Cambridge History of English and
American Literature
Occasional
References to David Copperfield
Volume
XIII. The Victorian Age, Part One. - X. Dickens,
§ 1.
Early life.
(...)
Dickens’s biography is familiar from one great storehouse, Forster’s Life,
and from many smaller monographs of varying merit, nor does it require full
handling here. Born in the lower, rather than the upper, middle class, and sunk,
by family misfortune, at one time, to the very level poignantly described in
David Copperfield, he acquired, in his interrupted schooldays, a very limited
amount of regular education and never enjoyed David’s subsequent
“advantages.” But he knew something of the school groundwork usual at that
time, and, on his own account, developed a keen and most fortunate fondness for
the great classics of English fiction, original or translated—Smollett,
perhaps, most of all, but, also, Fielding; Don Quixote, as well as The Arabian
Nights. After all the sordid but, eventually, genial experiences which, later,
reflect themselves in his books—the childish schooling which provides some of
the most charming things of his Christmas stories; his father’s prison in the
Marshalsea; the dismal shabby lodgings at Camden town and in Lant street and so
forth—he got no nearer Copperfield’s dignified articled position in
Doctors’ Commons than a boy-clerkship in a solicitor’s office and a
reportership in the Commons itself. But this last gave him a sort of hold on the
fringe of journalism, if not of literature, and he soon fastened that hold on
the garment itself. More varied and important reportings; Sketches by Boz, at
first mainly imitative but, even then, in part, noticeably original, led to the
great chance of Pickwick, which was taken greatly. After the success of
Pickwick, the aspect of his life presented as sharp a contrast to its earlier
phase as the often cited one which is shown by the two parts of a portrait in a
picture-cleaner’s windows, or the advertisements of a certain soap. It was, if
not exactly all dark, at any rate all shabby, grimy and obscure before: it was
all bright now, except for certain domestic inconveniences late in his career.
He never had any more money troubles; he never had any lack of popularity; he
worked hard, indeed: but he was a “glutton for work” and could choose his
time, place and manner of doing it after a fashion which deprives work of all,
or nearly all, its worrying effect. He found, in addition to his original and
independent work as novelist, two occupations, that of editor and that of public
reader, both of which were very profitable, while the former of them gave
exercise to his busy and rather autocratic temper, and the latter furnished an
outlet to the histrionic faculty which was almost as strong in him as the
literary. He died, it is true, in middle age only; but after a full, glorious
and, apparently, on the whole, happy life, not, indeed, without some preliminary
illness, but without suffering from that terrible lingering failure of faculties
which had beset Scott and Southey and Moore in the generation immediately before
him. Fame and fortune after the very earliest step, and far earlier than in most
cases, had, in almost all respects, been equally kind to him. (...)
§ 8.
Martin Chuzzlewit.
(...)
There is, in the bulk of the book, and in the majority of its characters, an
intensity of verve, “a warmth of imagination which excites the composition of
the writer,” only to be found in Pickwick earlier and never surpassed, and
seldom, even in David Copperfield, equalled later. (...)
§ 16.
Great Expectations.
There
are, however, those who admire A Tale of Two Cities sincerely, and who think but
little of the novel which followed it through the paper and in publication;
while there are others who take up the Tale more seldom than any other of
Dickens’s books, and who consider Great Expectations one of his very
masterpieces, putting it with the “wild freshness of morning” in Pickwick
and the noonday completeness of David Copperfield as an “evening voluntary”
of the most delightful kind. It is not faultless. The mannerism and the
exaggeration of all the later books sometimes break through, and the grime of
the heroine’s parentage is not only unnecessary but ill-managed. That
obsession of feeble satire as to rank and respect to rank, which was one of
Dickens’s numerous forms of his own “king Charles’s head” disease, comes
in, and melodrama is not far off. But he had never done anything, not even in
Copperfield itself, so real as “Pip,” with his fears, his hopes, his human
weaknesses and meannesses, his love, his bearing up against misfortune. Never
did he combine analysis and synthesis so thoroughly as here. (...)
§ 17.
Summary.
(...)
“How is it possible that things not fully real should exercise such power?”
some may ask, and others may answer, that it is precisely the fantastic
element—the contrast of real and unreal—which keeps the charm effective.
David Copperfield, in its characters, is, undoubtedly, the nearest throughout to
persons whom we have met and feel it quite likely that we might meet. Pip, who,
to some extent, is David’s younger brother, perhaps comes next. It would be
hard to find them many companions. (...)
