David Copperfield

by Charles Dickens

  "At all events," says Traddles, "if I ever am one----"

  "Why, you know you will be."

  "Well, my dear Copperfield, when I am one, I shall tell the story, as I said I would."

  We walk away, arm-in-arm. I am going to have a family dinner with Traddles. It is Sophy's birthday, and, on our road, Traddles discourses to me of the good fortune he has enjoyed.

  "I really have been able, my dear Copperfield, to do all that I had most at heart. There's the Reverend Horace promoted to that living at four hundred and fifty pounds a year; there are our two boys receiving the very best education, and distinguishing themselves as steady scholars and good fellows; there are three of the girls married very comfortably; there are three more living with us; there are three more keeping house for the Reverend Horace since Mrs. Crewler's decease, and all of them happy."

  "Except----" I suggest.

  "Except the Beauty," says Traddles. "Yes. It was very unfortunate that she should marry such a vagabond. But there was a certain dash and glare about him that caught her. However, now we have got her safe at our house, and got rid of him, we must cheer her up again."

  Traddles's house is one of the very houses--or it easily may have been--which he and Sophy used to parcel out, in their evening walks. It is a large house, but Traddles keeps his papers in his dressing-room, and his boots with his papers, and he and Sophy squeeze themselves into upper rooms, reserving the best bedrooms for the Beauty and the girls. There is no room to spare in the house, for more of "the girls" are here, and always are here, by some accident or other, than I know how to count. Here, when we go in, is a crowd of them, running down to the door, and handing Traddles about to be kissed, until he is out of breath. Here, established in perpetuity, is the poor Beauty, a widow with a little girl; here, at dinner on Sophy's birthday, are the three married girls with their three husbands, and one of the husband's brothers, and another husband's cousin, and another husband's sister, who appears to me to be engaged to the cousin. Traddles, exactly the same simple, unaffected fellow as he ever was, sits at the foot of the large table like a Patriarch, and Sophy beams upon him, from the head, across a cheerful space that is certainly not glittering with Britannia metal.

  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.

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

  THE END

  Afterword

  BORN IN PORTSMOUTH, ENGLAND, IN 1812, CHARLES DICKENS WAS taken out of school at age twelve and sent to work in a relative's "blacking warehouse"--a boot polish factory. Located near the Strand in London, this was dirty, rotting, and swarming with rats, whose "squeaking and scuffling" filled the air. Charles's father, John Dickens, was not a failure, exactly; he had for a long stretch a respectable job in the Naval Pay Office. And as the second of seven children in a boisterous, sociable family, Charles Dickens grew up happy enough, standing on chairs and tables to sing and tell stories to his family. He read avidly; though his parents came of the serving class, he had hopes of becoming educated and distinguished. But no one, perhaps, has ever been more frequently described as "improvident" than his father. Furniture and books had to be pawned--Charles carried his own books to the pawnshop--and around the time that Charles began his employment, John Dickens was clapped into a debtors' prison. (As he left the house, he reportedly said that the sun had set upon him forever.) Most of his family accompanied him; only Charles was left out in the city. Something like Little Dorritt in the later novel of that name, he visited with his family in the early morning and at night. By day, he-reported to the blacking warehouse, where his job was "to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat" before affixing a label. The work went on for twelve hours a day; this went on for over twelve months. Dickens suffered mysterious spasms while on the job, and was once put to rest on a bed of straw, on which he rolled while his coworkers held empty blacking bottles of hot water to his side. Things were hardly better when he was healthy. Because Dickens and his companions worked near a window, for light, they attracted onlookers entertained by their quickness; John Dickens witnessed his son thus displayed at least once. "I wondered," wrote Dickens, years later, in an aborted autobiography, "how he could bear it."1

  So great was Charles's humiliation that he almost never spoke of it as an adult. Indeed, he might never have, but for the serendipity of his friend and future biographer, John Forster, happening to meet, one day, a former colleague and friend of John Dickens's. This man told Forster how he had once given a half crown to Charles, when Charles was working down by the Strand, and how, in thanks, the child gave a bow. When Forster, in turn, relayed this story to the adult Dickens, the latter was quiet for several minutes; he did not allude to the subject again for several weeks. Sometime after that, though, he began an autobiography in which he recorded his experience, including his mother's reluctance to free him from his ordeal once his father's affairs were back in order. "I never shall forget. I never can forget," he wrote, "that my mother was warm for my being sent back." The story of the blacking'warehouse was hardly the only secret he had ever kept; in the autobiography Dickens tells of how, when a friend in the blacking warehouse insisted on escorting him home after his illness, Dickens pretended to be entering a nearby house rather than proceed to his real destination, the prison. Still one senses an especially deep pain to have come with his parents' abandonment: "It is wonderful to me," he wrote, "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that ... no one had compassion enough on me--a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally--to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have, to place me at any common school.... No one made any sign. My mother and father were quite satisfied."

  Out of this trauma, David Copperfield grew. There were other sources, though, too, for this eighth novel. In a letter to Maria Beadnell, a lover who had spurned him, Dickens imagined "that you may have seen in one of my books a faithful reflection of the passion I had for you ... and may have seen in little bits of 'Dora' touches of your own self sometimes." John Dickens, similarly, is reincarnated as Mr. Micawber; even a "stout, hale pudding, heavy and flabby; with great raisins in it" makes the journey from life to book. Yet what is striking, if one looks at the result from an autobiographical perspective, is how autobiographical the novel is not. David Copperfield grows up without a father; Dickens did not. David Copperfield was, until his mother's remarriage, an only child; Dickens was not. David Copperfield has a fairy godmother of an aunt; Dickens did not. David Copperfield has an ever-caring mother--and so on. It is indeed true that Copperfield, like Dickens, becomes first a reporter in Parliament and then, like Dickens, a novelist. (One of my favorite images of the book is that of Dora, David's child wife, helpfully holding his pens.) And we know the book was of personal import to Dickens, who upon its completion wrote to Forster: "If I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel tonight, how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World." Late in his career, too, Dickens famously referred to David Copperfield as his "favorite child" among his books. And yet for all of this,. the novel is very much a novel, written, as Dickens put it, "ingeniously, and with a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction."

  But why so complicated? we may ask. Why be ingenious? Why interweave? Why not, in poet
Robert Lowell's words, say what happened? People have long speculated as to why, not too long before writing David Copperfield, Dickens began the autobiography, but then stopped. Why did he leave off writing once the narrative left the blacking warehouse? Why did he not continue, as he did in the novel, and as Victorian biographies were wont to do, until the childhood privation had led, though application and rectitude, to success? Some have thought the project too painful; Dickens himself wrote to Maria Beadnell that he "did not have the courage" to continue. Others have guessed that it was too harsh in its depictions of his parents. (One of his sons reported that Dickens had shown the manuscript to his wife, who discouraged its publication.) But even if this were true, why should he not have gone on writing for posthumous discovery--a possibility we know he entertained?

  Less often hypothesized is that Dickens abandoned the autobiography because the form was too narrow. At one point he relates how when he visited the prison, "I was always delighted to hear from my mother what she knew about the histories of the different debtors," and goes on to describe in great detail how he sat in the corner that he might witness a petition being read. "Whatever was comical in this scene, and whatever was pathetic, I sincerely believe I perceived in my corner.... I made out my own little character and story for every man who put his name to the sheet of paper." Could an autobiography have accommodated the range of prisoners Dickens appears to have been interested, even in his distressed state, in drawing? It is possible he could have himself identified his preoccupation with murderers and prisoners as central to his psychology, and thereby justified their inclusion. It is more likely, though, that the hedge hoglike form would have seemed to augur, for an imaginative fox like Dickens, curtailment. (Dickens's own favorite characters in the novel, interestingly, were not Copperfield and his family, but the relatively marginal and wholly imagined Peggotty group.)

  It might be reasonable to guess, too, that he quit because the autobiography did not bring out his humor. That is to say, not that he quit because the material was too painful, but because writing it this way did not make it less so. In The Wound and the Bow, critic Edmund Wilson wrote how Dickens's laughter represents "like the laughter of Aristophanes, a real escape from institutions," though in the early works it is "an exhilaration which already shows signs of the hysterical. It leaps free of the prison of life; but gloom and soreness must always drag it back." One may reasonably wonder if for Dickens, the spur to write was closely linked to that desire to leap free of or even to destroy the "prison of life"--to rend rather than be rent. Another critic, John Carey, has noted the characteristic violence of Dickens's work; like Milton, whom William Blake called "of the devil's party without knowing it," Dickens is considerably animated by malevolence and destruction. The villain Uriah Heep, for example, is drawn with an unctuous deliciousness absent from the depiction of the angelic, static Agnes; the rage of the abandoned Rosa Dartle, likewise, crackles and spits in a way Dickens's own abandonment, in his autobiography, does not. The tone of the autobiography is, quite the contrary, matter-of-fact and, at times, defensive. "I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness and difficulties of my life," he writes. And: "I do not write resentfully or angrily." Though possessed of a legendarily formidable memory, Dickens is in several places unable to remember certain details--his salary, for example, and the name of a nearby public house ("The Swan, if I remember right, or the Swan and something else I have forgotten)." Conspicuously absent is the robust confidence of the novel.

  Interestingly, in sitting down to a new project, Dickens intended neither to recast his autobiography, nor to mine his childhood. Rather, David Copperfield began, according to Forster, as an experiment in form. Two years earlier, in 1847, Charlotte Bronte, writing under the pseudonym Currer Bell, had published a book--Jane Eyre: An Autobiography--written in the first-person point of view. Now Forster, possibly influenced by Jane Eyre's success, suggested Dickens try, "by way of change," the first person. Dickens was intrigued, perhaps by the sheer novelty of the idea. One might imagine, though, too, how the pose of a first-person narrator might appeal to a man with a theatrical bent. Would a man as tuned to his audience as Dickens not sense how a famous man writing an apparent autobiography might make for a delicious new kind of performance, at once like and unlike that of the obscure Currer Bell? (And he did love performance; witness not only his many staged readings, but the whole conceit of David Copperfield having been written by Copperfield himself, a personal history--like Dickens's abandoned autobiography--"Which He never meant to be Published on any Account.") Or was it something else altogether that attracted Dickens to first person? Did he simply try it and conclude that it worked--that it made the words come rather than not come? Writing in the first person forces a kind of intimacy; it is more like handwriting a letter, say, than typing an article. Were it not for Forster's suggestion, would Dickens have written so close to home?

  Happily for English literature, in any case, he did--freely interweaving experience and invention, as he has said, but also, more important, drawing on, distilling, and transcending still-live emotions. Many a commentator has noted the vividness of the first part of the book especially, in which Dickens depicts Copperfield's childhood; George Orwell, reading the novel at age nine, thought it written by a child. This was not a far-fetched idea. Dickens immerses us in the way things smell and feel and sound with a preternatural immediacy. Palpable as he makes the paradise that is Blunderstone, though, the wallop of the writing comes with the intrusion of Murdstone into it, and with David's subsequent ejection from Paradise. This we connect, intellectually, with Dickens's own early Fall; we understand it to represent, too, the joyless tyranny of Victorian, respectability. But we experience it as something more, something fairy tale like. It is so like reading our own worst nightmare that it is hard not to think of Freud's fascination with David Copperfield, and his notion that we find certain pieces of art uncannily familiar because they recapitulate fears or experiences we have repressed. Other parts of the novel represent not only a revisiting, but a mastering; we feel in them Dickens's distinctive leaping free, though their complex comedy bears pentimentos of past pain. Mr. Micawber, for example, is portrayed, not with the outright bitterness with which John Dickens is drawn in the autobiography, but with a lightness and relish that belies a persistent quality in his narrative thread. Similarly, while Dickens writes to Forster, "No one can imagine in the most distant degree what pain the recollection [of Maria Beadnell] gave me in Copperfield," Copperfield's marriage to Dora is a live, sweet struggle, so charming that injured assertions such as "I write the exact truth" seem to proceed from nowhere.

  "The exact truth"--now those could be the most comic words Dickens ever wrote. John Ruskin called Dickens "almost as mischievous" as Cervantes, and with reason. What with the constant reminders that this made-up "autobiography" is a thing written and remembered--making it a construction based on a reconstruction of events that may actually be based on true life--that is, if they are not made up--Dickens establishes a fictional reality far more freewheeling than simple versimilitude. Dickens not only uses details from his autobiography, but appears to mimic its manner when he insists, for example, "I forget whether it was the Blue Bull, or the Blue Boar, but I know it was the Blue Something." Gone, though, is the woe is me; this "forgetfulness" is firmly tongue-in-cheek. Dickens has lived not only to tell the tale, but to retell it--the novel representing not so much the facts of Dickens's life as his triumph over them. By the end of this bildungsroman, Copperfield has mastered his heart. Dickens has mastered his story, finding for it a right form and tone.

  Or perhaps I should say a right-enough form. It may seem perverse to criticize a book as outrageously fictional as David Copperfield for being full of improbable event and far-fetched coincidence, yet even the most elaborate artifice must succeed in its effects. Dickens wrote in a preface, "no one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writi
ng," assuming that the reader did believe it. We are meant to believe it. Yet often we stand outside the events, just as we often stand outside the more melodramatic and sentimental elements of the book. Dickens's portrait of Little Em'ly, for example, brings us close, not to Dickens, but to Oscar Wilde, who sweetly said of the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop: "It would take a heart of stone not to laugh."

  The coincidence, melodrama, and sentimentality, what's more, put Dickens at odds with current literary standards. These dictate that "serious" novels should neither shamelessly entertain, nor baldly instruct; Dickens, alas, did both. One might argue that he cannot be held to the ideals of another time. Still, such notions do determine whether a work lives or is simply studied. What with our modern emphasis on individual freedom, for example, Dickens's opposition to social stricture still speaks to us. On the other hand, we tend to be put off by his embrace of what we today judge an enemy of art, the market. Appearing in serial form over a period of eighteen months, David Copperfield was a commodity par excellence; how all too easy it is to imagine him cheerfully embarked on a hundred-city book tour. Movie deals! Tie-ins! Plush toys! If he could have conducted market research on the plot, he no doubt would have; and this sales orientation is linked to all we object to in his work. What surprise is it, really, that in 1939, Edmund Wilson found, "Of all the great English writers, Charles Dickens has received in his own country the scantiest serious attention from either biographers, scholars, or critics"?

  The greater surprise is that high culture ardently claims Dickens today. As for how that came to be, the reasons are various. For one, many now question the distinction between high art and low; they accept Dickens's potboiler orientation as possibly more "authentic" than a posture of artistic "integrity," and point out, too, the close tie artistic distinctions have with class distinctions. Lowly Dickens, what's more, greatly expanded the socioeconomic reach of the novel; and he exemplified his age, what with his interest in commerce and the city, as well as his emphasis on, and possession of, energy. (Besides producing fifteen novels, he edited magazines, put on theatricals, and gave readings even while traveling, socializing, fathering ten children, and walking twenty to thirty miles a day.) Formally, he was an important innovator--a man who managed to cross the Romantic Wordsworth with the picaresque Fielding, and who did much to invent the novel we call Victorian. (Other Victorian novels, we note, do not begin to appear until a few years before David Copperfield, with Vanity Fair published the same year as Dom bey and Son, followed quickly by Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.) And, ever protean, Dickens moved fluidly between the novel and the theater with his readings, even while borrowing from poetry an elevated rhetoric for certain characters, and iam bic pentameter for moments of pathos. The influence of the Romantic poets is evident, too, in the pains he takes to reproduce the talk of ordinary folk, for example the Suffolk dialect of the Peggottys.