From Rossana Bonadei, Clotilde de Stasio, Carlo Pagetti, Alessandro Vescovi (eds), Dickens:The Craft of Fiction and the Challenges of Reading, Proceedings of the Milan Symposium, Gargnano September 1998, Milano, Unicopli, 2000. Reprinted in Carlo Dickens by kind permission of the publisher.

STEPHEN HASTINGS

«» AND «»: THE CRAFTING OF KINDRED NARRATIVES

The interrelatedness of Dickens’s works is a fascinating aspect of his art, and few would deny that David Copperfield and Great Expectations have more in common than any other two of his novels. For the orphans David and Pip the experience of growing up and making their way in the world, however different in its overall pattern, is often remarkably similar in detail: both have early recollections of family graves, suffer violence from surrogate parents and teachers, feel uncomfortable at mealtimes, show acute awareness of social status, interpret their lives at times in terms of fairy tale, fight with other boys, move to , experiment uneasily with debauchery, go to the theatre, prove victims of idle and dishonest servants, have disheartening dealings with the legal profession and undergo a serious emotional crisis, marked by illness and travel abroad. The characters who surround them also tend to resemble each other: Biddy and Herbert taking over from Agnes and Traddles in the later novel, while Miss Havisham represents a more sinister development of Betsy Trotwood. More surprising, perhaps, in the light of Dickens’s claim to have reread David Copperfield when starting out on Great Expectations in order to avoid “unconscious repetitions” (Forster, 1928: 285), is the recurrence of specific imagery in similar circumstances: the skins of both Peggotty and Mrs Joe are associated with nutmeg graters1 and both lawyers’ clerks – Heep and Wemmick – have mouths “like a post office”2.

1 “I have an impression on my mind which I cannot distinguish from actual remembrance, of the touch of Peggotty’s forefinger as she used to hold it out to me, and of its being roughened by needlework, like a pocket nutmeg-grater.” David Copperfield: 61. “My sister, Mrs Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible she washed herself with a nutmeg grater instead of soap.” Great Expectations: 40. 2 “His mouth open like a post-office” David Copperfield: 443. “His mouth was such a post-office of a mouth” Great Expectations: 196. David Copperfield and Great Expectations 85

Above all, however, it is the continuous use of the first person narrator that sets these novels apart from others by Dickens and makes them at the same time central to his oeuvre. Not only because they are in some ways autobiographical (a factor that has little influence on readers’ appreciation of the works), but also because this form of narrative allows for the most vivid and structurally coherent representation of what Geoffrey Thurley (1976) has suggestively, if over-schematically, defined as the central “Dickens myth”: the story of the painful social climb of an orphaned or fatherless child. As Thurley points out, this story pattern is also central to the novel as a genre, reflecting as it does the aspirations of the middle-class society within which that genre developed. And I would argue that no other 19th century novels convey as memorably as these the moral and emotional complexity of the experience of growing up and seeking a role in life. Stendhal’s Julien Sorel or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre may be more striking as characters than David and Pip, but neither these nor other writers succeed as well as Dickens in persuading us that the feelings of the protagonist are also, intimately, our own. “What is natural in me, is natural in many other men, I infer” (516) says David Copperfield at one point, and such appeals to the reader’s awareness of his own fallibility or emotional ambivalence recur a number of times3 in both novels. My aim is to illustrate some of the ways in which Dickens persuades us to respond to these appeals by subtly controlling our reactions while reading. A subtlety that is partly achieved by means of a supreme exercise of literary craftsmanship – a term that Dickens would surely have found congenial, for he himself implicitly likened the writing of Great Expectations to Joe’s craft: “All the iron is in the fire, and I have ‘only’ to beat it out” (Dexter 1938: 217). In order to appreciate this craftsmanship, however, it is necessary to recognize that the pleasure and stimulation derived from these novels usually owe more to a sense of intimately shared experience (David Copperfield himself tells us that his books kept him “company” (105)), lasting perhaps a number of weeks (or months, when they were first serialized), than to any subsequent evaluation of their overall significance –

3 Examples include: “I committed two small fooleries which other young gentlemen in my circumstances might have committed” David Copperfield: 542. “We have all some experience of a feeling (...)” David Copperfield: 630 “If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden in mine – which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity – it is the key to many reservations.” Great Expectations: 95. “There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance (..)” Great Expectations: 135. 86 S. HASTINGS moral or otherwise. These novels should not be interpreted as if they could be assimilated in a single glance, like a painting, seeking flaws of detail that in a normal reading are concealed by sheer authorial sleight of hand and the natural limitations of the reader’s memory4 . The workings of memory are of course themselves part of the subject matter of David Copperfield, and here too Dickens’s achievement is above all to make us feel the complexity and strangeness of the experience of remembering – as when David the head-boy recalls his younger self as “something I have passed, rather than have actually been” (325-26) – and the ways it influences our perception of time, rather than to make us continually seek patterns of meaning in the memories themselves. Such patterns undeniably exist – indeed the plot would collapse without them – yet they often (as in the case of David’s choice of a wife so similar to his mother) derive their strength from remaining submerged as it were beneath the surface of the narrative, enriching it with echoes that are only indistinctly perceived. In the same way Great Expectations – a work more exclusively of than about memory – is surely more involving as an exploration of the often irrational nature of unhappiness, dissatisfaction, shame and guilt than as a neat moral fable – however well it may function exegetically as such. For Dickens the first person narrator was the ideal medium to achieve both immediacy of expression and strong reader participation. In order to obtain the latter, he limits the analytical self-awareness – though not the sensitivity or intelligence – of his narrators. We have extreme examples of this in chapter fourteen of both novels, where David states that he “never thought of anything about” himself “distinctly” (272) and Pip says: “What I wanted, who can say?” (135) This indeterminacy is both convincingly true to life and necessary to Dickens’s fictional aims, for if David and Pip interpreted their lives more self-assuredly , they would inevitably force the reader into a more passive, onlooking role. By comparison, earlier first person narrators such as Moll Flanders, Roderick Random and Jane Eyre – although they too are made to withold information for the sake of suspense – seem in greater retrospective command of their own existences and are more consistent in tone of voice (and this in turn makes them appear more concretely tangible as human beings)5. On the other hand, the often subdued tone of David and Pip when describing their own feelings contrasts with their extrovertly virtuosic depiction of other characters and reporting of

4 Most readers surely do not even notice the contradictory statements regarding David’s birthday and the sale of Betsy Trotwood’s Dover home. 5 It is also interesting to compare Moll Flanders’s straightforward acknowledgement of the physical pleasures of life with David and Pip’s difficulty in enjoying them. Not only is there no explicit mention of sex, but eating and drinking are almost invariably uneasy or embarrassing experiences. David Copperfield and Great Expectations 87 dialogue. The lightly satirical style of Pip’s commentary on his sister’s funeral or on the Pocket and Wemmick households differs notably, for example, from his introspective moods. Yet although Dickens sacrifices one kind of verisimilitude here, he achieves another. The variety of tone not only makes Great Expectations a less bitter novel than a mere summary of Pip’s feelings would seem to make it, but also increases our sympathy for the protagonists of both novels by making them seem less self-absorbed. The fact that they do not invariably analyze other people’s behaviour in relation to themselves (as Moll Flanders does constantly and Jane Eyre does with characteristic discretion during the entertainment at Thornfield Hall) both enhances their credibility as objective observers and enables the reader to perceive those people with unfiltered clarity. Of the two novels, David Copperfield is presented more formally as an autobiography, beginning with the protagonist’s birth. Any sense of self- importance is immediately deflated however by the digressively self- deprecating humour of the opening (which recalls Tristram Shandy at times) and by the narrator’s desire for his life to speak for itself (which recalls chapter one of Roderick Random). Throughout this novel we sense Dickens’s delight in experimenting with what was for him a new narrative method, and in the opening chapter he demonstrates that working within established literary conventions he can produce a more effective mingling of humour and pathos than any of his predecessors. The first touch of pathos is when David – shifting briefly forward in time – recalls the “indefinable compassion” he felt for his father’s grave in the churchyard “when our little parlour was warm and bright with fire and candle, and the doors of our house were – almost cruelly, it seemed to me sometimes – bolted and locked against it” (50-51). This is typical of the novel in that the narrator recalls the ingenuousness of his younger self with a gentle irony that only serves to highlight the sensitivity of the child. In chapter two this effect is reinforced by the often startling immediacy of the present tense (also adopted in four subsequent ‘retrospective’ chapters). Here Dickens reveals the radical otherness of the child’s perception of the world (in the added alertness of certain senses and different awareness of the emotional and physical proportions of things); the anxieties that accompany that perspective (David is even afraid that Mr Chillip must feel unhappy about a church tablet saying that “physicians were in vain” (64)), and the underlying buoyancy of youth that reduces the duration of any painful thoughts (almost immediately afterwards he thinks “what a good place” the pulpit would be to “play in” (64)). Dickens is particularly subtle in his mingling and contrasting of the points of view of the youthful protagonist and mature narrator. The latter never scores easy moral points over his younger self, even when David ingenuously worships Steeforth for his patronizing behaviour – for Dickens 88 S. HASTINGS is careful to counterbalance an often devastating irony6 with moments in which the adult narrator himself succumbs to Steerforth’s Byronic charm7. And at times the adult David even appears more ingenuous than his younger self, as when he tells us that Uriah Heep “was so officious to help me, that I uncharitably thought him mighty glad I was going” (340). There may be a tongue in cheek quality to the adverb “uncharitably”, but its effect in any case is to make us accept all the more readily the boy’s instinctive understanding. At other times the two points of view are subtly combined, as when David observes Mrs Fibbitson: “screening herself by the fire as if she were sedulously keeping it warm, instead of it keeping her warm” (126). Here the quality of observation, profoundly revealing of the woman’s selfishness, is typical of childhood, while the addition of the very adult adverb “sedulously” places her behaviour in a clear moral perspective. The youthful point of view also adds cogency to effects that are typical of Dickens’s writing, such as caricatural exaggeration, as when we are told that Peggotty – anxious about David’s mother – was “thoughtfully sticking her needle into various parts of her face and arms, all the time” (67), or personification – so effective in conveying the vaguely paranoic anxieties of childhood. We are told for example that during David’s lessons at home, words “seemed to have put skates on, and to skim away” (107) from him, and the much older David has similar experiences when learning shorthand8. Time and again, David’s close observation – both as a child and as a young man – allows the reader to perceive people and things with singular directness and become actively engaged in interpreting them for himself. For the narrator sometimes offers no interpretation, as in his revealing description of Mr Murdstone at Betsy Trotwood’s home – “though the smile was on his face still, his colour had gone in a moment, and he seemed to breathe as if he had been running” (270) – and sometimes interprets minimally, as when Uriah Heep interrupts dinner at Mr Wickfield’s: “Uriah looked at me, and looked at Agnes, and looked at the dishes, and looked at the plate, and looked at every object in the room, I thought, – yet seemed to look at nothing” (287). In these examples, Dickens’s imaginative grasp of character, mood and situation is highlighted by his craftsmanlike restraint: his refusal to waste superfluous commentary on what is so directly seen and felt by the reader. And of course it is this willingness to let people’s words

6 “Whenever I had been treated worse than usual, he always told me that I wanted a little of his pluck, and that he wouldn’t have stood for it himself; which I felt he intended for encouragement, and considered to be very kind of him.” David Copperfield: 144. 7 “I admired and loved him, and his approval was return enough. It was so precious to me that I look back on these trifles, now, with an aching heart.” David Copperfield: 145. 8 “Shall I ever forget how the crack speaker walked off from me before I began, and left my imbecile pencil staggering about the paper as if it were in a fit!” David Copperfield: 609. David Copperfield and Great Expectations 89 and behaviour speak for themselves that saves the emotional extremes of a Rosa Dartle (or of a Miss Havisham in the later novel) from appearing absurd – even to a modern reader, less accustomed to certain forms of emotional repression and to the idiom of melodrama. David shows a similarly revealing reticence in describing his own behaviour, which is often surprisingly complex in motivation. After hearing of his mother’s death, we are told that he looked into a mirror: “to see how red my eyes were and how sorrowful my face” (177). And at the funeral he behaves not unlike Uriah in the dining-room: referring to the other mourners, he says: “I do not mind them – I mind nothing but my grief – and yet I see and know them all” (184). This ambivalence recurs frequently in the novel, as when David tells us: “I cannot say – I really cannot say – that I was glad to see Mr Micawber there; but I was glad to see him too” (315). Or in his reaction to Emily’s engagement: “I know that I was filled with pleasure by all this; but, at first, with an indescribably sensitive pleasure, that a very little would have changed to pain”(374). Once again, any further explanation of these paradoxical feelings would have blunted their impact on the reader. While the narration of David Copperfield is often boldly experimental in its alternation of past and present tenses; its imaginative use of stylization (such as when David’s wedding is presented as a dream-sequence (697)); its poetically charged set-pieces (such as the Tempest chapter) and occasional introduction of alternative narrative voices (as in Miss Mills’s diary), in Great Expectations everything is more essential, less technically demonstrative. Yet once again Dickens’s primary aim and achievement is surely to make us share – and feel as our own – the perceptions of the growing child and young adult: his sense of physical discomfort (as at the Christmas dinner, with the “table” in his chest and the “Pumblechookian elbow” (56) in his eye), guilt and dissatisfaction. Such feelings are experienced by David too, yet he never becomes as trapped by them as Pip bleakly admits to being when speaking of the blacksmith’s trade – “I had liked it once, but once was not now” (134) – or Estella: “I stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy with her, but always miserable” (290). Although it is sometimes true that in this novel, unlike David Copperfield, we feel the narrator is “remote from the self who is the subject” (as Q.D. Leavis puts it), the reader surely does not share that remoteness. When the narrator tells us that his first childish notions of his parents’ appearance were “unreasonably derived from their tombstones” (35), the slightly patronizing tone of the adverb reinforces our bond of sympathy with the younger Pip. The same effect is achieved later when the narrator accuses his younger self of being “too cowardly” to do what he “knew to be right” (72), and describes his behaviour towards Joe after 90 S. HASTINGS moving to London with excessive harshness. And even when Pip’s behaviour is genuinely odious, as in the days before his departure for London, Dickens makes us feel what it is like to be odious and the moral complexity of that experience9. Mrs Leavis suggests that we can “grasp, without being told, that the narrator is a truly free man, freed from the compulsions of his childhood guilt” (290). Personally I believe that we have a much hazier sense of his moral and psychological identity (and rightly so, for it is the younger Pip who interests us) and that Dickens’s use of the first person narrative is as pragmatically manipulative (without naturally seeming to be so) as it is in David Copperfield. As in the earlier novel, there is sometimes no apparent distancing from the child’s ingenuous viewpoint – “the church jumped over its own weather cock” (37) – while elsewhere the points of view of child and adult are difficult to distinguish, as when we are told that Mrs Joe “had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up ‘by hand’” (39) – here it is left to the reader to fully savour the double meaning. The adult narrator on the other hand usually dominates in later descriptions of Mrs Joe’s violence, often humorously framed in the language of understatement and irony, thus avoiding excesses of self-pity or bitterness. His sister’s beating of him thus becomes the application of “Tickler to its further investigation” (41) – “it” being the little Pip hidden behind the door. Yet the cumulative effect of such understatement is surely to make Pip’s occasionally aggressive thoughts as necessary to the reader as to himself: “Mr Wopsle’s nose so aggravated me, during the recital of my misdemeanours, that I should have liked to pull it until he howled” (59). And while Pip expresses no satisfaction when Wopsle and Pumblechook are humiliated and his sister is beaten into imbecilic immobility – the reader surely does feel satisfaction on his behalf. To conclude I would like to touch on Dickens’s use of irony. Most critics agree that Great Expectations is dominated by a sense of irony, while the earlier novel is not. This may in part be due to a confusion of irony with a more general sense of bitterness, for in quantitative terms one could assert that both novels are equally shaped and coloured by irony. It is however true that in Great Expectations irony is applied descriptively to some of Pip’s most painful experiences: the humiliation he is subjected to as a child – “if

9 An example of this is to be found in the following paragraph: “I was to leave our village at five in the morning, carrying my little hand-portmanteau, and I had told Joe that I wished to walk away all alone. I am afraid – sore afraid – that this purpose originated in my sense of the contrast there would be between me and Joe, if we went to the coach together. I had pretended with myself that there was nothing of this taint in the arrangement; but when I went up to my little room on this last night, I felt compelled to admit that it might be so, and had an impulse upon me to go down again and entreat Joe to walk with me in the morning. I did not”. Great Expectations: 185. David Copperfield and Great Expectations 91 any neighbour happened to want an extra boy to frighten birds, or pick up stones, or do any such job, I was favoured with the employment” (73) – and his moral confusion after hearing of his great expectations, when he feels “a sublime compassion for the poor creatures who were destined to go” to the village church “Sunday after Sunday, all their lives through” (173). This contrasts with the account of David’s most painful experience – his work at Murdstone and Grinby’s – which is largely devoid of irony, and where the narrator is arguably more moved than moving10. Generally speaking, the descriptive irony in David Copperfield is more incidental to the novel’s emotional core and less biting, but brilliant nonetheless in exposing the naïvety of David’s love for Dora, and the sheer bad faith of characters such as Mrs Markham, Mrs Crupp and Steerforth in his light-hearted moods. Mention of Steerforth reminds us of Dickens’s structural use of irony in both novels to sharpen the lessons David and Pip learn in the process of becoming adults. In this respect indeed the novels are much more similar than has often been suggested: David is misled by his infatuation with Steerforth and Dora and his failure to understand Agnes, while Pip misinterprets the roles of Miss Havisham, Estella and Magwitch in his life. In both novels Dickens makes the reader largely share the limited perspective of the protagonist while preparing him through subtle hints for the shock of revelation – Steerforth’s elopement and Magwitch’s return – without however reducing the impact of that shock. An exception is Agnes, for we are surely more than half aware of her feelings for David, and indeed it is this awareness that adds an extra poignancy and tension to much of the second half of the novel. The presence of Agnes is felt above all when she is not physically before our eyes, and if commentators had better appreciated this dynamic function, instead of accepting David’s own self-deludingly static conception of her, Dickens’s employment of this character might have come in for less unjust criticism.

10 In the passages deriving from the autobiographical fragment (see Forster) we surely find it difficult to entirely share David’s deep resentment about the crushing of his “hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man” (p. 210) – partly because we have not previously been made aware of those hopes. And while we can understand the exceptionally talented young Dickens’s profound unease at having to associate with Bob Fagin, we hardly feel so strongly about the more ordinary David’s association with Mealy Potatoes – which is why his occasional snobbery in this chapter has attracted so much unfavourable critical attention. In making David a universal figure with whom the average reader could easily identify, Dickens inevitably neutralized his personality, making him less credible as a writer of genius. And although he implicitly acknowledged this by making some changes in the text – the “ child of singular abilities” in the autobiographical sketch becomes a more generalized “child of excellent abilities” (p. 208) in the novel – these changes do not enable him to avoid an occasional overweighting of tone. 92 S. HASTINGS

Works Cited

DICKENS Charles. David Copperfield, T. Blunt (ed.), Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1966. DICKENS Charles, Great Expectations, A. Calder (ed.), Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1965. DEXTER Walter (ed.), The Letters of , Nonesuch Press, London 1938. FORSTER John, The Life of Charles Dickens, Cecil Palmer, London 1928. LEAVIS F.R.& Q.D., Dickens the Novelist, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1970. SMOLLETT Tobias, Roderick Random, D. Blewitt (ed.), Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth 1995. THURLEY Geoffrey, The Dickens Myth, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1976.