Charles Dickens (9 page)

Dickens had other memories of childhood, some of them cherished. It was not only the unpleasant ones that compelled him as he began to address his early life in his work. In her last weeks, his sister Fanny had recounted to him an odd experience, which he related to Forster: “In the night, the smell of the fallen leaves in the woods where we had habitually walked as very young children had come upon her with such strength of reality that she had moved her head to look for strewn leaves on the floor at her bedside.” Dickens's characteristic hypersensitivity to everything, but especially to sensory experiences, surely was a permanent feature of his makeup, and, of course, he had an extraordinary and well-developed memory. The impressions left by his childhood were a treasure; in order to revisit them, he had to rob the darker ones of their
power, which he began to do through the autobiographical fragment. The fragment portrays the young Charles as the hapless victim of those around him, which Dickens the experienced author certainly sensed was not quite right, rhetorically, for a work that was to see publication. Confession and self-regard are the trickiest forms of rhetoric, the most likely to arouse ridicule or antagonism in the reader. Dickens the editor could distinguish between a document that had value for the author in organizing memories of experience and a document that had value for the reader in telling an entertaining or enlightening story. The autobiographical fragment didn't succeed, and Dickens subsequently sent it to Forster, who waited until after Dickens's death to publish it.

In the autumn, Dickens wrote his last Christmas book,
The Haunted Man
. The haunted man in question, a chemist named Redlaw, is an isolated scholar beset by memories of the death of his sister and of his betrayal by a trusted friend, who many years before had seduced away Redlaw's beloved. Like Scrooge, he is visited by a ghost, who offers to remove his faculty of memory and to give him the power to do likewise for everyone he meets. A kind and benevolent man, Redlaw suffers so much with his memories that he accepts this gift. In
The Haunted Man,
Dickens makes his most explicit argument for the primacy of mental attitude over external circumstances in the achievement of peace, happiness, and even prosperity. Redlaw's associates and acquaintances live in more problematic circumstances than he does—Mrs. Williams, his housekeeper at the college, has never had children after the death of her firstborn. Her eighty-four-year-old father-in-law has seen his older son lead a life of increasing depravity. One
of Redlaw's students is recovering from a life-threatening illness and is impoverished. Neighbors of this student, the Tetterbys, have little money, little space, and too many children. But until Redlaw comes along, everyone is happy enough. In particular, the portrait of the Tetterbys is one of Dickens's very best evocations of family life and absolutely sparkles with a sense of lived experience. There is even a touch of homely forgiveness, since Mr. Tetterby is a small man and Mrs. Tetterby is fat (something Dickens seems to have held against Catherine). But every time Redlaw interacts with another character, even incidentally, that character loses his or her memories and is transformed. The effect is illustrated comically with the Tetterbys: “The hand of every little Tetterby was against the other little Tetterbys; and even Johnny's hand—the patient, enduring, and devoted Johnny—rose against the baby! Yes. Mrs. Tetterby, going to the door by mere accident, saw him viciously pick out a weak place in the suit of armour where a slap would tell, and slap that blessed child.” The other characters are transformed as well, until Redlaw comes to realize the horrifying manner in which he is remaking the world and seeks reversal of his gift. Dickens's explicit point is that memories of both pleasure and suffering are the source of forgiveness and, indeed, the source of our capacity to live with one another in toleration and happiness. Without memories, only the present inconveniences of life can assert themselves, breaking connections and driving people apart.

Whether or not this philosophical assertion is true, Dickens worked it out in detail in
The Haunted Man
and then built upon it when he began perhaps his greatest, and
certainly his favorite, novel,
David Copperfield,
in February 1849. It was just around the time of his thirty-seventh birthday, and exactly twenty-five years after the commencement of his employment at Warren's Blacking Factory.

It was Forster who suggested that Dickens use the first-person point of view to tell the story. He was possibly influenced by the popularity of
Jane Eyre,
published in 1847, though Dickens himself never read it. Dickens was no longer alone in the field of the Victorian novel—the publication of
Vanity Fair
coincided with that of
Dombey and Son
. Thackeray's feelings of rivalry (which Dickens does not appear to have shared) could not have been soothed by the comparative sales of the two novels—five thousand for each number of
Vanity Fair,
thirty thousand for
Dombey
.
Wuthering Heights
was published in 1847 as well, and Mrs. Gaskell's
Mary Barton
in 1848. Dickens was still the most popular serious novelist of the age, but other voices were emerging from his shadow, expressing distinct visions of their own. That they fed his inspiration, at least secondhand, is another manifestation of Dickens's natural inclusiveness. He seems to have been far less aware of them as rivals than they were of him—throughout his writing life, he was the primus inter pares. Writers who lived during his lifetime (and just after) felt they had to define themselves in relationship to him, but he did not reciprocate the feeling—he was generous with praise and invitations to write for the periodicals he edited, and honest, though tactful, with criticism. His own work filled up his thoughts while he was creating it; he paid no attention to what other writers might be doing.

David Copperfield
did not go as smoothly or easily at first
as
Dombey
. His letters to Forster were filled with complaints, and certain details, such as the title of the novel, the names of some characters, and the nature of David's profession, remained undecided or were changed well into the composition of first numbers, evidence of indecisiveness that was unusual for Dickens and in contrast with the high degree of planning that had worked so well for
Dombey
. Nevertheless, and even though
David Copperfield
sold fewer copies than
Dombey,
Dickens grew increasingly pleased with it and wrote steadily, without interruption.

He loved it as if it were his autobiography, but in fact the incidents of the novel and the incidents of Dickens's early life were quite different. David Copperfield, of course, is the scion of a much different family from the populous and convivial Dickenses. His father, twenty years older than his mother, is already dead by the time David is born. He lives happily with his mother and the servant, Peggotty, near Yarmouth. His father's sister, Betsey Trotwood, is a woman of property, though eccentric and embittered by her failed marriage. The first chapters of
David Copperfield
detail a sort of early childhood idyll, with David the treasured male child, that is brutally ended by David's mother's remarriage to Mr. Murdstone. Murdstone and his sister, Jane, are classic portraits of just the sort of Victorian parents that Dickens detested. They are harsh, serious, authoritarian, and unimaginative. Their cruelty arises from their own joylessness and lovelessness. Their most evil effect comes not from how they treat David and his mother (which is bad enough), but from how they cast a pall of heavy sobriety and restraint over everything. What Murdstone says is just close enough to what a typical stepfather
might say to or about his stepson as to be especially chilling. When David bites Murdstone in the midst of being punished, he is sent away to boarding school.

The characters of Peggotty and her brother, Ham, Little Em'ly, and Barkis the carrier have no known analogues in Dickens's family, nor had Dickens ever been to Yarmouth until just before he began the novel. Nevertheless,
David Copperfield
seemed to Dickens to evoke the feelings he had had as a child, and therefore to be true to his life as he had experienced it. The events themselves were less important than the feelings they gave rise to in the author, and the first-person point of view allowed Dickens to evoke how it feels to be a child. This was certainly one of his special talents, and in
David Copperfield,
he did better than he had in
Oliver Twist
and
The Old Curiosity Shop
in mediating between a growing child's sense of his own power and his sense of being in the power of others. David is not a hapless victim; in fact, once he gets to school, his immaturity and ignorance hurt others, most notably Mr. Mell, whose family circumstances David knows he should not reveal but does anyway, leading to Steerforth's ridiculing Mr. Mell and Creakle's firing him. While we never lose sympathy for David, we also never forget that he has a task, which is to learn how to be a good man—his innocence is no guarantee of good judgment or right action. In this sense, the portrayal of David is far more sophisticated than earlier portrayals of children; even Paul Dombey is characterized at one point as sometimes imperious but never shown to be other than unusually wise and loving. The depiction of David's infancy and childhood is the sine qua non of such later depictions of childhood as the first chapters of
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. Dickens's experience and his natural sympathies with children in general led him to understand that the tone and style of childhood are different from that of adulthood and worthy of artistic representation. This is surely in part the reason Freud was so fond of
David Copperfield
—Dickens apprehended that the symbolic world of the small child was rich and had lifelong power, and in the course of relatively few pages of text, the life is lived and the symbolic links are forged. The narrative also reinforces the idea that a consciousness can understand how it came to be through memory and reconstruction of early experiences. David has no “analyst,” but the narrator himself serves as the analyst, mediating through language and selection of incident between the reader and the protagonist.

The death of David's mother ends his schooling at Creakle's institution. He returns to Blunderstone for the funeral and subsequently is sent to work at the counting house of Murdstone and Grinby, wine merchants. He lodges with the Micawbers, but soon Mr. Micawber is arrested for debt and the Micawbers move into the King's Bench Prison. Of his working life, David notes, “All this time I was working at Murdstone and Grinby's in the same common way, and with the same common companions, and with the same ceaseless sense of unmerited degradation as at first. But I never, happily for me no doubt, made a single acquaintance, or spoke to any of the many boys whom I saw daily in going to the warehouse, in coming from it, and in prowling about the streets at meal-times. I led the same secretly unhappy life; but I led it in the same lonely, self-reliant manner.” The contrast to Dickens's own life is specific. The Micawbers are comic
representations of his parents; the counting house, while tedious and unpleasant, is not quite as appalling as the blacking factory. In fact, when Murdstone speaks to David before sending him out to work, he says something Dickens himself might have said: “To the young this is a world for action, and not for moping and droning in.” The point is that David feels uncared for. It is not that he must make his way, but that no one cares whether and how he makes his way. Even the Micawbers are so wrapped up in their own affairs that David's ups and downs are of little moment to them. Certainly this is a true reflection of how Dickens experienced his parents when they were having difficulties—however pleasant and agreeable they were upon occasion, they were capable of no real understanding of or sympathy with him; it was as if he were simply their lodger.

David Copperfield
evokes Dickens's life without relating it. The fiction frees him to contemplate not only his boyhood and young manhood, but boyhood and young manhood in general. David's task is simultaneously a moral one and an emotional one—to find true companionship but also to assume responsibility for one's choices and their consequences. Through observing those around him and also weighing his own actions and choices, David attains responsible manhood: at the end of the novel, he has a respectable career, good friends, and a soul mate in Agnes, who is often criticized for being dull and one-dimensional but is an interesting evocation of a quiet, self-contained, and responsible feminine presence. David succeeds fully where Dickens himself succeeded only partially—he was beginning to confide in Forster that he despaired of ever finding true intimate companionship.

The tenor of
David Copperfield
is comic, but because its
great subject is David's moral education, the happy ending does not quite balance out the costs of getting there. David and Agnes find each other, David's other loved ones live in prosperity and amity, Em'ly, Martha, and the Micawbers leave the scenes of their defeats to find new opportunities elsewhere. But Steerforth is lost, the Peggottys' lives are destroyed, and even Heep's defeat has a sour taste about it. The natural tendency of individuals to live in isolation through selfishness, greed, addiction, despair, and self-delusion is not
generally
mitigated—it is mitigated only in David's case, at least partly because he is lucky enough to find Agnes. There is no suggestion that he deserves Agnes, except insofar as he has learned enough to value her.

Both
Dombey and Son
and
David Copperfield
are great novels, but they succeed in part because they have backed away from larger social issues and allowed their protagonists to resolve problems that are representative of large social forces and dilemmas only as individuals. For a novel, such an individual solution is the only believable one, the only “realistic” one. At the same time, though, Dombey and David come to seem Cinderella-like—the form of the comic novel itself chooses them to prevail while all around them others succumb. The solution that Dickens bodies forth in each of his Christmas books, that of a change in a character's inner life creating outward change, works better as a parable than it does as a novel, because a novel needs more action to carry it than a single miraculous inner shift. As characters in a novel act upon one another and make their way in the world, the vivid sense of a single inner life is overwhelmed by the varied and multifarious strands of the narrative. Novels are both too
short and too long. They are too short to reproduce, in rigorous depth, the moral development of more than a handful of characters, and too long to meditate upon philosophical issues without plenty of action to give those issues some narrative liveliness. Nevertheless, Dickens persisted in attempting to broaden and deepen the social meaning of his work, and of the novel itself, as subsequent works show.