chap3

GETTING DAVID COPPERFIELD: HUMOR, SENSUS COMMUNIS, AND MORAL AGREEMENT

The discussion, in the previous chapter, of the differences between the moral reception of Oliver Twist and that of the larger Newgate novel subgenre was firmly rooted in a specific formal technique: suspense. Suspense, after all, offers a way of describing the structuring elements that a novel does not reveal to its reader but nonetheless determine the novel’s narrative trajectory. In this way, it offers a relatively straightforward model for moral intuition—that is, a felt principle directing the reader’s orientation toward the unfolding of events. But what about novels that are not particularly suspenseful?

David Copperfield offers, a decade later, one answer to these questions. The novel, at a narrative level, is not all that concerned with suspense. A few elements are held back from the reader, but they do not particularly matter to the direction of the story. We do not necessarily know, for example, that Uriah Heep has been stealing from Mr. Wickfield; but neither reception history nor anecdote indicates that many readers are likely to be overly curious about this one way or the other. Unlike Fagin and Monks’s backroom deals in Oliver Twist, the question of “What is Heep up to?” is hardly asked until the moment it is answered. Even the one significant narrative effect of Heep’s machinations—David and his Aunt Betsey’s loss of their savings—seems to be brought about more by Dickens’s autobiographical urge, as David shifts seamlessly from his life as a lawyer to a trajectory of journalism, stenography, and fiction writing. The interest in the financial ruin derives from how David removes himself from it, not from how he got into it. Copperfield, then, does not rely on withholding information; what the narrator does not say is hardly worth knowing. The same is true at the level of character psychology as well: almost nothing is withheld. As D. A. Miller puts it, “The secret subject [in David Copperfield] is always an open secret.”1 Keeping with the example of Uriah: the novel does not reveal the character’s malevolence, but it certainly does not hide it either. It is difficult to imagine a reader too surprised by Uriah’s true nature, once he appears with his “mask off.”² Unlike a good number of Dickens’s other novels—whose narratives, as Viktor Shklovsky points out, tend toward suspense³—David Copperfield maintains a level of openness with its readers: no unexpected familial connections, no unexplained plot twists later explained by a secret plan, no mysterious benefactors, not even a false name. As the narrator writes toward the end of the novel, “I have made it thus far, with no purpose of suppressing any of my thoughts” (796).⁴ We understand what the narrator knows, and in most cases—Steerforth’s character, Agnes’s more-than-sisterly love—we understand a few things more as well.

And it is this understanding, as I will argue in this chapter, that is central to the way that David Copperfield produces its sense of narrative necessity. Unlike Oliver Twist—or, for that matter, Jane Eyre, or Little Dorrit—David Copperfield does not rely on an inaccessible back-story. Instead it relies on a shared understanding, but one so implicit that it seems to be more of an intuitive sense than any sort of rational knowledge. It relies, in other words, on the idea of sensus communis: what Kant describes as “a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought.”⁵ David Copperfield’s narrative is structured around an awareness of, and agreement with, a larger collective judgment—“everyone else’s” judgment—even though it cannot say what, exactly, this judgment contains. The narrative’s forward trajectory, in other words, does not come from a hidden “law,” present only in its phenomenal manifestations; instead it comes from something that is present, and shared, at all times, while still remaining obscured. Characters, and the reader, “get it” while not being quite sure what “it” is.

Of course, we also “get it” because Dickens is a humorist: the “greatest humourist whom England ever produced,” according to one obituary notice.⁶ The double valence of the term is not incidental; I will argue that humor, properly understood, is essential to Dickens’s narrative strategy, and to the sort of formal intuitions that he requires from his readers. Humor, in other words, plays the role in David Copperfield that suspense plays in Oliver Twist. While suspense is the formal technique that produces an affective narrative response to withheld knowledge, humor produces that response to an implicit shared knowledge. This may seem rather distinct from our modern conception of humor; and, indeed, a good deal of my argument will be based on the fact that, for Dickens and his contemporaries, the idea of humor was not at all confined to things that might make an audience laugh. In fact, as we’ll see, the Romantic and Victorian conceptions of “true humor” often shied away from laughter, and Dickens himself shows some distrust for the response. Humor, I will argue, was understood rather as a sense of implicit community—not so much laughing when we get the joke, as the experience of “getting it” itself. As Henri Bergson puts it, a precondition for laughter is that the “intelligence … must always remain in touch with other intelligences”; it would not be possible if “you felt yourself isolated from others.”7 My focus will be on how Victorian humor—and particularly that of its “greatest” practitioner—produces this “felt” connection of “intelligences.”

Even though this discussion will require a bit of hermeneutic excavation—the genealogy of affective responses to wit and humor from the eighteenth century through the fin de siècle—the central affective response that I will be discussing should not be foreign to Dickens’s modern readers. As I will suggest, a certain critical fondness for affective responses in general—and laughter in particular—has led many unintentionally to misrepresent the experience of reading Dickens. He is a humorist, to be sure, but if this led to as much laughter as certain critics seemed to indicate, reading him would be a physical endurance test, and university seminar rooms would produce a deafening din. My argument will be that our understanding of the novel’s narrative trajectory actually suggests that we still understand Victorian humor, though we perhaps misapply the term.

The use of humor, in the novel, further combines the act of reading with moral intuition. Everyone in the novel has an implicit understanding of the way things should be—even if they don’t know it, or can’t quite put it into words. According to the decidedly non-humorous intuitionist William Whewell, the business of the moral philosophy lay in producing the system that would move society toward this ethics it already implicitly knew: not “inventing a new system of the world, but analyzing the actual system, which exists, and always has existed.”⁸ The work of the moralist, then, is not to create a moral system but to find the language for one that we already have. In a somewhat Hegelian fashion—though he himself had little respect for Hegel—Whewell’s work sees a gradual unfolding of human awareness of what “always has existed.” The result, paraphrasing Alexander Pope, is that the moralist “must give us back the image of our mind. He must show us the connections of moral truths which had governed our thoughts, though we had not unfolded them into reasonings” (20). The point is that the intuitions that direct us are the still-folded—but shared—moral truths. Dickens certainly does not make any claims toward being a moral philosopher, of any persuasion, but what I will try to argue is that the narrative trajectory of David Copperfield works along similar lines to those that Whewell describes. Victorian humor is the style that allows a novel to be motivated by something both shared and unspoken.

Making this all quite tricky, though, is the line that the novel draws between “everyone” and “someone,” between its anonymous social backdrop and its named characters. Though there may be a knowledge that everyone possesses, an individual character—a David or a Dora or an Emily—remains excluded from any explicit knowledge. At the same time, they themselves, when they are out in the novelistic world and not onstage, are part of this “everyone.” Characters thus possess an implicit knowledge of what everyone thinks, since they themselves, when they are not before us as characters, think it as well.

What persists, as an underlying axiom, is the sense that this larger common knowledge is correct. As an example, consider the following scene from near the novel’s beginning, as David describes his everyday life after Mr. Murdstone has married his mother:

Yes, and again, as we walk home, I note some neighbours looking at my mother and at me, and whispering. Again, as the three go on arm-in-arm, and I linger behind alone, I follow some of those looks, and wonder if my mother’s step be really not so light as I have seen it, and if the gaiety of her beauty be really almost worried away. Again, I wonder whether any of the neighbours call to mind, as I do, how we used to walk home together, she and I; and I wonder stupidly about that, all the dreary dismal day. (50)

In the passage’s first sentence, David is an object, along with his mother, of the neighbors’ gaze. In the second sentence, though, he separates himself from that position. Though he says he is “alone,” he has actually joined the neighbors: not only because his gaze “follow[s]” their “looks” but also because, through his separation from his family, he has gained the knowledge that they seem to share. That is, the language of the passage implies that his immersion among the whispering neighbors has informed him that Clara’s step is “not so light,” and that “the gaiety of her beauty be … almost worried away.” Reading between the lines, we might imagine that he had overheard whispers, but the important thing is that no whisper is actually present in the text. David is not told the truth; by a shift of narrative perspective, it becomes evident that he knows the truth. And, even more to the point, he has already known it. His rhythmic return to the word “again,” along with his use of the present progressive, suggests that this was either a repeated instance or, perhaps more likely, an event that rises before the narrating David with an imminent strength. Either way, the narrative style makes it hard to locate this in time, as a specific incident with a before and an after. The effect of the movement in this passage, then, is not a sudden rush of enlightenment—like, say, the perspective shift at the end of a James novel, or the epiphany at the end of a Dubliners story. Rather, the emphasized repetition makes it seem a return to some experience that has already been accessed before. There is no shock or surprise in the immersion in the crowd; rather it seems a return to something that David already is, one of the whispering townspeople himself.

Another word for this sort of unknowing assent is “convention,” and it is here that David Copperfield makes perhaps an even greater claim to producing moral intuition in its readers than a suspenseful novel like Oliver Twist.9 With Oliver Twist, the narrative motion of the character away from crime, and the reader’s sense that that movement was what the character was about, framed the relationship between morality and novel structure. In David Copperfield, the connection between narrative and moral intuition is both more abstract and more powerful; the key term here is “providence.” In Oliver Twist, everything worked according to a plan we had no access to; in a providential plot, though, everything is working according to the plan.¹⁰ The most familiar moment of providence in the plot occurs with the death of David’s first wife: the childlike Dora. Like so many other Victorian protagonists—Mr. Rochester and Dorothea Brooke come to mind—David finds himself in a marriage that produces not only unhappiness but also a narrative impediment. The novel does not end with the marriage; but, at the same time, the marriage blocks the moment that will allow the novel to end. Barbara Hardy notes the way out of this: “Many a marital problem in Victorian function has to be solved by the Providential death.”¹¹ Abstractly, this seems a rather clumsy bit of deus ex machina, but readers are generally willing to excuse it—in fact, hope for it—in order to work past the narrative impediment. In other words, most of us are willing to overlook a bit of blunt functionality, even unto death, in the name of narrative satisfaction. In this way, most readers are not that different from Eliot, who, in her 1856 “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” subjected these conventions to her most withering scorn: “[The heroine] as often as not marries the wrong person to begin with, and she suffers terribly from the plots and intrigues of the vicious baronet; but even death has a soft place in his heart for such a paragon, and remedies all mistakes for her just at the right moment.”¹² Yet this scorn did not stop her from using these identical conventions, almost to the letter, fifteen years later in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda (though the latter does not quite offer the remedy that Gwendolen, or we, expect). We can assume that she had not forgotten herself in that decade and a half; the hackneyed conventions must not have seemed so hackneyed when she wrote them. Indulging in biography for a moment, it is safe to assume that Eliot had come, just as Dickens had by 1849, to wish for a providential end to a loveless marriage (in Dickens’s case, his own; in Eliot’s case, Lewes’s). As Hardy puts it, “Convention and personal fantasy meet” in the providential deaths of Middlemarch and David Copperfield (132).

While a novelist might inscribe his or her “personal fantasy” into providence, though, the case is rather different for a reader. Dickens and Eliot, at least at the significant junctures in these two novels, imagine a world that “works” in accordance with their desires. The reader, on the other hand, is faced with a narrative-ethical world and, if the reader has some level of narrative comprehension, intuits the loose outline of those rules. A reader feels some dread when Dorothea walks toward Casaubon’s study to be burdened with his work after his death, or cannot help but wonder with David what might have been, “if Dora and [David] had never known each other” (678); and that same reader might well feel some sort of relief, or narrative satisfaction, when Dorothea finds Casaubon dead, or Dora soon afterward dies of some unidentifiable feminine ailment. That does not mean, though, that the reader has any particular opinion, outside of the novel, about what would be the best, or at least the most natural, outcome for a poorly matched spouse.

To talk so generally about “readers’ desires,” of course, is to invite argument. But my point is less about reception history and more about generic expectations. In the previous chapter, I offered Thackeray’s parodic Catherine as a commentary on Newgate conventions, since parody serves to make plain the conventions of ephemeral lower-brow genres. To understand the conventions of a specific moment of novelistic realism, though, we are better served by looking at even more realism. There is a certain parody at the heart of the realist tradition, in which successive generations of writers distinguish themselves from the previous generation by being “realer” than previous convention. As Harry Levin puts it,

Fiction approximates truth, not by concealing art, but by exposing artifice. The novelist finds it harder to introduce fresh observations than to adopt the conventions of other novelists, easier to imitate literature than to imitate life. But a true novel imitates critically, not conventionally; hence it becomes a parody of other novels, an exception to prove the rule that fiction is untrue.13

In other words, to demonstrate that their fiction is “real,” realist novelists point out what is conventional in previous attempts at realism. Jameson sees this “systematic undermining and demystification” as the “processing operation variously called narrative mimesis or realistic representation, the secular ‘decoding,’ of those preexisting inherited traditional or sacred narrative paradigms which are its initial givens.”¹⁴ In the latter part of the century, the providential marriage plot was a persistent target for such “decodings.” Such canonical creations as Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth, Henry James’s Isabel Archer, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess Durbeyfield offer repeated negations: God does not step in for any of these unhappily wed characters, forcing them to refigure providence as a maddening exercise of personal agency. Chapter 5 will discuss this theme in Daniel Deronda; for our present purposes, though, the important thing about these works is that their narrative effects came about through a denial of previous literary convention. To the extent that they have unhappy—or, at least, ambiguous—endings, they speak not only to narrative conventions, but to the way that those conventions become connected with readers’ desires.15 The assumption of a desire produced by convention allows for these novels’ sense of realist moral pedagogy: “you think it works this way, but really that’s just a wish-fulfilling convention.” So in Daniel Deronda, for example, at the very moment that Gwendolen is disappointed by Daniel’s rejection, Eliot offers the reader the most direct, and lofty, moral address in the novel, invoking “the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind.”¹⁶ The novel’s key moment for moral instruction, in other words, comes when things do not work out in the fashion that novelistic convention has told us that they should. What is assumed here—assumed in order to be disappointed—is a certain desire to see conventions enacted.

“Convention” is also an important term for us because it reminds us that formal narrative devices went a long way toward re-inscribing a social status quo. The marriage plot in particular, by bringing together formal resolution with social sanction, seems particularly coercive to many critics. As Moretti puts it, “One either marries or, in one way or another, must leave social life.”¹⁷ What I would like to suggest here, though, is that a novel like David Copperfield does not just resolve on marriage simply because there is already an existing social agreement about the societal importance of the institution. That is, the novel doesn’t draw its sense of what ought to happen solely from a pre-existing set of conventions it assumes we all share. Rather, by representing tacit consensus through humor, it models the experience of shared opinion. When the final successful marriage does come, it is no surprise. But that is not just because Victorian readers demanded a marriage; it is also no surprise because the large mass of characters—from Aunt Betsey to an unnamed beggar in the street—know it’s coming. We don’t just “get it” because we share the social convention; we know the social convention is shared because the novel offers us the experience of “getting it.”

Whether or not we feel license to talk about Victorian readers’ narrative expectations and desires, we can look to the contemporary authorities on the subject. And from that point of view, it certainly seems that David Copperfield makes use of a known convention to move David and the reader forward, even when it means that readers will allow, perhaps even wish for, the death of another character. In what follows, I will show how convention—both literary and social—is emphasized in both the novel’s thematics and its style. To read David Copperfield is to feel that one “gets it,” along with the rest of the anonymous society that David feels at his back. As I will show, David is himself a part of society as well, and it is his unconscious membership that motivates the narrative. And as David moves along, in fits and starts, from house to house, we feel that David is slowly moving toward us.

A SCENE OF READING

To say that David Copperfield yields a sense of the larger public group goes against the grain of our received model of novel reading, which presents the act as withdrawn and private. The image of the young David, alone with his novels, has become one of the iconic figures of the solitary reader:

My father had left in a little room up-stairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) a small collection of books which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. (53)

Like Jane Eyre, holed up in her breakfast room with Bewick’s, David takes solace from his grim home life in reading. He can share the “company” of literary characters only because he has been left alone, and is not “troubled” by anyone downstairs. This figure of an individual reader narrating himself in the first person to other individual readers—to us, in other words—seems tailor-made for new-historicist critics such as D. A. Miller and Mary Poovey, who see here the identity formation of the modern, middle-class reader: psychologized, split between public and private.18 Such an approach generally emphasizes the solitude of reading; in fact, for Miller, solitude becomes a constitutive quality of the act of novel reading. While discussing the generalized “novel-reading subject,” he notes, axiomatically, that “he is reading in private” (208). In this, Miller reiterates a basic assumption of novel theory, the most canonical expression of which is likely due to Ian Watt. For Watt, the novel form, starting with Richardson, was a reflection of modernity’s larger transition from “the objective, social, and public orientation of the classical world” to a “subjective, individualist and private orientation of … life and literature.”¹⁹ Following this critical line of thought, the experience of reading makes any reader into a David or a Jane: apart from others, and focused inward.

The standard approach to David’s scene of reading thus reflects the main current of novel criticism, not only by seeing it as an inward-facing and solitary act but by associating this inwardness with the private and the domestic sphere. Miller makes this connection explicit in his discussion of Bleak House: “Since the novel counts among the conditions for [its] consumption the consumer’s leisured withdrawal to the private, domestic sphere, then every novel-reading subject is constituted—willy-nilly and almost before he has read a word—within the categories of the individual, the inward, the domestic” (82). Whatever we might say about Bleak House’s dialogism, in other words, Miller sees the novel as something that one must withdraw to, away from external life. Since we cannot finish a novel in a single sitting, it remains, as we do other things, in “the mode of having to get back to it” (83). Even if we read it out loud, he further claims, we do it in the form of “family reading”; the desire to return to the novel is a “nostalgic desire to get home.” The novel is something distinct from the everyday world out there—even as it relies on that world to provide its referent. We might note, in support of this claim, that the family life that David and Jane are escaping is not their family life; the Murdstones are outsiders in the Rookery, and Jane is treated like an outsider in the Reeds’ home.

My argument in what follows, though, will be that this model of reading is insufficient for describing the sort of intersubjective affect that David Copperfield’s narrative structure relies on.20 As a first step toward making this point, before I talk about the readers of the novel, I would like to point out the insufficiencies of the standard model for talking about the reader in the novel. The sort of reading that the novel depicts is not so much a withdrawal from the outside world as it is a form of vague consciousness of that world. Consider what occurs as we continue reading the scene in David’s attic, beyond his catalog of novels. David goes on to describe an image that “rises” before him: “When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life” (53). The picture in David’s mind seems to zoom in, in almost cinematic fashion: from the surrounding evening, past the churchyard outside with the “boys at play,” and into the attic room. The motion here is inward, to be sure, but something strange happens along the way: those “boys” in the churchyard—where do they come from? Certainly, they are not with David; they are outside and he is inside. Before this moment, though, they have had no textual presence at all. David has mentioned the churchyard a number of times, but there has never been anyone in it. In fact, the narrator has gone out of his way, up until this point, to describe the churchyard as a “quiet” space, not only unpopulated, but dead: “the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window, with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon” (14). There is a mention of “other children” a few pages prior, but it comes in a general way, and negatively: “As to recreation with other children of my age, I had very little of that; for the gloomy theology of the Murdstones made all children out to be a swarm of little vipers …” (52). So, thanks to Murdstone, David’s home life has been separated from the outside world. Reading is neither an escape inward nor a surrender to the private sphere; it is a recuperation, however internalized, of the relation with the world outside. It is only in the act of reading that David is able to imagine himself and these children as somehow being part of the same imagined “picture.”

This moment depicts a sort of socialization. The groundwork had been laid by previous moments, following a rough dialectical logic. We have already seen that David is separated from his family, conceptually, by an awareness of the other whispering families in church. But this does not do much to place David within a group, other than perhaps the general group of people who live in Suffolk. A more specific possibility is offered in the “other children of [his] age.” Note the “other” here: even though the group is brought up negatively, David is already linguistically part of it. The final image that “rises” before David might not bring him together with these children in any real way, but it does lead to an imagined frame that can hold both David and the boys. In the moment of reading, David has come to see his individual experience as being part of the larger experience of the group that includes him. He is not “at play in the churchyard” with the boys, but he is with them. The companion piece to the scene in the attic is the scene of young David at school, “story-telling in the dark” for the entertainment of the other boys in his boarding room, based on the memory of these novels (90). Again he is “up-stairs” (81); again he is in the company of Peregrine Pickle and Gil Blas. Now, though, the other boys whose presence he senses—he cannot see them well, since they are “in shadow,” but he is “glad they are all so near” (82)—are in fact present. The repetition of the reading scene literalizes its logic; he is now one of the boys. The scene is usually read in the context of the novel as a Künstlerroman, as a moment in the writer’s development: retelling and embellishing novels, shifting from the child who reads to the man who writes. But, since David Copperfield is quite reticent about the experience of writing, there is no scene of David-as-writer that it particularly resembles. It does, however, resemble the scene of reading, and thus it seems better understood as a literalization of that experience. Or we could look at it from the other side: reading about Peregrine Pickle alone and silently in the attic feels something like the concrete experience of having other fellows near, being one of the boys.

Given this representation of reading, the idea that David offers a template for a novel’s reader would take on a different meaning. Specifically, it would mean that reading David Copperfield is not a solitary move away from others, and not necessarily a move into the private sphere. The essential historicist insight into the identity emulation that goes on in reading seems accurate, but we have to reconsider just which identity is being formed. Miller’s identification with David comes from being bookish and appreciating literature of the previous century. This is a pretty fair description of the reader of David Copperfield in the twentieth or twenty-first century. But the representation of reading in the novel, and the mindset that accompanies it, makes a good deal more sense if we are willing to imagine what the experience of reading David Copperfield would have been in its moment: the experience in partaking in a cultural experience that was popular.

What I mean by the term here is something closer to the second meaning, of being “well-liked by many people.” Pushing the definition a bit further: I mean that form of cultural experience that carries with it the knowledge that others are experiencing it at the same time. Popular fiction, as I am describing it, is similar to the idea of convention, with which I began. It is not enough for everyone to be doing it; everyone must also be aware, at some level, that everyone is doing it. So I am talking less about “popular fiction” like supermarket romances,²² and more about the sorts of literary phenomena and manias that surrounded, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the releases of Pamela, Pickwick, Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, Byron’s Corsair, and du Maurier’s Trilby.²³ For a modern publishing example, we can think about a Harry Potter novel, in the day or week after its release.²⁴ Of course, the sort of effect that I am talking about is not limited only to published works. For example, certain episodes of serial television shows—series finales, season premieres—produce similar effects.²⁵

In his contemporary context, we can include Dickens’s novels—though none ever matched the popularity of Pickwick—in this list. Dickens was by this time a known quantity: readers knew of his popularity, they knew that other people were reading him, and he knew what they expected of him. Richard Altick writes that Dombey and Son, the novel immediately preceding David Copperfield, “reflects the conception of his steady audience that Dickens had formed over a decade of successfully writing for it.”²⁶ The reading of the novels themselves easily exceeds Miller’s domestic description. Rather than reading aloud being only an inward-facing activity—doing the police in different voices around the family hearth—it seems to have been a public activity as well. One anecdote has the illiterate charwoman of Dickens’s mother-in-law attending “on the first Monday of every month a tea held by subscription at a snuff-shop above which she lodged, where the landlord read the month’s number aloud.”²⁷ Dickens’s popularity among the reading public—or listening public—of nearly every class was nearly unprecedented. To read a part of a Dickens novel, when it was published, was knowingly to take part in an activity, with the understanding that others were doing the same thing, at the same time.

This discussion recalls Benedict Anderson’s famous argument that the explosion of print culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was indispensable for the “imagined communities” that underlie nationalism.28 In particular, the traditional multi-plot novel can be understood as “a complex gloss upon the word ‘meanwhile’”—that is, a representation of people who will never meet each other and yet are part of a larger community moving in unison (25–26). This is true even for a first-person novel like David Copperfield; one could imagine, say, a useful comparison of failed upward social mobility in the characters of Little Emily and Uriah Heep, even though those two never meet and neither one is aware of the other. At the same time that this form of fictional representation serves an educative purpose, teaching people to imagine in this fashion, Anderson sees the newspaper as actually allowing people to imagine themselves within a community of their own. Reading the newspaper “is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident” (35). The sign of this simultaneity is the date at the top of the page, “the single most important emblem on it” (33). The two most important cultural forms for the maintenance of the imagined community, then, are the novel, which performs communal connection, and the periodical, which allows us to place ourselves into it. Dickens—publishing in parts, a mass phenomenon since the fifth number of Pickwick—neatly combines these two textual forms.²⁹

In spite of the familiarity of Anderson’s argument, though, novel theory and criticism remain ill-suited to describing this sort of literary engagement: the experience of reading something with the knowledge that others are reading it at the same time. Of course, there is a good deal of discussion in narrative theory of the “popular” as opposed to the “serious” or “canonical” or “literary”—meant here as generic terms rather than evaluative ones.³⁰ But such work usually ends up transferring the notion of popular from a collective activity to either formal characteristics or the relationship between the work and the literary tradition. A Raymond Chandler or Philip K. Dick novel, by most scholarly accounts, would seem to be a better representation of popular fiction than a widespread literary phenomenon such as, say, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. At the same time, critics are adept at analyzing the way a novel would be read in a specific cultural context, but how do we approach the analysis when the novel itself is a significant part of that context? Historicist scholarship tends to connect what people were reading inside their homes to a certain political and social context outside the home; looking at accumulated discourse, critics point to what people were talking about and thinking about: “hidden links between high cultural texts, apparently detached from any direct engagement with their immediate surroundings, and texts very much in and of their world [i.e., non-literary texts].”31 In the case of the popular text, though, what we might learn is that the “world” that exists apart from the literary text is actually concerned specifically with that literary text. If we attempt to think about the question of popularity, in other words, we do not see the novel as a necessarily private experience to be held up against a different public experience. Reading certain novels, whether inside or outside the house, becomes a sort of public experience in itself. One knows that others are reading the same thing at the same time. The connection with other people is vague and anonymous, to be sure, but it is a connection all the same.

I have raised, perhaps polemically, more questions here than it is within the scope of this chapter to answer. A full cultural account of the popular novel, as I have described it, would be a project in itself. For the purpose of this chapter, however, it is sufficient to indicate that the model of reading as a form of communal connection—as figured in David’s scene of reading in the attic—goes some of the way toward describing the experience of reading a Dickens novel. Still, it does not go all the way. What I have been describing is a sense that other people are doing the same thing. The theme of agreement requires that people are somehow in alignment with one another. In fact, Dickens’s style does lend itself toward a sort of unspoken agreement at the stylistic level. The method it uses is a familiar one, in discussions of Dickens, but perhaps unexpected in this context: to produce a sense of unspoken moral agreement, Dickens relies on humor.

HUMOR AND SENSUS COMMUNIS

If the reader in Dickens is linked with the reader of Dickens, as I have been suggesting, it is important to have some sense of how Dickens was read as a matter of convention. And this much we know: Victorians considered Dickens a humorist. The Spectator, as mentioned above, eulogized him as the “greatest humourist whom England ever produced—Shakespeare certainly not excepted.” Two years later, in 1872, John Forster would open his Life of Charles Dickens by offering nearly identical praise: “Charles Dickens, the most popular novelist of the century, and one of the greatest humourists that England has produced. …”³² Insight into the experience of reading Dickens—especially when that’s mirrored by experience within the novel—would seem to require that we understand the nature of this praise.

Yet though it is clear that Dickens was a humorist, it is much less clear now what that term once meant. The most obvious meaning would be that Dickens made people laugh. And, in fact, it is difficult to find modern discussions of Dickens’s humor that do not, almost reflexively, seem to define his humor as that quality which will produce laughter in the reader. This assumption is no doubt due in large part to the importance of Henri Bergson’s essay “Laughter,” which holds a place of importance in literary discussions of humor matched only by Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious.33 Both of these works—dating from the first years of the twentieth century, but written about the nineteenth—focus heavily on the physical act of laughter. Furthermore, this idea, that “the most popular novelist” was popular because he made his readers laugh, fits in well with one of our received Victorian types: readers of Punch and patrons of the comic theater, culturally childlike and easy to amuse. In 1877, George Meredith would describe these figures as “hypergelasts”: “the excessive laughers, ever-laughing, who are as clappers of a bell, that may be rung by a breeze, a grimace.”³⁴ Meredith, distinguishing his own form of wit from the larger Victorian store of humor, made it clear that these laughing English are not to be relied upon for their discernment or taste: “to laugh at everything is to have no appreciation of the comic of comedy.” The only English alternative Meredith offers is the “agelast,” or “non-laugher.” This is our other Victorian image: black-clad and serious, “men who … if you prick them, do not bleed.” While Meredith was trying to carve out space for a more cerebral and moral—and continental—form of comedy, the current choice in England seemed to lie between two extremes: be blind to humor and laugh at nothing, or appreciate humor and laugh at everything.

Meredith’s binary may seem excessively stark, but it has had a good deal of critical staying power—even if its evaluative valence has shifted. In modern criticism, such thorough laughter—at chosen authors—becomes more often a form of good reading than of bad culture. This is in large part because of its joint association with Freudian release and Bakhtinian carnival.³⁵ Deleuze is probably the most consistent on this front: “You cannot admire Kafka if you do not laugh frequently while reading him”; “Those who have read Nietzsche without laughing—without laughing often, richly, even hilariously—have, in a sense, not read Nietzsche at all.”³⁶ If you do not laugh “frequently” or “often,” you simply are not reading Kafka or Nietzsche correctly. If you don’t get it, you won’t get it.

The same comes up in discussions of Dickens: to “get” Dickens, to respond to his style, carries with it something like the imperative to laugh, and laugh often. James Kincaid’s Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter—the most complete book-length discussion of the subject in Dickens—focuses exclusively on this affective reaction in the reader: “Every time we laugh at Sam Weller’s witty attacks on the law, we are moving a step further from our usual position of commercial safety; laughter at Sam Tappertit implicates us in his final crippling; laughter at Mr. Micawber forces us to.”³⁷ But what if “we” do not laugh at all of these moments—perhaps only at some, perhaps at different ones?³⁸ Kincaid’s implication seems to be that if we do not laugh at such properly humorous moments, then we are somehow missing the full rhetorical power of Dickens’s novels. The novel, or so the argument goes, only can be appreciated by those hypergelasts who laugh frequently at Sam Weller, at Sam Tappertit, at Wilkins Micawber.

But, as Thackeray said, “If Humour only meant laughter, you would scarcely feel more interest about humourous writers than about the private life of poor Harlequin.”39 In this section, I will argue for a broader understanding of Victorian humor than as simply the experience that makes us laugh.⁴⁰ That is to say, I will be seeking to discuss Dickens’s humorous style in a way that does not assume that his readership is necessarily full of hypergelasts now. Even more importantly, as I hope to demonstrate, his readership was not so full of hypergelasts then, either. The key affective result of Dickens’s humor, particularly in David Copperfield, is not so much laughter as it is an experience similar to the one that I described in the previous section: an experience of being in community with a larger group of unknown others. Not so much what happens after we “get it,” in other words, as the phenomenological experience of “getting it” itself: the comprehension of an unsaid meaning, and the shared understanding that allows that meaning to remain unsaid.⁴¹ Meredith suggests as much about his conception of “comedy” when he writes that, unlike the forceful laughter of satire, “The laughter of comedy is impersonal and of unrivaled politeness, nearer a smile—often no more than a smile. It laughs through the mind, for the mind directs it; and it might be called the humor of the mind.”⁴² Meredith’s description of this “humor of the mind” moves away from physical manifestation; laughter becomes a mental state. More importantly, it becomes a mental state that implies the social, as indicated by his use of terms like “politeness” and “impersonal.” He sums up this concept by linking his concept of humor with a “state of society … founded in common sense.” As he puts it:

You must, as I have said, believe that our state of society is founded in common sense, otherwise you will not be struck by the contrasts the Comic Spirit perceives, or have it to look to for your consolation. … [T]o feel [the Comic Spirit’s] presence, and to see it, is your assurance that many sane and solid minds are with you in what you are experiencing. … A perception of the Comic Spirit gives high fellowship. (48–49)

Meredith’s description of the Comic Spirit—the “humor of the mind” that need not produce laughter—thus returns to the experience that I have been describing in Dickens: the “assurance that many sane and solid minds are with you in what you are experiencing.” This “perception” moves humor from an individual or personal experience to a stylistic one that expresses shared experience, or, as Meredith calls it, “Common Sense.”

Meredith likely believed that he was being somewhat heterodox in his idea of comedy, but in what follows, I will suggest that his ideas fit quite well with the main stream of Romantic and Victorian thought on the subject, though the terminology occasionally differed. In particular, I will argue that Victorians, including Dickens, did not immediately associate humor with laughter. In fact, as the large body of Victorian work on the distinction between wit and humor indicates, humor tended to be based on this idea of “Common Sense”—and what I will call, for the sake of both clarity and tradition, “sensus communis”—an unspecified intuitive feeling of connection with others. In fact, by many accounts, laughter could actually be detrimental to this experience. This idea, of sensus communis, displays a connection between literary Victorian ideas of the style of humor, on the one hand, and an intuitive moral and political tradition extending from Shaftesbury to Hannah Arendt, on the other. The affect produced by humor in other words, tends toward the moral side of the sort of connectedness in reading I have been describing.

At the outset, though, it is worth pointing out the limits that this discussion will run up against. The central question here is a hermeneutic one: how people in another time read a text. In the case of an affective reaction, though, we find ourselves at a double remove, since we only have access to people’s re-inscriptions of their reactions into the literary. Jonathan Rose, in an essay on historical reader-response criticism, quotes the memoirist George Acorn’s “suspiciously Dickensian” account of reading David Copperfield to his family: “And how we all lived it, and eventually, when we got to ‘Little Em’ly,’ how we all cried together at poor old Peggotty’s distress! The tears united us, deep in misery as we were ourselves.”43 Rose concludes that, since “unalloyed truth in autobiography” is elusive, the main significance of a passage like this is to “measure Dickens’s influence on working-class readers.” That may be so—unless a critic’s goal is actually to determine what made working-class readers cry, in which case it would certainly make a difference whether or not this anecdote were true. But since, for the most part, we only have textual accounts of reactions, we must approach them with a certain amount of suspicion. And then there are also the questions of numbers: even if we were to encounter a number of accounts of people laughing or crying at a text, that would not mean that everyone, or even most people, did so. Even if we believe Acorn’s account, it would hardly prove that “the Victorian reader” or “the English common reader” by and large cried at “poor old Peggotty.” So there’s only so much we can say, one way or the other, about whether Victorian fiction actually made people laugh.

That being said, unlike early-modern drama or even eighteenth-century fiction, Victorian fiction owes a good deal of its critical appeal to the fact that it offers a way out of this hermeneutic bind. Whether a critic prefers to tell time by Marxian modes of production or Foucauldian epistemes, there is a general agreement that in talking about the mid-nineteenth century, we are to some extent talking about ourselves. Fredric Jameson, for example, would categorize our contemporary moment as postmodern. But he would still see that as the third stage of a realist/modernist/postmodernist triad, determined by the historical progression of capitalism through a classical market stage, a monopoly and imperial stage, and, finally, our current global stage. So, for Jameson, nineteenth-century realism “show[s] the functioning of all those realities of capitalism that have not changed substantially … wage slavery, money, exploitation, the profit motive.”44 Miller, meanwhile, sees the “novelistic” as something that has now been “freely scattered across a far greater range of cultural experience.” The continuity here does not depend on an economic base, but the ultimate effect is the same as what we see in Jameson: to speak about the Victorian novel is to “to recognize a central episode in the genealogy of our present.”⁴⁵ If a novel is too foreign—if it requires too much hermeneutic investigation—then it will hardly count as a Victorian novel at all.⁴⁶ But there is also a flip side to this: critics move almost imperceptibly from projecting their reading habits backwards to the opposite approach. Critics bring what they take to be Victorian reading habits into the present, and treat them almost as critical fact, as when Miller analyzes the form of the sensation novel by referring to The Woman in White’s “sensation effects on us” (153). Dickens makes many modern readers laugh out loud, I am sure, and The Woman in White may well make people physically shudder—of that, I am not so sure—but both reactions, ultimately, seem to be based on the idea that these works had these effects on their Victorian readers, and so, if we are to understand them, we must allow, sometimes perhaps disingenuously, that they have the same effect on us.

My suspicion is that many readers are actually, affectively, closer to their Victorian counterparts than they imagine. If many modern readers rarely laugh aloud while reading Dickens, we should at least be suspicious, absent evidence, that Victorian appreciation of Dickens as a humorist was tied entirely to laughter. There certainly is evidence to the contrary: take, for example, Elizabeth Gaskell’s portrayal of a Dickens reader in Cranford. While fictional, this representation suggests humor and laughter were not necessarily linked. Captain Brown, who thinks The Pickwick Papers “famously good,” reads a section of the latest number aloud to the assembled ladies of Cranford—most of whom laugh “heartily.”⁴⁷ Yet, though Pickwick can produce laughter in social situations, we are also shown two scenes of Captain Brown’s reading practices: “He was rather ostentatious in his preference of the writings of Mr. Boz; would walk through the streets so absorbed in them that he all but ran against Miss Jenkyns” (14). Later, he meets his demise on his job at the railroad in similar fashion: “The Captain was a-reading some new book as he was deep in, a-waiting for the down train” (16). The nature of the Captain’s rapt attention is unclear, but it would at least seem that laughter is confined to the social situation, and reading aloud. No laughter comes from reading the same book to oneself.

A couple of related notes from Cranford’s textual history allow us to further generalize from this example. Gaskell’s work was published in parts in Dickens’s Household Words, and the scenes with Captain Brown occur in the first part. Whether or not we assume that Gaskell meant this description to please her editor, the fact that Dickens asked for and happily published more parts suggests that he in no way took this as an affront. More interesting, though, is the fact that Dickens replaced these references in the original publication with references to a collection of Thomas Hood’s collection of comic poems, Hood’s Own.48 Dickens claimed that the move was motivated by modesty: “with my name on every page of Household Words there would be—or at least I should feel—an impropriety in so mentioning myself.”⁴⁹ It is difficult to say whether this is an accurate expression of Dickens’s motivations, but, in any case, it certainly seems that he felt that the replacement of a collection of humorous poems for a number of Pickwick would convey the sense of Gaskell’s story. That is, he understood the meaning of these scenes not to depend only on the text being a hit—he did not replace it with the also-popular Pelham—or even, necessarily, on being a novel; rather the scenes depended on the fact that Pickwick was a work of humor. Furthermore, due to Dickens’s clear respect for Hood, we can assume that no insult was intended in showing that even a work subtitled Laughter from Year to Year would not necessarily produce laughter in an appreciative reader.⁵⁰ So, whether or not we can know how anyone actually read, we would be safe in assuming that Dickens’s own understanding of his work, as humorous work, was not dependent on consistent laughter.

This characterization of humor is not only the case for Dickens’s own work. In the middle of the nineteenth century, and stretching on to the time of Meredith’s lecture, very few humorous works were seen to be necessarily dependent on laughter. That is not to say that laughter was unimportant; in fact, the question of laughter was central to the key debate in the theories of comedy that ran through the period. Meredith stressed the distinction between “the laughter of satire” and the “no more than a smile” of comedy. More often, though, the debate focused on the distinction between another couple of key terms: “wit” and “humor.” This distinction took a number of subtle, and sometimes contradictory, forms, but it can be summed up as follows: wit is cerebral, based around ideas and their incongruity; humor is more sentimental, based around feelings, and particularly, sympathy. So, Leigh Hunt, for example, would see himself following in the tradition of Locke and Addison by defining wit as “the [a]rbitrary juxtaposition of dissimilar ideas,” while defining humor as “a tendency of the mind to run in particular directions of thought or feeling more amusing than accountable.”⁵¹ Note that, although he situates humor in the mind, he does not associate it with “ideas” but rather with “thought or feeling.”

That “thought” and “feeling” could be used interchangeably helps to indicate the distinction, for Hunt, between “thought” and “idea”: the latter has content, while the former is more a “direction” the mind “run[s] in.”52 Another metaphorical distinction, following through on the image of flowing water, is that of dry sterile intellect, on the one hand, and some sort of warm organic and moist sentiment—as in the “humours”—on the other.⁵³ As the American critic Edwin P. Whipple put it: “Humour originally meant moisture—a signification it metaphorically retains,” while wit was “originally a name for all the intellectual powers.”⁵⁴ The different origins for the two terms goes a long way toward explaining the odd distinctions that keep popping up between them. Wit seemed more due to Locke—Hunt cites him—while humor seemed to come out of Galen. It was the slow discovery of the eighteenth century and Romantic era that they fell under the same rubric of “comedy.”⁵⁵

As is so often in the case when the rhetoric of head and heart are brought to bear, the distinction between wit and humor took on moral connotations as well. As one Blackwoods writer put it in 1820:

[H]umour is a far higher power than wit, and frequently draws its material from far deeper sources in human nature. The humours of mankind are not only endless, but in their most interesting exhibitions they are inseparably blended with their affections, their happiness, and their whole moral as well as natural being.⁵⁶

The split between humor and wit, then, was not only a question of rhetoric or genre: humor expressed something deeper about human nature, and was therefore more apt to express the truth of the “whole moral … being.” Carlyle, in an oft-quoted line, was one of many who made use of the head/heart binary to describe the distinction: “true humour,” as opposed to wit, was something that “springs not more from the head than from the heart.” He then extends this bodily distinction to what is effectively a Romantic—he was writing on the German Romantic Jean Paul Richter—moral distinction: “it is not contempt, its essence is love.”⁵⁷ This quote, when it is introduced today, is more often than not taken to be a distinction between kind-hearted and mean humor, between laughing at and laughing with someone. But while it is true that Carlyle is being evaluative, he is not distinguishing between good and bad humor; rather, he is distinguishing between humor and wit. And he certainly is not comparing two different sorts of laughing, as the third and final distinction demonstrates: “it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.”⁵⁸ Laughter, then, is the sign of something cerebral and contemptuous, perhaps cruel—while the lack of laughter is more often the sign of “true humour.”

Carlyle’s moral distinction, then, is manifested through different sorts of physical affect. But why such a negative view toward laughter? We might be tempted to see in this a rigid Victorian-ness, shying away from physical exuberance. In fact, the opposite was more the case; as Robert Bernard Martin puts it, “All the Romantic and Victorian distrust of the intellect is implicit in Carlyle’s praise of ‘true humour’” (28). A good deal of our current sense of the subversive physicality of laughter is due to the so-called release theory of laughter, now largely associated with Freud. There were Victorian versions of this conservation-of-energy model as well,59 but the idea that what was being liberated by laughter had been repressed, and was somehow libidinal in nature, was not much present in the nineteenth century. Instead of release, Victorians mainly associated laughter with two other familiar theories: “superiority” and “incongruity.” The first had the longer tradition, stretching back to Hobbes’s claim that “the passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others.”⁶⁰ This formulation was quite popular among Restoration theorists of humor, such as Dryden and James Drake.⁶¹ The latter is most often associated with Kant’s discussion in the Third Critique: “In everything that is to provoke a lively, uproarious laughter, there must be something nonsensical (in which therefore the understanding can take no satisfaction). Laughter is an affect arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.”⁶² Kant’s theory quickly gained adherents during the nineteenth century, in no small part because it allowed laughter to be seen as an ethically neutral act.

Henri Bergson’s famous essay on laughter brings these two theories together, in a theory of social coercion.⁶³ According to Bergson, we laugh at the image of a person who is acting in a mechanized, repeatable manner: a living being who is not acting like a living being. As Bergson puts it, we laugh at the image of “something mechanical encrusted on something living,” or, in other words, “every time a person gives the impression of being a thing.”⁶⁴ Now, the reason for this laughter is one part incongruity (it is incongruous for a person to be acting like a mechanical thing) and one part superiority (we, at least, are acting like living beings). For Bergson, though, this laughter has a purpose: to act like a repetitive thing “expresses an individual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of absent-mindedness in men and in events” (117). Leaving aside the specifics about repetition and the mechanical—a distinction that is quite important to Bergson’s larger theory about what constitutes “really living life,” but which we do not need to take for granted here (82)—we can see Bergson’s theory as distinguishing just what it was that made Victorians so uncomfortable with the prevailing theories of laughter. Both “superiority” and “incongruity,” when presented in social terms, lend themselves to the exclusion of others: with a shared superiority over a seemingly incongruous butt. “True humor,” as we shall see, was quite the opposite; discussions of humor turned repeatedly to a sense of sympathy and kinship with the most eccentric individuals.

Before turning to this “true” English humor, though, let us look at the theme of laughter in David Copperfield. We have already seen, in the publication history of Cranford, that neither Dickens nor his contemporaries saw laughter as a necessary result of his humor. Beyond presenting it as simply unnecessary, though, David Copperfield follows the Victorian tradition I have been discussing by treating laughter with suspicion. We do not need to look far in the novel to find this to be the case. In fact, we do not need to look further than the very first appearance of laughter and the first man who laughs: Mr. Murdstone—who will marry David’s mother, send him out into the world to work, and ultimately leave him alone to make his own way.

“Come! Let us be the best friends in the world!” said the gentleman, laughing. “Shake hands!”

My right hand was in my mother’s left, so I gave him the other.

“Why that’s the wrong hand, Davy!” laughed the gentleman. (18)

The laughter may seem benign, but it comes along with a series of Oedipal mandates: that David be separated (physically, in this case) from his mother; that David learn correct societal conventions, such as which hand to shake with. Note the verb: Murdstone doesn’t “order” David to use the right hand or “say” that he must; he “laughs” it. This laughter becomes an accompanying presence as Murdstone moves further into David’s life. When David finds himself among Murdstone’s friends soon after—including one Quinion, who will later oversee David’s employment at Murdstone and Grinby’s counting house—the adults start discussing “Brooks of Sheffield”: a coded reference to David. The conversation flies over David’s head, but he is aware of the laughter: “There seemed to be something very comical in the reputation of Mr. Brooks of Sheffield, for both the gentlemen laughed heartily when he was mentioned” (22). Murdstone’s admission that Brooks of Sheffield is “is not generally favorable” about the “projected business” (the marriage to Clara) is met, once again, with laughter:

There was more laughter at this, and Mr. Quinion said he would ring the bell for some sherry in which to drink to Brooks. This he did; and when the wine came, he made me have a little, with a biscuit, and, before I drank it, stand up and say, “Confusion to Brooks of Sheffield!” The toast was received with great applause and such hearty laughter that it made me laugh too; at which they laughed the more. In short, we quite enjoyed ourselves. (22–23)

The scene can be painful to read—even without any knowledge of what will come of Murdstone’s marriage to Clara, or of Quinion’s role in David’s London degradation. What it portrays is a familiar experience: “confusion” in the face of a joke that everyone else seems to get, laughing along without quite knowing why. As with the scene when Murdstone shakes his hand, laughter again becomes a sign of the baffling behaviors that we conform to.

These early scenes prepare us for the fact that Murdstone—“the gentleman, laughing” —will be the novel’s central figure of the horror of trying to bend others to one’s will. Murdstone’s desire in marrying David’s mother is to “[form] her character,” which as Betsey Trotwood later puts it, is what “wear[s] her deluded life away” (48, 208). He does not kill her, but as his murderous name indicates, his presence in the house is instrumental in her death. This is a theme that repeats throughout the novel, especially when David finds himself reiterating Murdstone’s attempts by trying to “form [Dora’s] mind” (676). In fact, one of the novel’s central morals would seem to lie in the unquestioning acceptance of the nature of other people. Emma Micawber comes to accept her husband’s wastefulness, just as Peggotty comes to accept her husband’s miserliness. The novel’s most idealized couple along these lines—ingenuous, asexual, and infinitely accepting—would be Aunt Betsey and Mr. Dick.

Laughter, identified with Murdstone, is presented as being opposed to this sort of acceptance of eccentricity and difference. Humor, on the other hand—detached from a crueler laughter—was associated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a host of eccentric characters who, though flawed, were not expected to change: Parson Adams from Joseph Andrews, Uncle Toby from Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, and Falstaff.65 As Charles Lamb put it, a humorist focuses on “the diversified bents and humours, the blameless peculiarities of men, as they deserve to be called, rather than their ‘vices and follies.’”⁶⁶ The negative “blameless” is key here; the peculiarities could draw blame, if etched by the wrong hand, and therefore be mistaken for vice or folly, which should be either punished or corrected. The humorist, on the other hand, showed people a character who, in his eccentricities, was different from them but further led them to feel an affection for this difference rather than a desire to lessen it. What is most moral in humor, then, is that it is a sort of sympathy that maintains distinctions.

Humor thus becomes a sort of fellow-feeling; taken to its extremes, this feeling could become one of expansive universalism. Carlyle expresses this in his writing on Jean Paul Richter. Humor, he writes, is “the ruling quality with Richter”: “He is a humorist from his inmost soul; he thinks as a humorist, he feels, imagines, acts as a humorist.”⁶⁷ What this means, for Carlyle, is that Richter “is a man of feeling, in the noblest sense of that word; for he loves all living with the heart of a brother; his soul rushes forth, in sympathy with gladness and sorrow, with goodness and grandeur, over all Creation.” A full description of why Carlyle thought this to be true about Richter, and to what extent Carlyle’s characteristic overstatements should be taken at face value, would take us too far afield. What I wish to point out here is how quickly Carlyle unfolds humorist: from “feeling” to “sympathy”—these we have seen already—and finally to the universal sympathy “over all Creation.” If humor allows for sympathy regardless of distinction, then, as Carlyle’s argument would have it, it allows for undistinguished sympathy, a fellow-feeling with everyone. This use of the term, furthermore, is not unique to Carlyle, nor to discussions of Richter. Earlier in the same decade, in his Defense of Poetry, Shelley drew the distinction between wit and humor along similar universal lines: in “periods of decay” such as the Restoration, Shelley claims, “Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph instead of pleasure.”68 The “triumph” here recalls Hobbes’s “sudden glory,” but Shelley also stresses the individual nature of that glory, by linking it with “self-complacency.” We have already seen the physical invoked as part of the head/heart binary, but here the physical sensation—“pleasure”—is offered in opposition to the “self.” Thus the warm feelings that we have seen associated with humor, as opposed to wit, are now further associated with humor’s “universality.”

We might be tempted to take these formulations with a grain of salt—Carlyle and Shelley were not known for understatement—but, in fact, they fit in well with a longstanding tradition in English thought. Specifically, the idea that the moral value of humor lies in the sense of connection it creates with others can be found in the early eighteenth century in the work of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, the source of many of the ideas of the English school of moral intuitionist philosophy.⁶⁹ In the case of the sensus communis, we can see the belief in a sort of connection that, pace Hobbes and Mandeville, could motivate people through their moral interests, not just their self-interest.⁷⁰ Shaftesbury’s 1709 “Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor” seeks to refute Hobbes’s account of humor and to defend humor from the accusation that it worked contrary to either reason or sociability. To counter this, Shaftesbury describes a conversation that he recently had taken part in: “A great many fine Schemes, ’tis true, were destroy’d; many grave Reasonings overturn’d: but this being done without offence to the Partys concern’d, and with improvement to the good Humour of the Company, it set the Appetite the keener to such Conversations.”⁷¹ The larger theme of the work is that humor can induce men to reason, as a habit, by inviting them to “find pleasure in it” (70). But central to this account is the idea that humor will produce pleasure through a sense of sociability. It is, after all, the basis of a “company” to have “conversations.” In other words, it produces a sense of fellow-feeling that reason can follow from. There is, it should be pointed out, a strong elitist current here: Shaftesbury goes on to remind his reader that he is “writing … in defence only of the Liberty of the Club and of that sort of Freedom which is taken amongst Gentlemen and Friends” (75). Still, the fact that his notion of the social was inherently limited should not distract from the fact that humor was for Shaftesbury a social experience. If it was only to be defended within the club, then this also meant that the experience of humor, properly conceived, was that of “friends” in a “club.”

Extending our discussion from Shaftesbury to the larger tradition around the idea of sensus communis, it is important to distinguish between the literal translation of this term, “common sense,” and this meaning of intersubjective assent. Kant, in the third Critique, offers the best-known distinction of the terms. Kant defines common sense in a relatively straightforward manner as “the common human understanding, which, as merely healthy … understanding, is regarded as the least that can be expected from anyone who lays claim to the name of a human being.” Sensus communis, on the other hand, expresses “the idea of a communal sense, i.e., a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought.”72 He hastens to add that he is referring here “not so much to the actual as to the merely possible judgments of others”: that is, not so much how others do judge, as how we imagine them to judge. Without getting into the fine points of the third Critique, we can see why this sensus communis was necessary for his aesthetic project. As he explains it, in looking at “judgments of taste,” we are looking at something that has neither an objective necessity nor pure subjective freedom. To say that a painting is beautiful is, for Kant, different than to say that one likes that painting. Judgments of taste are subjective, and yet, at the same time, make a distinct claim to being valid for others as well. Such judgments “thus have a subjective principle, which determines what pleases or displeases only through feeling and not through concepts, but yet with universal validity” (5:238). The ground for aesthetic judgments, then, rests in this “feeling.” Hannah Arendt offers a good summary: sensus communis “for Kant did not mean a sense common to all of us, but strictly that sense which fits us into a community with others, makes us members of it and enables us to communicate things given by our five private senses.”⁷³

My argument is that this communal feeling offers the ground for understanding humor as well. The aesthetic sense that Kant spells out offers a way of describing the intersubjective experience that Shaftesbury, Carlyle, and Shelley all associate with humor. This feeling, in other words, is more central to the idea of humor—at least in previous centuries—than the physical reaction of laughter. And, furthermore, I would argue that we can see the intuitive relation of humor with this feeling even in arguments that associate humor largely with laughter. Bergson, as I have mentioned, is mainly interested in laughter, in ways that follow the basic distinctions we have laid down. Laughter, he claims, demands “a momentary anaesthesia of the heart,” and its appeal “is to intelligence, pure and simple.”74 He follows up these familiar assertions, though, with a paragraph in which he expands on this appeal to the intelligence: “This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other intelligences. … You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself isolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo” (emphasis mine). For Bergson, to “appreciate the comic” means to laugh, so this passage suggests that there is a feeling of connection—you must not “[feel] yourself isolated”—that serves as the necessary ground for laughter. This connection, though, is not universal; just as it requires a group, it also implies that there will be outsiders to that group: those who don’t get the joke. Thus laughter requires not only a sense of connection but a sense of community, with all the problematics of exclusion and anxiety that this term implies.⁷⁵ Bergson seems to sense that he is treading on difficult ground, as his language becomes impressively vague: “laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imagined.” A secret society of fellow laughers, who might be themselves imagined: Bergson’s thought seems to be circling around the fact that laughter does not require a community of like-minded individuals. Instead, it requires a sense—even if only imagined—of being part of a larger group. To quote Arendt again, “Common sense, by virtue of its imaginative capacity, can have present in itself all those who actually are absent.”⁷⁶ Bergson’s terms remain vague, in large part because he is not discussing laughter itself; instead he is discussing what he takes to be the affective precondition to laughter. Before the intelligence can know something to be risible, in other words, it has to feel a connection with others—even if the connection is only an imagined one, even if the others are only an Andersonian “imagined community.”

We have come full circle. I started off by decoupling humor from wit, and, at the same time, humor from the necessity of laughter. This led to a conception of humor as an accepting sort of sympathy, the form that allowed connection between reading subject and textual object without demanding change. This in, turn, led to the idea of sensus communis in moral thought: an idea that began in discussions of humor and that provides a link between humor and notions of moral intuition. This decoupling of the linguistic and the physical is rare in modern discussions of humor, but here is some grounding for it in work on another set of conjunctions of the linguistic with the physical: that is, on the “erotic,” the “sexual,” the “pornographic.” It is no surprise that work on these fields would be rather more advanced than work on humor; it reflects the critical role that Freud, Foucault, and queer theory more generally play in contemporary literary studies. A particularly significant move has been the decoupling of erotic affect from sexual arousal. Sharon Marcus has argued against the modern critical trend of necessarily linking the two terms together, particularly when it comes to female desire:

“Erotic” and “sexual” are not used here as interchangeable terms. The erotic and the sexual can and do intersect, but only the sexual refers to acts that involve genital arousal. Sexual desires are wishes to perform or fantasies about engaging in such acts. … Because the erotic has no necessary connection to sex acts, to describe a dynamic or relationship as erotic requires no evidence of sex.77

The erotic, as Marcus goes on to describe it, following Roland Barthes’s discussion in Sade/Fourier/Loyola, is “an affective valence defined by intensity, obsessiveness, theatricality, and pleasure.” The erotic, then, lies at the nexus of the sign-system and affective response, and can include many objects—including, but certainly not limited to, those involving or implying sex. At the same time, though, erotic involvement is not simply coincidental to sexual arousal. Rather, sexually arousing texts, and particularly pornographic texts, make use of an “erotic repertoire” that they share with other elements of mainstream culture. Pornography requires an erotic attachment with the object, in other words, but not every erotic attachment leads to genital arousal. I am not claiming that humor does the same affective work as the erotic; I am claiming instead that, like the textual erotic, it is a style of interaction between a reader and a text that allows for, but is not limited to, an involuntary physical reaction. Because of the sense of Freudian transgression attached to laughter, the insistence on a physical laughter-based reading in critics as different as Kincaid and Deleuze seems homologous to the “incitement to talk about sex” that Foucault analyzes.⁷⁸ The absence of laughter in Carlyle, though, does not necessarily indicate some sort of repression or denial of the body; instead it can open the door for a discussion of humor as an “affective valence” in its own right.

At this point, there seem to be two related strains in my discussion of Victorian humor: the sympathetic relation to the eccentric individual, such as Falstaff or Uncle Toby; and this larger sensus communis, which seems to make a social act out of the experience of “getting it.” What I would like to suggest is that these two strains coincide in Dickens’s work in a specifically “Dickensian” way: he produces a sense of community around the sight of the eccentric individual, without holding that individual up to any sort of ridicule or demand for change. We can think of this as the community of sense in Bergson without the social correction that follows upon it. An early example—which should be familiar enough as a sort of Dickensian style—should help illustrate this. The novel starts with the narration of David’s birth, and the introduction of the character of David’s great-aunt Miss Betsey, who will reappear later as his benefactress. Here, when Peggotty and her nephew Ham arrive with the delivering doctor and nurse, they encounter the formidable figure of Miss Betsey:

Those allied powers were considerably astonished, when they arrived within a few minutes of each other, to find an unknown lady of portentous appearance, sitting before the fire, with her bonnet tied over her left arm, stopping her ears with jeweller’s cotton. Peggotty knowing nothing about her, and my mother saying nothing about her, she was quite a mystery in the parlor; and the fact of her having a magazine of jewellers’ cotton in her pocket, and sticking the article in her ears in that way, did not detract from the solemnity of her presence. (9)

For most, I imagine, this will not be laugh-out-loud funny. At the same time, though, it will not allow itself to be taken completely seriously. Some of this can be explained by incongruity: “portentous” and “solemnity” sitting next to the crass physicality of an old woman sticking cotton in her ears. This fits with Hippolyte Taine’s tendentious account of English humor: “saying very jocular things in a solemn manner.”79 But reading it as simple incongruity, whether of event or tone, misses the oddness of the scene somewhat. Incongruity relies upon a moment at which an expectation is frustrated—when what looks to be a whole lot turns out to be very little. Here, though, the expectation is not quite deflated: the scene is weird, and not a little bit astonishing given the circumstances. Why is Miss Betsey putting jeweler’s cotton in her ears? One mundane possibility is offered by the doctor, that she has a “local irritation” (10). Betsey, though, replies that this is “nonsense.” Another explanation may be that Betsey does not wish to hear the pains of Clara Copperfield’s labor. This explanation is plausible enough, perhaps, but does not occur to any of the characters. The cotton, in other words, is part of what defines the character of Miss Betsey, but it is also a mark of the character’s otherness. It is an unassimilable kernel in the depiction of the character, which keeps us from identifying thoroughly with her.

The plural is important: it keeps us from identifying with her. For Miss Betsey is the object of an audience; the subject of the first sentence is “those allied powers.” Though the reader is told at the outset that these powers “were considerably astonished,” the sentence has to work itself through a series of delays and subordinate clauses until the source of that astonishment reveals itself. Each comma-separated phrase serves only to increase the reader’s curiosity. Here, as is so often the case in Dickens’s prose, syntax has a noticeably temporal dimension. If phrased in terser terms, the sentence would have allowed the reader to encounter both the viewers (the Peggottys, the doctor, and the midwife) and the viewed (Miss Betsey) in the same tableau. As it is, though, the length of the sentence joins the reader’s perspective to that of the characters. The statement that something was astonishing soon becomes a question: “What is so astonishing?” Moving toward the end of the sentence, the reader is also in a position to be astonished. Think of any number of Dickensian tableaus—Sam Weller on the witness stand during Pickwick’s trial, Micawber reading aloud his indictment of Heep—where a crowd looks in amazement at one of Dickens’s stock eccentrics. Viewing the picture, we are looking at them as much as at their object. But Dickens’s style, in the textual example, brings us together with them.

Thus, it is humor, the term that was so frequently associated with Dickens by his contemporaries, which describes the sort of affective readerly reaction to Dickens that I discussed in the previous section. To put it another way, we can say that the frequent insistence on Dickens as a humorist spoke more to his ability to make readers feel a sort of sensus communis than to any ability, necessarily, to make readers laugh. Of course, it bears repeating that I am not arguing that Dickensian humor cannot produce laughter; but as with the relation of eroticism and genital arousal that Marcus describes, laughter is just one possible reaction to the experience produced by humor, and, for Victorians, far from the most trustworthy one.

THE COMMUNAL UNCONSCIOUS

Instead of Kincaid’s claim that to understand Dickens we need to laugh, then, it would be more appropriate to say that to understand Dickens, we need to feel a vague connection to others. But do we feel this connection? At an intuitive, and imprecise, level, I would certainly argue that we do. Dickens’s narrative voice cannot quite be taken seriously, even when he is talking about serious matters. Whether it’s the expressionist names or the repetitive characters, few readers, I think, would believe that they are getting a straight representation of the world as either they or Dickens would actually perceive it. From Dickens’s own time forward, critics have stressed the power of his imagination, rather than his power of observation.80 The point here is not meant to be a complicated one; Dickens writes with an almost unequaled stamina of tone. While Trollope, for example, may produce effect from letting the authorial voice slip for a moment,⁸¹ Dickens never lets up. To read Dickens, then, is in a sense always to be called upon to “get” something.

This formulation is, as I have said, an imprecise one; what I will argue in the remainder of this chapter is that Dickens’s use of sensus communis in the novel produces the novel’s underlying narrative mechanism. That is, the experience of sensus communis underwrites the novel’s production of a sense of narrative necessity. This will become clearer once we look more closely at how this necessity functions in the novel. Though David Copperfield takes the form of a fictional autobiography, the novel’s narrative trajectory is not determined simply by the events in the title character’s life. In fact, as many readers of the novel have noted, with some disapproval, the underlying structure of the narrative seems to do a lot of work that David should be doing himself. Alexander Welsh makes this case plainly: “Helpless as a child and passive as an adult—except in his devotion to work—the hero owes his eventual good fortune to an aggressive plot.”82 Welsh’s caveat about work is crucial, and I will discuss it at length later in this section. The larger point, though, seems to be that the novel does not require David to do things for himself; whatever the force is that moves the novel forward will do it for him. The most representative scene of David’s passivity—and one that will likely have caused many readers some discomfort—comes toward the novel’s end, when he discovers the location of Emily, thus tying up one of the novel’s subplots. An incensed Rosa Dartle has arrived there first, and her abuse of Emily fills half a chapter: “The miserable vanity of these earth-worms!”; “Why don’t they whip these creatures! If I could order it to be done, I would have the girl whipped to death!”; and so on (700, 701). There is a certain rhetorical charge here, sadistic though it may be. But what accounts for David, standing in the doorway, silently watching this? The reason he gives is confused, and confusing: “I did not know what to do. Much as I desired to put an end to the interview, I felt that I had no right to present myself; that it was for Mr. Peggotty alone to see and recover her. Would he never come? I thought impatiently” (698). One critic has brushed off this explanation, calling David’s refusal to interfere “inexplicable.”⁸³ Another has claimed that the reason is, in context, “understandable,” but that “his silence as Rosa goes on and on imposes … an outrageously unjust penalty on Emily. David should have intervened.”⁸⁴ The issue here—and a good example of the sort of passivity that readers see in David—is the sense that as a character in the novel, he should have done something;⁸⁵ but instead he expresses his “impatience” for something to happen. Indeed, as the abuse continues on for pages, even his initially stated “desire” to intervene drops out, and we only see him waiting for the episode to end: “Would [Mr. Peggotty] never, never come? How long was I to bear this? How long could I bear it?” (702). David’s question is our question; and like us, he is waiting for the story to reach its conclusion.

We can abstract from this scene a basic topography of David Copperfield’s narrative structure: passivity and stasis are associated with the space inside the house; the forward-moving “aggressive plot” comes from outside the house. Novelistic narrative, in general, can be seen as a form of mediation between two different principles: a descriptive principle that describes how things are; and an end-oriented, teleological principle that logically connects the way things are with how they were before, and how they will become.⁸⁶ These are, essentially, the synchronic and diachronic axes of the novel.87 What is interesting about David Copperfield is the way that it localizes these general novelistic principles. If some change does not enter from outside, what is going on inside the house could continue indefinitely. The novel would remain in what amounts to a single non-narrative moment, without any teleological progress. In the scene in Emily’s room, the novel leaves ambiguous whether Rosa hears, along with David, “a distant foot upon the stairs” (702). But there is no reason to think that his arrival alone would prompt her to stop. Throughout the chapter, Mr. Peggotty’s arrival has been defined as the moment that would end the episode; his appearance on the stairs is the sign that the story is ready to move on. Rosa, as a character, does not leave because of his arrival, but as part of the novel, she leaves because of what his arrival indicates: that the scene is over. Had he not arrived, there would have been nothing to prevent the scene from continuing on forever. This claim may sound like overstatement, but recall that, at the novel’s end, David describes Rosa alternately berating and comforting Mrs. Steerforth: “Thus I leave them; thus I always find them; thus they wear their time away, from year to year” (853). The dynamic inside a home does not change in David Copperfield, without some intrusion from the outside—the entrance of Murdstone into David’s home, say, or the entrance of Steerforth into Peggotty’s. These examples are negative, certainly, but the change can be a positive one as well, as with Peggotty’s belated rescue of Emily. The narrative structure of David Copperfield, based on this model, works through a series of fits and starts. To oversimplify only a bit, the novel places David in a house, with the promise that things may remain as they are; this state of affairs grows increasingly unsatisfactory, until some events either allow or force David to leave. From his childhood home with the Murdstones, to the home he shares with the Micawbers in London, through the home he makes with Dora: each time he arrives in a home, the novel makes it increasingly clear that he should move on. If he is passive inside his home, the narrative pressure comes from outside.

Thus, we can see the novel as pushing David, unwillingly, through a series of domestic spaces. The principle, is similar to, but expanded from, the one noted by Alexander Welsh: “the main action of David Copperfield is the replacement of one wife by another.”⁸⁸ The move from Dora to Agnes is certainly one of the most evident examples of a move from dissatisfaction to satisfaction. But it is only one example of what is a much larger pattern in the novel. To add one more rather obvious link in this chain, we have David’s mother: Clara. Not only does her relationship with David before Murdstone’s arrival present an almost too-perfect portrait of a pre-Oedipal family romance, but she also prefigures Dora: by debilitating ingenuousness and early death, in addition to the slant rhyme of their names. Furthermore, this initial happiness—unsustainable though it might have been—offers the model of happiness that David finally finds in Agnes. The novel’s main action, then, is not necessarily from “one wife” to another, so much as it is from one home to another.

Of course, Clara is something like a wife—but in the context of David Copperfield, this says less about one specific relationship and more about the way the novel blurs the lines between its parent-child relationships and its romances. Numerous central characters—David, Agnes, Steerforth, Dora, Uriah—have no siblings and are raised by only one parent. In each of these cases, the parent in question is of the opposite sex. Beyond the much-discussed Oedipal overtones of David’s life with Clara, it seems that in every one of these upbringings, Oedipus or Elektra has some odd presence. Agnes, Mr. Wickfield’s “little housekeeper” (217), is the very image of her mother, so much so that David imagines that the portrait of the late Mrs. Wickfield “had grown womanly, and the original remained a child” (217). Steerforth’s mother reacts to his flight with Emily much as a jilted lover might: “to take up in a moment with a miserable girl, and avoid me!” (457). Of Mrs. Heep and Uriah, David writes, “I have no doubt she did [love him]; or that he loved her, however strange it might appear; though to be sure, they were a congenial couple” (736). Then there are fatherly husbands with childlike brides: figures such as the elder David Copperfield and Dr. Strong, whom Annie calls “my husband and father” (640). Finally, there is the odd case of Mr. Peggotty and Emily. Though he is neither her father nor her husband, he acts as both. As Philip Weinstein points out, Mr. Peggotty proposes to Emily in Ham’s stead; he acts as the one most betrayed by Steerforth; and, finally, he sets sail with her for Australia to “begin a new life over theer” (711) without Ham, “quite alone” (712).89

I am not suggesting that the novel contains a blunt incestuous undercurrent. Instead it seems to collapse the difference between parent-child and spousal relationships. None of the couples—at least until the novel’s end—is particularly good at filling either role, and the result is that home life is always presented as a binding, limiting relationship. The marriages are broken or threatened when someone comes from the outside: Mr. Murdstone, say, or Jack Maldon. And in each case, no matter how imperfect the relationship, it is always devastating when it is broken.

The plot of the novel moves by fits and starts, as characters align and realign themselves, marriages and deaths occurring in tandem. Peggotty, for example, only marries Barkis after Clara’s death, and in large part because of it: “‘I shall always be near my pretty’s resting-place,’ said Peggotty musing, ‘and able to see it when I like; and when I lay down to rest, I may be laid not far off from my darling girl’” (133). On the other side of the sentimental spectrum is Murdstone, with whom marriage is a death sentence, as is rather bluntly suggested by his acquisition of his second marriage license in Doctors’ Commons, just as Peggotty is settling her dead husband’s estate. The greatest beneficiary of the link between death and marriage, however, is David. It is only Mr. Spenlow’s sudden and convenient death, occurring just days after he had forbidden David to marry his daughter, that allows David to marry Dora in the first place. Dora’s death finally allows David to marry Agnes. There is no subtlety here; on her deathbed, she explicitly leaves him to his “good angel,” charging Agnes that “only [she] would occupy this vacant place” (844). A neat summary of these interwoven tendencies of marriage, death, and interpersonal relationship can be seen in Mr. Wickfield’s story of Agnes’s mother:

“She married me in opposition to her father’s wishes, and he renounced her. … He was a very hard man, and her mother had long been dead. … He broke her heart. … She loved me dearly, but was never happy. She was always laboring away under this distress. … She left me Agnes, two weeks old.” (820)

A woman with a single father breaks their “marriage” to enter another marriage. This marriage brings about her death both indirectly, through her grief over her father’s renunciation of her, and directly, through childbirth. Just as she exits though, Agnes enters, forming yet another pseudo-marital relation.

Static inside the house; change—and the plot—pushing in from outside. Recall the scene in the attic, though, or the scene walking home from church: even inside, David has a connection with the outside world. The motivating force from outside is something that even the most passive inside-the-house character has access to. An example occurs in the one overt exception to the novel’s passive presentation of David: his decision to escape from his life of child labor in London.90 The titles of the novel’s twelfth and thirteenth chapters put this agency at center stage: “Liking life on my own Account no better, I form a great Resolution” and “The sequel of my Resolution.” In the text, David further makes it clear how unique the resolution was, while also suggesting that its source was unclear:

I had resolved to run away.—To go, by some means or other, down into the country, to the only relation I had in the world, and tell my story to my aunt, Miss Betsey.

I have already observed that I don’t know how this desperate idea came into my brain. But once there, it remained there; and hardened into a purpose than which I have never entertained a more determined purpose in my life. I am far from sure that I believed there was anything hopeful in it, but my mind was thoroughly made up that it must be carried into execution.

At the moment he explains his resolution, then, it is already in place: a “hardened purpose.” The decision has already been made before this account takes place: the relevant language here is all past-perfect. Now, what Dickens is doing here—stressing the unknown origin of an idea or decision, making every decision refer back to a decision that has already been made—is a common piece of narrative sleight of hand, lending some sense of psychological depth to the process of decision-making. Usually, as with Pip’s decision in Great Expectations to leave for London, the determined close reader can hunt down clues that have been dropped earlier in the text, so every explicit decision recalls an implicit reference to that decision made earlier.91 In this case, we see David stressing that he does not know “how this desperate idea came into [his] brain.” The implication, at least, is that this moment of decision grew out of, or at least reflects, a narrative necessity in the novel. Barthes claims that decision making is just a cosmetic cover for the narrative’s drive forward: the freedom of a character to choose, as portrayed by a sort of psychological overdetermination, exists ultimately to mask “by superposition the implacable constraint of the discourse.”⁹² The agency, in other words, is like Mr. Peggotty’s entrance: a nudge forward from some unknown place out there, moving David from one house (the Micawbers’, in London) to another (his aunt’s, in Dover).

The difference in this case, though, is that the David who moves the narrative along and the David who is moved along are the same person. Yet this figure is also split: the decision-making David is outside the house, while the passive David is inside. This becomes clearer if we trace back to the moment that David decides that he must leave London. It occurs when the Micawbers announce that, due to Mr. Micawber’s financial and legal woes, they will be leaving London, and that David will have to find a new place to live:

I had grown to be so accustomed to the Micawbers, and had been so intimate with them in their distresses, and was so utterly friendless without them, that the prospect of being thrown upon some new shift for a lodging, and going once more among unknown people, was like being that moment turned adrift into my present life, with such a knowledge of it ready made, as experience had given me. All the sensitive feelings it wounded so cruelly, all the shame and misery it kept alive within my breast, became more poignant as I thought of this; and I determined that the life was unendurable. (167)

It is not particularly surprising, of course, that he should want to leave this life that was “fraught with … pain, … mental suffering and want of hope” (210). But what this passage shows is that it did not necessarily seem that painful while David was living with the Micawbers. It is only with the threat of the loss of this domestic life that he determines that “the life was unendurable.” To be more precise, he has already known that it was unendurable: “like being that moment turned adrift into my present life, with such a knowledge of it ready made, as experience had given me.” In other words, the David that is living this present life—going about his life outdoors, “among unknown people”—already has the knowledge. But that David is, for the David that is narrating the novel, himself an “unknown person.” In order to make the decision that moves him and the novel forward, it is this understanding that David accesses. We can think of this as an inversion of existential anxiety: instead of falling from an embeddedness in Das Man (“what one does”) into unmoored individuality in order to assert agency, David falls from his individuality into embeddedness. In order to rescue Emily and move the novel along, Mr. Peggotty must intervene from outside the house; in order to move David’s story along, David himself must intervene—the David who is part of the everyday life outside.

This idea—that the role of motivation is given over to an “unknown person” that is both part of us and distinct from us—sounds a good deal like the psychoanalytic unconscious. Given the important position of a libidinal Freud in American Dickens criticism,93 I should stress that by “unconscious” I do not mean much in the way of physical drives. Rather, I am referring to a more broadly Lacanian sense of the unconscious as the shared language and concerns that pre-exist our subjecthood: the “discourse of the Other” that underwrites the self.⁹⁴ To access this unconscious is to access the social world that we are already a part of, to draw from “riches already involved in the symbolic system as it has been constituted by the tradition in which we as individuals take up our places.”⁹⁵ We do not need to subscribe to a fully Lacanian model to see how this idea offers a way of understanding how the novel underwrites its teleological narrative drive. The push forward comes from outside the house, yes, but it also comes from the part of the characters themselves that dwell outside the house. The motivating drive of the novel exists in a communal unconscious,⁹⁶ in which an ultimate agency resides in a sort of shared understanding, which is for the most part forgotten.

The difference between the inside and the outside of the house, of course, is not simply topological; it is also the split between private and public, personal and professional. The “present life” that David is “turned adrift into,” after all, is a life in which he is forced to work for a living. That is, the part of his life that is part of the novel’s communal unconscious is also part of its professional world. This echoes George Orwell’s famous observation that “[i]n Dickens’s novels anything in the nature of work happens off-stage.”⁹⁷ This exclusion, for Orwell, is not just thematic; it leads to a formal quality of Dickens’s fiction: “Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but sees them always in private life, as ‘characters,’ not as functional members of society; that is to say, he sees them statically.”⁹⁸ Orwell links private life together with Dickens’s famously static representation of characters. In other words, to be a character in a Dickens novel is, almost by the very nature of Dickens’s art, to be static—that is, not to do anything. For Orwell, the nature of action is to take part in “functional” social life. To be presented a character absent from work, then, is to get a representation of what that character “is” at the expense of what a character “does.” Being a character in Dickens is something you do on your own time—when you are off the clock.

Perhaps the best way to formulate the particularly Dickensian form this communal unconscious takes, then, is as a form of forgetting: the leaving behind of the working world when a character returns home. This forgetting is not specific to Dickens: “Don’t talk about work at the dinner table” is one of the fundamental principles of middle-class life. But it’s a specific sort of forgetting, where the outside world passes out of sight, perhaps out of consciousness, but never out of mind. Just as no middle-class worker ever actually forgets her job—she will still get up in the morning—so David doesn’t actually let work go. When David describes his courtship of Dora, for example, a thorough working discipline seems to coexist with complete absorption in his domestic life: “I loved her, and I went on loving her, most absorbingly, entirely, and completely. But going on too, working pretty hard, and busily keeping all the irons I now had in the fire” (529). The next chapter begins with a series of paragraphs that describe this absorption, describing step by step David’s disciplined approach to learning stenography, which seems to belie the “absorbingly, entirely, and completely” in the previous paragraph. The two trajectories—passive domestic David, disciplined public David—go on at the same time. But here the form of Welsh’s description is as important as its content: “Helpless as a child and passive as an adult—except in his devotion to work—the hero owes his eventual good fortune to an aggressive plot.” Work is an aside, an interruption that does not derail the syntax of the larger sentence. In the same way, while the novel occasionally reminds us that David is constantly working, it is easy to forget that backdrop—easy to forget the public David that underwrites the private one that we read.

Indeed, part of the experience of reading David Copperfield is an experience of forgetting its well-populated public world. Earlier, I mentioned the similarity in the scenes of reading between David and his literary twin Jane Eyre.99 The difference is that while David’s consciousness expands to take in the boys in the churchyard, Jane remains only aware of John Reed and the others inside the house. This is not so much a limitation of Jane’s imagination, though, as it is a statement of Brontë’s imagination of the outside; who, in the fog outside Gateshead, could Jane be aware of in the first place? Put simply, there are more people outside in David Copperfield than there are in Jane Eyre. When the London novelist imagines an outside, it is populated; for the Yorkshire novelist, less so. For Brontë, the space between private spaces is cold, hostile, barren. We can see this in the journeys they both take to run away from home—David heading to Aunt Betsey’s in Canterbury, Jane to the Rivers’ at Moor House. Again, the settings have some structural similarity: running away from a home and occupation they find unlivable, they set out on the road; both lose their parcel in a carriage; both walk almost to the point of starvation before reaching a home that will take them in. In Jane’s case, this voyage takes place in unpopulated space:

The population here must be thin, and I see no passengers on these roads: they stretch out east, west, north, and south—white, broad, lonely. … Not a tie holds me to human society at this moment—not a charm or hope calls me where my fellow-creatures are—none that saw me would have a kind thought or a good wish for me. I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature.100

Brontë seems to invoke a certain tautology here: the space between habitations is uninhabited. Or, to put it another way, there is no public in the public space in Jane Eyre.

I bring this up to highlight just how different the case is in Dickens. If Jane Eyre surprises by its lack of people outside the house, David Copperfield surprises by the density of its population—more, I would imagine, than most readers can remember, and certainly more than they need to remember. Turning to the scene that parallels Jane’s solitary escape, we find any number of figures on the road to Canterbury. First, David comes across Mr. Dolloby, who underpays him for his waistcoat; then he meets an old drunkard named Charley, who has a set of Dickensian exclamations—“Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo!” (178)—all his own. Following this, a gang of boys, who run around Charley’s shop, chase after David. Finally, after hiding from “ferocious looking ruffians,” he comes across a tinker, who tries to rob him, and he is rescued by the tinker’s female companion, whom David sees—over his shoulder, as he runs—being beaten as a result (181). Now, it would be a stretch to say that any of these portraits actually rises to the level of character; they do, however, definitely have their own distinctive characteristics.¹⁰¹ They are “memorable” in that particularly Dickensian way.¹⁰² Even David thinks so; while the novel, made up of retrospective narration, is all memory, the narrator makes sure to point out the lasting impression of these characters. On meeting Charley: “I never was so frightened in my life, before or since” (179); on the tinker’s abused companion: “I never shall forget seeing her fall backward on the hard road” (181). The claim, then, is that these characters between houses will stay present in David’s consciousness. Yet, for all that, they are never mentioned again. The public space between the Micawbers’ and Betsey’s has an asserted presence, but functionally—and, for most readers, I would imagine, even practically—it slips away.

But what persists as a reminder of this outside world, and of the working world, is the language of the novel. David, though we never see him at work on his writing, is a novelist. More to the point, he is the author of David Copperfield—even if he “never meant [it] to be published on any account.” His labor, in other words, is present throughout the novel. Of course, this could be said of nearly any Dickens’s novel: the overwhelming, rather intimidating energy of the prose both reminds you of the novelist’s labor while, at the same time, effacing that labor through its consistency. Trollope and Thackeray occasionally affect some degree of weariness, reminding the reader of the hard work of writing but, at the same time, presenting a more natural, private, voice. Dickens, though, maintains such a strong consistency of tone that, just like David’s, his work is at once always present and always hidden. The working world is the space of the novel’s communal unconscious, because the novel is, quite literally, a record of the working world. And at the same time, it is in this tone that people found Dickens’s humor. Because he never breaks tone, there is something beyond the page, waiting there for the reader to “get it.”

BLIND, BLIND, BLIND

In the remainder of this chapter, I will offer a reading of the narrative structure of David Copperfield, in terms of the categories that I have brought up so far: the source of motivation in a sensed, but rationally unknown, social sphere, the felt necessity from the everyday world of convention weighing on character and reader alike. This structure offers an excellent example of an intuited narrative necessity that does not rely on suspense. Instead, it relies on formal mechanics produced by the sort of Victorian humor that I have been outlining: not only describing David’s motivation in a communal unconscious but implying the reader’s membership in the community as well.

One of the most oft-quoted moments of David Copperfield occurs when David, returning from boarding school, finds his young mother alone, nursing his new half-brother. As he recalls laying his head on her breast, he writes, “I wish I had died. I wish I had died then, with that feeling in my heart! I should have been more fit for Heaven than I ever have been since” (104). This is, to be sure, an odd sentiment, for it would seem to suggest that for all the trials and successes, tragedies and ultimate bliss with Agnes, none has in the end been truly worth it. If David could have avoided all this Bildung in the first place, it would have all been for the better. The same sentiment appears again, as he recollects Agnes’s self-sacrificing praise about Dora: “Oh, Agnes, sister of my boyhood, if I had known then, what I knew long afterwards!—” (504). It is perhaps best that David allows this sentence to trail off, as its implied completion would be an admission that the hard-won experience of the novel is something that he would rather do without.

Such moments seem indicative of a larger aspect of the novel: it is a reluctant Bildungsroman, with an implicit preference for innocence over experience. Consider, for example, the judgment that David passes upon learning of Steerforth’s seduction of Emily: “In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more towards all that was good in him. … I believe that if I had been brought face to face with him, I could not have uttered one reproach” (443). Franco Moretti, writing on the English Bildungsroman, sees this moment as exemplary: “If then, as with Steerforth, innocence proves to be mistaken—too bad for experience. What has been learned will be disavowed and forgotten, rather than revise the initial judgement.”103 David’s essence remains what it was in childhood. The novel’s happy ending, David’s marriage to Agnes, is a fitting tribute to this sacred childhood, as Agnes tells him, “I have loved you all my life!” (842). David, in turn, calls Agnes “the source of every worthy aspiration I had ever had” (844). The final bliss that the novel presents, in other words, is not so much the fruit of a lifetime of experience as it is a return—a final coming into being for the protagonist of what he has always been. Critics as distinct as Moretti, Alexander Welsh, and Harry Stone have all pointed out the novel’s similarity to a “fairy tale”: a form whose essential element is the return to the place of origin.¹⁰⁴

But there is a basic difference between David Copperfield and a fairy tale: the personification of the happy ending that the narrative is working toward, Agnes, is with David throughout most of the novel. There is nothing to travel toward; David must instead realize something that is already true, but that is hidden from him: namely, that Agnes is the correct mate for him, and that his brotherly feelings for her are in fact the correct form of love. In other words, the novel has to perform an odd narrative maneuver: move toward an ending that seems natural because it is something that has always been inside of David while at the same time never presenting that knowledge.

I said at the opening that David makes a point of being as open as possible with the reader about all things. There is, however, one significant exception, and it relates to this conclusion with Agnes:

I have now recalled all that I think it needful to recall here … with one reservation. I have made it, thus far, with no purpose of suppressing any of my thoughts; for, as I have elsewhere said, this narrative is my written memory. I have desired to keep the most secret current of my mind apart, and to the last. I enter on it now. I cannot so completely penetrate the mystery of my own heart, as to know when I began to think that I might have set its earliest and brightest hopes on Agnes. I cannot say at what stage of my grief it first became associated with the reflection, that, in my wayward boyhood, I had thrown away the treasure of her love. I believe I may have heard some whisper of that distant thought, in the old unhappy loss or want of something never to be realized, of which I had been sensible. But the thought came into my mind as a new reproach and new regret, when I was left so sad and lonely in the world.

The “secret current of [David’s] mind”—his love for Agnes—is presented here as something that has been held back from the reader. At the same time, though, David offers that the reason it had been held back is that his consciousness of it had grown so slowly that he was not sure when he first became aware of it. In other words, the only part of the novel that has been withheld from the reader is one that has been withheld from David as well.

It is hard to imagine, though, that any reader would be as surprised by this revelation as David seems to imagine. This is not suspense, in the sense that we saw it in Oliver Twist, nor is it a succession of events whose meanings inhere in themselves, as in Jack Sheppard. Rather, it seems closer to what we saw in Newman’s Apologia: a controlling internal motivation whose presence can be felt, and is known by the reader, before it is known by the character itself. It is certainly clear that Agnes loves David, and it becomes increasingly clear that David loves Agnes in return. Agnes channels many readers when she asks David, right before declaring her love for him, “Do you know, yet …?” It seems that she cannot quite believe that he has not yet figured out that their love—which, as they both attest, stands as the motivation for nearly everything they do—has been there all along.

The novel has a specific figure for this relationship with knowledge: blindness. Specifically, the novel introduces this term, through the voice of Aunt Betsey, to refer to David’s inability to see his correct trajectory. As David speaks about his budding love for Dora, Betsey replies with, “Blind, blind, blind” (489). The statement is a blunt enigma: blind to what? But David does not ask his aunt what she means. And, even more notably, the older narrating David lets it pass without comment. Instead, the novel suggests a pause in Betsey’s speech, by closing her quote, and then, in the next paragraph, opening her quote again:

“Ah, Trot!” said my aunt, shaking her head, and smiling gravely; “blind, blind, blind!”

“Someone that I know, Trot,” my aunt pursued, after a pause, “though of a very pliant disposition, has an earnestness of affection in him that reminds me of [Clara].” (489)

So, in between the enigmatic statement and its continuation, there is no reaction, no question, no attempt at narrative interpretation. The narrator opens a grammatological space here for a response but leaves it blank. It draws our attention, in other words, to what it does not say. Punctuation here takes the form of a sort of audible silence, or narrative pause. The question, if asked, would have a rather obvious answer; but it would be an answer that is also the book’s conclusion. Consider again, the way in which David trails off while admitting that he had some knowledge: “Oh, Agnes, sister of my boyhood, if I had known then, what I knew long afterwards!—” (504). The real meat of the sentence is covered over by a punctuated pause, almost as if the em-dash were crossing out the counterfactual result. Even by the looser standards of Victorians in general, and Dickens in particular, the exclamation/dash combination is an odd one.105 The exclamation gives the apostrophic statement the appearance of a declaration, but what it declares is something missing. It is not the case that there is no knowledge there, in other words; we are told that there is, and that David has no conscious access to it.

So “blindness,” as it appears here in the novel, refers to a presence, the knowledge of which is never made explicit in the novel. That is to say, it does not mean that David is simply unaware; instead it refers to the specific awareness of something that cannot, or will not, be put into words.¹⁰⁶ The novel makes this meaning explicit as it again invokes the figure of blindness. Betsey continues to try to direct David toward Agnes by saying that someone as “earnest” as David needs someone who is also “earnest” to “sustain him and improve him.” When he does not pick up on the hint, mistakenly believing she is referring to Dora, she repeats herself: “‘Oh, Trot!’ she said again; ‘blind, blind!’ and without knowing why, I felt a vague unhappy loss or want of something overshadow me like a cloud” (490). This moment offers an example of a standard form of narrative expression: a communication of meaning to the reader which, by its very nature, demands that it remain somehow distinct from the surface level of the narrative. We understand it, even if it is not explicitly stated, and even if the characters in the novel do not consciously understand it themselves.

When I say “consciously,” though, I do not mean to suggest only that the characters have a subconscious understanding, after the fashion of Freudian psychoanalysis. Rather, the understanding is what I have referred to as the “communal unconscious” produced by sensus communis. Recall that the novel validates the judgments of the anonymous world outside the house. A particularly clear moment of this occurs as the scene with Agnes continues. Immediately after David trails off in his apostrophe, he narrates heading down to the street: “There was a beggar in the street, when I went down; and as I turned my head towards the window, thinking of her calm seraphic eyes, he made me start by muttering, as if he were an echo of the morning: ‘Blind! Blind! Blind!’” (505). The joke here is clear enough; the blind beggar’s self-description appears to David as an echo of Betsey’s words. But this does not only appear as a coincidence. Betsey knows; the reader knows; and now it seems that everyone outside knows as well. The fact that David thinks this particular beggar’s speech is worth transcribing, without, again, bothering to interpret or even explain his interest, makes it clear that he himself knows as well. The very end toward which the novel is moving, then, is one that David understands at some level, and that the anonymous group of “everyone” around him—readers and characters—understands as well. David, as a character, is moving toward the communal understanding he already has, but to which he is blind.

Here we have the essential narrative mechanism of David Copperfield, a pressure coming from the outside which, because it is not explicit, is only understood as an internal intuition. David knows there is something wrong—a “vague unhappy loss”—while at the same time being unable to understand what exactly it is. I have already described, in the last section, how the novel’s alternation between stasis and change is associated with the spaces inside and outside of the house. What we see now, though, is that the space outside the house, where the beggar is standing, or where the townspeople watch David and Clara walk home from church with the Murdstones, is also associated with David’s unrepresentable internality: what I have been calling his unconscious, but what we could also call, to go back to the Kantian-ethical language of my first chapter, his noumenal self. In other words, the change that comes from outside the house can also be understood as the change that comes from David himself. The move toward anonymous agreement is a move toward what David has always been.

This reading fits in well with the observation that the characters in David Copperfield are fixed, static entities. While it is not quite the case they are the sum of their tics—Rosa Dartle’s “isn’t it, though?”, Uriah Heep’s “umbleness,” Betsey Trotwood’s “eccentric and somewhat masculine” nature (581)—the true characters are not far beneath the exterior. As D. A. Miller puts it, “The secret subject [in David Copperfield] is always an open secret”107 This is rather clear; it is hard to imagine a reader surprised by Uriah’s true nature, once he appears with his “mask off” (730). There is very little distance from the surface to the true character beneath, and the truth is usually not hard to spot. As for Betsey, as Miller points out, “Though David knows [her] only as a legendary dragon, … he nonetheless risks throwing himself on her mercy sight unseen” (205); he cannot forget “how [his] mother had thought that she felt her touch her pretty hair with no ungentle hand” (171). Of course, something happened to make each character who he or she is, whether it be Betsey’s failed marriage, Uriah’s education, or Rosa’s emotional and physical scarring at the hands of Steerforth. In each case, however, the event took place before the action of the novel, or at least before the entrance into David’s life. Once these characters become characters—that is, figures in the novel—they are doomed to be creatures defined by a fixed quantity of characteristics. Any change that might occur is only in the degree to which they mask these characteristics. Miss Murdstone, in admitting that she is “not the creature of circumstance or change” (382), is exceptional only for her self-awareness.

Rosa Dartle, whose magnificent rage makes for some of the novel’s strongest moments, offers perhaps the best glimpse of this mechanism. Upon their first encounter, David comes to understand that her telltale scar provides a direct conduit for her buried anger: “It was not long before I observed that it was the most susceptible part of her face, and that, when she turned pale, that mark altered first. … I thought her, for one moment, in a storm of rage; and then I saw it start forth like the old writing on the wall” (288). As far as Rosa’s character goes, David sees the writing on the wall quite plainly. Her explosion, when it comes, is something to behold: “If I could hunt her to her grave, I would. If there was any word of comfort that would be a solace to her in her dying hour, and only I possessed it, I wouldn’t part with it for Life itself” (459). It is not, however, a surprise. Indeed, as David himself makes clear, the real force is not in her words—so different from her wont—but in her body: “The mere vehemence of her words can convey, I am sensible, but a weak impression of the passion by which she was possessed, and which made itself articulate in her whole figure, though her voice, instead of being raised, was lower than usual” (459). However much her words might be a departure from her habitual passive aggression, this true “passion,” residing in her body, has always been visible. It has, in a nearly literal fashion, slipped through the cracks. Her rage shows on her scar, and her “wasting fire” finds “a vent in her gaunt eyes” (285). The writing is not only on the wall; it is written all over her face. Even change as violent as Rosa’s outburst, then, is practically static, as it only makes explicit that which was already quite apparent.

The result, in David Copperfield, is a certain iterative quality, but it is one perhaps best understood as a sort of “reflective equilibrium.”108 The term is from Rawls, and represents a process by which successive approximations at an idea removes increasing difficulties and confusions. Generally speaking, the propriety of such an equilibrium can be judged by whether an approximation expresses the idea in a way that seems to get it across. Of course, in David Copperfield, there is not an idea, just a “vague … want of something” that indicates that the external reality does not match David’s internal state. Equivalently, this could be taken to say that the external reality does not match the dictates of the shared communal unconscious. This resembles in some way the fort-da game that René Girard sees as central to the novel form’s narration of “triangular desire”: the structural desire for that which another desires. This “imitative desire,” Girard claims, “is always the desire to be Another.”109 Such desire, furthermore, can never be satisfied by the object it sees itself as pursuing. The moment of possession of the object of desire, as Girard sees it, may be summed up in “the famous Stendhalian exclamation: ‘Is that all it is?!’” (88). This idea of a repeated dissatisfaction works well to describe David Copperfield, and what I located in the previous discussion as the narrative dynamic motivating the main character’s progress from home to home.

Such dissatisfaction is an integral part of the novel. As Kelly Hager notes, in examining such marriages as the Micawbers, the Strongs, David and Dora, and Betsey and her estranged husband, “the novel is more about desertion than unity, more about separation than marriage.”¹¹⁰ Hager is not speaking of actual separation, for outside of Betsey Trotwood, whose separation occurs before the novel, and Emily, who leaves her fiancé but is eventually reunited with her pseudo-husband in Mr. Peggotty, no one actively ends their marriage. I would perhaps add to this list Steerforth, who leaves his mother/wife, and in the process destroys both himself and her. For characters with less destructive tastes, however, there is only dissatisfaction and a good deal of wishful thinking, as exemplified by Emma Micawber’s insistent declaration, “I never will desert Mr. Micawber,” repeated so often that it is difficult not to read the opposite desire into it. David, meanwhile, “in the innermost recesses of [his] mind,” wonders what might have been, “if Dora and I had never known each other” (678).

Such a sense of dissatisfaction, a sense that there has to be something else, points strongly to the presence of a world beyond the limiting interpersonal relationships of the novel. Indeed, moments of consciousness of such a world do take place. Consider, for example, David’s arrival at Salem House, when he is required, as punishment for biting Mr. Murdstone, to wear a placard bearing the words, “Take care of him. He bites”:

What I suffered from that placard, nobody can imagine. Whether it was possible for people to see me or not, I always fancied that somebody was reading it. It was no relief to turn around and find nobody; for wherever my back was, there I imagined someone always to be. … The playground was a bare gravelled yard, open to all the back of the house and the offices; and I knew that the servants read it, and the butcher read it, and the baker read it; that everybody, in a word, who came backwards and forwards to the house, of a morning when I was ordered to walk there, read that I was to be taken care of, for I bit. I recollect that I positively began to have a dread of myself, as a kind of wild boy who did bite. (75)

Three important points arise here. First, David is alone, without the comfort of other characters and their reassuring characteristics. In their stead, he is conscious of an anonymous “everybody.” This consciousness, then, is not of a world beyond people, but of a world beyond knowable characters. Solitude, paradoxically, comes as a result of a widening of social perspective. This leads to the second point: David is acutely aware of being seen. The shame that pervades this passage arises from the mute judgment he is sure that the world, uncountable and unknowable, is passing on him. Third, David feels the force of this judgment, wrong though it may be, is to make him the very thing he is seen to be: “a kind of wild boy who did bite.” This perfect helplessness in the face of the unknown is figured in the placard placed on his back; no matter which way he turns, he is always being seen, and judged, by those he cannot see in turn.

The sort of close, and closed, relationships between recognizable characters fostered in David Copperfield, then, acts as a blockade of sorts against the consciousness of a larger world, and the helplessness that comes with its judgment. Without such a relationship, the outside world intrudes. Recall the scene, discussed at the outset, of David walking back from church with his mother and the Murdstones: “I note some neighbours looking at my mother, and at me, and whispering. Again as the three go on arm-in-arm, and I linger behind alone, I follow some of those looks and wonder if my mother’s step be really not so light as I have seen it …” (50). Excluded from his relationship with his mother, “linger[ing] behind alone,” he becomes conscious of the world’s judgment. Emily, as well, when she leaves her circle of relationships, opens herself up to the judgment of the world, as “the news of what had happened soon spread[s] throughout the town” and David “overhear[s] people speaking of it at their doors” (444). Even Uriah Heep, when he is finally unmasked, opts for an informal resolution, among those he knows, rather than face the external judgment of the law.

The novel thus offers two means of engagement with the external world. Both are unsatisfactory, but both tend toward the other. Relationships with other characters, unmodifiable as they are, lead to a desire for dissolution. A consciousness of the larger world of “everybody,” with its isolating effect, leads to a desire for interpersonal relationships. The pivotal moment in David and Dora’s marriage comes when David realizes the simultaneous presence of both of these modes. Dora’s incompetence at housekeeping leads to their swindling at the hands of their page. As the page continues to reveal the extent of the thefts, David becomes “so ashamed of being a victim, that I would have given [the page] any money to hold his tongue, or would have offered a round bribe for his being permitted to run away” (673). It as a result of this shame that David is forced to become again conscious of the outside world: “‘My love,’ said I, ‘it is very painful to me to think that our want of system and management, involves not only ourselves (which we have got used to), but other people.’” (673). As forming Dora’s mind is an impossibility, David is ultimately left solitary, even in the midst of his marriage: “I could not endure my own solitary wisdom; I could not reconcile it with her former appeal to me as my child-wife. I resolved to do what I could, in a quiet way, to improve our proceedings myself” (677).

It is at this point, in one of the novel’s central passages, that David proceeds to a moment of dialectical self-realization:

What I missed, I still regarded—I always regarded—as something that had been a dream of my youthful fancy; that was incapable of realisation; that I was now discovering to be so, with some natural pain, as all men did. But, that it would have been better for me if my wife could have helped me more, and shared the many thoughts in which I had no partner; and that this might have been; I knew.

Between these two irreconcileable conclusions: the one, that what I felt, was general and unavoidable; the other that it was particular to me, and might have been different: I balanced curiously, with no distinct sense of their opposition to each other. When I thought of the airy dreams of youth that are incapable of realisation, I thought of the better state preceding manhood that I had outgrown; and then the contented days with Agnes, in the dear old house, arose before me, like spectres of the dead, that might have some renewal in another world, but never never more could be reanimated here. (678)

David vacillates between two impulses here. On one side is a consciousness of the larger world. Here the emphasis is on rules applied from without, over which he has no control. His language—“as all men did,” “general and unavoidable”—is here that of an external set of conventions, the law of “everybody,” which he helplessly feels forced on himself. At the same time, however, he feels a sense that there should be something he could do about it. This takes the form of an interpersonal relationship: “my wife could have helped me more.” He is thus simultaneously conscious of the external world of law and judgment, over which he has no control, and the interpersonal world, in which he feels he should have some control but has none. Seemingly lost beneath these antitheses is the kernel of his innocence, the “dream of [his] youthful fancy,” seemingly unrealizable. Yet here something remarkable occurs; the two antitheses cease to oppose one another. David balances both, “with no distinct sense of their opposition to one another.” It would seem that perhaps some synthesis between the two was being reached. And indeed, in an almost mystical fashion, the figure of Agnes rises before David, like a “spectre.”

Why Agnes? How does she somehow offer a resolution to the dissatisfaction experienced in both interpersonal relationships and solitude? Agnes, notably, is David’s “good angel,” a quiet and forgiving, but watchful, eye. When David goes drunkenly into the London night, it is Agnes who sees him, as he remembers her face “with its indelible look of regret and wonder” (354). If it is hard to imagine a more benevolent judge, it is nonetheless the case that Agnes is the only character able to stand in the stead of the anonymous world. Thus, when David is alone in Switzerland, it is Agnes’s letters that he receives, and they guide him: “she urged no duty on me; she only told me, in her own fervent manner, what her trust in me was” (794). Taking the place of shame, then, is a kinder figure, one whose judgments are not an imposition from an outside, but rather based in David’s own self: “She knew (she said) how such a nature as mine would turn affliction to good” (794). The external gaze that Agnes represents is one that tells David to be what he always has been, “the source of every worthy aspiration [he has] ever had.” In this, she offers an interpersonal relationship—a relationship inside the house, with another character—that is at the same time a relationship with the outside world. If her character, as such, is largely an absent quantity, it is because her character expands to fill David’s world; if she is lacking in personality, it is because she stands in for a larger anonymous external reality. At the moment of their final joining, Agnes comes to embody David’s past as well, as he sees “the spirit of my child-wife” looking “even out of [her] own true eyes” (842). In the novel’s final words, Agnes’s unity with the external world becomes absolute:

And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet, these faces fade away. But, one face, shining on me like a Heavenly light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond them all. And that remains.

I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me. My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company.

O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I when realities, when realities are melting from me like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward! (855)

All of the characters of the novel fade away, then, and there is Agnes. She offers a final mystical synthesis: a figure inside the house who contains within her the world “above” and “beyond” the house as well. That is, she brings the space in which David lives—as David, the character—together with the anonymous outside world. She is someone who, at novel’s end, becomes everyone. In this, she allows David to achieve his conclusion, as his internal yearnings—which have always been outside the walls, and beyond the world of characters—rise to the level of textual representation.