David Copperfield

by Charles Dickens

  Yet if Dickens is seen today as far more than a phenomenon, or a stepping-stone, it is surely thanks to his characters. The endless teeming range of them! Peggotty, Barkis, Ham, Em'ly--Dora, Traddles, the Micawbers! Betsey Trotwood! Mr. Dick, Miss Mowcher, Rosa Dartle! The murderous Murdstones; the magnetic Steerforth; the 'umble Uriah Heep. Though sometimes criticized for their flatness, Dickens's creations weirdly live and live, proving far more memorable than most "realistic" characters. How to explain their numbers and effect? What to make of their strangely mechanical magic? In their tremendous variety and matchless pull, they constitute the most singular, mysterious, and significant element of Dickens's genius. Only a fool would believe he had accounted for them. Still, biographer Peter Ackroyd in his Introduction to Dickens bravely links them to Dickens's character, as exemplified by two incidents in his life: "When [Dickens] was courting his future wife, Catherine Ho garth, he once arrived outside the small villa in Fulham where she lived with her family--or rather, he burst in through an open window. He was dressed in a sailor's suit and proceeded to dance a hornpipe in the middle of the drawing room where the family were sitting; he then leapt out through the window but, a few minutes later, knocked on the front door. He was wearing his usual clothes and conducted himself in an ordinary manner, making no allusion to his previous extraordinary behavior except for a sudden 'roar of laughter.' A few years later he was sitting at a dinner with some acquaintances when a woman turned to her husband and called him 'Darling.' This was not a customary endearment in the period and at once Dickens slid off his chair, lay on the floor, put one leg in the air, and addressed no one in particular with 'Did she call him darling?'. Then he got up from the floor, resumed his seat, and carried on as if nothing whatever had occurred." Ackroyd finds these incidents reminiscent of the way characters in Dickens will theatri cally disrupt a more customary reality, which will then resume as if nothing extraordinary had taken place. They also shed light, though, on how both the characters themselves, and the extravagant comedic sense that produced them, anticipate contemporary preoccupations with the absurd and with the performance embedded in everyday behavior.

  Tolstoy called Dickens his favorite writer and David Copperfield his favorite book; Dickens's portrait hung on his study wall. Perhaps more salient, though, is Dickens's influence on Freud, Dostoevsky, and-Kafka. Without them, Dickens might have come to seem a mere early practitioner of the novel, crude in comparison to successors such as George Eliot and Henry James. With them, we see how he looks forward to our time. With his urge to disrupt and to decimate; with his penchant and nose for performance; with his fixation on imprisonment, and his edgy laughter, and his powerful cartooning, he prefigures not only modernity, but also the postmodern graphic novel,. as exemplified by artists like Art Spiegelman. And yet we do not love David Copperfield because of its relationship to Maus. We love it because we feel more alive reading it than we do living. Is David Copperfield as great as Dickens's social novels? Is it simplistic in its treatment of women, good and evil, domesticity, Australia? We conclude yes or no, then return to turning the pages. David Copperfield is quintessential Dickens, one of the most beloved novels ever written. If experience is any guide, we will be justifying our pleasure in it for centuries to come.

  --Gish Jen

  Selected Bibliography

  Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York and London: Harper-Collins, 1990.

  Andrews, Malcolm. Dickens and the Grown-up Child. London: Macmillan, 1994.

  Butt, John, and Kathleen Tillotson. Dickens at Work. Fairlawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1958.

  Chesterton, G. K. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens. New York: Dutton, 1911.

  ------. Charles Dickens: The Last of the Great Men. Foreword by Alexander Wollcott. New York: The Press of the Reader's Club, 1942.

  Collins, Phillip. Dickens and Crime. 3rd ed. London: St. Martin's Press, 1994.

  Epstein, Norrie, ed. The Friendly Dickens. New York: Penguin, 2001.

  Foor, Sheila M. Dickens's Rhetoric. New York: Lang, 1993.

  Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874.

  Hawthorn, Jeremy. Bleak House: The Critics Debate. London: Macmillan, 1987.

  House, Humphrey. The Dickens World. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1941.

  Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. 2 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.

  Kaplan, Fred. Dickens: A Biography. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1988.

  Leavis, F. R., and Q. D. Leavis. Dickens the Novelist. New York: Pantheon, 1971.

  Miller, J. Hillis. Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.

  Orwell, George. "Charles Dickens." In The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. I. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. London: Penguin, 1972.

  Page, Norman. Bleak House: A Novel of Connections. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

  Schlicke, Paul, ed. Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Smiley, Jane. Charles Dickens. Penguin Lives. New York: Lipper/Viking, 2001.

  Stone, Harry. Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.

  Tomalin, Claire. The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

  Welsh, Alexander. The City of Dickens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

  1 All quotes from the fragment of Dickens's autobiography that survives, as well as quotes from his first biographer, John Forster, come from The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, collected, arranged, and annotated by B. W. Matz, published in New York in 1911 by the Baker and Taylor Company.