by F. R. Leavis
‘What lay are you upon?’ asked the tinker. ‘Are you a prig?’
‘N-no,’ I said.
‘Ain’t you, by G—? If you make a brag of your honesty to me,’ said the tinker, ‘I’ll knock your brains out.’
Even when he arrives at Dover the ordinary decent people torment instead of assisting him when he asks to be directed to his aunt’s house. Arrived there, his old clothes burnt and himself newly bathed, he lies motionless on the sofa and is then swaddled like a new-born babe in a suggestive representation of re-birth. He is indeed reborn, as Trotwood Copperfield, with a new pair of guardians as parents, Miss Trotwood representing inflexible rationality and Mr Dick, who lets David help him fly his home-made kites up into the skies, bearing his mind with them ‘out of its confusion. As he wound the string in, and it came lower and lower down out of the beautiful light, until it fluttered to the ground, and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed to wake gradually out of a dream; and I remember to have seen him take it up, and look about him in a lost way, as if they had both come down together.’ We don’t need any more direct hint that Mr Dick, whose sensitive feelings are not emanations from Reason, represents the supplementary fostering to Miss Trotwood’s common sense that Dickens believed essential to a healthy childhood – play, fantasy and poetic imagination; Mr Dick moreover lives intuitively by a better sense than common and, as Miss Trotwood liked to say with unconscious double meaning: ‘Mr Dick sets us all right’. The kite-flier relates to the novelist in more than name. There is a Blake-like feeling and intention about all this part of David’s history which shows also Dickens’s inexhaustible originality of inventiveness, since though quite different it relates to Walter Gay’s imaginative fostering in the home of the scientific instrument-dealer Sol Gills, who is supplemented by the simple-minded Captain Cuttle, unlearned like Old Glubb except in knowing the mysterious lore of the oceans which reason cannot compass.
Then can the Murdstones really be said, as they have been, to belong to a fairy-tale – are they ogre and Baba Yaga and defeated magically by Miss Betsey, an all-powerful fairy godmother? Surely this is a preposterous falsification. The facts are that the Murdstones, who go on existing throughout the book and are last seen doing very nicely in their own line, are merely discomfited in an impressively novelistic scene whose social drama is founded on psychological truth to life. We note that in it the elements of comedy – the boy David trussed up like a baby in shawls and Mr Dick’s trousers, and hemmed in by chairs, Mr Dick having to be kept up to company behaviour by Miss Trotwood’s awful eye, the ever-present anticipation of donkey-boys intruding again on the sacred green – keep under control the painful elements, notably David’s agonized fear that he will be delivered up to the Murdstones and the warehouse, Miss Trotwood’s own horror at the fate, only recently made known to her by David, of Poor Baby and at David’s experiences (horror that is heightened by some remorse at having abandoned Clara and David), and the sense we have conveyed to us that Mr Murdstone, unlike his sister, has enough feeling to have a bad conscience and to be made to wince at unpleasant memories (‘he seemed to breathe as if he had been running, though still with a smile on his face’). The duel that develops between Miss Trotwood and Mr Murdstone is not lessened in seriousness by Miss Murdstone’s ‘perfect agony at not being able to turn the current’ of Miss Trotwood’s address towards herself, but this is one further indication of the novelist’s full consciousness of the living nature of the material he works in, material that he is shaping with the responsibility of a great artist possessed by a theme he must develop.
Another denial of Dickens’s functioning as an artist in composing David Copperfield is represented by the amateur psychologizing of the school of Edmund Wilson. His wild travesties of Dickens’s novels and character in his crudely journalistic essay called ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’, has been one of the disastrous obstacles to getting Dickens’s novels read responsibly ever since; (his characterization of Dickens’s creative achievement as ‘the eternal masquerade of his fiction’ has been expanded by Garis into a theory that virtually relegates Dickens’s work as a whole). Thus it is asserted that Miss Murdstone was invented ‘to bear the weight of the childish resentment Dickens undoubtedly felt against his own mother’, though Dickens himself saw his mother as Mrs Nickleby (and was amused at her not being able to believe in such a woman) who is so like Mrs Micawber in her mental processes and other respects that we should be justified in claiming that it is Mrs Micawber who was created out of his feelings about his mother when she was actually in Mrs Micawber’s circumstances. Wherever we can check Dickens’s use as fictional characters of people who impinged on him in real life, even in his most painful phase, we have, it seems to me, to give him the credit of being an artist, a free creator, and not a victim of blind drives of passion he can neither control nor even recognize, as this line of critics assume.
Forster’s account of the relation between the autobiographical fragment and the novel David Copperfield corresponds much more convincingly to the account of the novel which, as I’ve suggested, a sensitive and unprejudiced reader finds himself to have in his possession after reading the book. He claims that the autobiographical manuscript and the conversations he had with Dickens about it ‘enable me to separate the fact from the fiction’ of David Copperfield; he concluded that Dickens had started to write an account of the blacking-factory period of his childhood but gave it up when the novel ‘began to take shape in his mind’ because ‘Those warehouse experiences fell then so aptly into the subject he had chosen, that he could not resist the temptation of immediately using them.’ Dickens had already used other appropriate parts of his memories of this period of his childhood in his novels, with the firm objectivity of the creative mind in control of its material: Mrs Pipchin and her home in which little Paul Dombey lodged Dickens said was drawn from ‘a reduced old lady who took children in to board, and had once done so at Brighton and who, with a few alterations and embellishments, unconsciously began to sit for Mrs Pipchin in Dombey when she took in me’, at the time John Dickens went to prison for debt. David was no more Dickens than was Paul Dombey, and Miss Murdstone no more a creation to bear his resentment against his mother than was Mrs Pipchin. After a while the boy Charles Dickens was transferred to a back-attic in the home of a kind family who were the originals for the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop, and Forster also tells us that the orphan servant-girl who was employed by the Dickens family in their Micawber phase was translated into the Marchioness in the same novel. All these characters have their roots equally in this unhappy period of his boyhood, yet they bear witness to an effortless impersonality – and so, it seems to me, does his use of his amatory experiences (where Maria Beadnell and Catherine Hogarth amalgamate to provide the essence of a Dora). There is, equally, no question of Dickens having undertaken David Copperfield to excuse himself or deceive the reading public as to his history, as some critics have amiably alleged; nor was it a piece of self-therapy. Dickens, it seems to me, gave up the idea of writing an autobiography, whether for publication or his own use, because he was a novelist and had a more satisfactory way of telling the truth (the essential truth) about his experience of life (he knew that what mattered in it was what was representative). He follows Coleridge’s rule instinctively, that there should be a wide difference between his own circumstances and that of his subject, and David, the typical boy-child in his relation to a mother, is the very opposite in this respect to Charles Dickens. Since, as I have said, it is Mrs Micawber who has a good deal in common with Mrs Nickleby, it is more likely that she is the figure in David Copperfield to whom he transferred his feelings about his mother in boyhood – one notices that in her multiple troubles poor Mrs Micawber forgot David was a boy and took him into her confidence as an adult, but that at parting ‘a mist cleared from her eyes and … with quite a new and motherly expression in her face, put her arm round my neck and gave me just such a kiss as she might have given to her own boy.’ T
here is a touching truth to life but no sentimentality here.
In fact, any reader of Dickens who has comprehended the way his creative thinking develops, will have noted that the Murdstones represent forces both religious and psychological, which were powerful in his society and by which his parents were untouched – the will to dominate, justified as religious righteousness, and the Evangelical and Methodist animus against the nature of childhood, together with the Puritan acquisitiveness; Dickens had already realized that these were the enemies of life as he valued it, and they coalesce and culminate in Mrs Clennam, the doom-maker of Little Dorrit, who combines in herself both Mr and Miss Murdstone. But whereas David the orphan had escaped from these forces, Arthur Clennam did not but was crushed by the Murdstone-type upbringing of his step-mother, with her gloomy religion, her sense of guilt, and her fear of love and art; in this respect Dickens evidently became less and less hopeful about the progress of the Victorian Age.
V
David Copperfield differs from Oliver Twist and Dombey, from both of which it follows on, in carrying the child who, in the case of Oliver and little Paul, is a victim merely, into a boy who is ultimately successful in conflict with the world. The innovation of the autobiographical method meant that a domestic and not directly satiric tone was required; it also demanded more subtlety of narration which allows the reader both to identify with the narrator for the most part and yet see that he is to be viewed in a way he can’t of course see or understand himself. And as Dickens is not now, as in Oliver Twist or Dombey, indicting his culture but only questioning it, irony and satire are not suitable techniques. One of the less obvious advantages of the autobiographical medium is that seeing David’s past from his present height of achieved happiness allows him to make out a pattern in it and show us the relatedness of events, as well as to recreate in all their poignancy his feelings at any given time. Thus the follow-through from his mother’s two marriages to his own first and second marriages is divided into smaller units, from his own birth to his own virtual death as the babe in her arms in the coffin, then his fresh start in another character as the warehouse boy with the Micawbers in London, which itself ends with his reception into his great-aunt’s home and is the beginning of his adolescence (not the real end of the novel, as John Bayley seemed to think when he declared that ‘the novel David Copperfield really finishes at this point; all the rest is another novel’); after, in his new existence as ‘Trotwood’, he has gone through the cycle of marriage to Dora which ends with her death and Steerforth’s, there follows yet another phase, of wandering through Europe to live out his mistakes, which brings him back to Agnes and the due culmination of the whole novel when, with Agnes in his arms, he looks up at the moon (‘Peaceful! Ain’t she!’ Uriah had said, identifying the unattainable moon with ‘his’ Agnes) and the miraculous nature of David’s life comes home to him:
Long miles of road then opened out before my mind; and toiling on, I saw a ragged way-worn boy forsaken and neglected, who should come to call even the heart now beating against mine, his own.
Life has consisted of fresh starts, but each phase is penetrated by characters from his pasts or related to the others by parallels in incident. Dickens wrote ‘Trotwood Copperfield’ underlined, in his Plan for chapter XIV, showing he mean the new name to be significant. But Dr Strong’s school replaces Mr Creakle’s, and Mr Micawber and Traddles come back into his life – it is now Traddles who lodges with the Micawbers, who is confided in and is the innocent victimized – and as soon as David starts out from Dover to find his feet Steerforth turns up in the old relation to him. Steerforth’s ruining Mr Mell in wanton cruelty, in the former phase, forecasts his heartless ruining of Little Em’ly in the later one; Mr Murdstone’s manœuvring to exercise power over David’s mother and David is replaced by Uriah’s machinations to secure Agnes and crush David, and so on. David himself notices this effect and stresses the cyclical nature of life when having been to Covent Garden Theatre he says: ‘it was in a manner, like a shining transparency, through which I saw my earlier life moving along’ – though what he had been seeing was ‘Julius Caesar and the new Pantomime’ and the particular relevance of this is obscure until he runs into Steerforth again in consequence.
A final evidence of the careful thinking-out of the ideas incarnated and the human truths explored in David Copperfield is that in chapter LVIII when David has gone abroad to recover from the two blows he has suffered – the loss of Dora his child-wife and the loss of Steerforth his father-friend – he realizes that the two blows are but one ‘wound’ with which he has to ‘strive’: they’re inextricably associated not only because they are the loss of first love and first friendship, but that he now faces the fact that he was misguided in both. The sequel, a Childe Harold wandering through Europe and a Wordsworthian healing at the hand of Great Nature, is only a prolonged cliché. David has really to come to terms with his two disillusions, which he apparently does by writing a story about them; a neat way of reminding us that David is a novelist, for, as Dickens knew, this is what novelists do. The return to the England of Gray’s Inn in the character of the old David is quite refreshing, his reunion with the real friend, Traddles, and the right wife, Agnes, round off the theme.
Yet except in the obviously moralistic episodes there is no obtrusive schematic intention. Dickens’s creativeness did not work at the level of full consciousness that Henry James or Conrad show in their letters and introductions (though I shall not be at all surprised if the complete edition of Dickens’s letters gives us plenty of interesting insights into his methods of composition). The notes we have of his plans for numbers of Copperfield look like random jottings until, having read the novel as a whole in the way I have suggested, we can see that most of them are keys to his profounder meanings – ‘Why Rookery’, ‘Brooks of Sheffield’ and such were shorthand notes to keep himself in touch with his themes, though no doubt he could not have written, or even provided the material for, an essay on his art and craft as a novelist. I have elsewhere47 cited as an example of the way the creative mind works Charlotte Brontë’s indecisions about the name of her heroine in Villette. After naming her Lucy Snowe she changed the name to Frost, but subsequently wrote to her publisher to change it back, saying ‘As to the name of the heroine, I can hardly express what subtlety of thought made me decide upon giving her a cold name, but a cold name she must have.’ The conscious choice was between hard and soft cold (frost and snow) but the feeling of rightness in the necessity of a cold name was spontaneous and never analysed. The Freudian puns I have noted below in the choice of names like Dora and Doady and Murdstone were not fully conscious either, I imagine, but they are only slighter signs of the wonderful genius that produced the end of chapter IX.
Do we feel that the actual writing of David Copperfield is less interesting than the prose of Dombey? There is here nothing comparable to the wonderful passage of time passing in the desolate Dombey home, or the description of the broker’s warehouse, or of the flow of the populace from the country into the city registered in the consciousness of Harriet Carker; nor scenes so fertile in satiric purpose as Mr Dombey’s second wedding or little Paul’s chirstening or the scene in Warwick Castle among the pictures, not even in the poignant episodes in David’s childhood is there any so strangely moving as Paul’s introduction into Dr Blimber’s establishment. Even the death-bed scene of Clara is inferior in imaginative impact to those of Paul or Paul’s mother. But granted that David Copperfield doesn’t offer us the richly impressive rewards of Dombey, there is, I claim, a verbal interest in the later novel that shows Dickens’s Shakespearian use of the language. Dickens is a master of words because they are more than mere words to him, they are feelings and associations and dark implications. For instance, the conflicting relations of Rosa Dartle and Steerforth tell us more about Steerforth than they do about her, and that Dickens meant this is seen in another insight into Steerforth’s attitude to others shown when David tells Steerforth, who has d
ropped in on him in London, that Traddles has been there:
‘Oh! That fellow!’ said Steerforth, beating a lump of coal on the top of the fire, with the poker. ‘Is he as soft as ever? And where the deuce did you pick him up?’
David is just sensitive enough to feel from this that ‘Steerforth rather slighted’ Traddles, but we recognize something more in the brutal ‘beating’ of the lump of coal with the poker to break it up and the accompanying description of Traddles as ‘soft’ (easily broken, and only fuel for his fire to Steerforth), together with the characteristic of Steerforth’s in behaving in David’s room as though it were his own, in managing the fire – we have conveyed to us, without having to analyse or intellectualize it, the selfish and arrogant and even cruel traits in Steerforth, such as his ready contempt of others, that point to his subsequent brutal treatment of Emily. We see Dickens evolving this habit of making symbolic actions convey character-traits yet which are so natural that we hardly notice the symbolism, though it affects us as much more meaningful somehow than an ordinary action. A similar but distinct example is when Henry Gowan, a stranger watched from behind by Arthur Clennam, is seen to be idly tossing stones into the water with his foot. ‘There was something in his way of spurning them out of their places with his heel, and getting them into the required position, that Clennam thought had an air of cruelty in it.’ In due course Clennam is ‘heeled’ like a stone out of Gowan’s path in their rivalry for Pet, cruelly, insolently and effectively. This loading of words is sometimes really witty in David Copperfield and reveals Dickens’s understanding of how the mind works by associations it could not consciously explain. As in the sequence when Miss Trotwood discusses with David Emily’s folly in eloping with Steerforth, ending: ‘“I am sorry for your early experience”’ (she had therefore sensed he had been in love with Emily as a child) and immediately continues: ‘“And so you fancy yourself in love! Do you?” “Fancy, aunt!” I exclaimed, as red as I could be. “I adore her with my whole soul!” “Dora, indeed!” returned my aunt’ – thus making the typicality of Dora’s name for the novel’s purpose apparent, and apparent at the same time that Miss Trotwood has deduced she will be another Little Em’ly. So Miss Trotwood adds that ‘“the little thing is very fascinating, I suppose?” “And not silly?” said my aunt. “Silly, aunt!” “Not lightheaded?” said my aunt.’ David says he was struck with these ideas as both new and absurd to him, but we see, without being told, that Miss Trotwood, who then mentions his likeness to his mother (‘poor Baby’) has realized that he is bound to fall in love with someone like his mother and that this will be a misfortune for him. She suggests that what his mother’s child ought to look for is ‘earnestness “to sustain and improve him,’” hinting delicately at Agnes of course, but without effect. Earnestness, the Victorian model virtue, was not what David wanted even if he needed it in an object for love. We pick up this train of thought again during the engagement, notably when David has begun to notice uneasily that everyone treats Dora as a child and that she expects to be petted. He suggests she ‘might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally’, but rightly sensing this is dissatisfaction with her as she is, she begins to sob.