Dave's Book Blog: "David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens

I reread this in preparation for reading Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

DC is the fictionalised biography of CD, starting with his birth. It is often regarded as one of the best novels by Dickens, his personal favourite, and marks a break between his early novels (Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, and Martin Chuzzlewit, of which only the first two are regularly read nowadays), and his later, more serious work, such as Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend.

Dickens was, in his day, phenomenally best-selling, and he is still hugely popular, though honoured nowadays more in film and television adaptations of his works than in actual readers. His characters are extraordinarily memorable. But is his work actually any good?

The first problem that a modern reader is likely to encounter with Copperfield is its length. It's about 360,000 words, about four or five times as long as a typical modern novel (although, to be fair, it's only about half as long as the Bible); the Audible audiobook lasts 34.5 hours. A lot happens, but there are also some awfully long passages. Most people quail at the long descriptions but they seemed proportionate to me (and sometimes brilliant). What I found difficult was the extended speeches, often very melodramatic, particularly when a character becomes distressed:

"‘Oh, Trotwood, Trotwood!’ exclaimed Mr. Wickfield, wringing his hands. ‘What I have come down to be, since I first saw you in this house! I was on my downward way then, but the dreary, dreary road I have traversed since! Weak indulgence has ruined me. Indulgence in remembrance, and indulgence in forgetfulness. My natural grief for my child’s mother turned to disease; my natural love for my child turned to disease. I have infected everything I touched. I have brought misery on what I dearly love, I know—you know! I thought it possible that I could truly love one creature in the world, and not love the rest; I thought it possible that I could truly mourn for one creature gone out of the world, and not have some part in the grief of all who mourned. Thus the lessons of my life have been perverted! I have preyed on my own morbid coward heart, and it has preyed on me. Sordid in my grief, sordid in my love, sordid in my miserable escape from the darker side of both, oh see the ruin I am, and hate me, shun me!’" (Ch 39)
"Oh what will you feel when you see this writing, and know it comes from my wicked hand! But try, try—not for my sake, but for uncle’s goodness, try to let your heart soften to me, only for a little little time! Try, pray do, to relent towards a miserable girl, and write down on a bit of paper whether he is well, and what he said about me before you left off ever naming me among yourselves—and whether, of a night, when it is my old time of coming home, you ever see him look as if he thought of one he used to love so dear. Oh, my heart is breaking when I think about it! I am kneeling down to you, begging and praying you not to be as hard with me as I deserve—as I well, well, know I deserve—but to be so gentle and so good, as to write down something of him, and to send it to me. You need not call me Little, you need not call me by the name I have disgraced; but oh, listen to my agony, and have mercy on me so far as to write me some word of uncle, never, never to be seen in this world by my eyes again! Dear, if your heart is hard towards me—justly hard, I know—but, listen, if it is hard, dear, ask him I have wronged the most—him whose wife I was to have been—before you quite decide against my poor poor prayer! If he should be so compassionate as to say that you might write something for me to read—I think he would, oh, I think he would, if you would only ask him, for he always was so brave and so forgiving—tell him then (but not else), that when I hear the wind blowing at night, I feel as if it was passing angrily from seeing him and uncle, and was going up to God against me. Tell him that if I was to die tomorrow (and oh, if I was fit, I would be so glad to die!) I would bless him and uncle with my last words, and pray for his happy home with my last breath!" (Ch 40)

Dickensian characters don't have stiff upper lips.

There are an awful lot of characters. I recently advised a fledgling novelist to reduce the number of characters in her draft novel because (a) it is difficult for the reader to keep track of multiple characters and (b) it is difficult for the author to create distinct and properly rounded characters if a new one pops up every so often. To be fair to Dickens, when you are writing what is in effect a whole life, there must inevitably be a lot of characters: one's early playmates, schoolfriends, early romantic attachments, workmates etc. To be fair to Dickens again, many of the characters he introduces reappear later in the book (although sometimes, as with the final appearances of Creakle, Heep and Littimer, these have the appearance of being rather forced and moralistic tying up of loose ends). To be fair to Dickens a third time, he introduces each character with a few sentences which make them instantly memorable; his characters often have a quirk or a catchphrase which he repeats in order to evoke them each time they appear. But, on the other hand, he fails, in my opinion, to create many fully rounded characters. Most of his characters, vivid though they may be, are caricatures. They're one dimensional. They never surprise the reader. Heep is a villain from start to end, Dora is a child-wife, Ham is the salt of the earth. These aren't people, they're puppets. Perhaps the only character who felt real was Rosa Dartle, though she's not so much a character as a way of using irony to point out the falseness and hypocrisy in other people, and in the (melodramatic) end she too was revealed as just another mask.

So I feel justified in what I told the new novelist. Dickens is extraordinary in that he can create characters that stick with you (by his tricks of quirk and catchphrase) but even he can't create a multiplicity of three-dimensional characters.

It's great fun, it's entertaining, but fundamentally, for me, this novel fails as a work of literature because Dickens fails to ask why his characters are as they are. For all his social campaigning (against workhouses in Oliver Twist, against abusive schools in Nicholas Nickleby, against abusive schools, and the Doctors' Commons, and the solitary system in prisons in Copperfield etc) Dickens accepted the basic Victorian social divide between the classes. Thus our hero retains his dignity despite becoming a poor labourer ("I worked, from morning until night, with common men and boys, a shabby child." (Ch 11), there being no suggestion that DC himself is 'common')and a homeless (Dickens uses the word "houseless") tramp, because he is of good birth; he is rescued by his aunt who lives on her investments. Steerforth may be a cad but he is a gentleman and therefore David ultimately forgives him. Peggoty and Barkis and Ham and the other picturesque members of the working servant classes are tolerated because they know their place. Heep, on the other hand, commits the unforgivable sin of resenting his lower class birth and wanting to better himself (He does have a couple of pages in which he talks about his low birth and how being "umble" was his way to rise but Dickens seems to have cut him no slack on this account.)

(This reminds me of Oliver Twist. The eponymous hero is an orphan who grows up in a workhouse. One would have expected him to have been brutalised. But Dickens, in an introduction to the novel, explained that he wanted to write a story which showed that those of gentle birth would, despite their circumstances, retain their innate nobility and in so doing he created one of the most unbelievable title characters in literature.)

David Copperfield is a pantomime with goodies and baddies.

But the scenery is brilliant. He can describe something so that you are immediately in the picture:

"It was beautifully clean inside, and as tidy as possible. There was a table, and a Dutch clock, and a chest of drawers, and on the chest of drawers there was a tea-tray with a painting on it of a lady with a parasol, taking a walk with a military-looking child who was trundling a hoop. The tray was kept from tumbling down, by a bible; and the tray, if it had tumbled down, would have smashed a quantity of cups and saucers and a teapot that were grouped around the book. On the walls there were some common coloured pictures, framed and glazed, of scripture subjects; such as I have never seen since in the hands of pedlars, without seeing the whole interior of Peggotty’s brother’s house again, at one view. Abraham in red going to sacrifice Isaac in blue, and Daniel in yellow cast into a den of green lions, were the most prominent of these. Over the little mantelshelf, was a picture of the ‘Sarah Jane’ lugger, built at Sunderland, with a real little wooden stern stuck on to it; a work of art, combining composition with carpentry, which I considered to be one of the most enviable possessions that the world could afford. There were some hooks in the beams of the ceiling, the use of which I did not divine then; and some lockers and boxes and conveniences of that sort, which served for seats and eked out the chairs." (Ch 3)
"At length we stopped before a very old house bulging out over the road; a house with long low lattice-windows bulging out still farther, and beams with carved heads on the ends bulging out too, so that I fancied the whole house was leaning forward, trying to see who was passing on the narrow pavement below. It was quite spotless in its cleanliness. The old-fashioned brass knocker on the low arched door, ornamented with carved garlands of fruit and flowers, twinkled like a star; the two stone steps descending to the door were as white as if they had been covered with fair linen; and all the angles and corners, and carvings and mouldings, and quaint little panes of glass, and quainter little windows, though as old as the hills, were as pure as any snow that ever fell upon the hills." (Ch 15): This house still exists in Canterbury; it is called the 'House of Agnes'.
"The neighbourhood was a dreary one at that time; as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London. There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which—having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather—they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves. The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, arose by night to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke that poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year’s handbills offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb-tide. There was a story that one of the pits dug for the dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and a blighting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole place. Or else it looked as if it had gradually decomposed into that nightmare condition, out of the overflowings of the polluted stream." (Ch 47)

Some of his immediate characterisations

"He was a limp, delicate-looking gentleman, I thought, with a good deal of nose, and a way of carrying his head on one side, as if it were a little too heavy for him." (Ch 6)
Uriah Heep, to be damned from the outset (all Ch 16)

His catchphrase: "I’m a very umble person." (False humility added to dropped aitches)
His behavioural quirks:

"he frequently ground the palms against each other as if to squeeze them dry and warm, besides often wiping them, in a stealthy way, on his pocket-handkerchief"
"He had a way of writhing when he wanted to express enthusiasm, which was very ugly; and which diverted my attention from the compliment he had paid my relation, to the snaky twistings of his throat and body."

Selected quotes:

"The man with the wooden leg eyed me all over—it didn’t take long, for there was not much of me" (Ch 5)
"A cloggy sensation of the lukewarm fat of meat is upon me" (Ch 7)
"I used at first to wonder what comfort Traddles found in drawing skeletons; and for some time looked upon him as a sort of hermit, who reminded himself by those symbols of mortality that caning couldn’t last for ever. But I believe he only did it because they were easy, and didn’t want any features." (Ch 7)
"I was in the carrier’s cart when I heard her calling to me. I looked out, and she stood at the garden-gate alone, holding her baby up in her arms for me to see. It was cold still weather; and not a hair of her head, nor a fold of her dress, was stirred, as she looked intently at me, holding up her child. So I lost her." (Ch 8)
"I am conscious of having confounded it with those demoniacal parchments which are held to have, once upon a time, obtained to a great extent in Germany." (Ch 11)
"she was one of a series of protegees whom my aunt had taken into her service expressly to educate in a renouncement of mankind, and who had generally completed their abjuration by marrying the baker." (Ch 13)
"a grave building in a courtyard, with a learned air about it that seemed very well suited to the stray rooks and jackdaws who came down from the Cathedral towers to walk with a clerkly bearing on the grass-plot" (Ch 16)
"‘It was as true,’ said Mr. Barkis, ‘as turnips is. It was as true,’ said Mr. Barkis, nodding his nightcap, which was his only means of emphasis, ‘as taxes is. And nothing’s truer than them.’" (Ch 21)
"they had a weazen little baby, with a heavy head that it couldn’t hold up, and two weak staring eyes, with which it seemed to be always wondering why it had ever been born." (Ch 22)
"The whole building looked to me as if it were learning to swim; it conducted itself in such an unaccountable manner, when I tried to steady it." (Ch 24) (Being drunk, a delightful description)
"Miss Murdstone, like the pocket instrument called a life-preserver, was not so much designed for purposes of protection as of assault." (Ch 26)
"'I smoke, myself, for the asthma.' Mr. Omer had made room for me, and placed a chair. He now sat down again very much out of breath, gasping at his pipe as if it contained a supply of that necessary, without which he must perish." (Ch 30)
"Try not to associate bodily defects with mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason." (Ch 32)
"Frozen-out old gardeners in the flower-beds of the heart" (Ch 33)
"There’s an account about the people being hungry and discontented down in the North, but they are always being hungry and discontented somewhere." (Ch 36)
"To a man possessed of the higher imaginative powers, the objection to legal studies is the amount of detail which they involve." (Ch 39)
"they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip [her pet dog]in his." (Ch 41)
"From babies who had but a week or two of life behind them, to crooked old men and women who seemed to have but a week or two of life before them; and from ploughmen bodily carrying out soil of England on their boots, to smiths taking away samples of its soot and smoke upon their skins; every age and occupation appeared to be crammed into the narrow compass of the ‘tween decks." (Ch 57)
"what such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance." (Ch 59)
"the prison ... was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old." (Ch 61)