I am tempted to argue with my mother, or at least with her ghost, that the headmaster in her orphanage was more aptly her Mr. Creakle than her Mr. Murdstone. But to do so would be a cavil, for Mr. Murdstone is the one truly terrifying villain in the novel, the figure who enters the sanctity of David’s childhood home and destroys it, the villain who in no way can be called or seen as comic. The other “bad” characters all have some comic tic—the vicious Creakle splutters and applies his “Tickler”; fulsome Uriah Heep is “umble” and wrings his hands; even Miss Murdstone snaps shut her steel-clasped reticule and proclaims against boys. Mr. Murdstone has no such verbal or physical idiosyncrasy. He is simply a killer of joy, a purveyor of misery.
My mother’s childhood “home,” for better or worse, was the orphanage, its frightening headmaster her Mr. Murdstone just as my intruding stepfather seemed mine. I see the irony that young Lily Shiel, reading the novel in her orphanage, consoled herself at seeming better off than David, whereas I in my comfortable Beverly Hills home lived his hardships in my imagination as if they were my own. Perhaps David’s childhood seemed worse to my mother than her own because from her earliest memories she had—and needed to have—a bedrock sense of self-reliance. She couldn’t afford to feel as vulnerable as David Copperfield. I could.
A few years after my mother was reading Dickens in the Norwood orphanage, the man I would later learn was my father, the British logical positivist A. J. Ayer, was reading him, also at a young age, in his own far more privileged upper-middle-class family home in London and then as a public school boy at Eton. Freddie Ayer would continue to read Dickens to the end of his life. As Ayer’s biographer Ben Rogers speculates:
Ayer never wrote about Dickens in any detail, but he returned to him again and again, and the novels are often a source of incidental reference in his philosophical writings. Dickens’s stories abound with vulnerable, receptive and enterprising orphans—children “of excellent abilities with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally,” more or less obliged to make their way in an unfeeling world. There was certainly much to which Ayer might have related in these creations. He was physically small, perceptive, and determined; at once bookish and resourceful, sad and enthusiastic, gifted but emotionally perhaps a bit neglected.
Rogers’s quotation, it so happens, is from David Copperfield. The description begins the chapter in which David is sent to London to Murdstone and Grinby’s. David as narrator expresses his surprise, “even now,” that a child of such abilities could have been “thrown away” at such a young age. I wonder how many of us have memories of a similar childhood self: gifted, delicate, sensitive, forced to go forth into a world that so often fails to value us as we value ourselves, yet persisting despite our delicacy. I do, for one. As for Freddie, he seemed without self-pity and was not drawn to David Copperfield in particular. He once told me his favorites were the later, darker Dickens novels—Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend. Yet it makes sense to me that his biographer sees him as David—observant, delicate, and tough—and I know he was bullied at Eton.
Because David Copperfield so often casts himself as passive—an observer of others, someone acted upon—it’s all the more striking when he isn’t, when he lashes out against a tormentor and shows he can defend himself. For one friend and colleague, among those whom I started questioning about the novel, seeking to fathom its captivating power, this was her point of attachment. She told me of her early fascination with Mr. Murdstone’s hand, the hand David bites as Mr. Murdstone thrashes him.
“Mr. Murdstone’s hand?” I echoed. Of course, I remembered David’s biting Mr. Murdstone, but I’d never given much thought to the tooth-marked hand.
“It obsessed me,” my friend confided, as we sat at our table at Arte Café, our favorite Upper West Side Italian restaurant, two gray-haired ladies savoring our early-bird special. “I could feel the hand throbbing.”
When I returned home from dinner, I looked up the passage. David fails in the recitation of his lesson, and Mr. Murdstone coldly determines to flog him:
He walked me up to my room slowly and gravely—I am certain he had a delight in that formal parade of executing justice–and when we got there, suddenly twisted my head under his arm.
“Mr. Murdstone, Sir,” I cried to him. “Don’t! Pray don’t beat me. I have tried to learn sir, but I can’t while you and Miss Murdstone are by. I can’t indeed!”
“Can’t you indeed, David?” He said. “We’ll try that.”
He had my head as in a vice, but I twined round him somehow, entreating him not to beat me. It was only for a moment that I stopped him, for he cut me heavily an instant afterwards, and in the same instant I caught the hand with which he held me in my mouth, between my teeth, and bit through it. It sets my teeth on edge to think of it.
Mr. Murdstone proceeds to beat David after this “as if he would have beaten him to death.” David is locked in his room, feels wicked, and crawls up to the mirror to look at his red and swollen face. After a five-day incarceration, he is packed off to Salem House where he must initially wear the placard, “Take care of him—he bites.” He doesn’t again encounter Mr. Murdstone until his half-year holidays. When they meet, David apologizes. The hand Mr. Murdstone extends to him, David recounts, “is the hand I had bitten. I could not restrain my eye for resting for an instant on a red spot upon it; but it was not so red, as I
