David Copperfield (Dickens, 1850)

Charles Dickens. David Copperfield. Pub. 1849-50. Ed. Nina Burgis and Andrew Sanders. Oxford: World's Classics, 2008.

• Serialized 5/1849-11/1850; book edition 1850 by Bradbury & Evans
• Good for: iconic bildungsroman but how difficult the bourgeois stability Dickens fetishizes is to get and keep; and how many alternative counterfactuals he incorporates into his identity; (slight) engagement with print culture/authorship along with Pendennis (Thackeray, 1850); montage effects; print culture: reference works (as contrast with imaginative works, copying and collating vs. invention), Copperfield's father's library;

Overall

The way that Dickens starts, a little past halfway through, to twine the separate narrative strands of DC's development together -- from, say, the catastrophic point of Steerforth and little Em'ly absconding in #11. He doesn't do this to the same extent in Great Expectations, even when Magwitch comes to London and Herbert helps him in his plot to get M away. I'd say there's an ethical thrust to this: that these narrative strands can't be resolved on their own, that it takes their twining and balancing to resolve narrative problems (then even closer, as at 776). So a practical vision of serialized narrative but also with the moral valence of a complex intertwined life. It starts too from forgiveness, which really the reader has to do more than anyone for Betsey: the return to understand her not as a dragon in David's most desperate hour. This gets picked up most prominently with Emily and I suppose with David's forgiveness of Steerforth. It's a testament to Dickens that he can develop a narrative of this complexity and clarity from autobiographical rather than picaresque or melodramatic genres, though the book contains both. It's striking too that I feel like the narrative is scoped so much more. Arrowlg onxd David starts to become an adult. GE feels so much more experimental in its recursions and even scale though it's much shorter. I think what keeps the telos of David's ultimate perfectly successful development from feeling hollow, like the society gentlemen at Julia Mills' dinners, is not so much what he has to endure along the way (a pretty standard if narratively satisfying feature) as the persistent inversion of counterfactual thinking - speculation on the what-ifs of him being born Betsey, of Dora living, of him becoming a robber or beggar rather than a writer. This gives a more subtle sense of the contingency on which his narrative is built.

• N.b. that Robin Gilmour's "Memory in David Copperfield" is a great reading (Dickensian 1977)

General Notes

• 6 already a tension (light and funny) between individual and social identity - D wondering if he will be the hero of his own story and then going back to the hours before his birth, recounting Betsey Trotwood talking about his father and then calling his mother "Baby" to, again, play with the reference to self
  • the self-effacement involved with narrating the scene between Aunt Trotwood and his mother before he is born
  • 127 again boundary between individual and family blurred when D.C. identifies with his baby brother in the grave with their mother
  • 148 Mr Quinion calls him "Brooks" - silly but still uncertain
  • 198 Miss Trotwood repeatedly saying "Your sister Betsey Trotwood" would have done this or that, then renaming him Trotwood C. when she becomes his guardian (209)
  • 269 "I am sure I am not like myself when I am away...I seem to want my right hand, when I miss you [Agnes]."
  • 284 Steerforth calls him Daisy
• 7 potential alternative identities: Betsey Trotwood Copperfield
• 14 he denies the spirit-seeing imputed to him but is haunted in a way by the "ghost" of his alternative identity, by the thought of his father rising from the dead when his mother reads the story of Lazarus
• 44 "God help me, I might have been improved for my whole life...by a kind word at that season."
• 56 that sense of criminality haunting D after Murdstone beats him - with even less literal relationship to it than Pip does in GE
• 86 "Here I am": montage-like present tense transitions between scenes of cruelty at the hands of Creakle at Salem House school (was this the type of thing Eisenstein thought about with Dickens?)
• 96 the word "blank" recurs, usually for expression
• 109-10 D's mother's "little contradictory summary" of her situation with Murdstone that Pegotty draws out
• 146 the ghost of memory "haunt[ing] happier times"
• 149 you can feel the pain and anger of being "so easily thrown away at such an age" to be made a "little laboring hind" in the beginning of Ch XI
• 187 when D.C. finds Miss trotwood: "I have been slighted, and taught nothing, and thrown upon myself, and out to work not fit for me" -- the work not fit for me part seems especially different in his character, like the Murdstones would have a much more conventional wisdom attitude about work making the man
• 198-9 Time and memory oddly intertwined in Mr Dick's obsession with Charles I's execution
  • Ms T: it's "his allegorical way of expressing...his illness"
• 204 Miss T relies on Mr Dick similarly to how Creakle does Tungay, and as Lignum Bagnet does his wife in BH - it seems partly to be a comedy double-act but also an interesting counterpoint to individuality
  • 501 this pattern of dependence takes on a parasitic turn with Uriah Heep's ascendancy over Mr. Wickfield
• 210 Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in Becoming Dickens identifies the theme of autobiography as reliving memories vs. relieving oneself of memories, and as far as narrating his time at the warehouse it is emphatically the latter: "that I have written, and there I leave it"
• chapter title "I make another beginning" - bildung as iterative beginnings here
• 244 Dick and David "I suppose history never lies, does it?"..."Oh dear, no, sir!" [...] I was ingenuous and young, and I thought so.
• 269 Mr Dicks and his Memorial = graduate students and their dissertations...
• "I am sure I am not like myself when I am away...I seem to want my right hand, when I miss you [Agnes].
• 284 Miss Dartle on the poor: "its such a delight to know that, when they suffer, they don't feel!"
• 339 "It's in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some influence on the present." (Aunt Betsey)
• 352-5 pretty entertaining description of drunkenness, again with a montage-type feeling to it
• 364 dinner conversation with hamlet's aunt about Blood -- pre-Darwinian inheritance, not to mention classist
• 378 Spenlow describing Doctors' Commons as its own self-contained world (Trollope would do a whole novel about it)
• 383 "purity" a key value: of his memories of childhood with little Em'ly, now in his first infatuation with Dora
• 434 Mr Peggotty describing the mystical connection between life and death for people "along the coast," that Barkis is "a going out with the tide" - reminds me of the connection to the river in Mill
• 456-7 class and family in the confrontation between Mr. Peggotty and Mrs. Steerforth
• 466: systems of representation and of reform

"I must say that I had my doubts about the strict justice of this [annulment of marriage based on an error in writing a name], and was not even frightened out of them by the bushel of wheat which reconciles all anomalies. But Mr. Spenlow argued the matter with me. He said, Look at the world, there was good and evil in that; look at the ecclesiastical law, there was good and evil in that. It was all part of a system. Very good. There you were!"

• 476 montage-like again through repetition: "what an idle time," "when I/we did X"...
• 510 again reforming energy creeping in, here with jack maldon's indifference: "A display of indifference to all the actions and the passions of mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguishing quality at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be since."
• 540 Spenlow's fit on the road reminiscent (or prefigures) the one that debilitates Mr Tulliver in Mill
• 588 D interrogating Dora's being treated like a child, or even a pet, vs being treated "rationally"
• 615 "The rest is all a more or less incoherent dream" - D's wedding again has a montage effect
• 627 Dora asks to be called "child-wife" -- a bit squidgy
• 646-7 psychologically astute - the phrases Mrs Strong uses in baring her heart to her husband stick in D's mind, giving expression to his own vague doubts - "There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose."
• 662 Martha's identification with the river
• 728ff Micawber et al. confront Heep
• 744ff Ch 53 again a "Retrospect" montage that allows Dickens to turn the pathos screws incrementally and in a way that shows really moving empathy even for a really annoying character like Dora. Really affecting and well-managed.
  • "I think of every little trifle between me and Dora, and feel the truth, that trifles make the sum of life." (749)
• 776 tying things ever closer together: Ham dies trying unsuccessfully to rescue Steerforth
• 792 David not realizing how deep his grief was until he left to go abroad
• 808 valorization of domestic over professional virtues in Traddles' chambers with the "dearest girl" and her sisters
• 827 Creakle like a less insistent Pumblechook in GE
• 828 Creakle's prison "system" again represented negatively

Theme Tracking

Reading and Writing

• 50ff David's reading and writing lessons, nominally from his mother but with the Murdstones lurking (Murdstone hits D with the book on 52)
• 66 Waiter mentions the paper duty tax to DC
• 86-87 Creakle's cyphering book (?), then Tommy Traddles drawing skeletons in his Latin Dictionary
• 88 D.C. "telling" the story of Peregrine Pickle and others to Steerforth to help him sleep or wake him up
• 123 Miss M deals with DC's mother's death by "reducing everything to pen and ink"
• 144 D.C becomes enamoured of the "large quarto edition of Fox's Book of Martyrs" at Barkis and Peggotty's house
• 174 D.C. on the run imagines himself "as a scrap of newspaper intelligence" then goes to Mr. Dolloby's rag and bone shop to sell his waistcoat
• 227 Uriah Heep's finger tracks through lines of the book he's reading "like a snail" (Tidd's Practice, law textbook)
• 231 Dr Strong a Greek philologist compiling a dictionary
• 393 Traddles at work as a compiler for an encyclopedia

"I am not a bad compiler, Copperfield...but I have no invention at all; not a particle."

• • interesting that reference works keep coming up (Uriah at work on a textbook elsewhere too) (517 Micawber to read "Mr Justice Blackstone" in prep to be Heep's clerk)
  • 677 trying to "form [Dora's] mind with "useful information" and Shakespeare
  • the household management book comes in here, too
  • 814 Mr Dick keeps Charles I at bay by copying everything - again, not invention
• 408 Micawber to advertise his talents in newspapers to find work
• 508ff D working on Dr Strong's dictionary
• 512 firs mention of D's interest in being a parliamentary reporter (and Dick copying legal docs)
  • 529 difficulty of stenography
• 536 D refuses to take back his discovered love letters from Spenlow and Ms Murdstone - look up politics of not taking returned letters
  • they would have been returned at the end of an engagement, per Faulkner-- Pen's uncle mentions doing just this in an early disappointment in Pendennis
• 610 "I wallow in words" through to being an infidel about political life
• passages attendant on his novelistic career
  • 647 first fiction
  • 671 trying to deserve more praise
  • 715 old Mr. Omer's good "review" of D's work (and more time for "general reading" now his legs don't work) - then the honor he feels at D's "three separate and indiwidual wollumes"
  • 822 "I do not enter on the aspirations, the delights, anxieties, and triumphs, of my art"
• 796 writing a story whilst mourning in Switzerland which Traddles has published in a magazine
• 735 tyranny of/tyranny over words

Materiality

• 28-9 After describing all the boating works in Yarmouth, the tea things and bible, and scriptural paintings (which he remembers when he sees the like as pedlars' wares), D writes,

All this I saw in the first glance after I crossed the threshold - childlike, according to my theory - and then Peggotty opened a little door and showed me my bedroom. 

• • interesting that he associates thick description of objects with childlike vision
• 41 D feels as if none of the objects in the house are familiar anymore after finding out his mother has married Murdsrone - alienation from familiar objects after strong emotional upset reminiscent of Villette
• 46 D's mother is dispossessed of her housekeeper's keys, an embarrassing inversion of Esther being given the keys to Bleak House
• 120: Mr Omer, "Fashions are like human beings"
• 159-66 the Micawbers and pawn -- Micawber's books David sells and Mrs M's jewels sold but she will - not - adesert - Mr. - Micawber!
• 177

It was a likely place to sell a jacket in; for the dealers in second-hand clothes were numerous, and were, generally speaking, on the look-out for customers at their shop-doors.

• 481ff Tommy Traddles' plan to get back his furniture from the pawnbroker which was impounded with Micawber's (aka Mortimer) - involving Peggotty and D

Shakespeare References

• 9 doctor walks like the Ghost in Hamlet
• 169 "take him for all in all" Micawber - Hamlet
• 261 "the shade of a young butcher rises, like the apparition of an armed head in Macbeth"
• 263 "even-handed justice" also Macbeth
• 279 he sees Julius caesar and a panto at Covent Garden Theatre
• 313 Steerforth "I am a man again" macbeth
• 326 "Jockey of Norfolk" Miss Mowcher - Richard Iii (apparently)
• 356 D writing to Agnes - "Shakespeare has observed, my dear Agnes, how strange it is that a man should put an enemy in his mouth" - Othello
• 362 "Conscience made cowards of us both" Hamlet
• 364

To mend the matter, Hamlet's aunt [Mrs. Henry Spiker] had the family failing of indulging in soliloquy, and held forth in a desultory manner, by herself, on every topic that was introduced.

• 417 "if any drop of gloom we're wanting in the overflowing cup, which is now 'commended' (in the language of an immortal writer)" - Micawber to D, Macbeth
• 475 "ignorant present" combining hamlet and Macbeth
• 576 Traddles about his hair "I am quite a fretful porcupine" hamlet
• twelfth night refs on 544 and 579
• 675 reading Shakespeare to Dora to fatigue her
• 732-3 Micawber denounces Heep using Macbeth and Hamlet full quote
• 785 Micawber "is it. It meet that every nice offense should bear its comment!" Julius caesar