I have read Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield for the
first time. I am sorry that I waited so long. This novel, despite its flaws, is
enjoyable, meaningful, artistic is one of the most famous books ever written
and has had a great cultural impact.
This is a chronicle of the fictional David Copperfield’s life. It follows
him from his earliest infancy through adulthood. It is the story of self-awakening,
education, abuse, emotional turmoil, friendship, love and a lot more.
Born after the death of his father, David is left with a mother
who loves him, but is terribly weak and who allows her new husband Edward Murdstoneand and Murdstone’s sister Jane,
to abuse him. Eventually his mother also dies, and David endures years of
physical and emotional abuse and neglect until he escapes to the safety and
protection of his eccentric, but benevolent aunt, Betsey Trotwood. Though the years David
encounters various interesting and colorful characters ranging from the saintly
to the downright evil. He experiences love, difficulty in love, as well as
tragedy and death. At the heart of this book is the central love story focusing
upon the decades long relationship between David and his childhood friend,
Agnes Wickfield.
So much can be said about this work, and volumes have been written
about it. As I often do, I will focus upon just one small part of this story.
Dickens is sometimes criticized as being one dimensional and
superficial. In the past I have had similar impressions. Though I see more to
his writing, I also believe that these views are not completely unfounded. Though
his characters are marvelously fun and amusing, some can be described as simplistic
caricatures.
With Dickens however, there is more then meets the eye. In the
psychology of his characters, his plot, his themes, and his prose, there seems to
be underlying manifestations of complicated things. I want to devote a few
words to what seems to be something sinister integrated into Dickens’s reality.
There is something dark lurking behind many
corners of the Universe built by Dickens in this work. Of course the book is filled with pernicious characters who do all sorts of
terrible things. As a result good people suffer. But it gets a little more complex.
It seems that Dickens might be saying that such evil is built into reality. I
think that this is exemplified by certain descriptive passages.
Take the below description of a very run down London
neighborhood,
“The neighbourhood was a dreary
one at that time; as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about
London. There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near
the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls.
Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity.
In one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished,
rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of
steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells,
windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some
speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which— having sunk into the
soil of their own weight in wet weather— they had the appearance of vainly
trying to hide themselves. The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the
river-side, arose by night to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken
smoke that poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding
among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like
green hair, and the rags of last year's handbills offering rewards for drowned
men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to
the ebb-tide. There was a story that one of the pits dug for the dead in the
time of the Great Plague was hereabout;”
The first thing that strikes me about the above passage is its
rhetorical power. Dickens was a great describer of people and things. His greatness
was not in realism; instead he was at his best when describing highly exaggerated,
almost dreamlike depictions of reality. These descriptions ranged from joyful,
to sad. But when these depictions were dark, as they are in the above passage,
they resemble nightmares.
Here we have prose that exudes death and despair. Dickens presents
us with a human made wasteland scattered with the monsters of
industrialization. This is an amazing representation of Industrial Revolution
nihilism. I think it is important, that the one vestige of human connection,
houses, were never completed and are now abandoned. Even the printed material
concerns itself with death. The slime and growth being compared to green hair
is a horrifying touch.
As there is in reality there some mystery to evil, some horrors
are apparent and some are not, as some of the objects have partially sunk into
the ground, obscuring their nature.
Is the allusion to the prison symbolic of how life can be a prison
for some people? Certainly many of Dickens’s characters find themselves trapped
in terrible situations.
The rumor of a mass grave originating from the plague years only
adds to the gloominess and the reminder of the inevitability of death.
The above is clearly a critique of industrialization that is
worthy commentary in its own right. But
I think that this and similar scenes in this novel are trying to illustrate
something dark that is woven into the Universe.
There are other hints regarding this darkness. For instance, Mr.
Dicks, an eccentric but oddly wise character, is haunted in his daily life by
thoughts of King Charles I, whose historical murder seems symbolic of something
very wrong in the Universe. There are many other instances in this novel where
this darkness is explored in all sorts of ways. I think that Dickens goes a
little beyond a simple good verses evil comparison. Instead this perniciousness
seems to be embedded into the Universe in a way that is not completely able to
separate from good.
There seems to be an antidote to this darkness. Dickens was
fascinated by, and advocated for human kindness and empathy. When his characters
display these positive traits, it seems to be an effective counterpoint to the
darkness. At one point Martha Endell,
a young women who has fallen into disrepute, declines an offer of money in
exchange for providing assistance to David’s friend Emily, who has fallen into
terrible straits. Though in need of this help Martha declines it.
'I could not do what I have
promised, for money,' she replied. 'I could not take it, if I was starving. To
give me money would be to take away your trust, to take away the object that
you have given me, to take away the only certain thing that saves me from the
river.”
The above reference to the river seems to have double meaning as
Martha has alluded to suicide and death in the water. It also seems to have a
metaphorical meaning, as the part of the Thames that runs though industrial
London also seems to represent the maleficent force in he Universe.
This darkness inherent in creation is presented in a complex way
and appears throughout the novel in the characters, plot, as well as other
descriptive passages. I find that the
above passages to be very aesthetically effective descriptions of this wicked influence.
The book is filled with interesting explorations on this subject. This is just
one of many reasons that David Copperfield deserves its reputation as an all time classic.
