Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 582
‘Half an hour before he rose to speak,’ says Forster, ‘I had been called out of the room. It was the servant from Devonshire Terrace to tell me his child Dora was suddenly dead. She had not been strong from her birth; but there was just at this time no cause for special fear, when unexpected convulsions came, and the frail little life passed away. My decision had to be formed at once, and I satisfied myself that it would be best to permit his part of the proceedings to close before the truth was told to him. But as he went on, after the sentences I have quoted, to speak of actors having to come from scenes of sickness, of suffering, aye, even of death itself, to play their parts before us, my part was very difficult. “Yet how often is it with all of us,” he proceeded to say, and I remember to this hour with what anguish I listened to words that had for myself alone, in all the crowded room, their full significance: “how often is it with all of us, that in our several spheres we have to do violence to our feelings, and to hide our hearts in carrying on this fight of life, if we would bravely discharge in it our duties and responsibilities.”’
There is a very general agreement that David Copperfield is Charles Dickens’s greatest book. The only doubt is as between David Copperfield and Pickwick. But the two are of such a different kind and class that a decision is difficult. They are not the same thing. Pickwick among Dickens’s books stands by itself. He never did it again and never tried to. It is not a novel; it is not a story; it has no particular plot or plan except what it gathers to it by its own attraction. It is the fortuitous result of setting the exuberant genius of its author to work on a roving commission. Certain unknown forces came together and Pickwick happened. Oddly enough, John Forster, the biographer whose view of Dickens was one of permanent idolatry, does not rate Pickwick as most people do. ‘I do not think the Pickwick Papers,’ he says, ‘comparable to the later books.’ A strange judgment, not sustained by the verdict of posterity.
But among all the works of Dickens, other than Pickwick, David Copperfield on a general vote would stand easily first. Every one knows, of course, the author’s own opinion expressed in his characteristic way, ‘Like all fathers,’ he said, ‘I have a favourite child, and his name is David Copperfield.’
The book was written at the maturity of its author’s powers. He was thirty-seven years old. He was surrounded with all the adjuncts of a happy life, — fame, fortune, friends, an affluent home and a babbling nursery of children. The great domestic tragedy which was later to shadow his life was as yet but a cloud on the horizon. The book was written at Devonshire Terrace, its writing punctuated with the pleasant dinners that were a feature of Dickens’s life at this period; and at Broadstairs, where the sight and sound of the sea inspired him with some of its famous passages. It was throughout a labour of love and absorption. ‘I am in that tremendous paroxysm of Copperfield’, so he wrote from Broadstairs (September 17, 1850) to Wills, his sub-editor, as the book drew to its close, ‘having my most powerful effect in all the story on the anvil, that you might as well ask me to manufacture a cannon seventy-four pounds as to do anything now’. The ‘powerful effect’ no doubt is the famous fifty-fifth chapter of the story with the storm and wreck at sea and the death of Steerforth. Dickens always thought it one of his greatest achievements and read it from the platform as one of his moving selections.
To realize the greatness of the book we have only to remember that not one, but several of its characters have become part of the history of literature, part of the language of the world. Not David himself: there is no such person. But Mr. Micawber, Dora, Uriah Heep, Mr. Dick and in a lesser degree David’s aunt Betsy Trotwood and Tommy Traddles. What a galaxy is there! What an achievement to have created that! Mr. Dick’s difficulty with King Charles’s head, the fact that ‘Barkis is Willing’, and the delightful fiction that ‘Jorkins was inexorable’, — these things are a part of Dickens’s legacy to human happiness.
One of the strangest things in the book David Copperfield is David Copperfield himself. Few people perhaps have noted the fact, but many will admit it when said, that there is, so to speak, no such person. David is merely the looking-glass in which we see the other characters, the voice through which they speak. He himself has no more character than a spiritualist medium. He tells us, for example, that he wrote stories for the press, but we don’t believe him. He tells us all about his career, his attempts to enter law, his struggle with shorthand reporting, but we take no stock in it. None of it seems real. And none of it is. Our interest is purely in the people who circulate in David’s life, Betsy Trotwood, and the Micawbers, Uriah Heep and his mother and Mr. Spenlow and, above all, Dora. But in David himself not at all: he is ruined and we don’t feel a pang, goes up in fortune or down or sideways, — it doesn’t seem to matter. All we want is to hear what happened to the others, not to him.
This instinctive attitude of the reader is entirely justified. It arises out of the origin of the book. Dickens, as everybody knows, planned to write an autobiography, to set down in writing especially all the early recollections of the sufferings of his own life. He began the task. He wrote out various early chapters of his life: then found the revelation too intimate, too poignant, and abandoned it. Later on he changed it into the story of David Copperfield, and in the changing the whole nature of the thing is altered. In the autobiography such as he meant to write the interest is in himself. We can see that in the burning passages which describe the humiliation of little Copperfield degraded to ignoble work, an outcast, on the edge of want and on the fringe of destitution: this is not David Copperfield. This is little Dickens. There are touches of this all through the book, though the intensity washes out of them as it goes on. In the written novel, the autobiography, the revelation of the author’s soul, is overwhelmed and absorbed by the characters in the book. If David Copperfield has a soul we don’t care about it. The effect is as if the other characters spoke through the medium of David, and sometimes Charles Dickens himself used the medium to do a little talk of his own. The book is therefore neither a real autobiography nor a real novel in first person impersonal. If this is bad art it doesn’t matter. For Dickens there were no more rules of art than there were rules of battle for Napoleon.
It is a supreme excellence of the book that the interest rises continually. For many readers David’s meeting with Dora and his falling in love seem to bring the book to a culmination of interest, when all the points run together, like lights focussed on a single spot. Yet Dora does not come in until the twenty-sixth chapter — halfway through the book. It is a wonderful evidence of the genius of Dickens that could introduce a new character and a new interest in a book at such a stage of the narration. Few writers would even attempt such a thing, and fewer still succeed in it.
Dora herself is one of the great triumphs of the book. The falling in love of David Copperfield, sudden, catastrophic, and idyllic, is one of the masterpieces of English literature. It is so marvellously written that to readers young enough in mind it comes with all the freshness and glory of love itself. The magic words transpose the scene, and the reader shares the exaltation felt by David, — carried away on the wings of the morning.
There has been much misunderstanding of this. A false literary tradition has grown up about it. Old maids and jealous women have formulated the idea that Dora was a doll. Men have not dared to contradict. Yet the real masculine judgment is that if these are dolls, let us have more of them. It is expounded by the critics that Dickens meant to contrast the helpless doll Dora with the serene and faithful Agnes of David’s later marriage. In a way he did, and in another way he didn’t. In depicting Dora, — which he did by instinct and not by artifice, recalling from the depths of his own heart the feelings he described, — Dickens was showing what love is, what lovers feel, the springtime of life as beautiful as a garden bursting into flower. As compared with this, efficiency, book-keeping and the buying of butcher’s meat is of no account.
It is part of the perversity of genius that, later on, Dickens should have seen fit to blur and smear the beautiful picture. He brought Dora of Copperfield back from the dead as the tittering Flora of Little Dorrit. But for most readers, luckily, little Dora sleeps on where Dickens left her.
The book has a further merit, in the negative sense, in that it is but very little marred by its author’s characteristic defects. There is in it very little of the dense dark complications which take the place of a plot in the later books. The story is in the main straightforward and easy to read. Many readers never quite understand who is who in Bleak House, or what is what in Little Dorrit. But the narrative of Copperfield runs as clear as a stream. Here and there the author’s love of the improbable forces its way in. Old Peggotty setting out on a search of the world at large is rather unconvincing. And the writer cannot resist the use of impossible coincidences, such as the drowning of Steerforth at exactly the right time and place. Steerforth, incidentally be it said, is a blot on the story, not in the moral but in the artistic sense, in that he doesn’t come out as Dickens meant him to. He is like a badly taken photograph that develops all wrong. Dickens was trying to portray a dissolute gentleman; what came out was a contemptible cad. Dickens’s own impression, no doubt, was that Steerforth was a charming fellow. Most readers find him repulsive. A gentleman was always a difficult thing for Dickens to ‘put over’ deliberately. He could only do it by accident and without trying to, as in the case of Tommy Traddles. But such characters as Steerforth, and Eugene Wrayburn of Our Mutual Friend, are merely ‘bounders.’
It seems to be generally agreed that the famous Mr. Micawber of David Copperfield, whose name is now almost a common noun in the English language, was in reality John Dickens, the author’s father: as much, that is, that anybody outside of a book is anybody inside a book.
At the time when Charles Dickens began the writing of David Copperfield (1849), Dickens senior was not only alive but still ‘going strong!’ His son’s generosity has lifted him from his shabby genteel poverty of twenty years before to a position of ease and comfort. The days of the debtors’ prison were long since past. Their squalid pathos, their maudlin tears, their false hopes and bitter disappointments survive only in the pages of the written book. ‘Mr. Micawber’ has passed out of them, as a butterfly kicks out from its entangling web. In the sunshine of prosperity and celebrity reflected from his illustrious son, his latent talents matured and his character blossomed into geniality. He was to a considerable extent a man of parts. His own exertions had gained him a part in the reporters’ gallery in the days before Pickwick lifted the family to eminence. Later on, when the Daily News was founded, his son was able to award him the position of chief of the reportorial staff. The mimic dignity of this position, its apparent control of the destinies of nations, suited John Dickens to the ground. One of his youthful colleagues on the Daily News, writing his reminiscences long afterwards, has given us a charming picture of the father of Charles Dickens, — short, portly, obese, fond of a glass of grog, full of fun, never given to much locomotion, but sitting as chairman, and looking carefully to the regular and orderly despatch to the printers of the numerous manuscripts thrown off at lightning speed by the men from the ‘gallery’. ‘It was his habit’, we are told, ‘to come down to the office about eight, at night, and he invariably in all weathers walked down Fleet Street and turned into the passage leading to Whitefriars. Every night as regularly as clock-work he was relieved of his silk pocket handkerchief by the thieves of the great neighbouring thoroughfare, and he would deplore the loss in feeling terms when he tried to wipe the perspiration from his brow: for it was a peculiarity of his nature that he was always hot, whatever the weather might be. He maintained that he knew when his pocket was picked, but that he could not help himself, because the thief was too nimble and he too stout.’
John Dickens, like Mr. Micawber, was apparently an orator of sorts, oratory being an acquirement natural to so genial a person in the days when toasts were drunk and speeches were made on any and every possible occasion. ‘I understand,’ wrote Dickens to a friend, ‘that my father went on like the Steam Leg, oratorically speaking, at your dinner.’ And this too in the last year of the good old gentleman’s existence. Nor was the comment meant in criticism. It was affectionate. It was part of the amused and kindly appreciation with which Dickens regarded the oddities of his father. He loved the old man’s grandiloquent habit of speech, and used to quote with delight from his letters. ‘I have a letter from my father,’ he wrote, ‘lamenting the fine weather, invoking congenial tempests and informing me that it will not be possible for him to stay more than another year in Devonshire as he must then proceed to Paris to consolidate Augustus’s French.’ When Dickens wrote in his correspondence a high-sounding phrase he would often put in the words,— ‘as my father would say.’ In short, the elder Dickens was a ‘character’ and ‘characters’ were the preoccupation of Charles Dickens’s life. His feeling for his father grew as time went on, and he looked back to the old man’s memory with an affection that grew with years. ‘The longer I live,’ he said, ‘the better man I think him.’
When he put his father into the pages of his greatest book, it was as a tribute, a mark of his esteem. It conferred upon him immortality. Mr. Micawber, be it admitted, is John Dickens senior: just as Mrs. Nickleby was Charles Dickens’s mother. But one must not overdo this connection between imaginary people and real prototypes in the books of Dickens: and indeed it has been sadly overdone. It seems to slur over the real creative merit of genius, and to turn it into mere transcription. A real person put into a book would be sorry reading. The art lies in making them fit to go into a book.
Human beings are made of aspects, not of realities. Each of us is such and such things from certain angles and in certain lights. We are many things to many people and show to the occasion and the hour a different aspect of our being. It is the art of genius to seize the deceiving aspects of real people and turn them into the realities of imaginary ones. The act involved is not transcription but creation. But when we talk of such and such a character in fiction as being taken from such and such a person we do the author a grave wrong, — at least if the book and the character are worth talking about. When we say that Mr. Micawber is taken from Dickens’s father we really mean that Dickens had the eye to see in his father those quaint, illusive appearances which led him to the discovery of Mr. Micawber.
One may well feel sensitive upon the point, inclined as it were to come to the defence of the author as against something like a charge of plagiarism. This is especially so in the case of Dickens. Consider, for instance, the book Dombey and Son discussed earlier in this chapter. Here the commentators give us a list of ‘characters’ which almost fills the book. Little Paul, we are told, is Dickens’s nephew Harry Burnett: Carker was a member of a firm of London engineers. Mrs. Skewton was at once ‘identified’ as a Mrs. Campbell. Captain Cuttle’s ‘real name’ was David Mainland, a merchant seaman whom Dickens met in the city. The real name of Sol Gills was Mr. Norrie, and John Forster knew Miss Blimber personally.
In other words, all that Dickens had to do was to take a look at these people and then write the book.
Or take the case of Mr. Dombey himself. When Dickens wanted to convey to Hablôt Browne (Phiz), who was to do the illustrations, the ‘idea’ of Mr. Dombey, he suggested that he might ‘get a glimpse of So-and-so, for he is the very Dombey.’ What this meant was that having created Dombey in his mind he saw a man who looked as Dombey ought to look.
One thinks here, — to carry the point of art a little farther, — of the American cartoonist who reduces a national president to a box of teeth, or to a pair of spectacles or to a jawbone. Dickens did the opposite. He took a jawbone and made a president.
Nor is there in the story, except in casual places, that overdone and overextended sentiment which so often pushes hard on sentimentality and even hysteria. Mrs. Annie Strong, — the young wife of the old Doctor, when she makes her general round of confession, autobiography and psycho-analysis, in speeches straight of the melodrama, — is a little hard to bear. But such odd lapses are but as a little mist in the sunshine. Of the works of imagination written in the English language, David Copperfield to many people stands first.
CHAPTER VII. BLEAK HOUSE AND SOCIAL REFORM (1850-1854)
AMATEUR THEATRICALS — BLEAK HOUSE — CHILD’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND — HARD TIMES
It was just after the publication of David Copperfield that Charles Dickens began, with the first number of his new magazine, Household Words (March 30, 1850), those editorial labours which only ended at his death. Indeed, from this time on, for the remaining twenty years that he lived, the occupations and diversions of Charles Dickens may be said to have swung through a sort of recurrent cycle of activities. There was, in the first place, the writing of his greater works, the novels so-called, of which at least two of the greatest were still to come. There was in addition his work on his magazine, Household Words, later to be exchanged for All the Year Round, including not only the writing of contributions of his own, but the editing of masses of material. There was soon to be added the exhilarating and exacting task of public readings of his works, the first of which took place at the close of 1853. To this, — as a diversion, an amusement, but an arduous one, — was added his pursuit of amateur theatricals; and the equipment of his new homes in London and in Kent. Migration having become a sort of physical and mental necessity, a very considerable part of the years that here follow was spent in Boulogne and in Paris.
