As a child, I remember being thrilled but frightened at David’s biting Mr. Murdstone’s hand. Thrilled to see him fight back. Frightened because I could anticipate the consequences of this instinctual act of self-defense. I thought of it as self-defense, not aggression, just as my fantasy that if Bow Wow ever returned, I would thrust a knife into his protruding stomach was my imagined defense of our home, not an act of premeditated murder.
For years, well into adulthood, I harbored my fantasy. The stabbing would occur on the sidewalk of our quiet tree-lined Beverly Hills street. A sentinel but always a child, I would be outside on our manicured front lawn, alert to the immanence of harm. Bow Wow would come walking up the sidewalk, heading towards our house, slowly but inexorably—an odd aspect of the daydream since almost no one walks in Beverly Hills. Pedestrians are stopped by the police, suspect simply by virtue of not being in a car. Somehow I would have a kitchen knife in my hand. Concealing it as I calmly approached him, I would stare at him hard, raise my hand in one swift motion, and before he could detect my purpose, plunge the knife into his beefy middle.
After our mother died, when my brother and I were both in our forties, I confessed my evil thoughts to him. “And what do you think you would do if you ever saw Bow Wow again?” I asked him.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Robert, “I guess I’d invite him out for a beer and ask him what he’d been doing all these years.”
Robert’s answer startled me. I found it hard to think of Bow Wow as someone one could talk to, yet my brother’s pacific inclinations put into stark relief the violence of my metonymies.
Mr. Murdstone’s hand is echoed in the novel in the long, skinny, grasping hands of Uriah Heep. Later David uses his own hand to strike Uriah on the cheek, Uriah who wants only what David wants and gets: to be a gentleman and claim Agnes Wickfield as his own angel in the house. Although I hadn’t until recently focused on Mr. Murdstone’s bitten hand, I have long been fascinated by imagery of hands—hands as touching, hands as grasping, hands as greedy. “Keep your hands to yourself,” my grandson, who tends to get into trouble, was warned over and over in his elementary school. At least unlike his younger cousin, who lives in France, he didn’t bite other children in his class. Another friend I teach with—and another devotee of David Copperfield—confessed to a persistent dream that she’s biting everyone in sight and then hurling them over a banister. This particular friend happens to be the best-loved professor in our department, renowned for her kindness to her students. Neither she nor I has lost touch with the passions or the wounds of our childhoods. But we feel we’re making progress, doing our best to contain our bitings and our stabbings to our nightmares, waking and sleeping. I no longer even see myself stabbing Bow Wow. I don’t know, though, that I could go so far as to ask him out for a beer.
iii
I BELIEVE I’M MOVING towards a better understanding of the role of David Copperfield in my life as well as in the lives of so many other readers, the cohort of people who loved the novel as children and continue to love it into adulthood. I’ve spoken of myself, my mother and father, my colleague fixated on the bitten hand, and the one throwing her enemies over the banister. To add just one further testimonial, I recently mentioned my link with the character of David to yet another of my colleagues, a specialist in Shakespeare. She’s my age and we, in fact, attended the same college though we hardly knew one another back then. She has always seemed very tactful and self-controlled. “I was David Copperfield,” I told her. “So was I!” she said. “At a very young age. I just loved that book, especially the early part.”
A tantalizing synchronicity emerges: one girl reading in Park Slope, Brooklyn, another in Beverly Hills, each lost in the same book. Suddenly we seemed like sisters. My colleague went on to say that, although the nineteenth century wasn’t her period, she had taught the book recently and been deeply moved by it. Now living in another Brooklyn neighborhood, she would come down from the upper floor of her brownstone, her eyes all swollen.
“Oh you’ve been reading David Copperfield again,” her husband and daughters would say almost accusingly. “There’s such an emotional richness to it,” said my friend.
That’s it, of course—the emotional richness. I’ve begun thinking about that, about the ways David Copperfield manages to touch us and also invite such identification. For one thing, why become David rather than Pip or Oliver or Little Nell or any of Dickens’s many other orphan children? Perhaps a clue lies in David’s mix of qualities. He’s not unbelievably pure like Oliver or Little Nell—surely neither of them would have bitten Mr. Murdstone. Nor is he unrelievedly miserable like Pip, suffering from earliest memory as either wronged or in the wrong. David is between these extremes—a bright, promising child who feels hurt and embarrassment but who also shows himself to be resilient.
He’s also at once flexible and constant. Other characters in the novel keep renaming him. His aunt Betsy, whom he reaches in Dover after many misadventures of the road on his flight from London, gives him a bath and renames him Trotwood. To Steerforth he is always Daisy. His young “child wife” as she’s called, Dora, calls him Doady. He bears the names others give him but remains himself, moving ever further from any threat of nullity and failure—at its most alarming when he is at the mercy of Mr. Murdstone—to become at last, securely, the hero of his own life. The novel has an aspect of
