Thus, through David I entered a completely absorbing, “knowable community”—the critic Raymond Williams’s wonderful phrase for a world of imaged coherence—to which the narrator himself is attached by bonds of memory and love. When, like my colleague, I returned to the book as an adult, I was struck by how strongly the force of memory colors the telling of the story. Despite the question hanging over the book of whether David will turn out to be the hero of his own life, David Copperfield is, above all, one of those books that look back on the past with at once aching and lyrical nostalgia for the felt experience of childhood. The past is remembered with compassion; pain is recast as reverie. Even the pain of the time at Murdstone and Grinby’s softens in retrospect. Thinking how he made up stories about the debtors in Kings Prison, David reflects: “When my thoughts go back now to that slow agony of my youth . . . when I tread the old ground, I do not wonder that I seem to see before me, an innocent romantic boy making his imaginative world out of such strange experiences and sordid things.”
Memory, which itself is a form of imagination, is David’s gentle and compassionate friend, recovering dear past moments that then exist for him almost out of time—Worthsworth called these “spots of time.” David’s “spots of time” include memories of the beach at Yarmouth with Little Em’ly; of his first evening home on holiday from Salem House with the Murdstones thankfully absent from the house; of Salem House itself, when he stops on his flight to Dover to sleep in a haystack behind a wall at the back of the school and remembers, not smarting under Mr. Creakle’s ruler or feeling shame at his placard, but “lying on my old school-bed, talking to the boys in my room.” Here experience is filtered through a double layer of memory with David the narrator’s nostalgically remembering the ten-year-old boy, who is already nostalgically transforming his school days. The tyrannies of Salem Hall fade into bedtime stories evoked in a pastoral haystack.
The power of memory in David Copperfield is linked to the faculty of love. Steerforth, fearing his own fallen nature and the changes it might work, pleads to his friend, transformed into a flower: “Daisy, if anything should ever separate us, you must think of me at my best, old boy.” But David’s answer goes one better, removing Steerforth from all vicissitudes of best and worst: “‘You have no best to me, Steerforth,’ said I. ‘And no worst. You are always equally loved and cherished in my heart.’”
Loving remembrance of his mother, of Steerforth, of Dora restores them to David Copperfield. Loving, compassionate remembrance of the past reconstitutes it whole, with no best and no worst. At one point when David is coming out of the theater after seeing Julius Caesar, he is filled with “the mingled reality and mystery of the whole show.” The play becomes “like a shining transparency” through which he sees his “earlier life moving along.” This passage seems to me the achievement of the novel. To revisit the past is not to deny its hardships but to deny “any severing of our love.” The past then looms through the creative force of remembrance like “a shining transparency.”
My past is my experience of Beverly Hills, of my mother and brother, of Rosemary Hall and Pam Wilkinson, Sue Stein and Judy Wilson. My past is also my life of reading, which I began young. The early reading of David Copperfield is as much a part of my personal history as anything “real” that happened to me. David Copperfield happened to me. It is one of my spots of time. The book has become like a shining transparency through which I see my earlier life moving along.
iv
THE ONE PART OF David’s past that never softens for him is the history with his stepfather, Mr. Murdstone. When Miss Murdstone reenters the novel as Dora’s companion, David has the opportunity to say to her, “Miss Murdstone, . . . I think you and Mr. Murdstone used me very cruelly, and treated my mother with great unkindness. I shall always think so as long as I live.” This is an important utterance. It remains within the bounds of civil discourse but manages, nonetheless, to convey unvarnished truth. I find it interesting that when, a few chapters later, David reencounters Mr. Murdstone—the character who, after all, is the primary villain—his language, though still truthful, is more constrained. Mr. Murdstone reenters the text for just a few pages as a client for whom David’s father-in-law, Mr. Spenlow, is helping to obtain a marriage license (the reader shudders to anticipate Mr. Murdstone’s next victim). The meeting occurs in Mr. Spenlow’s office. Peggotty, for whom David is transacting some legal business, is present as well. Mr. Spenlow unwittingly suggests that David knows “this gentleman,” and the two old antagonists exchange cool greetings. Then Mr. Murdstone addresses himself to Peggotty:
“And you,” he said, “I am sorry to observe that you have lost your husband.”
“It’s not the first loss I have had in my life, Mr. Murdstone,” replied Peggotty, trembling from head to foot. “I am glad to
