David Copperfield's Shadow

Finishing up with Dickens’ David Copperfield, it would be nice if I had time to go back and reread Great Expectations, thus bracketing Dickens’ two great account of maturation to manhood. I read Great Expectations once in college (uh, I think) and then again aloud with Mrs. B a few years back—that latter experience, at least, profitable and satisfying. I had always stayed away from Copperfield because I had heard it was too, well, too “Victorian,” at least as I understood the term.

I’m not at all sorry to have read Copperfield now. It has inarguable strength: unfailing narrative dynamism, and a range of secondary characters second to none—the quality, I guess, that makes people compare Dickens to Shakespeare. It has its failings although they are perhaps not quite what I expected: as I’ve said earlier, it is sentimental in its way, yet Dickens has a remarkable knack for spotting and criticizing his own sentimentalism at least as fast as any reader.

Yet it is a very different book from Great Expectations, not least in the respect that Copperfield’s David is a very different hero from GE’s Pip. David is, at the end of the day, perhaps the least interesting character in his own story: Angus Wilson says the book “has at times a prematurely mellow, over-cosy, self-satisfied note.” One might apply each of these adjectives to David himself (I quote from the Afterword to the Signet Classics Paperback edition of GE). The narrator David describes of himself as a writer, but (Wilson again) “for all the talk of his success as a novelist [he] seems much more like a bourgeois rentier.”

Pip is a darker, more doubtful sort of book with a hero more skeptical and in many ways more somber. It is not that Pip is free of vices (he is far too interesting for any such libel as that). But his vice are more subtle and complex, and Pip the hero himself, more self-aware. The adult Pip is heavy with—burdened with, perhaps—a kind of hypocrisy and pretension. But one reason for the complexity is that he finds himself a stranger in precisely the self-satisfied world where David finds himself so much at home.

One of the many wonderful things about Shakespeare is his wonderful capacity for self-correction. You can picture him in the audience at Richard II saying: Uh huh, can’t let the clowns speak verse again. Or you can literally see him try out the soliloquy form in Julius Caesar, and then to get it right later the same year in Hamlet. In a splendid little essay (called, plainly enough, Introduction to Dickens), Peter Ackroyd shows the same time of trajectory emerging in Dickens. He wrote different novels at different times in his life because he saw things differently—and what he saw was his own prior handiwork. It’s as if Dickens didn’t understand David’s own shortcomings until he had put them on full display. You can see the same sort of evolution (perhaps even more profound) between Bleak House—where “society” is the problem—to Little Dorritt—where it becomes clear that we are society, and we make out own fate.

Every text is a context. David Lodge writes somewhere about a character who is studying “the influence of Henry James on Shakespeare” (hat tip to Borges and Pierre Menard). I don’t suppose I have the time to go back and read GE at this point, but it’s good to have read it, and to see how the later Dickens casts a shadow over (and enriches) the early.