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 «DAVID COPPERFIELD» AND «GREAT EXPECTATIONS»: 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 London, 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.