I’m still sometimes asked how I liked my boarding school, and the question always stirs a little regret in me. When two years after I started at Rosemary Hall, my brother began at the Putney School in Brattleboro, Vermont, a coed progressive school where the students excelled in the arts, worked on a collective farm, and called teachers by their first names, it seemed to me he’d gotten a much better deal. We hadn’t known about Putney when I was deciding on Rosemary Hall. Or perhaps just hadn’t looked for it. My mother had been fixed for me on the model provided by Scottie.
Dickens’s near contemporary Matthew Arnold considered the portrait of Salem House and its cane-wielding Mr. Creakle in David Copperfield a brilliant depiction of the sort of puritanical English miseducation that, as he writes in Irish Essays, serves to form the “hard, stern, and narrow” nature of a Mr. Murdstone. David Copperfield’s nature, though, is the opposite of hard, stern, and narrow, and despite its severities, Salem House, oddly, does not hurt him. In part he is saved by the threadbare master Mr. Mell, who sees David’s worth and seeks to protect him. Also David takes a first step towards becoming a novelist through his role as Scheherazade—regaling Steerforth with the plots of Perigrine Pickle and other eighteenth-century novels. Later, forced into degrading work at the London warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby, he looks back to Salem House as a time of opportunity; Steerforth and Traddles are achingly remembered as the associates of his “happier childhood”; the time at the school represents his crushed “hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man.”
Rosemary Hall was narrow as well. It wasn’t a cruel place, but it was unimaginative in its conventional snobbery and anti-Semitism. The education it offered was decent, but its limiting and limited assumption was that its graduates would go on to lead genteel upper middle-class lives. Yet I, too, like David Copperfield, found boarding school a setting in which to begin coming into my own. I had a few excellent teachers—perhaps that’s all one really needs—who saw my potential and encouraged me. I won prizes (when my daughter enrolled in the coeducational and more diverse Choate-Rosemary Hall thirty years later, my name was among those she read on the plaques). I loved learning and was a great reader. By then, though, I had left Dickens behind me, at least for a stretch of years. I plunged more fully into the Russians, especially Dostoevsky, who showed me new possibilities of passion and also of humility. In a notebook of my “reflections,” I exhorted myself to follow the example of Father Z. in The Brothers Karamazov to “condemn no man.” Then I discovered Thomas Mann and saw myself in his figure of the outsider artist in “Tonio Kröger,” who idealizes unthinking, healthy normal beauty just as I had idealized Judy Wilson.
If I had been asked as a high school senior to name my favorite novel, I might have said David Copperfield, but I can’t be sure of that. What I know for a certainty is that I cherished the character of David—Davy, still to me—planning to give a son this name, though that ended up not happening in the real world. Yet his figure lived potently inside me. I didn’t need to reread the book; I never wrote a paper about it nor talked to anyone about my special sense of it. I never, in my French class, proclaimed, “David Copperfield, c’est moi.” But the sense of loving and being David Copperfield persisted—and has persisted to this present moment in which I write, early in a new century, nearing the end of a long teaching career, knowing I am in many ways ordinary yet still striving to count myself heroic.
ii
DICKENS DECLARED DAVID COPPERFIELD his “favorite child,” and much has been written about the novel’s striking autobiographical components: the parallel between David’s enforced sojourn at Murdstone and Grinby’s, whose trade is in wine and spirits bottles, and the author’s own terrible time at Warren’s Blacking in the Strand, the shoe polish factory where the young Dickens, visible to passersby through the shop window, felt searing shame at having to work in public view fixing labels to bottles of blacking; the reversal of initials through which his own C.D. becomes D.C.; the links between the improvident Mr. Micawber and Dickens’s father, who was also incarcerated in debtor’s prison; Dickens’s admission in his letters to Maria Beadnell Winter that his memories of being infatuated with her had animated his depiction of David’s courtship of Dora Spenlow; and, more generally, the fact that David Copperfield is ultimately a bildungsroman, the story of the novelist as a young man. It sets out to show how a sensitive child with the faculty of keen observation grows up to be a successful author.
David Copperfield is, I’ve learned, many readers’ “favorite child.” Since the early days of my reading life in which I adopted the novel as my own, I have discovered how many people, spanning generations and genders, classes and continents, have loved and embraced it.
First for me is my mother, the person who took the book from our den’s library shelves to hand to a child asking for something new to read. Even before Scott Fitzgerald discovered her struggling to get through the first volume of Proust and set out to complete her education, my mother had read Dickens in her orphanage and been quick to understand that “Norwood,” as it familiarly was called, was a Dickensian institution. As she recounts in her memoir College of One, looking back to her earlier reading:
Books were the breath of my existence. David Copperfield was my favorite—the first part. His childhood was worse than mine. My Mr. Murdstone was the headmaster, but he was a remote dragon, except for the terrifying time when I happened to pass
