The Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield the Younger   
Volumes VII & VIII   
   
Charles Dickens   
   
   
Biographical Note

Criticisms and Interpretations
By Andrew Lang
By John Forster
By Adolphus William Ward
By Gilbert K. Chesterton
By W. Teignmouth Shore
By George Gissing

List of Characters
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the “Charles Dickens” Edition

I Am Born
I Observe
I Have a Change
I Fall Into Disgrace
I Am Sent Away from Home
Enlarge My Circle of Acquaintance
My “First Half” at Salem House
My Holidays. Especially One Happy Afternoon
I Have a Memorable Birthday
I Become Neglected, and Am Provided For
I Begin Life on My Own Account, and Don’t Like It
Liking Life on My Own Account No Better, I Form a Great Resolution
The Sequel of My Resolution
My Aunt Makes up Her Mind about Me
I Make Another Beginning
I Am a New Boy in More Senses Than One
Somebody Turns Up
A Retrospect
I Look about Me, and Make a Discovery
Steerforth’s Home
Little Em’ly
Some Old Scenes, and Some New People
I Corroborate Mr. Dick and Choose a Profession
My First Dissipation
Good and Bad Angels
I Fall into Captivity
Tommy Traddles
Mr. Micawber’s Gauntlet
I Visit Steerforth at His Home, Again

XII.  A Child’s Dream of a Star

By Charles Dickens   
   
THERE was once a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought of a number of things. He had a sister, who was a child, too, and his constant companion. These two used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they wondered at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.      1   
  They used to say to one another sometimes, Supposing all the children upon earth were to die, would the flowers, and the water, and the sky be sorry? They believed they would be sorry. For, said they, the buds are the children of the flowers, and the little playful streams that gambol down the hillsides are the children of the water; and the smallest bright specks playing at hide-and-seek in the sky all night, must surely be the children of the stars; and they would all be grieved to see their playmates, the children of men, no more.      2   
  There was one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves. It was larger and more beautiful, they thought, than all others, and every night they watched for it, standing hand in hand at the window. Whoever saw it first, cried out, “I see the star!” And often they cried out both together, knowing so well when it would rise, and where. So they grew to be such friends with it, that before lying down in their beds, they always looked out once again, to bid it good night; and when they were turning around to sleep, they used to say, “God bless the star!”      3   
  But while she was very young, oh, very, very young, the sister drooped, and came to be so weak that she could no longer stand in the window at night; and then the child looked sadly out by himself, and when he saw the star, turned round and said to the patient, pale face on the bed, “I see the star!” and then a smile would come upon the face, and a little weak voice used to say, “God bless my brother and the star!”      4   
  And so the time came, all too soon! when the child looked out alone, and when there was no face on the bed; and when there was a little grave among the graves, not there before; and when the star made long rays down toward him, as he saw it through his tears.      5   
  Now, these rays were so bright, and they seemed to make such a shining way from earth to heaven, that when the child went to his solitary bed, he dreamed about the star; and dreamed that, lying where he was, he saw a train of people taken up that sparkling road by angels. And the star, opening, showed him a great world of light, where many more such angels waited to receive them.      6   
  All these angels who were waiting turned their beaming eyes upon the people who were carried up into the star; and some came out from the long rows in which they stood, and fell upon the people’s necks, and kissed them tenderly, and went away with them down avenues of light, and were so happy in their company, that lying in his bed he wept for joy.      7   
  But there were many angels who did not go with them, and among them one he knew. The patient face that once had lain upon the bed was glorified and radiant, but his heart found out his sister among all the host.      8   
  His sister’s angel lingered near the entrance of the star, and said to the leader among those who had brought the people thither—      9   
  “Is my brother come?”     10   
  And he said, “No.”     11   
  She was turning hopefully away, when the child stretched out his arms, and cried, “O sister, I am here! Take me!” And then she turned her beaming eyes upon him and it was night; and the star was shining into the room, making long rays down toward him as he saw it through his tears.     12   
  From that hour forth the child looked out upon the star as on the home he was to go to, when his time should come; and he thought that he did not belong to the earth alone, but to the star, too, because of his sister’s angel gone before.     13   
  There was a baby born to be a brother to the child; and while he was so little that he never yet had spoken word, he stretched his tiny form out on his bed and died.     14   
  Again the child dreamed of the opened star, and of the company of angels, and the train of people, and the rows of angels with their beaming eyes all turned upon those people’s faces.     15   
  Said his sister’s angel to the leader:—     16   
  “Is my brother come?”     17   
  And he said, “Not that one, but another.”     18   
  As the child beheld his brother’s angel in her arms, he cried: “O sister, I am here! Take me!” And she turned and smiled upon him, and the star was shining.     19   
  He grew to be a young man, and was busy at his books, when an old servant came to him and said:—     20   
  “Thy mother is no more. I bring her blessing on her darling son!”     21   
  Again at night he saw the star, and all that former company. Said his sister’s angel to the leader:—     22   
  “Is my brother come?”     23   
  And he said, “Thy mother!”     24   
  A mighty cry of joy went forth through all the star, because the mother was reunited to her two children. And he stretched out his arms and cried: “O mother, sister, and brother, I am here! Take me!” And they answered him, “Not yet.” And the star was shining.     25   
  He grew to be a man whose hair was turning gray, and he was sitting in his chair by the fireside, heavy with grief, and with his face bedewed with tears, when the star opened once again.     26   
  Said his sister’s angel to the leader, “Is my brother come?”     27   
  And he said, “Nay, but his maiden daughter.”     28   
  And the man who had been the child saw his daughter, newly lost to him, a celestial creature among those three, and he said, “My daughter’s head is on my sister’s bosom, and her arm is round my mother’s neck, and at her feet there is the baby of old time, and I can bear the parting from her, God be praised!”     29   
  And the star was shining.     30   
  Thus the child came to be an old man, and his once smooth face was wrinkled, and his steps were slow and feeble, and his back was bent. And one night as he lay upon his bed, his children standing round, he cried, as he had cried so long ago:—     31   
  “I see the star!”     32   
  They whispered one another, “He is dying.”     33   
  And he said: “I am. My age is falling from me like a garment, and I move toward the star as a child. And, O my Father, now I thank thee that it has so often opened to receive those dear ones who await me!”     34   
  And the star was shining; and it shines upon his grave.

Charles Dickens. (1812–1870)   
   
   
1   
      A demd, damp, moist, unpleasant body!   
          Nicholas Nickleby. Chap. xxxiv.   
2   
      He has gone to the demnition bow-wows.   
          Nicholas Nickleby. Chap. lxiv.   
3   
      My life is one demd horrid grind.   
          Nicholas Nickleby. Chap. lxiv.   
4   
      He had used the word in a Pickwickian sense.   
          Pickwick Papers. Chap. i.   
5   
      Did it ever strike you on such a morning as this that drowning would be happiness and peace?   
          Pickwick Papers. Chap. v.   
6   
      The wictim of connubiality.   
          Pickwick Papers. Chap. xx.   
7   
      I am a lone lorn creetur and everythink goes contrairy with me.   
          David Copperfield. Chap. iii.   
8   
      Barkis is willin’.   
          David Copperfield. Chap. v.   
9   
      Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.   
          David Copperfield. Chap. xii.   
10   
      I never will desert Mr. Micawber.   
          David Copperfield. Chap. xii.   
11   
      Accidents will occur in the best regulated families.   
          David Copperfield. Chap. xxvii.   
12   
      Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, all very good words for the lips,—especially prunes and prism.   
          Little Dorrit. Book ii. Chap. v.   
13   
      Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving HOW NOT TO DO IT.   
          Little Dorrit. Book ii. Chap. x.   
14   
      Secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.   
          A Christmas Carol. Stave 1.   
15   
      In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile.   
          A Christmas Carol. Stave 2.   
16   
      He’s tough, ma’am,—tough is J. B.; tough and devilish sly.   
          Dombey and Son. Chap. vii.   
17   
      When found, make a note of.   
          Dombey and Son. Chap. xv.   
18   
      The bearings of this observation lays in the application on it.   
          Dombey and Son. Chap. xxiii.   
19   
      Oh, Sairey, Sairey, little do we know what lays before us!   
          Martin Chuzzlewit. Chap. i.   
20   
      Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There ain’t much credit in that.   
          Martin Chuzzlewit. Chap. v.   
21   
      Not to put too fine a point upon it.   
          Bleak House. Chap. xxxii.   
22   
      “If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, “the law is a ass, a idiot.”   
          Oliver Twist. Chap. li.

   
Biographical Note   
     
CHARLES DICKENS, the most popular of English novelists, was born at Portsea, near Portsmouth, on February 7, 1812. His boyhood was one of extreme hardship, and his educational opportunities were very meager. His father, a clerk in the navy pay department, was a poor manager; and though he was at one time in receipt of a fair salary, he got deeper and deeper into financial difficulties, became insolvent, and was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. His son has immortalized some of his traits in the easy-going optimism of Mr. Micawber, who, though not an absolute portrait, is admitted to be in many respects a striking likeness of John Dickens.      1   
  Charles was a sickly boy, more given to reading than sports. While he ought to have been at school he was kept at home to run errands and look after the younger children; and when his father went to prison the boy of ten became a drudge in a blacking factory at six shillings a week. The misery of his situation is pictured in David Copperfield’s experiences in the wine warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby. Through the week he lodged in a small attic; on Sundays he visited his family in the prison. With his father’s release better days came, and Charles enjoyed a few years of schooling. From fifteen to seventeen he was a lawyer’s clerk, and it was during this period that he picked up the knowledge of law and lawyers that is shown in his attacks on legal abuses and in his portraits of members of the legal profession. Meantime, the elder Dickens had become a parliamentary reporter, and his son, like David Copperfield, set himself to learn shorthand and enlarge his reading with a view to following the same occupation. In 1831 he obtained a position on a newspaper, and by 1836, when he gave up reporting, he was regarded as the greatest expert in the gallery of the House.      2   
  From early boyhood Dickens had shown a fondness for playacting and story-telling. When he was eighteen, he made an attempt to go upon the stage, and only the accident of an illness prevented an interview with the manager of Covent Garden Theatre which might have lost Dickens to literature. Later he found some scope for his passion for acting in private theatricals and platform readings. He began to publish his stories in the “Monthly Magazine” in 1833, and in 1836 appeared his first book, “Sketches by Boz.” The success of this volume marks the close of his period of hardship. In March of the same year he issued the first number of the “Pickwick Papers,” and three years later he married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a journalist who had given him substantial aid. The story of the origin of the “Pickwick Papers” is a curious one. The publishers, Chapman & Hall, proposed to Dickens that he should write some account of the adventures of an imaginary “Nimrod Club” of unlucky sportsmen to supply subjects for plates by the comic draftsman Seymour, and the club of Pickwick and his friends was Dickens’s modification of this idea. The original suggestion left traces in the misadventures of Mr. Winkle. Seymour committed suicide after the first number, and H. K. Browne was chosen in preference of Thackeray to continue the illustrations. The book rapidly won amazing popularity; it remains a comic masterpiece.      3   
  The author was now fairly launched on a successful literary career. “Oliver Twist,” “Nicholas Nickleby,” “The Old Curiosity Shop,” and “Barnaby Rudge” followed in quick succession, and in 1842 Dickens made his first visit to America. Landing at Boston, he went as far west as St. Louis and as far north as Montreal, received everywhere with enthusiasm. He attempted, without success, to rouse the Americans to the justice of international copyright; and he was shocked at what he saw of slavery. American ways and institutions on the whole did not impress him favorably, and his criticism of these in his “American Notes,” as well as the satire in “Martin Chuzzlewit,” gave considerable offense on this side of the Atlantic.      4   
  On his return to England he produced his “Christmas Carol,” the first of his five Christmas stories, and in the following year, 1844, made a visit to Italy. For a short time in 1846 he edited “The Daily News,” but speedily returned to fiction in “Dombey and Son” and “David Copperfield,” this last the most autobiographical and perhaps the most popular of all his writings. He founded the weekly journal, “Household Words,” in 1849; and the years 1852–57 saw the publication of “Bleak House,” “Hard Times,” and “Little Dorrit.” In 1853 he gave with great success the first of his public readings from his works, and this form of activity he kept up till his death. He found it financially extremely profitable, and in his anxiety to provide for a large family, he continued it after his health was no longer equal to the strain, so that the practice is considered to have shortened his life. Domestic unhappiness, which had been growing more and more intolerable, culminated in 1850 in his separation from his wife—an affair which, though without scandal, created much unpleasant comment. With all this he continued his writing of novels, “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Great Expectations,” and “Our Mutual Friend” appearing between 1859 and 1865. In 1867–68 he returned to America, where he earned by his readings about $100,000. He was engaged in the composition of “Edwin Drood” when in 1870 he dropped dead from the bursting of a blood vessel in the brain. He was buried privately in Westminster Abbey.      5   
  Dickens was a man of great kindliness and sympathy with weakness and suffering, and these characteristics led him not only to engage in practical philanthropies, but also to use his art for the purpose of social reform. The maladministration of the poor laws, the red tape of government bureaus, the law’s delays, the brutality and incapacity of a certain type of private schoolmaster, the hypocrisy of insincere ministers of religion—these and many other wrongs and abuses were exposed and satirized in his novels—not always to the advantage of truth or beauty. The same side of his temperament led to the frequent introduction into his works of pathetic characters and scenes, and no small part of his contemporary vogue was due to his power of making his readers cry. Often his pathos is achieved with real tenderness and great poignancy, but at times it strikes the modern reader as somewhat too deliberate and even forced. His humor has better stood the test of time. He had genuine comic genius, which manifested itself in both the creation of character and in the description of incident; and in his earlier works especially there is a rollicking sense of fun and such abundant and spontaneous high spirits that few can resist their contagion. He cannot be called a great thinker, and his reflective power is decidedly inferior to his observation and memory. In his social propaganda there is never any doubt that his heart is in the right place, though one may occasionally question whether he saw to the bottom of the evils he combated. He had a keen eye and a great relish for oddities of character, and in conveying into his novels the results of his observation he at times copied the reality so closely as to cause distress to his models, at times accented peculiarities to a point where he ceased to convince. Thus there has arisen the charge of caricature, a charge which cannot always be refuted.      6   
  With all these defects, however, of occasional overemphasis and straining, Dickens remains a great novelist. His vast canvases are thronged with a wonderful variety of creations, and his plots, though lacking classical clearness of outline, are of captivating interest. “David Copperfield” exemplifies his art at its best. To the picturing of David’s youth he brought the vivid recollection of his own pitiful boyhood; Dora is a portrait of his own first love; Micawber, as has been said, is largely painted from his father; and in many other details of this absorbing tale he drew upon the persons and events that had made the deepest impression on his own life. The book as a whole shares with the best of his other novels that throbbing vitality and that sense of being almost crowded with life which makes most recent fiction seem in comparison pale and thin.

W.A.N

Criticisms and Interpretations
I. By Andrew Lang   
     
DICKENS called “David Copperfield” his “favourite child.” He was wiser than most parents or authors in his choice of a favourite. It is curious and amusing to see how men of genius, even, are misguided. The tragedian prefers his comedy; the comedian his tragic efforts; the statesman his literary attempts; the painter, like Turner, his essays in poetry. An author is wont to be prejudiced in favour of that effort in which his aim has been highest, and his labour most assiduous and prolonged. The difficult birth is the dearest. Now, in any art, above all, where genius is engaged, the work done most fluently and easily is apt to be the best. But the writer is fond of the child of a painful intellectual travail. In Dickens’s case, “Copperfield” came to him easily. “The story bore him irresistibly along; certainly with less trouble to himself in the composition; … and he was probably never less harassed by interruptions and breaks in his narrative,” says Mr. Forster. Yet Dickens made the book his favourite, agreeing, probably, with the majority of his genuine admirers. They who prefer “A Tale of Two Cities” merely prove themselves no true Dickensians. Had we to lose all Dickens’s books but one, the choice would be hard between “Copperfield” and “Pickwick.” But “Pickwick” would probably carry the day.      1   
  Mr. Forster seems to have suggested a tale told in the first person: the narrator being the hero. His own reminiscences of a neglected childhood then awoke in the memory and fancy of Dickens. He recalled the days of the debtors’ prison, of the blacking shop, of the lonely, self-supporting child, with his tiny budget and feats of housekeeping, his sense of being degraded by his environment, and of the “something there” within him, which Andreé Chénier spoke of on the scaffold. All this he has made immortal in “Copperfield” with the most tender pity and humour. It is a book for a boy (how happy were the childish days spent with the child!), and a book for a man. In his father Dickens had a type of Mr. Micawber, and surely the father himself could not have objected to the glorious and courageous waif, the unsoured and indomitable innocent adventurer, who blossomed out of his milder eccentricities. Miss Mowcher came perilously near being a case of Harold Skimpole and Leigh Hunt, but Dickens modified the character, and mollified the little original. Characters, in fiction, all start from a germ of observed reality; Mrs. Nickleby was Mrs. Dickens mère, but she never recognised herself, and if Mr. Micawber had done so, he would have smiled. Unluckily, Leigh Hunt was too generally recognisable; the original hurried the artist beyond bounds. David Copperfield, however, is doubtless even less Dickens himself than Pen is Thackeray.      2   
  Dickens was thinking over “Copperfield” at the close of 1848. Early in January, 1849, he, with Lemon and Leech, visited the scene of the Rush murder, and Dickens saw and fell in love with Yarmouth: “the strangest place in the wide world. I shall certainly try my hand at it.” Then came the usual struggle to find a name beginning with
           
MAG’S DIVERSIONS,
BEING THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF MR. THOMAS MAG THE YOUNGER, OF BLUNDERSTONE HOUSE.
   3   
  On February 20, 1849, Dickens sent to Forster a list of names; that actually chosen is decidedly the best. But he felt initial difficulties, “I am lumbering on like a stage-waggon; … I am quite aground,” in the first Number (April 19). The reader does not discover this. We are at once in the tide of the story; there is none of the early difficulty of “Chuzzlewit.” “David Copperfield” is so excellent that criticism is swallowed up in pleasure. Dickens, as he makes his hero say, had “as a man a strong memory of my childhood.” This kind of memory seems to be a privilege, or rather a constituent part, of genius. We see an excellent instance of this in George Sand’s autobiography: her childhood remains to her as vivid a series of pictures as those which she used to watch in the polished screen. It is probably more than a mere curious fancy which holds that the child re-lives (in a modified way) through the evolutionary experience of the race. To many children, at least, the world is all animated and personal, everything in it has life and character. This is the essence of early human thought, and the cause of the “gender terminations” in early languages. But this ancient mood is the indispensable basis of poetry and mythology; this, with the associated difficulty of discerning between dreams and realities. Had mankind been created in the modern condition of knowledge and reason, we could have no romance, and no poetry. The child of genius is a voyant, and the majority of children have genius. It fades into the light of common day, with the majority of mankind, but in the intellect of Dickens, George Sand, Scott, and Wordsworth (to take a few examples about which we have knowledge), it does not fade. They never lose “the gleam,” and to them the bright visions of their infancy are always present.      4   
  This enables Dickens to draw his children, of whom the old-fashioned little “Brooks of Sheffield” is only a Paul Dombey with a stronger constitution, and with that vivida vis of observation which Dickens asserts for himself. “Men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty than to have acquired it.” We know, indeed, by the singular history of “Calculating Boys,” like Gauss, Whateley, and many others, that some of those did actually lose their mysterious gift. So we almost all are abandoned by the gleam of childhood, but they who keep it delight the world.      5   
  The tender grace of the opening chapters of “Copperfield,” the pretty child-mother twisting her bright curls; Peggotty, with her unexaggerated love and goodness and needle-marked finger and red cheeks; the little boy’s mature studies in “Tom Jones” and “Peregrine Pickle,” his lectures on crocodiles, his keen notice of things, and fantastic reflections, and inspired antipathies—can never cease to charm in any change of taste. The Murdstone passages we can hardly bear to read, but, happily, the immortal waiter, with his fable of Mr. Topsawyer, comes in as a relief. Even Creakle is a relief from the Murdstones. Dickens excelled in drawing private schools. Mr. Creakle is not a repetition of Mr. Squeers, and, with his inaudible voice, is terrible in a new fashion.      6   
  Like Dickens, St. Augustine had a vivid memory of childhood, and bore a grudge against his own Creakle. “My stripes, which were so grievous and offensive to me at the tyme, were laught at by mine elders;” and he compares his sufferings “to those hooks, racks, and other torments, for the avoyding whereof men pray to God with great feare, from one end of the world to the other.”      7   
  The race of Creakles is probably not extinct. But Dickens has helped to thin it. There is not, probably, elsewhere in our literature so fine a study of a small boy’s hero-worship, his idolatry of a big, handsome, strong, kind boy, as in the story of David and his Jonathan, Steerforth. As a little lad of eleven, I remember being glad, with precocious foresight, that David had not the pretty sister about whose existence Steerforth inquired. But Tommy Traddles had the sharper sight—Tommy, who bravely cried, “Shame, J. Steerforth!” One used to draw many skeletons in imitation of Tommy.      8   
  The episode in London, the bottle-cleaning, the struggle with poverty, the delightful Micawber, are all in the foremost places of fact, glorified by imagination. The flight to Dover is a masterpiece, which dwells unalterable in the memory, from the young man with the donkey-cart, to Mr. Dolloby, and the dealer in coats whose slogan was Goo-roo! Miss Trotwood’s is a haven inexpressibly welcome, and Mr. Dick is an author from whose failing most professional scribes know that they cannot free themselves. We all have our King Charles’s Head.      9   
  Indeed, we linger fondly over the whole of David’s youth, his love for Miss Shepherd, his epic encounters with the young butcher’s boy. Berry and Biggs, Tom Browne and Slogger Williams, scarcely fought better fights, and this combat is described “from within.” That the Old Soldier suggested the Campaigner, Mrs. Mackenzie, is conceivable, but Thackeray probably knew a campaigner of his own, and Mrs. Mackenzie is a warrior more cruel in victory, more obstinate in defeat. Dickens expressed a just pride in David’s first dissipation; “it will be found worthy of attention, I hope, as a piece of grotesque truth.”     10   
  The affair of Steerforth and Little Em’ly is, of course, “indicated” and inevitable. If the crushing charge of “obviousness” is to be brought against any part of the novel, it is against this. The aristocratic seducer, the confiding rural maid, her poor but honest relations, her return, betrayed, the necessary Nemesis, the whole set of situations, are, we may venture to hope, very much more common in books, and on the stage than in life. Though Uriah Heep is an originally repulsive villain, yet the part played, as regards him, by Mr. Micawber, the unsuspected watcher, is the old Edie Ochiltree or Flibbertigibbet part of the man round the corner, the comic character who overhears everything. These are among the ficelles of fiction with a plot, but Mr. Micawber scarcely seems to have been born for the part he plays. However, somebody has to act it.     11   
  It is possible that most readers of “Copperfield” fall in love with the wrong heroine. We prefer, in our hearts, the child-wife, Dora, to “domesticating the Recording Angel,” in the form of Agnes. Mr. Forster hints that, when writing “Copperfield,” Dickens had already a sense of “how easily things go wrong” in his own married life. With this we have nothing to do. However, Mr. Forster himself preferred the pretty Dora to the ideal as depicted in Miss Wickfield. The pathos of Dickens has rarely been more delicate and playful than in the life and death of Dora, though the supercilious may regret that he could not hold his hand from the slaying of Jip. Dickens’s own favourite characters were the Peggotty group. But, except the Peggotty of the buttons herself, they dwell less faithfully in our recollections than Mrs. Crupp, Mr. Spenlow (who had a partner, Mr. Jorkins), the immortal waiter, Littimer (who again suggests Major Pendennis’s servant, Morgan), Miss Mowcher, Mr. Creakle, Tommy Traddles, the Micawbers, and the general population of this exquisite masterpiece.     12   
  The faults of Dickens, his emphasis, his blank verse, his iteration (for custom cannot stale the iterations of Mr. Micawber, or time wither them), are inconspicuous in “Copperfield.” He was at his prime of observation, humour, tenderness, and style. Something may be conceivably due to this use of the first person, which brought him into direct contact with life, and had a tendency to exorcise the wilfully fantastic. The same cause produces similar results in “Great Expectations,” probably the best work of his later period. It is perhaps a pity that he so seldom wrote in other than what we may call the irresponsible third person. Using it, he can reflect on things freely, and freely indulge his own tendency to the grotesque or the didactic. But when he has to make his hero speak throughout for himself, he subdues his own manner to the dramatic necessities of the character narrating. In “Copperfield” he cannot select a moral for a motive, or make the protagonist a moral type, of pride or of selfishness, as in “Dombey” or “Chuzzlewit.” He is saved, in fact, by the nature of the method, from a perilous resource.—From Introduction to “David Copperfield.”

Criticisms and Interpretations
II. By John Forster   
     
THE FEELING of the creator of Micawber, as he humoured and remembered the foibles of his original, found its counterpart in that of his readers for the creation itself, as its part was played out in the story. Nobody likes Micawber less for his follies; and Dickens liked his father more, the more he recalled his whimsical qualities. The fact and the fancy had united whatever was most grateful to him in both. It is a tribute to the generally healthful and manly tone of the story of “Copperfield” that such should be the outcome of the eccentricities of this leading personage in it; and the superiority in this respect of Micawber over Skimpole is one of the many indications of the inferiority of “Bleak House” to its predecessor. With leading resemblances that make it difficult to say which character best represents the principle or no principle of impecuniosity, there cannot be any doubt which has the advantage in moral and intellectual development. It is genuine humour against personal satire. Between the worldly circumstances of the two, there is nothing to choose; but as to everything else it is the difference between shabbiness and greatness. Skimpole’s sunny talk might be expected to please as much as Micawber’s gorgeous speech, the design of both being to take the edge off poverty. But in the one we have no relief from attendant meanness or distress, and we drop down from the airiest fancies into sordidness and pain; whereas in the other nothing pitiful or merely selfish ever touches us. At its lowest depth of what is worst, we never doubt that something better must turn up; and of a man who sells his bedstead that he may entertain his friend, we altogether refuse to think nothing but badly. This is throughout the free and cheery style of “Copperfield.” The masterpieces of Dickens’s humour are not in it; but he has nowhere given such variety of play to his invention, and the book is unapproached among his writings for its completeness of effect and uniform pleasantness of tone.…      1   
  Consider Copperfield in his proper place in the story, and sequence as well as connection will be given to the varieties of its childish adventure. The first warm nest of love in which his vain fond mother, and her quaint kind servant, cherish him; the quick-following contrast of hard dependence and servile treatment; the escape from that premature and dwarfed maturity by natural relapse into a more perfect childhood; the then leisurely growth of emotions and faculties into manhood; these are component parts of a character consistently drawn. The sum of its achievement is to be a successful cultivation of letters; and often as such imaginary discipline has been the theme of fiction, there are not many happier conceptions of it. The ideal and real parts of the boy’s nature receive development in the proportions which contribute best to the end desired; the readiness for impulsive attachments that had put him into the leading of others, has underneath it a base of truthfulness on which at last he rests in safety; the practical man is the outcome of the fanciful youth; and a more than equivalent for the graces of his visionary days, is found in the active sympathies that life has opened to him. Many experiences have come within its range, and his heart has room for all. Our interest in him cannot but be increased by knowing how much he expresses of what the author had himself gone through; but David includes far less than this, and infinitely more.      2   
  That the incidents arise easily, and to the very end connect themselves naturally and unobtrusively with the characters of which they are a part, is to be said perhaps more truly of this than of any other of Dickens’s novels. There is a profusion of distinct and distinguishable people, and a prodigal wealth of detail; but unity of drift or purpose is apparent always, and the tone is uniformly right. By the course of the events we learn the value of self-denial and patience, quiet endurance of unavoidable ills, strenuous effort against ills remediable; and everything in the fortunes of the actors warns us to strengthen our generous emotions and to guard the purities of home. It is easy thus to account for the supreme popularity of “Copperfield,” without the addition that it can hardly have had a reader, man or lad, who did not discover that he was something of a Copperfield himself. Childhood and youth live again for all of us in its marvellous boy-experiences.—From “The Life of Charles Dickens.”

Criticisms and Interpretations
III. By Adolphus William Ward   
     
NO doubt what so irresistibly attracted Dickens to “David Copperfield,” and what has since fascinated many readers, more or less conscious of the secret of the charm, is the autobiographical element in the story. Until the publication of Forster’s “Life,” no reader of “Copperfield” could be aware of the pang it must have cost Dickens to lay bare, though to unsuspecting eyes, the story of experiences which he had hitherto kept all but absolutely secret, and to which his own mind could not recur without a quivering sensitiveness. No reader could trace, as the memory of Dickens always must have traced, some of the most vivid of those experiences, imbued though they were with the tints of a delightfully playful humour, in the doings and dealings of Mr. Wilkins Micawber, whose original, by a strange coincidence, was passing tranquilly away out of life, while his comic counterpart was blossoming into a whimsical immortality. And no reader could divine, what very probably even the author may hardly have ventured to confess to himself, that in the lovely little idyll of the loves of Doady and Dora—with Jip, as Dora’s father might have said, intervening—there were besides the reminiscences of an innocent juvenile amour, the vestiges of a man’s unconfessed though not altogether unrepressed disappointment—the sense that “there was always something wanting.” But in order to be affected by a personal or autobiographical element in a fiction or poem, it is by no means necessary to be aware of its actual bearing and character, or even of its very existence; “Amelia” would gain little by illustrative notes concerning the experiences of the first Mrs. Fielding. To excite in a work of fiction the peculiar kind of interest of which I am speaking, the existence of an autobiographical substratum need not be apparent in it, nor need its presence be even suspected. Enough, if it be there. But it had far better be away altogether, unless the novelist has so thoroughly fused this particular stream of metal with the mass filling his mould that the result is an integral artistic whole. Such was, however, the case with “David Copperfield,” which of all Dickens’s fictions is on the whole the most perfect as a work of art. Personal reminiscences which lay deep in the author’s breast are, as effects, harmonised with local associations old and new. Thus Yarmouth, painted in the story with singular poetic truthfulness, had only quite recently been seen by Dickens for the first time, on a holiday trip. His imagination still subdued to itself all the elements with which he worked; and, whatever may be thought of the construction of this story, none of his other books equals it in that harmony of tone which no artist can secure unless by recasting all his materials.      1   
  As to the construction of “David Copperfield,” however, I frankly confess that I perceive no serious fault in it. It is a story with a plot, and not merely a string of adventures and experiences, like little Davy’s old favourites upstairs at Blunderstone. In the conduct of this plot blemishes may here and there occur. The boy’s flight from London, and the direction which it takes, are insufficiently accounted for. A certain amount of obscurity as well perhaps as of improbability, pervades the relations between Uriah and the victim, round whom the unspeakable slimy thing writhes and wriggles. On the other hand, the mere conduct of the story has much that is beautiful in it. Thus there is real art in the way in which the scene of Barkis’s death—written with admirable moderation—prepares for the “greater loss” at hand for the mourning family. And in the entire treatment of his hero’s double love-story, Dickens has, to my mind, avoided that discord which, in spite of himself, jars upon the reader both in “Esmond” and in “Adam Bede.” The best constructed part of “David Copperfield” is, however, unmistakably the story of Little Emily and her kinsfolk. This is most skilfully interwoven with the personal experiences of David, of which—except in its very beginnings—it forms no integral part; and throughout the reader is haunted by a presentiment of the coming catastrophe, though unable to divine the tragic force and justice of its actual accomplishment. A touch altered here and there in Steerforth, with the Rosa Dartle episode excluded or greatly reduced, and this part of “David Copperfield” might challenge comparison as to workmanship with the whole literature of modern fiction.      2   
  Of the idyll of Davy and Dora—what shall I say? Its earliest stages are full of the gayest comedy. What, for instance, could surpass the history of the picnic—where was it? perhaps it was near Guildford. At that feast an imaginary rival, “Red Whisker,” made the salad—how could they eat it?—and “voted himself into the charge of the wine-cellar. which he constructed, being an ingenious beast, in the hollow trunk of a tree.” Better still are the backward ripples in the course of true love; best of all the deep wisdom of Miss Mills, in whose nature mental trial and suffering supplied, in some measure, the place of years. In the narrative of the young housekeeping, David’s real trouble is most skilfully mingled with the comic woes of the situation; and thus the idyll almost imperceptibly passes into the last phase, where the clouds dissolve in a rain of tears. The genius which conceived and executed these closing scenes was touched by a pity towards the fictitious creatures of his own imagination, which melted his own heart; and thus his pathos is here irresistible.      3   
  The inventive power of Dickens in none of his other books indulged itself so abundantly in the creation of eccentric characters, but neither was it in any so admirably tempered by taste and feeling. It contains no character which could strictly be called grotesque, unless it be little Miss Mowcher. Most of her outward peculiarities Dickens had copied from a living original, but receiving a remonstrance from the latter he good-humouredly altered the use he had intended to make of the character, and thereby spoilt what there was in it—not much in my opinion—to spoil. Mr. Dick belongs to a species of eccentric personages—mad people in a word—for which Dickens as a writer had a curious liking; but though there is consequently no true humour in this character, it helps to bring out the latent tenderness in another. David’s Aunt is a figure which none but a true humorist such as Sterne or Dickens could have drawn, and she must have sprung from the author’s brain armed cap-à-pie as she appeared in her garden before his little double. Yet even Miss Betsey Trotwood was not altogether a creation of the fancy, for at Broadstairs the locality is still pointed out where the “one great outrage of her life” was daily renewed. In the other chief characters of this story the author seems to rely entirely on natural truthfulness. He must have had many opportunities of noting the ways of seamen and fishermen, but the occupants of the old boat near Yarmouth possess the typical characteristics with which the experience and the imagination of centuries have agreed to credit the “salt” division of mankind. Again, he had had his own experience of shabby-genteel life, and of the struggle which he had himself seen a happy and a buoyant temperament maintaining against a sea of trouble. But Mr. Micawber, whatever features may have been transferred to him, is the type of a whole race of men who will not vanish from the face of the earth so long as the hope which lives eternal in the human breast is only temporarily suspended by the laws of debtor and creditor, and is always capable of revival with the aid of a bowl of milk-punch. A kindlier and merrier, a more humorous and a more genial character was never conceived than this; and if anything was wanted to complete the comicality of the conception, it was the wife of his bosom with the twins at her own, and her mind made up not to desert Mr. Micawber.…      4   
  Thus, then, I must leave the book, with its wealth of pathos and humour, with the glow of youth still tinging its pages, but with the gentler mode of manhood pervading it from first to last. The reality of “David Copperfield” is, perhaps, the first feature in it likely to strike the reader new to its charms; but a closer acquaintance will produce, and familiarity will enhance, the sense of its wonderful art. Nothing will ever destroy the popularity of a work of which it can truly be said that, while offering to his muse a gift not less beautiful than precious, its author put into it his life’s blood.—From “Dickens,” in “English Men of Letters.”

Criticisms and Interpretations
IV. By Gilbert K. Chesterton   
     
THE STING and strength of this piece of fiction, then, do (by a rare accident) lie in the circumstance that it was so largely founded on fact. “David Copperfield” is the great answer of a great romancer to the realists. David says in effect: “What! you say that the Dickens tales are too purple really to have happened! Why, this is what happened to me, and it seemed the most purple of all. You say that the Dickens heroes are too handsome and triumphant! Why, no prince or paladin in Ariosto was ever so handsome and triumphant as the Head Boy seemed to me walking before me in the sun. You say the Dickens villains are too black! Why, there was no ink in the devil’s ink-stand black enough for my own stepfather when I had to live in the same house with him. The facts are quite the other way to what you suppose. This life of grey studies and half tones, the absence of which you regret in Dickens, is only life as it is looked at. This life of heroes and villains is life as it is lived. The life a man knows best is exactly the life he finds most full of fierce certainties and battles between good and ill—his own. Oh, yes, the life we do not care about may easily be a psychological comedy. Other people’s lives may easily be human documents. But a man’s own life is always a melodrama.”      1   
  There are other effective things in “David Copperfield,” they are not all autobiographical, but they nearly all have this new note of quietude and reality. Micawber is gigantic; an immense assertion of the truth that the way to live is to exaggerate everything. Mrs. Micawber, artistically speaking, is even better. She is very nearly the best thing in Dickens. Nothing could be more absurd, and at the same time more true, than her clear, argumentative manner of speech as she sits smiling and expounding in the midst of ruin. What could be more lucid and logical and unanswerable than her statement of the prolegomena of the Medway problem, of which the first step must be to “see the Medway,” or of the coal-trade, which required talent and capital. “Talent Mr. Micawber has. Capital Mr. Micawber has not.” It seems as if something should have come at last out of so clear and scientific an arrangement of ideas. Indeed if (as has been suggested) we regard “David Copperfield” as an unconscious defence of the poetic view of life, we might regard Mrs. Micawber as an unconscious satire on the logical view of life. She sits as a monument of the hoplessness and helplessness of reason in the face of this romantic and unreasonable world.—From “Charles Dickens.”

Criticisms and Interpretations
V. By W. Teignmouth Shore   
     
THE PLOT of “David Copperfield” is faulty, it is divided between the actions of two sets of characters, who fundamentally have no connection with or bearing upon each other. David is a forced connecting link between his own affairs and those of Steerforth, the other “leading young man” of the tale; David affects his friend not a whit or his career, and though he states the opposite, is not in reality affected by him. To put it another way, instead of the incidents of the plot centring round the hero, they centre round two heroes, there is as it were an attempt to draw a circle with two centres, the result being no circle but an aimless meandering. Or yet a third view can be taken: Dickens has endeavored to write one novel with two plots, the result being a distracted interest, which should not be, or rather never is, the case with a properly constructed story. “Tom Jones,” it has been said, has a perfect plot, the incidents develop naturally; so does the character of the central figure, round which all the incidents and personages cluster.      1   
  The two plots in “David Copperfield” are these. First the life and adventures of David himself, his childhood, his unhappy life after his mother’s second marriage, his misery in the wine merchant’s office in London, his flight to Dover to seek his aunt, Betsey Trotwood, his education in Canterbury, his coming to town and his work at Doctors’ Commons, his first marriage—with Dora—his struggles to earn fame and fortune as a man of letters, the death of Dora, his gradually awakening love for and marriage with Agnes, the good angel of the story. The second plot, in no way bound up with the first, is concerned with James Steerforth, the spoilt son of a proud widow, the seduction by Steerforth of Little Em’ly, the search for the latter by Mr. Peggotty, the affecting story of Ham’s unhappy love, and Steerforth’s death by drowning. It is curious that the first plot is simple, natural and true, the second is not only badly handled, but many times trenches on the preserves of melodrama.      2   
  Steerforth seems to us a total failure in so far as the author’s aims are concerned; for he set forth to portray a young man of brilliant parts and of irresistible fascination, but succeeds only in drawing a pretentious young prig and snob. Instead of realizing and sharing the fascination which Steerforth has for David we ask ourselves again and again as we read the chapters: “What could David have seen of charm in this insufferable young puppy?” Mrs. Steerforth, James’s unfortunate mother, lacks vitality; she moves, but in no human manner, she speaks, but with no human voice, she is a puppet from doll-land. Then there is that astonishing figure of a woman, Rosa Dartle; at first she is rather impressive, but after we have learned to know her catchwords and accustomed gestures, she is alive no more. Then turn to the group at Yarmouth, Steerforth’s connection with which forms the motive of the second plot. The only quite successful figures in this party are Ham, the stalwart, wholesome young fisherman, who loves Little Em’ly, and Mrs. Gummidge, whose cantankerous, dismal humours are highly entertaining, and whose eventual conversion to good-nature and unselfishness is very natural; who can forget, and, remembering, not laught at her “I’m a lone, creetur’ myself, and everythink that reminds me of creeturs that ain’t lone and lorn, goes contrairy with me”? Perhaps Mr. Barkis, the carrier, should be added to these two, if for no other reason, on account of his immortal remark, “Barkis is willin.” Mr. Peggotty, on the other hand, seems to us a failure, he is so very obvious; therefore true to life, it may be argued. But Dickens meant him to be a heroic and pathetic figure, he does indulge in heroics, his pathos somehow is not contagious, and his wild-goose chase for Emily is a too fantastic undertaking for one who is meant to be a hard-headed if soft-hearted man. As for Little Em’ly, she is, to use a stage term, a stock character; we all know the virtuous, innocent-minded, wronged maidens of melodrama. Little Em’ly is one of them. Here it is easy enough to see where the fault lies; Dickens has not shown us Em’ly tempted but only Em’ly fallen; we are not made to realize the growth of her infatuation for Steerforth, and occasionally the horrid thought crosses the reader’s mind that the girl is a bit of a minx and that she does not altogether deserve the love and devotion lavished upon her. The finest thing in this section—for section it is—of “David Copperfield” is the description, so admired by Ruskin, of the storm in which Steerforth is drowned, by stagey coincidence, on the scene of his villainy…. Here is a tragic background, but the figures before it do not arouse our emotion; Dickens could paint nature in her tragic moods, but men and women seldom.      3   
  We will now turn to the main plot, the concerns of David himself. Of his childhood the pictures are very pleasing, sentimentality—always a temptation to Dickens—is avoided, and there is plenty of fun with nurse Peggotty and Mr. Barkis. David’s mother is not in herself interesting; she is a flabby, pretty person, faithfully portrayed, but none the less dull. As readers of the story know, David’s early years are made wretched for him by his mother’s second husband, Edward Murdstone, and his sister Jane. In drawing characters with whom he was in heartfelt sympathy, Dickens was liable to overcharge his brush with colour; the same was true of him with characters that he disliked. The resulting over emphasis led to failure, as in the case of the Murdstones, who rouse in the reader no feeling of dislike, for we do not dislike mere phantoms. Leaving his home in undeserved disgrace, David goes to school at Salem House, on his way meeting that delightful waiter William, who showed such a capacity for beer, chops, and batter-pudding. At school, where he is from the first saddled with a bed name, David makes the acquaintance of Steerforth, and of the bullying Mr. Creakle, who need not detain us, also of Traddles, one of Dickens’s delightful “innocents,” wholly natural and lovable. Then comes the death of David’s mother, and his “advent” at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby, wine merchants in Blackfriars; which episode in his life is even in detail the autobiography of Dickens’s own boyhood. Here David meets with one of the world’s most famous men, “a stoutish, middle-aged person, in a brown surtout and black tights and shoes, with no more hair upon his head (which was a large one, and very shining) than there is upon an egg, and with a very extensive face…. His clothes were shabby, but he had an imposing shirt-collar on. He carried a jaunty sort of a stick, with a large pair of rusty tassels to it; and a quizzing-glass hung outside of his coat—for ornament, as I afterwards found, as he very seldom looked through it and couldn’t see anything when he did,” Mr. Micawber, who stands above the need of praise. This character alone would make Copperfield immortal; to produce a miniature portrait of this prince of happy-go-luckies would be impossible; Dickens has drawn him at full length; he lightens up the scene whenever he appears, and though we are always laughing at him, in the end we part with him with sincere regret as at the loss of one for whom we have more than a sneaking affection.      4   
  Driven to despair, David bethinks him of his aunt Miss Betsey Trotwood, and sets forth to find her at Dover, where he knows she has her residence. Miss Trotwood and her loyal friend and ally, Mr. Dick, who cannot get away from the head of Charles I, are a delectable couple, without one touch of caricature, a pair of amazing eccentrics, drawn with the deftest skill. Then we come to the days at Canterbury, where David once more goes to school, where he meets with Agnes, whom he eventually marries, with her father, who is somewhat of a bore, and with Uriah Heep. Heep and his mother have always seemed to us overdrawn, their slyness and ’umbleness would surely never have deceived even the most innocent; Dickens hated them and overstated his case, the result—as pointed out already in other instances—being lifelessness; Uriah is a type, not a man. Among the pleasant folk at Canterbury are the old schoolmaster, Dr. Strong, and his young wife, Annie; and among the unpleasant, “Mrs. Strong’s mama”—Mrs. Markleham, the “Old Soldier,” like Uriah a trifle overdone.      5   
  Agnes appeals to our admiration, to our judgments; Dora to our pity, to our hearts, even though there be some who can find it possible to despise her. Dora is a wonderful piece of work, perfect in every detail; so pretty, so helpless, so childlike; she lives for us, we feel that we have met her in the flesh, we forget that she is an imaginary portrait. We know of few more affecting things in imaginative literature than the description of Dora’s gradual fading away from life.… Agnes is cold, not of this earth; an angel rather in woman’s form, not an angelic woman. We long, as we grow intimate with her, to find her losing her temper or showing some of that pretty contrariety which so becomes a woman. Her perfection is exasperating, and we almost believe that David must have repented of his bargain, found Agnes to be a trifle of a prig and not a little of a bore, and looked back with ever keener regret to his child-wife, with all her little follies, her shortcomings and her sweet lovableness.      6   
  In this one book we have a representative work of Dickens’s art, which enables us to criticise his worth and to judge his weakness. We have noted the weakness in the arrangement of the tale, the presence of two distinct plots, only joined together by the small part that David played in the second of them. We see Dickens at his worst in such characters as Steerforth and his mother, Rosa Dartle and the Murdstones; we see him doing indifferently well with Uriah Heep and Mr. Peggotty, and at his top in David himself, Micawber, Miss Trotwood, Mr. Dick and others. We find that his chief strength lay in delicate pathos and comedy, in farce and in caricature; his chief weakness in extravagance of emotion and in farce so extravagant that it rings false.      7   
  We should note when studying this novel that it is narrated in the first person, the story is an autobiography, the most difficult form of fiction in which to attain a close approach to realism. Dickens has succeeded wonderfully; the scenes follow one another naturally, the narrator never shows signs of knowing what has taken place without his knowledge, and the course of the tale is not strained so that David shall be present at scenes without due reason and just cause. Even David’s memories of his childhood and the account of his birth are so told as not to jar upon our love of the natural and probable.      8   
  In this novel, too, Dickens gives proof of that fecundity which pertains to genius only; we have noted some of the more prominent characters; there are a host of others of minor importance, all distinct, most of them lifelike. Dickens wrote of the story: “I am not quite sure that I ever did like, or ever shall like, anything quite so well as ‘Copperfield”’; by it he might have been well content to stand or fall.—From “Charles Dickens.”

Criticisms and Interpretations
VI. By George Gissing   
     
TO speak severely of Mr. Micawber is beyond the power of the most conscientious critic, whether in life or art; the most rigid economist would be glad to grasp him by the hand and to pay for the bowl of punch over which this type of genial impecuniosity would dilate upon his embarrassments and his hopes; the least compromising realist has but to open at a dialogue or a letter in which Mr. Micawber’s name is seen, and straightway he forgets his theories. No selfish intention can be attributed to him. His bill might not be provided for when he declared it was, and, in consequence, poor Traddles may lose the table he has purchased for “the dearest girl in the world,” but Mr. Micawber had all the time been firmly assured that something would turn up; he will sympathise profoundly with Traddles, and write him an epistle which makes amends for the loss of many tables. No man ever lived who was so consistently delightful—certainly Dicken’s father cannot have been so, but in this idealized portraiture we have essential truth. Men of this stamp do not abound, but they are met with, even to-day. As a rule, he who waits for something to turn up, mixing punch the while, does so with a very keen eye on his neighbour’s pocket, and is recommended to us neither by Skimpole’s fantastic gaiety nor by Micawber’s eloquence and warmth of heart; nevertheless, one knows the irrepressibly hopeful man, full of kindliness, often distinguished by unconscious affectations of speech, who goes through life an unreluctant pensioner on the friends won by his many good and genial qualities. The one point on which experience gives no support to the imaginative figure is his conversion to practical activity. Mr. Micawber in Australia does the heart good; but he is a pious vision. We refuse to think of a wife worn out by anxieties, of children growing up in squalor; we gladly accept the flourishing colonist; but this is tribute to the author whom we love. Dickens never wrought more successfully for our pleasure and for his own fame.—From “Charles Dickens.”