Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  Though fancifully elaborated, David Copperfield’s Dora is our best portrait of the slimly documented Maria.

  In blending his memories of his blacking-factory ordeal into David Copperfield’s life, Dickens boasted that “I really think I have done it ingeniously, and with a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction.” David’s courtship of Dora no doubt contains the same interweaving. But which strands are truth, and which fiction? What “touches” of the young Maria appear in Dora?

  Some resemblances are concrete. He associated Maria with blue, and Dora’s signature color is blue: her eyes are blue; she wears “a straw hat and blue ribbons” and “a dress of celestial blue”; David buys her an engagement ring with blue stones. Like Maria, again, Dora is “rather diminutive altogether. So much the more precious,” David dotes. Dora has a “prettily pettish manner”; she is “captivating, girlish, bright-eyed, lovely”; “she had the most delightful little voice, the gayest little laugh, the pleasantest and most fascinating little ways.” All these attractions, seen through the eyes of the besotted David Copperfield, give us a snapshot of Maria. “What a form she had, what a face she had, what a graceful, variable, enchanting manner!” Dora’s “dimpled chin” and “slender arms” no doubt glance at Maria, as well, and her petted spaniel Jip certainly recalls Maria’s spaniel Daphne. Dora plays the guitar and trills French ballads, accomplishments that may echo the musical accomplishments of Maria, who played the harp and had studied in Paris.

  When he advised the older Maria that she might catch glimpses of her youthful self in Dora, Dickens felt no need to detail resemblances; she would recognize them herself. But he may have been chary of elaborating on the similarities for another reason, too: for though charming, lovely, and loveable, Dora is also immature, spoiled, and silly. No doubt there were touches of young Maria in these latter qualities, too.

  When David’s guardian Aunt Betsey loses all her money, for example, and David must inform the childlike Dora, now his betrothed, that he is suddenly penniless, she can barely comprehend the notion and proves entirely unable to cope with it—first dissolving in confusion and alarm, and then sliding into inconsequence:

  “Don’t talk about being poor, and working hard!” said

  Dora, nestling closer to me. “Oh, don’t, don’t!”

  “My dearest love,” said I, “the crust well-earned—”

  “Oh, yes; but I don’t want to hear any more about crusts!” said Dora. “And Jip must have a mutton-chop every day at twelve, or he’ll die.”

  David is melodramatically resolved to overcome poverty, but Dora’s levity itself is invincible:

  “Oh, please don’t be practical!” said Dora, coaxingly.

  “Because it frightens me so!”

  “Sweetheart!” I returned; “there is nothing to alarm you in all this. I want you to think of it quite differently. I want to make it nerve you, and inspire you, Dora!”

  “Oh, but that’s so shocking!” cried Dora.

  “My love, no. Perseverance and strength of character will enable us to bear much worse things.”

  “But I haven’t got any strength at all,” said Dora, shaking her curls. “Have I, Jip? Oh, do kiss Jip, and be agreeable!”

  And from childish frivolity she drops into hysteria.

  No such exchange ever took place between Dickens and Maria, for he had no money when they met, and Maria knew it. But the imagined scene may reflect his memories of flightiness and silliness in Maria, and perhaps, too, her (and her parents’) anxiety about his lack of means; for he was well aware that his own modest position and income scarcely met the Beadnells’ bankerly expectations.

  Though Dora, in both her irresistible (for David) charms and probably her giddiness, echoes Maria, it is less clear how closely David’s courtship follows Dickens’s. Dickens might indulge sweet memories of his old flame in Dora, but larger plot imperatives had to prevail. David’s courtship of Dora is both triumphant and mistaken—whereas Dickens’s courtship of Maria had simply failed. But despite David’s happier fortunes in love, Dickens poured his own remembered agonies into David’s trials. Writing later about his passion for Maria, “the occasion of so much emotion,” he confessed that “no one can imagine in the most distant degree what pain the recollection gave me in Copperfield.”

  Dora is the daughter of a proctor, a sort of solicitor, under whom David is apprenticed. Dickens had never been articled to a proctor, but David’s apprenticeship allowed him to revisit his early shorthand reporting days in Doctors’ Commons, the court in which proctors practiced. To someone who had known Maria’s banker father, Dora’s proctor father—starched, mercenary, a complacent humbug—might have been recognizable. (Dora’s mother is dead; all the novel’s young characters grow up with a single living parent, or none.) When David first meets Dora, she has just returned from Paris, where Maria too had been sent for schooling. Whether Mr. Beadnell had sent her abroad to separate her from Dickens is unclear; but when David’s illicit correspondence with Dora is discovered, her father threatens to send her to Paris: “You may make it necessary, if you are foolish or obstinate, Mr. Copperfield, for me to send my daughter abroad again, for a term.” Does this threat recall Mr. Beadnell admonishing young Dickens to eschew his daughter? The removal of a beloved girl for schooling long reverberated with Dickens—in Great Expectations, Pip’s Estella would also be sent to school in Paris.

  Mr. Spenlow’s threat is prompted by his discovery of David Copperfield’s letters to Dora, and perhaps this incident, too, recalls a crisis in Dickens’s courtship of Maria. David’s letters to Dora—tied up with a blue ribbon, naturally—are unearthed by Dora’s hired chaperone Miss Murdstone, and though there seems to have been no such Gorgon glooming between Dickens and Maria, certainly there were confidential letters waiting to be discovered. Dickens’s invaluable friend Kolle often acted as courier, apparently undetected, but the correspondence might at some point have been exposed. Some such misadventure seems a likely explanation for Dickens’s cryptic references in his letters to Maria to “existing circumstances” and “my existing situation,” and for his difficulties in seeing her. Higher authority had evidently interposed.

  Another incident in David Copperfield hints at this crisis in Dickens’s courtship of Maria. Confronted by Dora’s father, David admits to his secret correspondence with Dora:

  “There is nothing I can say, sir,” I returned, “except that all the blame is mine. Dora—”

  “Miss Spenlow, if you please,” said her father majestically.

  —leaving David to lament this “colder designation” for Dora. This compulsory retreat from “Dora” to “Miss Spenlow” echoes the plaintive salutation of a letter Dickens wrote during the unhappy “existing circumstances” of his own romance: “My dear Maria.—(I fear I ought to say ‘Miss Beadnell’ but I hope you will pardon my adhering to the manner in which I have been accustomed to address you.)” The more intimate “Maria” no doubt suggested an engagement, or at least a familiarity tending that way; the compulsory reversion to “Miss Beadnell” reveals that any such understanding between them had been detected and proscribed.

  Immediately after the crisis of the letters comes a greater crisis yet in David’s courtship. Dora’s father dies suddenly—a grief for her but propitious for David, removing the chief obstacle between him and Dora. Nothing like this occurred during Dickens’s courtship of Maria; her father remained obstinately alive, and with the death of Dora’s father David Copperfield leaves behind Dickens’s futile courtship of Maria Beadnell. Much later, he joked about himself and a lover named Angelica, claiming to remember when “I, turned of eighteen, went with my Angelica to a City church on account of a shower … and when I said to my Angelica, ‘Let the blessed event, Angelica, occur at no altar but this!’ and when my Angelica consented that it should occur at no other—which it certainly never did, for it never occurred anywhere.” Dickens’s experience with Maria had been not Dora’s complaisance but Angelica’s r
eluctance.

  But even as David Copperfield fondly revives young Maria Beadnell and glances at Dickens’s courting her, it betrays regret for another lost figure of that earlier time—Dickens himself as a young man. What he had lost with Maria’s departure was not just the pretty girl with long curly locks and blue eyes, but the ardent youth who had loved her with a freshness and intensity he had never recaptured. That first overpowering passion was irretrievable. Looking back, an older David Copperfield recalls himself in love with Dora—not just “in love,” but consumed, absorbed, “saturated”:

  I was steeped in Dora. I was not merely over head and ears in love with her, but I was saturated through and through. Enough love might have been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in; and yet there would have remained enough within me, and all over me, to pervade my entire existence.

  In David Copperfield’s love for Dora, Dickens celebrated—and mourned—the fervor of his own vanished youth. “What an idle time!” David recalls his courtship of Dora:

  What an insubstantial, happy, foolish time! Of all the times of mine that Time has in his grip, there is none that in one retrospect I can smile at half so much, and think of half so tenderly.

  Dickens was never more involved in his characters’ lives than in David Copperfield. “I can never open that book as I open any other book,” he later confessed. Writing it, he was once again twenty years old, and in love.

  When his beloved Dora dies a year or two after their marriage, David Copperfield goes on to marry again. While his marriage to Dora has been disappointing, his second marriage is superbly happy.

  And yet one cannot fall in love for the first time, twice. There could be no second Dora, no repetition of the rapture she had awakened. David Copperfield’s love for the girlish Dora is the earnest, thrilling love of a very young man awakening to the romance of life and the allure of the feminine: a joyous, vernal, amorous, intoxicating experience, wholly appropriate and good—for a young man. Looking back, Dickens wondered if marrying Maria Beadnell would have been a good idea after all, but he never regretted loving her so passionately. In the chapter titled “My First Dissipation,” David Copperfield gets drunk for the first time; meeting Dora two chapters later, he becomes drunk again—drunk with love. Both kinds of inebriation are rites of youth.

  Maria Beadnell had been a precious gift to Dickens, just as Dora despite all her wifely incompetence is a gift to David. Before her advent, David had been content to idle in a dusty corner of the law, sliding into a cozy career which his aunt has found and bought for him, and which David has done nothing to earn. His quest for Dora spurs his ambition, motivates him to work long and hard, pushes him into manhood and vocation. The need to prove himself worthy of her and able to support her stimulates him to heroic exertion. All this echoes Dickens’s experience with Maria. “I began to fight my way out of poverty and obscurity,” he later told her, “with one perpetual idea of you.”

  More importantly, Dora gives David the invaluable experience of romantic intensity and ardor. It is good to mature, to move beyond juvenile impulse and indiscretion—but not to sink into middle-aged prudence at twenty, to bypass ardent youth altogether. Dora introduces David to amorous passion, launching him onto a sea of tempestuous, exhilarating feeling. Maria had done the same for Dickens. “I have never been so good a man since,” he later told her, “as I was when you made me wretchedly happy.”

  There would be no turbulent emotions, no wretched happiness in David’s second love. With Agnes Wickfield, a placid pool in a still glade, David Copperfield never knows the headlong rush of Eros. If his love for Dora was the amorous awakening of a sensitive, romantic youth, his love for Agnes shows him entering into man’s estate. Looking back, Dickens recognized that there had been a moral logic in his own progress from Maria Beadnell to Mary Hogarth. Mary represented an ascent to higher things, a religious experience—and so, too, Agnes for David Copperfield.

  The lovely young Dora quickened David’s masculine senses; Agnes stirs his spiritual sensibilities. Like much religious art, her portrait in the novel is largely iconic.

  When as a boy David first meets Agnes, he is instantly struck by her aura of sanctity. “On her face,” David recalls, “I saw immediately the placid and sweet expression of the lady [Agnes’s dead mother] whose picture had looked at me downstairs.… Although her face was quite bright and happy, there was a tranquillity about it, and about her—a quiet, good, calm spirit—that I never have forgotten; that I never shall forget.” Dickens had no interest whatever in church architecture or religious art, but to convey Agnes’s moral glow he turned to stained glass:

  I cannot call to mind where or when, in my childhood, I had seen a stained glass window in a church. Nor do I recollect its subject. But I know that when I saw her turn round, in the grave light of the old staircase, and wait for us, above, I thought of that window; and I associated something of its tranquil brightness with Agnes Wickfield ever afterwards.

  Like Agnes herself, the memorable stained glass window lacks descriptive particulars—location, subject, design, hues—but details hardly matter, for the essence of both window and Agnes is a spiritual radiance, an ineffable glow of holiness.

  Five years after her death, Dickens called Mary Hogarth “that spirit which directs my life, and through a heavy sorrow has pointed upwards with unchanging finger.” Agnes Wickfield likewise points upward for David Copperfield. When Dora dies, Agnes is watching at her bedside, and descending to break the grievous news to David, she stands silently, her “solemn hand upraised towards Heaven!” Although she points upward on no other occasion in the novel, David seizes on this pregnant gesture as her emblem. “Until I die,” he later assures her, “I shall see you always before me, pointing upward!” and, at novel’s end, looking beyond, David invokes Agnes to his deathbed: “… so may I, when realities are melting from me,… still find thee near me, pointing upward!”

  Agnes remains physically indistinct. We never learn the color of her eyes, or the shade of her hair; as to her complexion, we learn only that she has “a fair hand.” Dora’s color is blue, but Agnes has no color at all. Ignoring mundane visual details, David Copperfield describes instead the soothing influence of her presence. She is tranquil, placid, quiet, good, calm, staid, discreet, pleasant, modest, orderly; he extols the “goodness, peace, and truth” of “my sweet sister … my counsellor and friend, the better angel of the lives of all who come within her calm, good, self-denying influence.” But we see Agnes only vaguely, through a veil. Why did Dickens not resurrect Mary Hogarth as vividly as he had revived Maria Beadnell in Dora? Beloved as she was, Mary seems never to have awakened his sensual imagination. What he cherished, rather, was her immaculate spirit: “So perfect a creature never breathed.… She had not a fault.”

  So too David Copperfield’s Agnes. Far from winning admiration, however, her unalloyed saintliness has long annoyed worldly critics. She is “a major embarrassment,” a “nullity,” “a religious ikon, an inert figure,” “passive,” a “secular Madonna,” and “lifeless” (according to one Dickens biographer). But George Orwell holds preeminent rank in the tradition of Agnes-denigration with a frequently quoted quip: Agnes, he asserted in a classic essay on Dickens, is “the most disagreeable of his heroines, the real legless angel of Victorian romance.”

  But to complain that Agnes is not vividly embodied misses the point. She was not meant to compete with David Copperfield’s sharply defined eccentrics, characters like Uriah Heep or David’s Aunt Betsey or the histrionic Micawbers. Agnes is, rather, the novel’s moral center, the sun around which the more colorful characters revolve in their erratic orbits.

  God works, indeed, through human means, even (or especially) the least likely. Flannery O’Connor could imagine grace operating through Georgia crackers, con artists, and serial killers, Graham Greene through a whiskey priest or a street punk. But while Dickens’s fancy was exuberant and expansive, his theology was narrow; he could see
the hand of God only in exceptional virtue. In creating Agnes, he strove not for bright color or texture, but moral luminosity. Hagiography does not as a rule appeal to novel critics—but with David Copperfield’s Agnes, it is what the critics must swallow. They may grumble; Dickens would not have apologized.

  As Dickens brooded on his memories of Maria Beadnell and Mary Hogarth, both girls were mythically transformed into something rich and strange—but not the same “something.” Maria became the eternally desirable coquette of sparkling blue vivacity and irresistible allure, every young man’s romantic fancy (and often shipwreck). Mary on the other hand became a Madonna without child. In Dickens’s imagination they were not just two women he loved one after the other, but antithetical feminine types. One aroused amorous desire; the other awakened immortal longings.

  Eros precedes Caritas, at least for David Copperfield. As a youth he admires Agnes, but the sexual sparkle of less angelic girls dazzles him. “The influence for all good, which she came to exercise over me at a later time, begins already to descend upon my breast,” he remarks of his early days with Agnes, but distinguishes between her edifying influence and the more sensual appeal of his childhood sweetheart, blue-eyed and provocative Emily: “I love little Em’ly, and I don’t love Agnes—no, not at all in that way.” Dickens had loved Maria Beadnell very much “in that way,” while his adoration for Mary Hogarth was beyond sexual motives.

  It is, in fact, because Agnes fails to tempt him that David venerates her. She soothes him, and excites his desire for goodness, without arousing any distracting amorous feelings. The day after becoming embarrassingly drunk, for example, he pays Agnes an expiatory visit: “She put her hand—its touch was like no other hand—upon my arm for a moment; and I felt so befriended and comforted, that I could not help moving it to my lips, and gratefully kissing it.” But for all its consolatory power, Agnes’s touch lacks sexual electricity. Her voice stirs David: it “seemed to touch a chord within me, answering to that sound alone.… there was a thrill in it.…” But the thrill is reverential rather than romantic, a thrill of earnestness “that quite subdued me.” Agnes acts not only as David’s conscience, but as a sexual depressant as well.