Dickens on Innocence as Calamity

The read-aloud book of the moment at Chez Buce is David Copperfield. I don’t know how I let this happen: I am no more than a tepid fan of Dickens, and I have always heard the Copperfield was soppy sentimental.

Surprise: it is wonderful, and I look forward to every reading session. In fact it is soppy sentimental. But –this is the part that nobody ever told me—nobody sees through its sentimentality than Dickens himself.

More precisely: Copperfield is full of seductive innocents: Mr. Micabwer, Mr. Dick, David’s own mother, the list goes on and on. Dickens loves them for (not in spite of) their innocence, and he can overcome the reader’s skepticism to make you love them too.

Thing is, though, this innocence can be a calamity and Dickens knows this too. Think of the car toodling down the expressway at 35 miles an hour, while a 60-car pileup clogs the traffic lanes behind him. David’s mother, for example. Her winsome, childlike nature is attractive in its own way, but it is a disaster for herself and her Murdstone child, and if David escapes her curse, it is his good luck and her good planning. So also Micawber. You need never to have read the book to remember W. C. Fields posturing and posing and hoping that something will turn up. But Micawber has a wife and four children and if he doesn’t feed them, then there is a good chance that no one will.

Dickens is also good at predation. David’s mother has Murdstone; Micawber has Uriah Heep, the list goes on. But this is an ambivalent kind of villainy: Heep and Murdstone pluck the low-hanging fruit. The world is a difficult place and grownups with responsibilities had better face that fact and Suck it Up.

He is good at innocents and predators; no less so at innocents who are predators. Mr. Wickfield is a good man, and a good friend to David. His daughter Agnes is a model of saintly devotion. Yet Wickfield is sucking the life out of Agnes with the demands he makes on her—and he knows it, yet he cannot bring himself to do anything about it, except drink himself into stupefication.

There’s another feature of Copperfield that I haven’t straightened out in my own mind yet; David’s own precocious maturity. In a way, this is a literary trope; think Little Orphan Annie, think Tin-Tin, maybe think Huckleberry Finn. It seems to work as a literary device, but in real life, we think of the children of alcohols who have adulthood thrust upon them and never really get to enjoy their childhood. I really don’t know what to do with this one: I suppose acres have trees have fallen to produce dissertations on the topic, extending the inquiry way further than I can ever hope to imagine. But it’s an angle, and it adds a somber note, perhaps unintended, to a generally wonderful book.

I think I’ll have more to say about Copperfield, but I’ll save it until I get a bit further on; I’m still a bit shy of half way.