[The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account), by Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by HK Browne. First Edition Published by Bradbury & Evans, London, 1850. 624 pp]
'Well, well!' said my aunt, 'the child is right to stand by those who have stood by him – Janet! Donkeys!'
Just opposite the pond where a pioneering Francis Bacon tried to stuff a chicken with snow (an early experiment in refrigeration, as a result of which he died) is where Coleridge stayed when he was trying to get off Laudanum. The chemist he used to supply his needs (just around the corner) apparently had a secret door so that he could pick up supplies discreetly.
This was all a bit earlier than Charles Dickens’s semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield, in which the hero stays with the Steerforth family, in the same street, in their imposing house on Highgate Hill, where he revels in the view across London. It does, though, set a tone.
Go to Highgate today and you can still take in the views, across Hampstead Heath and to the landmark hungry city beyond. You’ll see interesting looking delicatessens and bakeries and estate agents in whose windows are advertised average-looking properties with eye-watering prices. Cyclists and runners come here for the challenge. (That climb up West Hill must be traumatic, and so must the one past Highgate Cemetery where Karl Marx lies quiescent). What you won’t see is any trace (apart from a blue plaque) of that Dickensian hero who was to all intents and purposes, Dickens himself.
When I first went to Grammar School (some time before the flood), our teacher of English, a redoubtable Scots lady, set us to work reading Robbie Burns, most of which I still find unreadable to this day: (“First he ate the black puddens, and then he ate the white” if memory serves. What was all that stuff about?). But then, having, I suppose given up on us ever adopting Scotland as a second nation, started us reading David Copperfield.
There was a lot of early humour. She had us read passages from the book, and one of my classmates had the misfortune to take on a section in which, according to him, “workmen were warming their hands round a brassiere.” (Brazier was the word he was searching for, but an unpleasant nickname pursued him for years afterwards). We couldn’t get why Brooks of Sheffield would be listening in to awkward conversations about David’s destiny, let alone why David should be the someone who was “sharp”, or why Barkis, the carrier, should be ‘willin’.
Steerforth of course is both David’s boyhood hero and nemesis, eventually betraying in the most callous manner David’s adolescent friend Little Emily, so it is ironic that his family home sits high on a hill where you might have thought all manner of approaching disasters might be foreseen. You look at that house and contemplate how Mrs Steerforth lived there, alone and destroyed by the revelation that her son had been the least moral of individuals, with an inherent streak of cruelty.
What no one likes about David Copperfield in particular and Dickens in general is how good all the children (a lot of the adult characters too) actually are. You know, and I know, that children and adults too, just aren’t like that. His characters are noble, responsible, uniquely loving and should they ever commit a single irresponsible act, they suffer for it (usually in silent prayer) over a good number of pages. This is a feeling you can’t get over, but perhaps as the pages go on you learn to ignore a little in the face of mounting eccentricity.
The mentally troubled Mr Dick and his fixation with kites and Charles I helps you do this, so too does Mr Wilkins Micawber who continually totters on the brink of the debtors’ prison (like Dickens’s own father) while continually fathering children and remaining optimistic that ‘something will turn up’.
But while the good do seem impossibly good, the bad are really bad too, though believably so. David’s own mother perhaps doesn’t mean to be bad. (She just falls in love with the wrong man). But David’s schoolmasters are disconcertingly sadistic. Steerforth, the schoolboy role model shapes up to be a hero, but is gradually revealed to be a snob without decency or morals.
And then there’s Uriah Heep, the character for whom the word ‘oily’ was created, the beast who corrupts all about him and whose desires – for both heiress and position in society – are so grotesque, yet so nearly come true.
David Copperfield is not a fairy tale. Instead it is a whole collection of them, in which every variety of fairy tale outcome from cruel disaster to shining achievement takes its place within its pages. Most varieties of mythical beast are there too, together with a few, often vulnerable, often understated, heroes.
The best novels always answer ‘what if?’ questions. So many what ifs arise in David Copperfield that it is virtually a philosophy course. There’s a muted plea for social justice too, which is no bad thing, even now.
There are a lot of reasons not to read it. (Too long, too sentimental, too much else to do). But ever since my dour Scots teacher encouraged us to open its pages, it has become one of those books I go back to, time after time.
Top/Middle: Two photographs thanks to Quintessential Rare Books, LLC, Laguna Hills, CA, USA & to Abe Books. Bottom: Sketch of Dickens in 1842 during American Tour; thanks to Bonhams.
