Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  A historical example of how the dilemma could be made tolerable in practice is available in the case of Disraeli’s marriage. He was remarkably intelligent in knowing that he (also a novelist) needed the same qualities as David Copperfield for his domestic happiness and in being prepared to put up with the concomitants. He wrote to his future wife that he needed to be surrounded with love; it was tenderness and sympathy at home that made his political life possible. Though much his senior in age and previously a widow, Mrs Disraeli was juvenile in manner, gay, overflowing with affection, and adored her husband, so that she made him happy in spite of being generally considered by his society a silly woman, ‘foolish and at times even ridiculous’, noted Lady Battersea. Disraeli minded this not at all, and seems not to have repined at her accompanying childlessness either; he seems positively to have enjoyed her ‘not knowing who came first, the Greeks or the Romans’, and the similar examples of her Dora-like conversation. She was in fact widely loved, though Disraeli was commiserated for having a wife whose conversational follies made her a joke, and respected for his stoicism in ignoring this. He snubbed a friend who questioned his indifference to his wife’s shortcomings by saying that unlike other men he could feel gratitude (he did not mean for his wife’s very moderate private income). Mrs Disraeli however was unlike Dora in being, or being able to afford, a good housekeeper, and also in being unselfishly devoted to her husband; she did not merely hold his pens but corrected his proofs (or thought she did). Dizzy’s undoubtedly sincere love for his wife lasted into her old age and her death left him desolate.

  It is inevitable, then, that at the next phase of a man’s life, as adolescent, David meets his mother’s image again, in Dora Spenlow. (Dickens himself had fallen seriously in love at 17 with Maria Beadnell who provided Jip as well as typical features of Dora and David’s courtship, though Dora seems to have assimilated as well – very naturally since the point of Dora is her typicality – relevant qualities of Catherine Hogarth’s, whom Dickens subsequently married since Maria was denied him.) Dickens is in firm control of his theme here as throughout the novel, beautifully indicating David’s conditioned helplessness by his becoming ‘a captive’ at first sight of the curls etc. A less predictable factor is David’s complete lack of surprise at finding Miss Murdstone in command of the household; as she was his mother’s jailer it is natural she should be Dora’s and he reveals his unconscious train of thought by regarding Miss Murdstone not as Dora’s protector but more like a life-protector which is ‘a weapon of assault’. Her presence, together with her subsequently forcing a breach between David and the object of his love, made the parallel between Clara Copperfield and Dora Spenlow inescapable for the original readers, who might well have forgotten the earliest instalments of the novel by now. ‘Phiz’ the illustrator helped bring out Dickens’s idea (as so often) by showing Clara-like portraits of Dora over the mantelpiece in every interior Dora figures in. This girlish portrait of Dora appears finally in the central position of the sitting-room where David and Agnes sit surrounded by their children, pointing the contrast with the matronly Agnes.

  As Dora on further acquaintance shows herself an exact replica of Clara, David’s heart is satisfied in spite of the occasional misgivings of his intelligence, so that when Traddles tells him about his useful, Agnes-like fiancée Sophie, and David says, ‘I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction’ – our irritation at his fatuity is tempered by our having been put in command of the reasons why he can’t help it. A dazzling piece of supplementary insight into the situation is shown by providing Dora with Jip as a pet’s pet and playmate, who is more important than David to her and whose death coincides with hers not merely on the plane of sentimental effectiveness, and about whom David can be more explicit – he has to tolerate Jip though Jip is an insufferable nuisance, irrational, and cannot be trained, like his mistress, and parodies Dora in using the cookery-book as a plaything; after their marriage he lives in a doll’s-house in the form of a pagoda which is always in the way.17 Dora is rightly felt to be pathetic – as a pet is, of its very nature – as well as exasperating, and Dickens has been so successful in showing that her charm for David is potent in spite of her folly and rejection of reality, that not only in the Victorian Age but even in our own sophisticated literary world Dora has found masculine defenders on both sides of the Atlantic, who see her through David’s eyes instead of through Dickens’s or an intelligent reader’s. Alternatively, some ungallant (English) critics reproach David for his stupidity in not recognizing Dora for what she was, repeating Miss Trotwood’s refrain of ‘Blind, blind, blind!’ as though Dickens himself had not taken so much trouble to provide for this by the earlier part of his history.

  That Dickens put an immense amount of work and thought into the theme of this novel is seen in the numerous tendrils of associations between the Clara and Dora sections. Another line of association is that between David and his mother and father; he is shown to have inherited from the former ‘her affectionate nature’ and from his father the ‘blind’ trustfulness that gets him into so many disasters (both are of course characteristic Victorian features and values). That his case-history is a repetition of his father’s is brought out for us by Miss Trotwood’s description of David Copperfield senior as one ‘who was always running after wax dolls from his cradle’, a ‘wax doll’ being her contemptuous comment on the masculine weakness for a woman as a pet and plaything. She also says of the boy: ‘“He’s as like his father as it’s possible to be if he wasn’t so like his mother too”’, the likeness to his father being stressed by their having identical names18 and by Mr Dick’s repeatedly calling him ‘David’s son David’. Behind this of course is the new scientific interest in heredity characteristic of Victorian literature and a corresponding new interest in what determines conduct, which superseded the previous such interest that was based on the teachings of theology.19 Forster writes, very appositely: ‘The question of hereditary transmission had a curious attraction for him, and considerations connected with it were frequently present to his mind. Of a youth who had fallen into a father’s weaknesses without the possibility of having himself observed them for imitation, he thus wrote on one occasion: “It suggests the strangest consideration as to which of our failings we are really responsible, and as to which of them we cannot quite reasonably hold ourselves to be so. What A. evidently derives from his father cannot in his case be derived from association and observation, but must be in the very principles of his individuality as a living creature”’ (Life, Bk. VIII, § II, footnote).

  The problem represented by the marriages of the two David Copperfields is both more profound and more representative than seems commonly realized, and Dickens investigates it with concern since it was a problem that necessarily involved himself as an insoluble one. David the elder is reported by his widow as having tried to train her, but the demands the middle-aged man had made on his young wife are represented by her only as a pedantic insistence on accuracy, though he had eventually recognized that ‘a loving heart was better and stronger than wisdom and that he was a happy man in hers’. We are told this by Clara when she is justifying herself on her death-bed against the killing demands to change her character that her second husband has made on her, and we are therefore to take it very seriously. David the second comes to the same conclusion in due course as his father had done, but David’s demands on Dora were not pedantic or inhuman: he wanted to share his thoughts and interests with her and find support in his troubles, a natural claim. Her refusal to accept responsibility for managing the household is only a symptom of what he has to complain of, and not the main complaint he makes to himself, as Dabney and others allege.

  Yet David repeats his father’s experience in deciding that tenderness is, in the marital relation, better than a wife’s being ‘wise’ or sensible even, though the terms in which David describes his decision are revealingly different from the confident expression of a truism that his mothe
r had offered us. David explains: ‘I could not endure my own solitary wisdom: I could not reconcile it with her former appeal to me as my child-wife.’ Yet we can’t help questioning – are obliged to question, by the novelist’s art – the quality of this freely available affectionateness in a wife which is seen not only as making up for the absence of almost everything else but also as justifying an obstinate selfishness. Both Clara and Dora justify themselves thus, Clara repeating:

  ‘Whatever I am, I am affectionate. I know I am affectionate. I wouldn’t say it, if I wasn’t certain that I am. Ask Peggotty. I am sure she’ll tell you I’m affectionate.’

  – which Dickens has put in such a form that it sounds more like an obsession than a testimonial. We therefore immediately reflect that it is ‘affectionateness’ without ‘wisdom’ – without enough affection for David to consider her child’s welfare20 – which had made her sacrifice him by a re-marriage that ignored Peggotty’s warnings against Mr Murdstone. David himself notices her ‘wilful, pettish manner’ after his disillusionment following the marriage. And Dora’s ‘loving’ nature is repeatedly seen to be immune to David’s appeals to her alleged affection. ‘“I am sure I am very affectionate”’ Dora asserts in response to David’s asking her to behave more considerately.21 At an almost surface level therefore Dickens was making it evident to the reader that there are awkward questions involved in his age’s easy assumptions as to the superiority and adequacy of ‘a loving heart’, suggesting that it may be a cloak for a selfish will, for Dora’s callousness and Clara’s cowardice (in leaving David to suffer for her mistake and not interfering to protect him against his stepfather). Miss Trotwood, whose insights are never deflected by sentimental considerations, significantly characterises Clara’s ‘affectionateness’ as ‘the best part of her weakness’ when accusing Mr Murdstone of having played on it.

  Yet there is no doubt Dickens had arrived at a really important truth – important most of all to him – in spite of the perplexities it involved. David, who is a novelist, even if not a very impressive one, is shown to need, as Dickens himself supremely did – and recognized that it was a more than personal need – gaiety, and tenderness, and companionship in the fantasies of nonsense, that were the soil from which his creativeness sprang. [In life Dickens himself seems to have got them not from his wife (who was not, or soon ceased to be, a Dora) but from his children and circle of friends, and no doubt that is why he was such a splendid father to his children when they were small but lost interest in them when they were growing up.22] Dora the child-wife is these things and nothing else; to appeal to her reason is to alarm her and insult her – ‘“I didn’t marry to be reasoned with”’ she sobs; she expects to be talked nonsense to and refuses to live by the rules of common sense, balancing the wholly rational Miss Trotwood in the scheme of things. David’s recognition of the supreme value to him of such a personality made even more poignant the insoluble problem of how to reconcile this need with the other need of a housekeeping, child-bearing and burden-sharing wife, though all these functions except that of actual child-bearing could be delegated. And it seems that Dickens had intended to keep Dora alive, probably supplementing her by Agnes as the Peggotty of this next generation – Agnes having been described as ‘the real heroine’ in Dickens’s notes for Number V. Forster quotes a letter as late as 7 May 1850 (the novel having been first discussed early in 1849, and possibly conceived in the previous year) where Dickens, then writing Number XIV, says: ‘Still undecided about Dora but MUST decide today’ – and he decided only reluctantly to ‘kill’ her. But her premature death makes the parallel with Clara complete: the Little Blossom withers away in the unsuccessful attempt to become a mother – an excellent piece of symbolic thought. [The deep impression made on Dickens in July 1848 by the death-bed of his sister Fanny, resigned to her ‘early decay’, as he wrote, was heightened by the death soon after of her little child, whose pining away and other characteristics had been embodied in little Paul Dombey. Fanny had played an important part in Dickens’s childhood (even as Florence did to little Paul) and her death contributed to the genuine feeling conveyed in the death of David’s mother.] That Dora’s death from pregnancy was felt to represent a psychological truth is implied by George Eliot’s endorsement in using the same situation and image (even if an unconscious borrowing) in her tale ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ (1856) where her childlike tiny heroine ‘Tina’ comes to a similar end: ‘the prospect of her becoming a mother was a new ground for hoping the best. But the delicate plant had been too deeply bruised, and in the struggle to put forth a blossom it died.’

  The detailing of David’s difficulties with Dora after their marriage has been anticipated by his uneasiness during their engagement, when he had found his first attempts to enter on a more satisfactory relation with her invariably frustrated. He could not risk losing her, so postponed facing the problem until after the honeymoon, when it at once surfaces in his realization of what the irresponsibility of romantic courtship had landed him in: after ‘the romance of our engagement’ now, he finds, they have ‘no one to please but one another – one another to please for life’, where the possibility of happiness has evidently turned into the realization that it is in fact a sentence of imprisonment for life. Marriage after all was a most serious matter when divorce was impossible and separation not respectable; but neither of such alternatives would have touched the trouble here. David’s problem is eternal. David is helpless in the face of Dora’s refusal to listen to reason, and his patient efforts to make her meet him on other than playmate terms are really touching though seen with humour which precludes any sentimental stressing. He tries to share his thoughts and interests with her and ‘to “form her mind”’; Miss Trotwood when appealed to makes him see that she cannot consent to take the part Miss Murdstone did in his mother’s second marriage, and that he is in danger of repeating that situation. He then tries alternative tactics in the hope of getting Dora to grow up; these are in the line of those adopted by his father in his mother’s first marriage. Eventually it dawns on him that Dora is immutable, and he must, as his aunt had pointed out, enjoy the qualities she has, for which he fell in love with her, and put up with their drawbacks. Realizing that he risks losing everything that made her precious to him by frightening her, he gives up, seeing that he would otherwise be in the position of ‘always playing spider to Dora’s fly’. ‘I had been unhappy in trying it; I could not endure my own solitary wisdom; I could not reconcile it with her former appeal to me as my child-wife.’ He has learned the folly of ‘trying to be wise’, for after all, like Disraeli, it was not ‘wisdom’ that he ultimately needed from a wife but the relief and the stimulus of relaxing from ‘wisdom’, and it is this instinctive wisdom that Dora has, always characterizing herself as ‘stupid’, ‘foolish’, ‘silly’, ‘a poor little thing’ and so on, and taking it as a compliment and a testimonial when her husband calls her a Mouse, which is a tiny, helpless, timid, scampering, amusing little creature [Dickens used this as a term of endearment in his own courtship of his wife. It was a traditional English term of endearment in love-play – cf. Hamlet’s instructing his mother not to let his uncle call her his mouse – and still current in the early 19th century, but Dickens undoubtedly reactivated its implications that made Dora insist on identifying herself with it in her character of being a creature for love-play only. In a similar context it recurs in Our Mutual Friend when Bella’s father says to her, in loving praise on her wedding-day, when she behaves ‘as if she had never grown up’: ‘What a silly little Mouse it is.’] And Dora therefore feels that she must be a failure when he is ‘cruel’ enough to reason with her. David is then convincing when he says: ‘I told her I feared … the fault was mine. Which I sincerely felt, and which indeed it was.’ The whole detailed investigation of David’s courtship and married life strikes me as a marvel of delicate insight and moreover as exhibiting the impersonality of true genius. The case is completed by David’s attempt to imagine a sel
f who had not known Dora and what she represents: ‘Sometimes the speculation came into my thoughts, What might have happened, if Dora and I had never known each other? But she was so incorporated with my existence, that it was the idlest of all fancies, and would soon rise out of my reach and sight, like gossamer floating in the air.’ We see that this is associated with the fact, of which he is vaguely aware, that Dora’s identification with his mother is what makes her ‘incorporated with his existence’. We remember that during David’s ordeal in his journey, the flight from the warehouse-Micawber-Murdstone phase of his life to start afresh at Dover, he understood the source of his dogged persistence in trying to reach a home and happiness: ‘I seemed to be sustained’, he noted, ‘and led on by my fanciful picture of my mother in her youth, before I came into the world. It always kept me company.’ Surely this is a remarkable aspect of the theme so imaginatively created for us here.