David Copperfield and Great Expectations are widely regarded as two of the earliest examples of the Bildungsroman (formational novel) in the English language. Telling the stories of David and Pip from their childhood to a point in their
fictional lives at which the process of their formation is completed, Dickens’s two semi-autobiographical novels have long
been considered alongside similar narratives by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Honoré de Balzac, Thomas Mann,
Henry James and George Santayana. It seems that both novels – more than his other works – allow critics to include Dickens
in comparative studies because here he follows recognisable conventions and patterns of the formational novel. It has been
argued conversely, however, that neither David Copperfield nor Great Expectations are typical Bildungsromane, as they fall short of the typical characteristics of the genre, while several German critics have altogether dismissed the
Bildungsroman in English-speaking countries as following a different, uncharacteristic pattern. It is beyond question, however, that David Copperfield and Great Expectations are two significant contributions to the nineteenth-century, trans-European discourse about the formation of character, which
is rendered by Dickens in a quintessentially Victorian fashion.
The question of whether or not Dickens’s two first-person narratives belong to the family of the
Bildungsroman has preoccupied critics for many decades. This is hardly surprising bearing in mind that any attempt at giving an authoritative
answer is dependent on a universally accepted definition of the term
Bildungsroman itself. This does not exist. The academic quest for such a definition has led to a highly abstract discourse over the taxonomy
of terms such as
Entwicklungsroman (novel of development),
Bildungsroman and
Erziehungsroman (novel of education). Subtleties of distinction in German are lost in translation when these concepts are applied in English
studies, making it virtually impossible to be precise and succinct. Attempts to position Dickens within this framework
are difficult. If Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre is the widely accepted archetype against which other
Bildungsromane are considered, and if the understanding of a specific concept of
Bildung, as developed in eighteenth-century Germany, is a prerequisite for the execution of a genuine
Bildungsroman, then it is hard to accommodate Dickens’s novels in the tradition. This chapter is neither a study in taxonomy, nor does
it attempt to give a definitive answer to the question; instead, it examines why and how Dickens used elements of the
Bildungsroman specifically in two of his novels. Other developing characters in Dickens’s oeuvre, including female characters such as Esther
in
Bleak House and Little Dorrit, have been excluded as the nineteenth-century notion of
Bildung (formation) focussed on the social and professional domains of young men from adolescence to adulthood.
Unlike his Germanophile contemporaries Carlyle, Edward Bulwer Lytton and George Henry Lewes, Dickens was not particularly
interested in adapting Goethe’s model. As Michael Hollington has shown, Dickens ascribes
Wilhelm Meister to his friend Carlyle rather than to its original author, displaying a distinct lack of interest in the German philosophy
that is fundamental to the novel.
1 Dickens did not fashion his novels after any one specific precursor; he drew on traditions and current trends in storytelling
that suited his style and purpose. Thus, while it could be argued that the ‘school of
Wilhelm Meister’
2 influenced
David Copperfield and
Great Expectations, these novels were not conceptually designed to conform to the genre.
The explanation of why Dickens is frequently listed as the author of two novels of formation is threefold: firstly, many definitions
of the term are comprehensive, taking an inclusive approach based on similarities and general characteristics. Secondly, Dickens
was perceptive of the influence of the new form, which provided him with new expressive narrative tools and a framework in
which his characters developed according to widely accepted norms and morals. Thirdly, stories such as Don Quixote and A Pilgrim’s Progress as well as the works of Fielding, Sterne and Goldsmith – much admired and adapted by Dickens – have been identified as early
precursors of the Bildungsroman itself, so it is not surprising that interrelationships exist. Furthermore, Dickens was drawn to the positive and affirmative
message of moral and social self-improvement that emanates from the Bildungsroman. A brief analysis of the literary and historic background against which Dickens created the characters of David and Pip suggests
it is no coincidence that Dickens engaged in the discourse around character formation.
When, in 1824, Carlyle published the first English translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Dickens was only 12 years old. At this time he was working in Warren’s Blacking and was enduring one of the greatest formative
experiences of his life, subjected to the social pressures that often comprise a typical element in the formation of character.
According to his autobiographical fragment, Dickens went through a spiritual and material crisis:
It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age … a child of singular abilities, quick, eager,
delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally … No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I … felt my early hopes
of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being
utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that,
day to day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away
from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written.
3
Younger than most of the protagonists in the
Bildungsroman, the ‘child’ Dickens – for whom the process of ‘growing up’ and formation suddenly seemed to have come to a halt – had to
begin life anew, now scarred and ‘penetrated with the grief and humiliation’. For Dickens, recalling these memories in 1847,
the ideal of
Bildung as a ‘definite attainable goal’
4 towards a fully developed and content personality must have been eminently desirable – so far he had failed to achieve this.
As the fragment suggests, Dickens was haunted by this experience in his dreams, in which he wandered ‘desolately back to that
time’
5 – clearly, the realisation of fulfilment is remote.
But if Dickens had been emotionally scarred during his childhood, it is likely that he had also become aware of the therapeutic
quality of literature, in particular in the fairy-tale-like stories he had grown up with. In his later, semi-autobiographical
account of his childhood in David Copperfield, Dickens recalls how the precursors of Wilhelm Meister – Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphry Clinker, Tom Jones, the
Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe – ‘kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that
place and time’ (ch. 4). Schooled by his childhood experience and reading, Dickens was keenly aware of the literature of self-improvement,
personal development and fulfilment of character. Thus, while Dickens was too young – and too occupied by his employment –
to read Wilhelm Meister when it was first published in England, he was undoubtedly eager to absorb and develop this novel’s influence on English
literature in later years.
Dickens was, as Hollington suggests, ‘in some way or other familiar with it [the
Bildungsroman] and its leading characteristics and ideas’.
6 Novels inspired by and modelled on
Wilhelm Meister were published frequently from the 1820s onwards, and it is noteworthy that it became a popular form among fashionable as
well as lesser-known authors. Benjamin Disraeli and Bulwer were among the first – and at the time most renowned – writers
who promoted the concept of formation through their writings, inspiring a considerable number of books that dealt with a similar
theme, often in the form of the closely related novel about artists, the
Künstlerroman. By the time
David Copperfield was published in 1850, a phalanx of writers – including Carlyle, Lewes, Letitia Landon, Henry Chorley, John Sterling, Frances
Trollope, Thomas Miller and William Makepeace Thackeray – had responded to their readers’ craving for similar narratives.
Bearing in mind that most of these novels deal with the fortunes of authors and artists – usually in a semi-autobiographical
fashion – there is a good possibility that Dickens read more than just Lewes’s
Ranthorpe and Thackeray’s
Pendennis, considering his interest in the subject matter. In doing so, he would have observed how his fellow writers used the new
conventions of rendering inner life, of presenting an individual’s confrontation with the world and of organising the plot
around the guiding principle of character formation. Thus, while his early novels, such as
Oliver Twist and
Nicholas Nickleby lack the distinct characteristics of the
Bildungsroman,
David Copperfield and
Great Expectations clearly reflect a more mature awareness of the protagonists’ development. It should be noted, however, that Dickens owes
more to the English incarnation of the formational novel than to the German tradition.
Randolph Shaffner’s checklist of several distinguishing traits of the
Bildungsroman provides a useful tool to identify those elements and characteristics that feature in Dickens’s novels and that have led
to their inclusion in the tradition of this genre. The inclusive approach developed by Shaffner shows that many of the general
characteristics of the genre are embedded in
David Copperfield and
Great Expectations: the harmonious cultivation of a multifarious personality, the key notion of choice, the striving for knowledge of the world,
a continuous trial-and-error development of the protagonist’s natural gifts, a critical view of the world and the idea that
living is an art that the apprentice has to learn. If we add to this the advancement towards a responsible and essentially
humane personality, the ultimate integration into the order of the world and civilised community as well as an autobiographical
point of reference, Dickens’s novels clearly reflect some of the common themes of the
formation novel. Shaffner’s system also contains elements that are not applicable to Dickens’s works as well as traits that
are relevant to only one of the novels, such as the ‘release from bondage to false ideals’
7 which only pertains to
Great Expectations. It is significant that a key concept in both of Dickens’s novels, class and social ascension, is not a central theme in
the
Bildungsroman, revealing the author’s fusion of personal and social desires.
Dickens’s affinity to the
Bildungsroman is at its weakest when it comes to the more philosophical undercurrent of the deliberate, purer examples of this type. Unlike
Bulwer or Disraeli, Dickens does not focus solely on his protagonists’ inner formation in response to their environment and
personal crises. In a letter to Lewes, a writer with considerable knowledge of Goethe and German literature, Dickens analyses
Ranthorpe (1847), giving a useful insight into his interpretation of a more typical formational novel: ‘It occurred to me here and
there, in the perusal, that the characters were, sometimes, not sufficiently distinct from each other, and that instead of
your being metaphysical for them, they are a little too metaphysical for themselves.’
8 Praising Lewes for the novel’s practical ambition to teach his fellow writers ‘the honour and worth of their pursuit’, Dickens
shows a distinct lack of interest in the philosophical, theoretical approach of the novel. Because he does not feel bound
to the German conventions and concept of
Bildung that feature in Lewes’s novel, he is able to follow his usual interest in other characters and an expansive plot, especially
in
David Copperfield, creating novels in which the experiences of other characters are just as relevant as those of the protagonists. Dickens
did so almost instinctively, not only because he lacked a deeper philosophical understanding but because his concept and purpose
for the novels had many different facets, not one guiding principle.
When Dickens did borrow from the
Bildungsroman, he did so with considerable purpose. Take, for example, the ‘continuous trial-and-error development of the protagonist’s
natural gifts’ in
David Copperfield:
9 it could be argued that a novel as abundant in trial and error as
Tom Jones could have been Dickens’s model. However, Dickens displays a much greater, more mature depth in his portrayal of David. The
protagonist not only learns from his mistakes, he emerges a better man who has mastered life. As David puts it:
The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed,
if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted
feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating
him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried
to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to
completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that
any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and
hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. (ch. 42)
This reflection includes some of the crucial practical aspects of Bildung – natural gift, earnest activity, improved ability and fulfilment – and also emphasises Dickens’s didactic message to his
readership. David’s story is one of trial and error, whether in his household arrangements, choice of profession or even his
marriage, and he concedes that ‘there was nothing for it, but to turn back and begin all over again. It was very hard, but
I turned back, though with a heavy heart, and began laboriously and methodically to plod over the same tedious ground at a
snail’s pace’ (ch. 38). It is through the choices he makes and his wish ‘to get a better understanding of myself and be a
better man’ (ch. 58) that David eventually reaches fulfilment: ‘I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’
(ch. 63).
Great Expectations is a novel in which Dickens’s narrative lens takes a wider view of society in comparison to the more personal, domestic outlook
of
David Copperfield. Taking the ‘release from bondage to false ideals’
10 as a goal of formation, Pip’s story assumes not a weakness of a single character, but a systemic corruption of society that
affects the protagonist, who pursues fulfilment through self-cultivation but adopts a twisted course of action to achieve
his social ambitions. What has been seen as Pip’s snobbery and aspiration for worldly success is, as Robin Gilmour has argued,
a negative variant of the Victorian belief in self-culture and progress. If individual refinement and character rather than
wealth and success were at the centre of Samuel Smiles’s moral vision in his seminal book on
Self-Help, then Dickens presents a more ambivalent social vision in
Great Expectations, showing how Pip’s ‘admirable ambition to improve himself gets caught up in social and sexual fantasies’.
11
What Dickens achieves is a brilliant portrayal of a young man who is not only willing to be formed but to be transformed.
Pip takes deliberate and formal steps towards his self-improvement, but he does so in pursuit of false ideals and in betrayal
of his true character. Thus, while Pip believes that his education will enable him to realise his ambitions, his actual formation
comes through the realisation and acknowledgement of
his errors and delusions about his own character. At the end of the novel he concedes his own fallacies: ‘I often wondered
how I had conceived that old idea of his [Herbert’s] inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps
the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me’ (ch. 58). In this sense,
Great Expectations is a typical
Bildungsroman; yet it offers a wider critique of society by showing that self-improvement is not a means to achieve the social status of
a gentleman, but rather to gain gentility of the mind and character. Dickens ‘put us into a world more sympathetic to the
idea of self-culture than ours, where the dream of “great expectations” … had its positive side too’.
12 Set against the context of Victorian belief in the progress and refinement of civilisation, the novel gives an ambivalent
view of personal development but ultimately produces an affirmative attitude towards life.
Dickens was not interested in the philosophical potential of the novel of formation, although he was certainly drawn to the
expressive and confessional tone of the genre. Driven by his need to align his own secret experience with a universal human
confrontation between the individual and the world, he found in the
Bildungsroman new conventions and ideas that enabled him to write about his own past. In
David Copperfield and
Great Expectations he created outlets for his own artistic and didactic vision as well as his personal anxieties. Haunted by the ghosts of the
past, his fictional alter egos overcome their crises, following the virtuous path of Victorian self-improvement and earnestness
to happiness. Dickens confirms and legitimises his own life story through his fiction by allowing his heroes to grow to become
complete and fulfilled. He was able to combine elements of his beloved childhood stories with layers of the more modern principles
of improvement and affirmation. Thus, Franco Moretti’s belief that the English
Bildungsroman resembles the fairy tale seems particularly appropriate in relation to Dickens, who needed an outrageously positive view
of life in which the individual can emerge triumphant from its vicissitudes.
13 He had to believe in this because only a fairy tale could potentially transform his own life into a happy ending in which
he was not only wealthy and famous but also, like David and Pip, content.