These are the Book Club resources for David Copperfield. Everyone has access to the introduction and a short version of the video. Paid subscribers can learn about Dickens’s autobiography, his anti-feminist reaction to Jane Eyre, use of the present tense, and how David Copperfield as a self-made man is an example of Thomas Carlyle’s theory of the heroic. The video is not a recording of the session but specially made for this post.
The video outlines the ideas which are given below in (much) more detail, with quotes from a range of critics, to introduce the spectrum of responses to this remarkable novel. As far as I know, there is no detailed scholarly work that traces the detail of Carlyle’s idea in Copperfield. If anyone knows of any such work, I would be grateful to know about it. To unlock the full video and essay, subscribe now.
The next book club will be about Mrs. Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, a suitable follow-on from Copperfield. We will meet in mid-July, date tbc—suggestions welcome in the comments. Gaskell is our primary focus, but I also strongly recommend The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller. And of course, re-reading Jane Eyre, one of the all time great novels. As I said to someone who questioned Emily’s talents recently, the Brontës are five-star geniuses and I won’t hear another word about it.
Contents
Introduction. Is David Copperfield the most Victorian of nineteenth century novels?
Copperfield as Dickens’s autobiography, the relationship between Dickens’ life and David Copperfield to see how autobiographical the novel was.
Literary influence, the literary influences of Jane Eyre as an “autobiographical novel” and the use of the present tense.
David Copperfield as Carlylean hero, a discussion of the way Carlyle’s theory of the heroic is encoded in the novel, demonstrating the influence of Samuel Johnson on the novel and showing that Agnes is the lynchpin of this idea.
If you are interested in reading more about David Copperfield, do look at the essays on Rachel’s blog, All the (Dickensian) Year, written by Rachel, Boze, and members of the Dickens Chronological Reading Club.
Introduction
Is David Copperfield the most Victorian of nineteenth century novels? It has so many essential elements of Victorianism. The self-made man, the angel in the house, the spinster aunt, the anxious marital secret, the nasty brutish step-father, sexual hypocrisy, ruined innocence, labouring children, class division, class hatred, snobbish hypocrisy, the rising to dominance of the middle-class, apple-faced ruralism, nostalgia for the pre-steam engine age, commerce and trade, country lawyers with scheming clerks, silly wives with little dogs, wicked servants, humble servants, financial ruin, emigration, financial recovery, port towns, London, loyal daughters, good Christian men, mental health problems and unsympathetic relatives, eccentricity, a sensible submissive wife with a wise heart, the rich dissolute friend who brings evil to beautiful women, closed societies who scorn the weak, mercy and charity, anonymous city life, indignation, consternation, poetic justice, sentimentality, and the ever present influence of Thomas Carlyle.
Copperfield is Dickens’s last book that is predominantly comic: after 1850, Carlyle’s influence on Dickens turns him into a darker, more pessimistic writer, something which made Bleak House and Little Dorritt less popular with the critics. This is the last time we see the Dickens of high-days and holidays, whose view of life is essentially optimistic and beneficent, before social evils crowd his work like an irremovable smell. After Copperfield, Dickens is always attacking something, often bitterly. Carlyle’s influence on Copperfield is more optimistic: it makes this a novel of the heroic man-of-letters and the rising Victorian middle-class that casts off the Byronic idea of a Romantic hero.
These ideas are set in the opening line, Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life… Life, here, has two meanings. First, the actual life Copperfield lives. This is directly related to our lives: we might all want to become the hero of our own lives. But life also meant biography, such as in Forster’s Life of Dickens. David Copperfield is a fictional autobiography.
In this fictional autobiography, Dickens uses the material of his own life and the ideas of his literary hero Thomas Carlyle, to present the story of a development of a neglected child into a hero as a man-of-letters.
Paid subscribers get access to the full video, the rest of the detailed notes, can come to the Book Club meetings, and receive occasional additional essays. You can also join the conversation over at the discussion thread.
Copperfield as Dickens’s autobiography
Letters written to his friend John Forster show the various names Dickens went through while he was “revolving a new work” at the beginning of 1849—various elements of this new work become evident. It is especially notable that Mag reappeared a decade later in another Bildungsroman, Great Expectations.
Mag’s Diversions, Being the History of Mr. Thomas May the Younger of Blunderstone House
Mr. David Mag the Younger of Copperfield House
Mr. David Copperfield the Younger and his great-aunt Margaret
The Copperfield Disclosures
The Copperfield Records
The Last Living Speech and Confession of David Copperfield Junior
The Copperfield Survey of the World as it Rolled
The Last Will and Testament of Mr. David Copperfield
Copperfield, Complete
The real title is more complicated, but unambiguously autobiographical—
The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (which He never meant to be Published on any Account)
Forster replied that David Copperfield had reversed the initials of Charles Dickens. “Why else should I so obstinately have kept to that name when once it turned up?” the unruffled author replied. He was quite intentionally writing an autobiographical novel, a mirror of himself.
Shortly before he wrote Copperfield, Dickens began writing an autobiography, which he never finished or published. When Dickens died, Forster wrote quoted several long sections from the autobiography, revealing the now well-known details about Dickens’ childhood and showing that David Copperfield was very much a story about Dickens own childhood. This autobiographical fragment “led to the larger design in which it became absorbed.”
Dickens’ never got over his childhood. The warehouse where David works is almost identical to the blacking factory Dickens was sent to work in as a child. John Carey says,
The weeks in the blacking warehouse permanently wounded Dickens’ mind, and helped make him a great novelist. His whole nature was, as he put it, penetrated with ‘grief and humiliation’... Dilapidated buildings, riverside waste land, and counting-houses haunt his fiction. They were the components of his childhood nightmare as described in his autobiography and repeated, almost verbatim, in the account of David Copperfield’s experience at Murdstone and Grindby’s.
[The Violent Effigy, pp. 148-149]
His father’s impecuniosity was responsible for that experience, and Mr Micawber’s famous pronouncement about happiness being a question of living within your means was a direct quote from Dickens’s father. Throughout Copperfield, Dickens is reworking his own life into a novel. Even Dora is based on an early romance. As one recent PhD dissertation says,
Through fiction, Dickens tied together all of the major, disparate sections of his life into one cohesive narrative. In this way, his hardship and abandonment in childhood, his experiences of courtship, his struggles as a young professional, and his ultimate triumph as an author all come together as parts of the single journey that made Copperfield into a hero.
[David Copperfield: Victorian Hero by James A. Hamby, p. 84]
What is most notable about David Copperfield is that he escapes his childhood. The lasting pain that Dickens' felt is absent from the novel, which instead becomes the embodiment of a new idea from the 1840s, the hero as a man-of-letters.
Literary influence
There were professional, literary reasons to write an autobiography and then an autobiographical novel. In 1847, Jane Eyre was published, a novel that was called an autobiography and was written in the first person. Dickens was startled by the competition: he claimed not to have read it (and often he simply did not read women novelists) but its influence is all over his work, especially Bleak House. Dickens will have disliked this novel because it challenged the patriarchy. As Lisa Jadwin says,
Fictional portraits like Rosa Dartle and Miss Wade reveal Dickens’s conviction that an acute intellect leads a woman either to destroy men or to “agitate,” to “step out of her domestic path... to seek influence in the civilised world,” as he suggests in his 1851 anti-feminist diatribe “Sucking Pigs.”
In ‘Sucking Pigs’ Dickens wrote,
Beloved one, does your sex seek influence in the civilised world? Surely it possesses influence therein to no mean extent, and has possessed it since the civilised world was… Should we love our Julia better, if she were a Member of Parliament, a Parochial Guardian, a High Sheriff, a Grand Juror, or a woman distinguished for her able conduct in the chair? Do we not, on the contrary, rather seek in the society of our Julia, a haven of refuge from Members of Parliament, Parochial Guardians, High Sheriffs, Grand Jurors, and able chairmen? Is not the home-voice of our Julia as the song of a bird, after considerable bow-wow-ing out of doors?
Not only is this attitude clear in the way Dora and Agnes are written—Agnes is the angel in the house—it is a reaction against Jane Eyre and novels like it. This anti-feminist position got stronger in Bleak House, causing J.S. Mill to detest the novel.
Dickens will have been shaken by the fact that Jane Eyre, along with Vanity Fair, was greeted by critics as part of a new generation of novelists, an implicit challenge to his dominant position. [Cambridge Companion, pp. 99-100] First person narratives became a significant part of Dickens’ work in Copperfield and then Bleak House after Jane Eyre appeared as a rival.
The influence of Jane Eyre is present is a technical way, too. The use of the present tense. John Mullan details Dickens’ use of the present tense in highly readable, entertaining, and learned book The Artful Dickens. The first novel to have a sustained use of present and past tense together was Dombey, written just before Copperfield. Dickens has flicked into present tense before, briefly; now it became technique.
Jane Eyre is famous for its use of the present tense to dramatise moments of narrative intensity.
Sweet-briar and southernwood, jasmine, pink, and rose have long been yielding their evening sacrifice of incense: this new scent is neither of shrub nor flower; it is—I know it well—it is Mr. Rochester's cigar. I look round and I listen. I see trees laden with ripening fruit. I hear a nightingale warbling in a wood half a mile off; no moving form is visible, no coming step audible; but that perfume increases: I must flee. I make for the wicket leading to the shrubbery, and I see Mr. Rochester entering. I step aside into the ivy recess; he will not stay long: he will soon return whence he came, and if I sit still he will never see me.
The present tense here makes it as if the smell has revived the memory, as if she lives it again. This is how Dickens uses the present tense in Copperfield to discover, as Mullan says, “that the distant past is still present to him.” He also uses the present tense to condense time, as in the accounts of his childhood and the time before his wedding.
Using the present tense like this is a significant invention in narrative technique. Dickens’ nest novel, Bleak House, is the most significant example, being divided between past and present chapter by chapter. These experiments influenced the modernists decades later, with Bleak House often cited. Though Dickens denied it, he learned at least some of this technique from Charlotte Bronte.
David Copperfield as Carlylean Hero
As in many other areas, when defining a hero Dickens drew on Carlyle. Caroline Fox, Victorian diarist, wrote in 1841 that Dickens:
…is carrying out Carlyle’s work more emphatically than any; he forces the sympathies of all into unwonted channels, and teaches us that Punch and Judy men, beggar children, and daft old men are also of our species, and are not, more than ourselves, removed from the sphere of the heroic.1
[Critical Heritage, pp. 6-7]
First, let’s look at what Carlyle meant by heroic; then, we shall see how the idea of the heroic is presented in David Copperfield.
Carlyle delivered a series of lectures called On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History in London in 1840, nine years before David Copperfield began serialisation. Rather than the selfish ideal of heroes of Bryonic legend, Carlyle admired the heroes who made their nations great. For Carlyle, the hero as a man-of-letters was someone who spoke the truth to readers, be they poet or journalist.
[The] Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole world will do and make. The world’s manner of dealing with him is the most significant feature of the world’s general position
Carlyle thought the man-of-letters was a very modern hero, because “Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised… Books still accomplish miracles… They persuade men.” [On Heroes, p. 138]
Carlyle’s example is Samuel Johnson, “one of our great English souls...a giant invincible soul; a true man’s.” [pp. 153, 154] Carlyle praised Johnson’s “Rude, stubborn self-help” and said he was “An original man;—not a secondhand, borrowing or begging man.” [p. 154] He praises Johnson’s sincerity, his attachment to truth and fact, and his obedience to a higher order (i.e. God).
This is a very Victorian idea. Michael K. Goldberg says,
Though Carlyle’s intensity was his own, his sentiments were widely shared by his fellow Victorians who, said Edmund Gosse, turned admiration “from a virtue into a religion, and called it Hero Worship.” One factor behind Victorian Hero Worship was the Romantic rediscovery of enthusiasm. In the neoclassical period [i.e. C18th] it had been applied as a term of ridicule to religious zealots who felt themselves literally en-theos, possessed by god or having God within them.2 Romantic theory and sensibility converted enthusiasm from an intellectually ludicrous delusion into a sign of emotional depth and power. The characteristic “romantic passions” thus came to include enthusiasm or unfettered admiration, which, according to Ruskin, mean “primarily all the forms of Hero Worship.”
Carlyle was concerned to reestablish the idea—which he thought was in decline in the industrial age—that great achievements were made by individuals. Worshipping heroes would lead to feats of originality. This is echoed when David goes to London, and he is inspired to live up to the examples of his heroes,
What an amazing place London was to me when I saw it in the distance, and how I believed all the adventures of all my favourite heroes to be constantly enacting and re-enacting there, and how I vaguely made it out in my own mind to be fuller of wonders and wickedness than all the cities of the earth, I need not stop here to relate.
The idea of the self-made hero would later morph into Samuel Smiles’ book Self-Help—David’s “steady application” to his work is the virtue Smiles most praised. Hard work is the foundation of David’s success. Mr. Micawber is supposed to be a man of talent who never finds the right opportunity; his indulgence and lack of application are a contrast to David’s frugality and persistent application. In a very Victorian way, David does not dwell on his past but turns it to good use. Mr. Dick is another, more compassionate contrast, to David in this regard. As Irène Simon said,
While Mr Dick’s memory is blocked because his mind has given way under suffering, David did not submit for long to the dreadful life of the warehouse, but escaped through ‘[his] own act’ (Ch. 12, p. 228) and can now integrate this experience into his life. Compared with David, Mr Dick figures the passive versus the active response to traumatic experience: his reaction is a regression into childhood, a temptation against which David is not always proof, but which as a narrator he resists successfully. As Aunt Betsey tells him: ‘It’s in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present’ (Ch. 23, p. 407). This is further brought home to David when Mr Wickfield realizes how wrong he has been to indulge in fond memories (Ch. 39, p. 642)
[Irène Simon, David Copperfield: A Künstlerroman?]
The shade of Johnson, the heroic man of letters, is ever present in Copperfield, notably in David’s work as a Parliamentary reporter, one of Johnson’s early jobs as a London writer, and in the Dictionary being compiled by David’s headmaster Doctor Strong, a task Copperfield is later employed to help with. Doctor Strong is a similar age when Copperfield meets him to the age of Johnson when he met Boswell. Both have poor eyesight, live in a Cathedral town, are of shabby appearance.
When Carlyle describes the new modern sort of hero, the man-of-letters, he describes a figure “in his squalid garret, in his rusty coat.” [On Heroes, p. 133] This is the description of Strong:
Doctor Strong looked almost as rusty, to my thinking, as the tall iron rails and gates outside the house; and almost as stiff and heavy as the great stone urns that flanked them, and were set up, on the top of the red-brick wall, at regular distances all round the court, like sublimated skittles, for Time to play at. He was in his library (I mean Doctor Strong was), with his clothes not particularly well brushed, and his hair not particularly well combed; his knee-smalls unbraced; his long black gaiters unbuttoned; and his shoes yawning like two caverns on the hearth-rug. Turning upon me a lustreless eye, that reminded me of a long-forgotten blind old horse who once used to crop the grass, and tumble over the graves, in Blunderstone churchyard, he said he was glad to see me: and then he gave me his hand; which I didn’t know what to do with, as it did nothing for itself.
Dickens had recently read Forster’s Life of Goldsmith in which Johnson featured. Joseph Rosenblum has noted the way Dickens’ probably drew the description of Strong from Forster’s description of Johnson (which in turn relies on Boswell). Note the use of the word “rusty” and the handshake. Forster writes, following Boswell, of Johnson’s “rusty brown morning suit” and “the knees of his breeches hanging loose.” There is also an awkward handshake. “Johnson suddenly roared across the table, ‘Give me your hand; I have taken a liking to you.’” As Rosenblum said, “The conjunction as well as the similarity of detail suggest some conscious or unconscious borrowing.” [DOCTOR STRONG AND DOCTOR JOHNSON REVISITED, Joseph Rosenblum]
Johnson is described by Carlyle in contrast to Goethe as not finding the truth but as having “fought bravely, and fell.” It is this fighting to find truth that Carlyle admires as heroic and which Dickens has made the foundation of his novel. A further contrast of David’s discipline is made with the dissolute and indulgent Steerforth, who dies tragically like the poet Shelley, an almost too-literal metaphor for the replacement of Romantic inspiration with Victorian hard-work.
Julia Saville has said, of eccentricity as an early Victorian preoccupation, that “Through his sincerity a middle-class man of character could distinguish himself from rivals such as the aristocracy or, at an international level, the French.” [Eccentricity as Englishness in David Copperfield]
This was the time when J.S. Mill would say that “the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.” To be sincerely yourself, was part of creating the English culture of liberality. Mr. Dick represents this ideal, so does Betsy. But the ideal of the middle-class liberal individual, who is good, that comes from David.
Agnes, whose name means “holy” or “pure”, tells David, in high Carlyle manner: “Your growing reputation and success enlarge your power of doing good.” Writing is not done for mere entertainment or fashion—something Hazlitt complained about when reviewing Vivian Grey in 1827. For Carlyle, writing is foundational to democracy, to doing good. “Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority.” It is this spirit that animates all the novels that come after Copperfield and which are darker, more insistent, more preaching about social problems.
Agnes is described as the “real heroine” in Dickens’s notes for the novel and we can see David’s heroic development being to work hard and become worthy of the ideal she sets. We may not like this ideal as it is expressed in her passive, dormant femininity—but we shouldn’t mistake this, as many critics, including Orwell, do for an artistic failure, but a moral one, to the extent we can separate the two.
Some critics think the question of David’s development as a writer is neglected and the real point of the book is for him to marry Agnes. That’s wrong. Irène Simon shows very clearly in ‘David Copperfield: A Künstlerroman?’ the way David becomes capable of seeing his past with a detached artist’s eye—the climax moment is when he see Steerforth on the beach.
The true aim of the book, when seen in Carlye’s heroic terms is for David to become the sort of artist and person who is worth of Agnes—to enlarge his power of doing good. Critics who focus on one or the other of personal vs professional development miss the crucial point: David becomes a true hero as man-of-letters, and a true gentleman, when he becomes worth of Agnes, whose character represents a moral ideal.
Agnes’ injunction for “doing good” mirrors what David had felt on his journey abroad, when he was “almost hoping that some better change was possible within me.” This is Wordsworthian—finding an inner vision among Nature—but it will only come about through hard-work and virtuous intentions. This is Wordsworth as understood in the context of Carlyle.
Importantly, this is a marginal episode. Dickens takes his cue from Carlyle that it is better to worship the heroic acts of our fellow man than to describe the beauties of Nature. “How much more he who sings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart the noble doings, feelings, darings and endurances of a brother man! He has verily touched our hearts as with a live coal from the altar. Perhaps there is no worship more authentic.”
It is worth noting that the name Doctor Strong is apposite for a Johnsonian figure. Boswell says,
In all respects he was of great stature. His contemporaries called him a colossus, the literary Goliath, the Giant, the great Cham of literature, a tremendous companion. His frame was majestic; he strode when he walked, and his physical strength and courage were heroic. His mode of speaking was ‘very impressive,’ his utterance ‘deliberate and strong.’
Copperfield becomes Boswell to Strong’s Johnson as part of his journey towards heroic status as a man-of-letters. This is very much in tune with Dickens’ personality as a literary hero worshipper. Branwen Bailey Pratt says: “John Forster (who once in all seriousness addressed Carlyle as “My Prophet”) records that Carlyle was a hero to Dickens, and hero and hero -worshipper they continued.” [‘Carlyle and Dickens: Heroes and Hero-Worshippers’]
The voice of Carlyle is directly present in the novel, in the figure of Betsy Trotwood, who constantly exhorts David to “fight bravely” in Carlyle’s words, and not be a secondhand, borrowing or begging man:
I wanted to see how you would come out of the trial, Trot; and you came out nobly—persevering, self-reliant, self-denying!
***
On our way back, my aunt informed me how she confidently trusted that the life I was now to lead would make me firm and self-reliant
***
‘Trot,’ said my aunt at last, when she had finished her tea, and carefully smoothed down her dress, and wiped her lips—‘you needn’t go, Barkis!—Trot, have you got to be firm and self-reliant?’
This is in contrast to the way “firmness” is defined in the character of the bullying, domineering, wickedness of Murdstone:
‘Oh, it’s very well to say you wonder, Edward!’ cried my mother, ‘and it’s very well for you to talk about firmness, but you wouldn’t like it yourself.’
Firmness, I may observe, was the grand quality on which both Mr. and Miss Murdstone took their stand. However I might have expressed my comprehension of it at that time, if I had been called upon, I nevertheless did clearly comprehend in my own way, that it was another name for tyranny; and for a certain gloomy, arrogant, devil’s humour, that was in them both.
Murdstone’s firmness seeks to control and dominate; Besty Trotwood’s to establish David as independent and self-sufficient. One is demonic, the other heroic. When David has left-school and is still trying to decide on his choice of life, Besty tells him
‘But what I want you to be, Trot,’ resumed my aunt, ‘—I don’t mean physically, but morally; you are very well physically—is, a firm fellow. A fine firm fellow, with a will of your own. With resolution,’ said my aunt, shaking her cap at me, and clenching her hand. ‘With determination. With character, Trot—with strength of character that is not to be influenced, except on good reason, by anybody, or by anything. That’s what I want you to be. That’s what your father and mother might both have been, Heaven knows, and been the better for it.’
I intimated that I hoped I should be what she described.
‘That you may begin, in a small way, to have a reliance upon yourself, and to act for yourself,’ said my aunt…
This is what David, a cipher for Dickens, accomplishes, and it encodes the idea of the heroic that Dickens learned from his own hero, Thomas Carlyle.
(Unwonted here means, according to Johsnon, “Uncommon; unusual; rare; infrequent,” or, “Unaccustomed; unused.”)
Johnson defines enthusiasm as: “A vain belief of private revelation; a vain confidence of divine favour or communication.”
