This is the pattern of fairy tale, in which you don’t need to start out heroic to survive heroically and triumph, and it’s reassuring. As a young reader of David Copperfield, I, too, felt vulnerable but persistent, sorrowful but optimistic, variable in the ways I was perceived by others—classmates, teachers, family friends, my brother, my mother—but nonetheless constant to myself. In my case that self was female, in David’s male. But this was not a difference that concerned me. The way that each of us is and was a child “of excellent abilities and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally” seemed a state of being in which gender played very little part.
Another aspect of David’s story, also akin to the fairy tale pattern, is that he has friends who shelter and help him, friends, to borrow Mrs. Micawber’s phrase, who will never desert him (“I will never desert Mr. Micawber!” this wonderful character can be counted on to proclaim every time she enters the novel) and who assist in keeping evil at bay. So Betsy Trotwood, the aunt who in Chapter One “walked out and never came back,” is back—there at the end of David’s walk to Dover, never to leave him again and to rout the Murdstones. And Mr. Micawber, whose abiding hope is that something will turn up, keeps turning up himself—in Canterbury, in London where amiable Tommy Traddles, moreover, reappears as his lodger, and then once more in Canterbury, for his heroic unmasking of Uriah Heep.
Of course, it’s not just David’s protectors who keep reappearing. This is a book so centered in the protagonist’s early years that just about all the dramatis personae assemble in its first third—the part readers almost always remember and love best—and then keep coming back as their roles in David’s life and psyche play out. Steerforth is reencountered—“My God, he exclaims, “It’s little Copperfield!”—when David is seventeen. The Murdstones reenter as, respectively, Dora Spenlow’s “confidential friend” and Mr. Spenlow’s client. Even Mr. Chillip, the doctor from the novel’s first chapter, looking “just as he might have looked when he sat in our parlour waiting for me to be born” comes in to give a last report of Mr. Murdstone inflicting misery on a new young wife, while Mr. Creakle pops up as the warden of a model prison in which Uriah Heep, still wringing his hands, and Steerforth’s former valet, the hypocritical Littimer, are incarcerated. Finally, Mr. Peggotty, back in England on a visit from Australia, catches us up on Little Em’ly, Mrs. Gummidge, and the Micawbers—the émigrés we know are there—and tells of a prospering Mr. Mell. No one, nothing from childhood is forgotten. The original cast of characters is always being reassembled and rearranged as the psyche struggles to repair itself.
I realize this may not be entirely reassuring. That the Murdstones are still constraining others’ lives and Uriah and Littimer still at their wiles shows that evil persists and childhood demons never completely leave us. But if we’re lucky, these forces weaken; they get pushed to the outskirts of our stories. David, at long last married to Agnes and surrounded by old friends, is heartening proof that ties to others can be sustained and be sustaining and that experience can feel whole.
It may be my inclination to be positive—so wanting things to turn out right that I’ve often been accused of not giving proper weight to hurt and difficulty, but I can’t help seeing David Copperfield, for all its terrors, as in many ways a gentle book. It tells a painful story but then finds ways to cushion the pain—through humor and the charm and vividness of characters, and also, very importantly, through its setting, a southern English landscape from which mid-nineteenth-century capitalism and urban grittiness have been largely banished. These may be hinted at in David’s London sojourn at Murdstone and Grinby’s or in Betsy Trotwood’s reversals in the stock market. But the young reader of David Copperfield, whether in Beverly Hills, Brooklyn, or a London orphanage, is carried out of herself into one of Dickens’s greenest, most pastoral worlds.
Just look at the opening chapter in which David, from inside his parlor “warm and bright with fire and candle,” feels “indefinable compassion” for his father’s white gravestone “lying out alone in the dark night,” against which the doors of the house are bolted. Then even that outside darkness lifts in the ensuing reflection. “There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere,” the narrator muses, “as the green of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother’s room, to look out at it.”
David will soon be expelled from this womb with a view—cast out from his room, house, and green countryside. Thus the pastoral is qualified; it is never untinged by loss. Rooks, after all, even at the outset, have deserted the Rookery, and the pigeon house and dog’s kennel are empty. Snakes come into the garden: Mr. Murdstone, Uriah—that’s part of the book’s fascination—but even when the sea rises in storm to punish Steerforth for seducing and abandoning Little Em’ly and claim as well the good Ham Peggotty, the reader is drawn into a world that can only be called enchanting. I was happy to be transported to Sussex, to Yarmouth, to Canterbury. I was delighted to travel by coach with Barkis, to enter Mr. Peggotty’s boat of a house and meet its colorful inhabitants, or even, at the nadir of young David’s fortunes in London, to encounter the wonderful Micawbers and to lose myself
