by F. R. Leavis
Forster is correct, but the key to all this has escaped his notice, since he was deaf and blind to Dickens’s art,13 though invaluable in the insights he gives us into Dickens the man. We ought to reflect that D. C. could not possibly have written C. D.’s novels, even if some of Charles Dickens’s experiences were made use of – in the usual manner of writers – in the history of his hero, though apart from the episode in boyhood in the wine-business and London low life, David Copperfield does not get mixed up in Dickens’s own history. The other parts of Dickens’s feelings and adventures drawn on are there, deliberately chosen, because they are typical, such as his adolescent love-affair with Maria Beadnell. Whoever David is, he isn’t his author, and very obviously less so even than Levin is Tolstoy. David incarnates the kind of youth the age demanded – sensitive, modest, upright, affectionate, but also resourcefully industrious and successful in rising in the world. Now whatever Dickens was he was not a Daisy, and his habit of referring to himself as ‘The Inimitable’ does not sound at all like David either. While Dickens was a colourful personality David is colourless and intentionally uninteresting in himself – only a type. I doubt if Dickens admired David as unreservedly as his public did, or endorsed him fully as writers even now assume – David is necessarily sensitive and lacking in guile, the evidence for this exists in the text of the novel itself, but I will return to this later – just as Pip is later explicitly constructed to be ‘morally timid and very sensitive’, both being shown to be the product of childhood conditioning and therefore, for the purposes of each novel, typically significant. As also is Little Dorrit’s Arthur Clennam, though a fully human and characterized exponent of a Victorian disease, however, being in a novel of a different kind from Oliver Twist, David Copperfield or Great Expectations. We can therefore dismiss the kind of charge of dishonesty now brought against Dickens, represented characteristically by Cockshut’s assertion that Dickens wrote David Copperfield in order to present his past and himself in a favourable light – ‘the self-criticism has no sting’. Not only is David’s life not Dickens’s past, but even though, as Forster noted, the young male reader of his time naturally identified himself with David, there is no compulsion to identify with him uncritically as there is, for instance, for the reader of Jane Eyre to do so with the heroine. In fact, those critics who do identify C. D. with D. C. and complain that Dickens didn’t realize that David was stupid not to see through Dora, or reprehensible not to blame himself, merely expose their inability to read what Dickens has offered them. Dickens had started to write his autobiography, it is true, and abandoned the project when he decided to write the novel instead; but this must have been because he did want to examine impersonally the experience of growing up in the first half of the 19th century, with the problems that a young man of that generation incurred, an examination needing the kind of objectivity that inheres in the novelist’s art, but still one best exposed through the autobiographical form. [David Copperfield was his first novel in this form and it is interesting that in his next novel, Bleak House, he decided to combine the advantages of the fictional autobiography with the freer possibilities available to the writer of narrative, so that this novel is divided into halves technically, with alternations of each form sandwiched together. Whatever advantage he found in this, it was presumably not successful enough to be worth repeating, and when he needed a first-person narrative again, he re-read David Copperfield, as we know, before writing Great Expectations in the Copperfield form.] David’s relation to Charles Dickens is even less close than Levin’s to Tolstoy – who is Tolstoy not only without the genius but without being Vronsky either (as Tolstoy was or had been). What Tolstoy evidently saw in David Copperfield was that real issues were raised in it that were not personal to Dickens.
The questions Dickens was asking himself more or less consciously before writing David Copperfield must have been similar to and often identical with those we can see Tolstoy, alerted to them by Dickens, asking himself in the Peace sections of War and Peace; Tolstoy’s fiction is formed to state and explore these questions by dramatizing them, and we may well ask whether Tolstoy’s answers would have been worked out on Dickensian lines, or even if he would have been conscious of such questions, if he had not come on Dickens’s novel in his wild youth. Yet Dickens’s questions arise from a painful if not yet bitter feeling (as later in Great Expectations) that a young man is misled by taking the new Victorian pilgrim’s path to the Promised Land. David’s history is a model one in that buoyant era which believed or held that every man had the prospect of achieving comfort and respectability, even riches and distinction, at any rate happiness, if he would choose the path of thrift, austerity, perseverance in hard work, and self-improvement. This David does, and he accepts the reward that his society had given him to understand would then make him happy: domestic bliss which would be guaranteed by marriage with the incarnation of a feminine ideal he had been conditioned to accept as lovable. Dickens had done so too, and evidently had now reached the point of asking himself: Why then am I not contented? If society is right, what went wrong? Or was it the wrong prescription? What should it have been? These questions are explored through the history of David Copperfield, but there is no such uncontrollable passionate identification of the author with the protagonist as we resent at times in Jane Eyre or find embarrassing in The Mill on the Floss, for not being David, Dickens is not concerned to make a hero of him.
The theme is preluded before David’s birth, in his mother’s typical marriage. Clara Copperfield is the girl-wife whom her son registers as the ideal woman because, fatherless, and isolated with her in a male infant’s paradise of having his mother entirely to himself, turned in on her, surrounded with love and tenderness till a suitor appears, he inevitably associates love of woman with her personally, with her curls, gaiety, vanity, her pettishness even, and extreme youthfulness. These were in fact generally considered winning feminine characteristics then, though David as an uncritical child sees them ideally without recognizing his mother’s weaknesses, of course. Dickens’s note for Clara in the original plan for the first number14 was ‘Young mother – tendency to weakness and vanity’; the phrase ‘Brooks of Sheffield’ also occurs there, showing that Dickens intended David’s innocence to be exploited from the start, thus launching the two themes together15. This innocence is shown to be the result of David’s sheltered life among women combined with his need for affection. The innocent trustfulness which makes him ridiculous so often as well as unhappy in the event is inherited, we must note. In the opening chapter, before David’s birth, Miss Trotwood extracts from Mrs Copperfield the admission that the house was called The Rookery by David’s father (of the same name) under a mistake. ‘“David Copperfield all over!” cried Miss Betsey. “David Copperfield from head to foot! Calls a house a rookery when there’s not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust, because he sees the nests!”’ This striking and suggestive generalization applies to both Davids and is to alert us to later events. Dickens wrote Why Rookery and underlined it in his plan for chapter I, showing the significance he attached to the point. We have this heritage revived for us when David’s reception into Miss Betsey’s home is marked by constant references to ‘David’s son’ and ‘David’s son David’. The mistakes David makes, we are to understand then, are inherent in the upbringing and heredity of such a child; the cloistered infancy is virtually repeated in his second existence as the sheltered schoolboy fostered by Miss Trotwood and Agnes and the guileless Dr Strong, though a different kind of idealism is provided by them. Miss Trotwood and Agnes are very different and – to us – superior to his mother, but how can they supplant her in his imagination since her early death in peculiarly painful circumstances has stamped her image on his memory as she was before a stepfather came between them? (Owing to whose advent, he remembers, he was turned out of his mother’s room where he had slept in a closet – whether the stepfather was actually ‘a Murderer’ or not he would of course have seemed one to the
child as murderer of his happiness, in coming between him and his mother.)
The woman who fulfils the maternal function in practice for David, his real mother, is also a Clara, and David tells us that he loved her (Clara Peggotty) equally but in a different way from his mother; he loved her because he recognized that she loved him truly (unselfishly) and was indispensable – he says he could never have borne to lose her (though he bore the loss of the other Clara). It is evident that for his purpose of examining the role of woman Dickens has split the dual nature of it into separate identities, the two Claras.
The Plan for chapter IX that Dickens made says: ‘close with the idea of his mother as she was, with him as he was, in her arms’ – surely the most striking proof of the seriousness of Dickens’s commitment to this novel as an impersonal work of art. It is impossible to imagine this major theme – the relation of mother and son – handled with more delicacy, insight and firm control in its understanding of the dilemma involved. The idea is psychologically true in conception and richly and interestingly rendered. Underlying it is Dickens’s strikingly intelligent apprehension of the need for both romantic tenderness and devoted services to sustain the male ego in its struggle with the conditions of living in such a world as the Dickens world, in a competitive society; and the impossibility of combining these qualities in a single personality. The emotional complexity of David’s situation as the boy-child who, as a posthumous son, had been from birth in sole possession of his mother, until her remarriage banished him from her, is made tolerable for him when, returning from school, he finds his mother with a new baby boy at her breast and instead of feeling jealous identifies with him because of his overwhelming desire to be that babe again. David has first heard Clara’s voice singing in the tone he remembered from his infancy before he saw the baby, and this predisposes him to the identification, of course, though we are left to deduce this16 for ourselves. The accompanying illustration (and we know Dickens kept a tight hand on his illustrators, often specifying the illustration or criticizing the drawing to get it right) shows a worn-looking Clara suckling the infant with David opening the parlour door; on his face is a curious mixture of surprise and perplexity, over the head of the nursing mother is a portrait of her as the girlish mother of his earliest memories, flanked by two Biblical pictures chosen in the Hogarth tradition for the symbolic nature, of their content: they are the infant Moses being taken from the bulrushes, and the Prodigal Son being embraced by his father again. The lovely idyll of the evening David then spends, encircled in the love of the two Claras, is completed when he returns next time from school to his mother’s funeral and hears Peggotty’s account of her ‘sweet girl’s’ pining and death-bed; it has the effect of wiping out the intervening period for David, and establishing forever their old relation of being all in all to each other and of Clara as eternally girlish, for Peggotty had mothered them both, and this I conclude is why Dickens forbore to have a direct death-bed scene, witnessed by David:
From the moment of my knowledge of the death of my mother, the idea of her as she had been of late vanished from me. I remembered her, from that instant, only as the young mother of my earliest impressions, who had been used to wind her bright curls round and round her finger, and to dance with me at twilight in the parlour. What Peggotty had told me now, was so far from bringing me back to the later period, that it rooted the earlier image in my mind. It may be curious, but it is true. In her death she winged her way back to her calm untroubled youth, and cancelled all the rest.
The mother who lay in her grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.
There is nothing finer in Tolstoy’s novels, and it is ‘Tolstoyan’ before Tolstoy. The whole conception and treatment is perfectly free from sentimentality. It is a supreme example of Dickens’s ‘feeling the story in its minutest point’, as he truly said, for it is an insight which can owe nothing to Dickens’s personal experience. It is the understanding of the way we deal with the deepest human feelings which only a great genius could arrive at, and it is made the basis and starting-point of a typical male history in that age. Dickens was as far as possible from having a Freudian attachment to his mother. But – a proof of genius – he had observed that the other was the more usual condition of man, and had pondered, and worked out, its implications. This passage presages David’s escape from a second phase of misery in order to find a substitute home and mother, which he does at Dover with his great-aunt, where he is reborn as Trotwood, goes to school all over again, is launched into the world of London on his own a second time, where he – in a dreamlike or Alice-in-Wonderland world – strays into the previous dimension inhabited by the figures of his previous state – Steerforth, Micawber, Traddles, the boat household at Yarmouth, and meets the double of his mother, Dora. Dora is naturally to repeat his mother’s history, in fading away for the same reason. Dickens’s original idea seems to have been to keep Dora alive, but it was a sound instinct that made him, however reluctantly, (and only deciding at the last possible instalment) kill off Dora (as he put it) – not, as has been alleged by those who do not grasp the theme and structure of the novel, because he wanted the spurious pathos of a death-bed scene.
That David’s love of his mother is the love of Woman, and that he is always looking for her image, a pettish, wilful, childish, loving playmate, is shown as the pattern of his emotional life. He has first encountered in childhood Little Em’ly, whom he was thrown with both at the time of first being separated from his mother and again when he is desolate after her funeral. These two episodes give prominence to this part of the theme and indicate its nature very delicately. David is impressed by Emily’s being loving, tender-hearted, spoiled, pretty and gay, she even has the necessary curls (characterized as running over her uncle’s hand like water) so that David goes to sleep praying that he ‘might grow up to marry little Em’ly’. Emily also prefigures Dora (and echoes his mother whose manner he had recognized – but only after her remarriage – as ‘pettish and wilful’) in her response to David’s juvenile courtship, calling him ‘a silly boy’ as she ‘laughed so charmingly’, in fact she has all the marks by which he recognizes the feminine character. He then thinks of their marriage as one where they would ‘never grow older, never grow wiser, [be] children ever’ etc. Growing older and wiser is associated with the Murdstones’ programme of educating Clara which was to denature her. When David meets Agnes he notices at once that what characterizes her is that though a child she is her father’s housekeeper with the household keys at her side. The charge of the housekeeping keys was an issue between David’s mother and Miss Murdstone, marking the victory of the latter. This therefore becomes a symbol for David, and is picked up in Dora’s case when her response to David’s request to her to take charge of the household is to ‘tie the key-basket to her slender waist’ but use the keys only ‘as a plaything for Jip. She was quite satisfied that a good deal was effected by this mode of make-belief of housekeeping’. David identifies Agnes with her dead mother’s portrait, as Agnes’s father does – she is to both of them not a child but a little woman. Agnes isn’t gay and girlish but calm, staid and responsible, so David realizes that: ‘I love little Em’ly, and I don’t love Agnes – no, not at all in that way’, so she can be only loved as a sister. Maturity in a woman is chilling to him.
Of course this was a typical Victorian dilemma, and at the centre of Dickens’s theme as he understands it. Idealizing immaturity stabilized it and inhibited maturity in women, but this was not the product of a morbid or irrational desire in the man since the qualities that Dickens shows as being associated with feminine immaturity of the Clara-Em’ly-Dora kind represented a real emotional need for men living in the world that the 19th century became. (George Eliot’s observation, that the serious, intellectual Dorothea Brooke was unnattractive to the average man in her social sphere, who recognized the ‘infantile fairness’ of Rosamund Vincy as being
the right idea in a woman, conveys the contempt of a superior woman for the weakness of the male of her time.) Of course the dilemma was that the qualities needed in a satisfactory wife (as efficient household manager and mother) were of a conflicting kind with the other need. Dickens made two attempts to resolve this dilemma, in his creative experiments. The first was with Mrs Peerybingle in The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), the gay young wife of a much older and very staid man; her name is Mary but her husband calls her Dot, she has a baby and is represented as the goddess of the hearth, where the chirping cricket typifies the spirit of Home, but she combines the housewife’s virtues with girlish disclaimers of efficiency, calling herself ‘little woman’ and ‘your foolish little wife’ like Dora, and ultimately explaining to her husband: ‘And when I speak of people being middle-aged, and steady, John, and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot sort of way, it’s only because I’m such a silly little thing, John, that I like, sometimes, to act a kind of Play with Baby, and all that: and make believe.’ In short, maturity is only tolerable if disguised as a children’s game. The other attempt came at the end of Dickens’s work, showing that he never got much beyond this point in his thinking. Bella Wilfer, the heroine of Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel, is a resolute effort on the novelist’s part to take a winning type of girl into womanhood by the disciplines of misfortune, good fortune, a sacrifice of her prospects by a marriage to a poor man, and motherhood. Bella, for all her curls, coquettry, follies and charms, has capabilities beyond those of a ‘little woman’, and indeed aspires to be something more. In her own words, ‘I want to be something so much worthier than the doll in the doll’s house.’ This is promising, but once married she is described in exactly those terms, playing at housekeeping in a fascinating way and, when she has a baby, ‘acting a kind of Play with Baby’ just like Dot Peerybingle, having rehearsed for it with her father beforehand; afterwards, so that we shall be under no misconception, her father ‘justly remarked to her husband that the baby seemed to make her younger than before, reminding him of the days when she had a pet doll and used to talk to it as she carried it about’. Bella (a name in the Clara–Dora tradition of course) is shown using the baby Bella as a toy and as an instrument for flirting with her husband in an embarrassing way. By this time Dickens had had ten children and must have known that a baby is no joke. The obstinate unreality of his image of a charming wife, from Dot and Dora to Bella, would of itself suggest that he would be unlikely to achieve marital happiness in the form of husband to the mother of many children.