemesis by the hand of Sloppy. None of all this can be taken as anything but deplorable – tired writing and trivial moralizing that are totally out of keeping with the serious parts of the novel and are (like Mr Venus) too dreary to be the comic relief they may be supposed to have been intended for.
Thus the last novel, Edwin Drood, shows that though unfinished it was working up to a merely melodramatic exposure scene, possibly, in Jasper’s prison, after a chase through the cathedral at night, where the intricate plot would be explained and the choirmaster exposed in his true colours, that is, as hypocrite and murderer (or, some think, only would-be murderer). There is certainly an undercurrent of heightened feeling in every part of the novel concerned with Jasper. This is associated partly with his creepy powers of an abnormal kind (something more than hypnotism seems needed to account for it) but mainly with the tension set up between his public role of respectable choirmaster in the cathedral, and his secret life in the underworld of opium-addiction and his privately fostered murderous enmity to his nephew, his unconscious rival in love. The suggestion of moral interest here is minimal but what possibilities it had are not explored in the novel as it develops, we can see. Such a set-up can be only melodramatic in its working out and dénouement, and there is no reason to suppose that we have lost anything of value by The Mystery of Edwin Drood’s not having been revealed to us.
1. R. Garis, The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels (Oxford, 1965).
2. Ross H. Dabney, Love and Property in the Novels of Dickens (Chatto & Windus, 1967).
3. I quote from letters printed in Lord Acton and his Times by David Mathew.
4. When he was 24, not, as he alleged in 1896, before he was 20 – though his putting the influence of David Copperfield back in memory to his adolescence, the most formative period, is significant.
5. Dickens was highly esteemed by the Russian intelligentsia and early translated, David Copperfield appearing in Russian translation in both ‘The Contemporary’ and ‘The Muscovite’ in 1851. Tolstoy refers to it first in his diary for 2 September 1852, where he wrote: ‘Read David Copperfield – a delight’, and in December 1853 wrote to his brother: ‘Buy me Dickens’s David Copperfield in English, and send me Sadler’s English Dictionary, which is among my books’ – I quote from an essay, ‘Tolstoy and Dickens’ in Family Views of Tolstoy, ed. Aylmer Maude, to which I was referred by Dr Theodore Redpath, on consulting him with respect to my interest in Dickens’s influence on Tolstoy. There N. Apostolov says that Dickens’s translations in Russian magazines ‘crowded out’ all other English and French writers, Dickens’s popularity in Russia being at its height in the 1840s and 1850s; Russian critics approved of Dostoevski’s imitating Dickens, for example. While Apostolov stresses a general debt of Tolstoy to Dickens, he does not specify anything more than Tolstoy’s finding congenial Dickens’s ‘humorous treatment of his themes’ and ‘the socio-ethical bearing of his novels’ generally. Dickens himself was soon made acquainted with this success in Russia; a Russian man of letters sent him a translation of Dombey into Russian ‘informing him that his works, which before had only been translated in the journals, and with certain omissions, had now been translated in their entire form by his correspondent’, ending: ‘For the last eleven years your name has enjoyed a wide celebrity in Russia … Your Dombey continues to inspire with enthusiasm the whole of the literary Russia.’ This seems to have been in 1849 (v. Forster, Book VI, § rv) but Dickens’s work was widely known in Russia by 1844. It was as well that Tolstoy struggled with David Copperfield in English, for Russian translators made free with Dickens’s text, and the translator of David Copperfield has been found guilty of many hundreds of ad libbings.
6. R. F. Christian, the Tolstoy scholar and critic, has two generalizations of interest in this connexion. He writes of Tolstoy: ‘There is no doubt that he seized avidly at any confirmation of his ideas in other people’s work and even borrowed their examples’ and ‘A study of the drafts of Tolstoy’s novels confirms the suspicion that problems of structure and composition were often in the forefront of his thoughts’ (Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’: A Study, Oxford, 1962).
7. H. House, The Dickens World, ignoring the surely essential and obvious fact that Dickens was a creative artist, treats his novels as accurate or inaccurate sources of facts, implying in Dickens ignorance or dishonesty in the latter case; in addition to this crass and dangerous approach to the works of Dickens he constantly insinuates misleading valuations or fatuous generalizations, e.g. that Pip’s history is ‘a snob’s progress’, that Dickens habitually and characteristically ‘flattered the public’s moral feelings’, and so on.
8. ‘Why did he marry Lisa?’ asks R. F. Christian. ‘We are not told.’ Thus Mr Christian expresses a natural surprise at such an improbable marriage.
9. Tolstoy has been greatly admired for his understanding of children and sympathetic insight in his novels into a child’s and boy’s modes of feeling, but has it been noticed how much these insights owed to Dickens’s in David Copperfield? Not only is his rendering of children’s feelings and behaviour Dickens’s, but scenes are of a similar kind. David’s lessons with his step-father seem to have made such an impression that they are reflected in both Tolstoy’s great novels – in Princess Mary’s misery at her mathematics lessons from her bullying father, and Serezha’s lessons and unhappy relations with his father Karenin (who like Miss Trotwood has the peculiarity of being unable, though apparently a hard, cold, character, to bear the sight of tears). Serezha instinctively hates Vronsky for coming between him and his mother even while Vronsky is not openly Anna’s lover, as David was hostile to Mr Murdstone before he knew he was courting his mother, feeling a threat to himself from the man touching his mother’s hand.
10. Not, as Cockshut asserts (The Imagination of Charles Dickens, 1961) intending a sneer, that it shows he is an actor, but to make us aware that David’s consciousness is now outward-directed. All parents and teachers will recognize this feature of the now self-conscious schoolboy David as normal and typical.
11. Dickens was perfectly well aware of the advances he made both as an artist and in educating a reading-public, as these two excerpts from letters show: ‘I hope David Copperfield will do for your correspondent. The world would not take another Pickwick from me now, but we can be cheerful and merry, I hope, notwithstanding, and with a little more purpose in us’ (to Costello, April 1849); ‘I am glad to say that there seems to be a bright unanimity about Copperfield. I am very much interested in it and pleased with myself. I have carefully planned out the story, for some time past, to the end, and am making out my purposes with great care. I should like to know what you see from that tower of yours. I have little doubt you see the real objects in the prospect’ (to the Rev. James White, July 1850).
12. Too much has been made of the possible psychological implications of the fact that the novel’s hero and the novelist have the same initials in reverse and of Dickens’s being unaware of this or startled when Forster pointed it out to him. Dickens’s first two choices of name for the hero had been ‘David Mag’ and ‘Thomas Mag’, and it was the novel David Copperfield, not its hero, that Dickens called his ‘favourite child’.
13. The most striking instance is that of his well-intentioned but revealingly stupid objection to the masterly ‘History of a Self-Tormentor’ chapter in Little Dorrit, which he thought should have been part of the narrative. Dickens used his better judgement, but the letter Dickens wrote justifying himself and expressing despair at not being understood is important to an appreciation of the difficulties under which he worked: ‘In Miss Wade I had an idea, which I thought a new one, of making the introduced story so fit into surroundings impossible of separation from the main story, as to make the blood of the book circulate through both. But I can only suppose, from what you say, that I have not exactly succeeded in this.’ This did not prevent Forster’s blandly confident assertion, in the Life, of the shortcomings, as he saw them, of Little Dorrit: ‘the want of coherence among the figures of the story, and of a central interest in the plan of it … some of the most deeply considered things that occur in it have really little to do with the tale itself. The surface-painting of both Miss Wade and Tattycoram, to take an instance, is anything but attractive, yet there is under it a rare force of likeness … and they must both have had, as well as Mr Gowan himself, a striking effect in the novel, if they had been made to contribute in a more essential way to its interest or development.’ He adds, with incredible fatuity: ‘The failure nevertheless had not been for want of care or study, as well as of his own design as of models by masters in his art’ [the classical and 18th century picaresque novelists, who all use the autobiography of a character inserted into the narrative for variety and other purposes, for instance; he thinks Dickens failed to emulate them in Miss Wade’s history] and he goes on to cite the letter from Dickens I have quoted above. We may also observe there his criterion of ‘attractive’ in operation, that of his age. This Dickens was courageous enough to ignore, and to stand by his own lights, as he implies in another letter of self-defence when he wrote: ‘Wrong or right, this was all design, and seemed to me to be in the fitness of things.’
14. The plans for David Copperfield are given in Dickens at Work by John Butt and K. Tillotson (1957).
15. In looking at Dickens’s ‘Plans’ I personally have been struck by the confirmation they give to my deduction – that Dickens was predominantly interested in thematic construction after the first batch of impromptu fiction-writing before Dombey – that I have made from studying the novels themselves. But Tillotson and Butt, ignoring this evidence of Dickens’s concern for construction in the Tolstoyan sense, discuss the Plans simply as evidence for the handling of the plots only, whereas we can see that the themes determined the plotting.
16. This is only one of the innumerable occasions in David Copperfield where we should take heed of the statement in a letter Dickens wrote to G. H. Lewes: ‘The truth is, I am a very modest man, and if readers cannot detect the point of a passage without having their attention called to it by the writer, I would much rather they lost it and looked out for something else.’ ‘Readers have done just that. They have been so dazzled and so satisfied by the richness of the immediate effects that they have neglected the subtler shadings’. – thus Professor Harry Stone comments on this statement when reviewing the first volume of the new edition of Dickens’s letters in the quarterly of the University of Illinois Press.
17. Life obligingly provided Dickens with a perfect piece of symbolism when, on taking his wife to call on his old flame, he was able to observe in the hall the original Jip, dead and stuffed.
18. Dickens preserved this feature through all the changes his titles for this novel passed through – ‘Thomas Mag the Younger’, ‘David Mag the Younger’, ‘David Copperfield the Younger’, ‘David Copperfield, Junior’ etc.
19. Wuthering Heights is another example of this interest, v. my essay in Lectures in America (F. R. & Q.D. Leavis).
20. That Dickens intended us to make this reflection is shown by Miss Trotwood’s making this very point when she asks Mr Murdstone if Clara had made no settlement upon her boy when she remarried, and it then appears that David’s father was equally guilty in having left his young wife ‘the what’s-its-name Rookery without any rooks in it’ unconditionally. To underline this point, there is a Biblical picture on Miss Trotwood’s drawing-room wall in this scene, called ‘Jacob’s Garment’.
21. Dickens’s notes for the chapter ‘Our Housekeeping’ contain this one, underlined as important: ‘Carry through incapacity of Dora – but affectionate.’
22. Forster’s Life is a mine of interesting documentation here. The incredible number of letters dashed off to his friends with which Dickens, as it were compulsively, filled the chinks of his editorial duties and novel-writing and social activities, is explicable only as the result of this need – they overflow with high-spirited fun and nonsense that it seemed he must share with someone. He was a wonderful conjuror, a giver of outstanding children’s parties, and brought all his children into his theatrical activities in the home, as part of this need. His insight into the necessity of play-activities and imaginative fostering for the child’s psychic health is generally recognized, since it is explicit in most if not all of his novels; but this is part only of his general theory, as a creative artist, of the adult’s need also for love and art, which is basic to Hard Times, and in David Copperfield produced this characteristic inquiry into the nature of happiness in marriage.
23. I have always thought that Tolstoy was struck with the psychological insight shown in this trait and that the result was his Karenin, who is afraid of feeling and can’t bear the sight of tears, but once develops a fully human self owing to the appeal of the helpless neglected baby his wife has borne that is not his. His realization thereby that Anna’s adultery is something he is involved in, and thence that if it were not for the moral conventions of his society they could find a modus vivendi which would not turn her out of her home with the loss to him of the baby is his first tentative effort towards a moral rebirth. It is thwarted, unlike Miss Trotwood’s, and he dries up.
24. Dickens cannot be said to have meant this as a symbolic threat of murder or castration at a conscious level, but it is undoubtedly the right gesture to express the attitude Miss Trotwood has taken up, just as the Doll’s Dressmaker charateristically makes two pricks in the air with her needle when angered, symbolically blinding those she dislikes. To use – or invent – characteristic gestures for his personae is one of the means a novelist has to convince the reader of his insight, of course, and Dickens is peculiarly gifted in being able to uncover such authentic expressions of a unique inner life.
25. Her humanization towards the end of the novel is shown by her acceptance of woman’s fate – ‘aiding and abetting’ her last maid’s marrying a tavern-keeper and ‘crowning the marriage-ceremony with her presence’, as well as in spoiling her god-daughter when she gets one. The half-way stage is marked by her declaring to David her refusal to try to help him improve Dora’s character: ‘I want our pet to like me, and be as gay as a butterfly.’ Dora is now ‘our’ pet, in effect an acceptance of the idea.
26. A contrast in the same novel to Miss Trotwood’s fallacious use of logic is provided by Miss Dartle’s brilliantly witty use of logic to expose the fallacies of the Steerforth assumptions, based on class contempt for the lower orders, when in reply to James Steerforth’s conventional dismissal of their right to consideration as not being sensitive like ‘us’, she retorts: ‘Really! Well, I don’t know, now, when I have been better pleased than to hear that. It’s so consoling! It’s such a delight to know that, when they suffer, they don’t feel!’
27. Scott, who like Dickens was greatly interested in the psychology of the legal profession besides being a lawyer himself, showed in Guy Mannering an eminent lawyer enjoying himself in an atmosphere of high jinks, but in the sanctioned smoking-room tradition of masculine relaxation, which is very different from Traddles’s childlike diversions.
28. Dickens had previously made a joke about this in Nickleby, via John Browdie.
29. A better treatment of the unequal marriage had already appeared in The Cricket on the Heath (1845) where the gay young wife is thought by her sober and older husband to have a lover; after some saddened self-reproach he decides to separate from his wife without allowing blame to attach to her since he ought not to have tied a young girl to middle age. He finds however, in the general dénouement, that his wife truly loves and honours him and enjoys the disparity as an excuse for a game of make-believe. Dickens can carry this off with a light hand in a Christmas fairy-story, and the couple’s having a baby and a convincingly realistic working-man’s home makes the marriage more acceptable.
30. Cf. Oliver Twist: the real horror at the corruption of innocence there is epitomized in Fagin, whom Oliver thinks a kind old gentleman fond of children, but who is really turning them into thieves, criminals and prostitutes; he teaches Oliver a game which Oliver later realizes is picking pockets, thus using the child’s natural instinct for play to ruin him.
31. David himself feels at this time that he was ‘aware, indeed, of being younger than I could have wished’ – and Phiz, deliberately instructed thereto no doubt, makes this excessive immaturity inescapable visually, by stressing David’s extremely unformed and innocent appearance; v. e.g. Phiz’s picture of his introduction to Dora, and the illustration entitled: ‘Mr Micawber Delivers Some Valedictory Remarks’. In the picture ‘The Friendly Waiter and I’ David’s smallness and innocence are even exaggerated, and the waiter’s grossness made appropriately evident. The illustration entitled ‘I make the acquaintance of Miss Mowcher’, quite the best in the novel, brings out most intelligently all aspects of Dickens’s theme as to the disabilities of innocence in a corrupt world. David’s and Steerforth’s contrasted faces deserve studying under a magnifying glass for subtlety of expression. On the wall among other suitable pictures we see one showing Mephistopheles looking on at the meeting of Faust and Marguerite, and another of Gulliver as a smirking and subservient manikin amusing the hideous society of Brobdignag, David’s role here in relation to Steerforth and Miss Mowcher.
32. In this light, there is no ground for Cockshut’s objection that Steerforth’s obvious failings ‘make David’s hero-worship seem much less touching than it is supposed to be’. It is only Mrs Steerforth who thinks it touching, and Agnes’s disregarded warning against Steerforth is one further proof that Dickens meant us to be exasperated with David’s simple-minded credulity, and to realize that his need for affection and for an object to lavish affection and hero-worship on (accounted for by his history), are dangerous. At the beginning of chapter XXXII David explains that even when he has been disillusioned about Steerforth he could not have reproached him if brought face to face and still cherishes the old relation with him.
33. Dickens was a great deal more knowing at this age. The hint we are given of the difference David felt between himself, who had shared the life of the disreputable Micawbers, and the boys from unsullied homes, when he first went to Dr Strong’s school, is one of the more deeply-felt insights in the novel (chapter XVI) – e.g. ‘How would it affect them, who were innocent of London life and the London streets,’ he wondered, ‘to discover how knowing I was (and was ashamed to be) in some of the meanest phases of both?’ David’s remembrance of things past was buried by his rebirth as Miss Trotwood’s Trotwood and his re-education in the honour system of Dr Strong’s school; this was not the case of Charles Dickens – at 15 he was a clerk in a lawyer’s office, acquiring the cynical view of the law and lawyers evident in his writings from Pickwick Papers onwards, where he sponsored Sam Weller’s knowingness against Mr Pickwick’s greenness. Pickwick’s innocence is considered lovable but shown to be dangerous. Characteristically, Dickens goes deeper into the subject by showing the ridiculous innocence in some respects of ‘knowing’ characters such as old Tony Weller and his circle, when obliged to go outside their own purlieu – that is, that to be sharp is not to be wise. Mark Twain uses the same technique with Huckleberry Finn to make the same point.
34. So is the comparable seduction of Hetty Sorrel by ‘the young squire’ in Adam Bede, but this does not prevent George Eliot from making it the centre of a really interesting moral inquiry (and providing a convincing Nemesis for the seducer) by centring the novel on the seducer’s conscience. Of course the seduction of a respectable lower-class girl by an upper-class symbol was a hallowed subject of the 19th-century theatre of the poor – the melodrama – long before David Copper field. A stock feature of this subject on the stage was the stand-up fight in which the girl’s dastardly seducer or would-be seducer was knocked out by the brother/father/suitor of her own class/husband. It is interesting to note a point in Dickens’s favour here as against George Eliot that while she compulsively reproduces in Adam Bede this embarrassing piece of drama, Dickens’s better judgment carefully arranged to avoid it in David Copperfield by sending Steerforth abroad out of Ham’s and Ham’s uncle’s way and not bringing him back alive.
35. V. Times Lit. Sup., 30 April 1949 – K. J. Fielding.
36. David and Steerforth, representing the innocently good and the selfishly vicious forms of young manhood of the age, combine to cover the possibilities here, and are in this respect identical, hence the importance of Rosa Dartle’s testimony, that she ‘descended into a doll’ for him – and hence we see why Dickens did not take the trouble to fill in Rosa and Steerforth’s joint past: all Dickens needed was to establish this fact from it.
37. The assumption made by John Butt that Dickens cut it out only because he had over-written the Number, going with the claim that the passage was a success and its sacrifice a pity, ignores the fact that Dickens could have restored it when republishing in book form. Dickens might be given credit for good taste here, as in excising the reference to the song Rosa Dartle sings in chapter XXIX which was originally given as ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, where, as Butt admits, he had not over-written (v. John Butt, ‘David Copperfield: From Manuscripts to Print’, R.E.S., 1950).
38. The novel shows David somewhat embarrassed at finding Mr Chillip and Mr Omer are admirers of his books – he seems uncomfortable at having to face the fact that his readership is made up of such as these, that is.
39. Dickens went on noting his father’s Micawberisms in his letters until John Dickens’s death, having started to do so long before Micawber was conceived, Forster tells us.
40. Not merely what Forster characterizes as his ‘rhetorical exuberance’. There is real wit in John Dickens’s snub to a Nonconformist asserting the superiority of Dissenters: ‘The Supreme Being must be an entirely different individual from what I have every reason to believe Him to be, if He would care in the least for the society of your relations.’
41. Dickens himself, though always paying his way, and sharp with publishers for his rights, was extremely open-handed with the money he earned by incredibly hard toil, and paid out largely to settle the debts of his relatives and even in-laws. Georgina Hogarth wrote that ‘he had greatly suffered from almost every member of his own family. And most especially from his father … not only debts and difficulties, but most discreditable and dishonest dealing on the part of the father towards the son.’ Dickens could justly claim that no one cared less for money as money than he did.
42. George Eliot in Middlemarch makes Dickens’s point in remarking that the Vincy household, with its whist-table, musical daughter and unrefined mother keeping open house, was an attraction because ‘The Vincys had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional in most county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had cast a certain suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements which survived in the provinces.’ Correspondingly, Trollope’s soft spot for scamps, even gamblers (or especially gamblers) is to be explained by his resentment of the dull propriety, restraint and hypocrisy which he saw had closed in in his lifetime. Men like Burgo Fitzgerald and Mountjoy Scarborough – dashing, generous, loved by women, running through fortunes and living shamelessly on other people – are preferable, he feels, to the drearily virtuous Mr Pallisers and Barchester Close (Mr Palliser, with a lively young bride, regularly sits up over blue-books till the small hours so that neglect and boredom nearly drive his wife to elope with her old flame and cousin – another angle on such a marriage as Annie Strong’s). Similarly, Lady Dedlock is shown languishing in boredom, cherishing her secret past with her ne’er-do-well lover Captain Hawden in imagination. Hence Trollope’s mischievous delight in bringing back the Italianized Stanhope family to set Barchester and the County by the ears. In the same decade as David Copperfield, in The Warden (1855) he had taken the reader on a visit to Plumstead Rectory (chapter VIII) in order to ask why well-off people should deliberately make themselves now such a dismal environment: ‘considering the money that had been spent there, the eye and taste might have been better served; there was an air of heaviness about the rooms … it was not without ample consideration that those thick, dark, costly carpets were put down; those embossed but sombre papers hung up; those heavy curtains draped so as to half exclude the light of the sun … The apparent object had been to spend money without obtaining brilliancy or splendour … The silver forks were so heavy as to be disagreeable to the hand’, etc. Then follows a catalogue of the food and drink on the lavishly-supplied breakfast-table, overflowing oppressively on to the sideboard, ending: ‘And yet I have never found the rectory a pleasant house. The fact that men shall not live by bread alone seemed to be somewhat forgotten.’ That man cannot live by bread alone is the message equally of Mrs Gaskell, Dickens, Kingsley, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Trollope, as much as of Ruskin, Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, and that message is communicated more persuasively and incontestably by the novelists, it seems to me.
43. Andersen’s Tales cover a very wide range of forms, in which the fairy-tale counts for less than the satire, the fable, the folk-tale, and the record of childhood experience through a child’s consciousness – it was this last that made Andersen’s work of most interest to Dickens, I conjecture from his rapture at, and confessed constant re-reading of, Andersen’s tale ‘The Old House’ which is wholly concerned with recapturing a child’s way of seeing and feeling his encounter with old age, and is very much in the style of the early chapters of Copperfield. Dickens’s own interest in what could be done by seeing life and society reflected in the eyes of childhood never ceased, and as late as 1868 he wrote Holiday Romance in four parts (two girls and two small boys serve as the authors) containing the delightful tales of ‘The Magic Fish-bone’ and of ‘Mrs Orange and Mrs Lemon’ which, like Andersen’s, have a serious aspect too.
44. The details of Dickens’s actual contacts with Hans Andersen and his disillusion with him personally on sustaining an excessively long visit from Andersen in 1857, have been told by the authority on the subject, E. Bredsdorf in his ‘Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens’. Dickens’s courtesy was such that Andersen never realized that he had been a bore and a burden to the Dickens family. Andersen was delighted with them all and noted – and this is really interesting – that Mrs Dickens seemed to him the original of Agnes (‘exactly like Agnes’) in David Copperfield, though the Dickens ménage was on the verge of breakdown at the time, unknown to him.
45. v. my introductions and Notes to the Penguin English Library editions of Jane Eyre and Silas Marner and my essay on Wuthering Heights in Lectures in America (Chatto & Windus).
46. David Copperfield is more realistic in fact, for David never forgives the Murdstones, or Creakle, or Uriah Heep or Littimer; his goodness of heart is shown by his praying, when his ordeal is over and he is safe under Miss Trotwood’s roof, ‘that I never might be houseless any more, and never might forget the houseless’.
47. In the Penguin English Library edition of Jane Eyre.
48. I might cite here two interesting examples from Our Mutual Friend. Bella Wilfer complains that she has been ‘left to him in a will, like a dozen of spoons with everything cut and dried beforehand, like orange chips. Talk of orange flowers indeed!’ – where the metaphorical ‘cut and dried’, to express the unromantic nature of the matrimonial arrangement that willed her to John Harman, suggests ‘like orange chips’, and this brings up another reference to the fate prepared for her in the will, the orange flowers being traditionally worn by a bride, their sweetness and beauty symbolizing the accepted idea of a wedding as a love-match. What Dickens is interested in is the way the mind works, with its own logic; as again in the same novel, when old Lady Tippins, seeing the butler, a freezingly correct character, offer Lightwood a note and Lightwood being affected by her to be a lover of hers, she says to him; ‘Falser man than Don Juan; why don’t you take the note from the Commendatore?’ – moreover the note announces the death of the hero, John Harmon, making a dramatic point at the same time as suggesting that the Veneering’s dinner-table is a society of the damned. (Note also that Dickens is inward with Don Giovanni.) The mention of Mrs Sparsit’s Roman nose which is immediately followed by the reference to her ‘Coriolanian’ eyebrows, when she is taking up a preposterously Coriolanian attitude about the strike, is a witty and literary use of the suggestiveness of language such as is frequently made by Dickens. Flora Finching’s conversation is a dazzling and inexhaustibly entertaining demonstration of Dickens’s understanding of what speech is for us; his advantage over James Joyce is that this interest is never with him pedantic and so does not become self-stultifying. Examples from the early novels are Mrs Nickleby’s mental habits and conversation, Dick Swiveller’s and Mrs Gamp’s. Owing to the unique nature and infinite possibilities of the English language, there was of course an English tradition of such a literary interest, going back through Sheridan’s Mrs Malaprop, Swift and others to Shakespeare the great forerunner and exemplar. A spontaneous popular tradition of delight in exploiting the nature of the language, to which Dickens also had access like all other English children, is enshrined in our rich collection of nursery rhymes and the words of children’s games with their astonishing imaginative coinages and nonsense-fantasies.
49. In the Note to my edition of Jane Eyre in the Penguin English Library.