Mick Walker, a Dickensian character, in David Copperfield.
But don't you mean, Micawber?
No, Mick Walker. The name doesn't quite suggest Dickens, does it? Dickens was a genius at inventing names that sounded convincingly like real English names but were all his own. Such as Dora Spenlow, Mrs Crupp, and of course Wilkins Micawber.
But here, anyway, is Mick Walker, introduced just a page earlier than Mr Micawber (in Chapter 11). He comes from the undifferentiated underclass, the "regular boys" from which David shrinks, the Other that can be neither heroes nor even villains because the author simply doesn't want to think about them, wants to keep his imagination entirely free of them. Mick Walker is a name, a character almost without features.
Hither, on the first morning of my so auspiciously beginning life on my own account, the oldest of the regular boys was summoned to show me my business. His name was Mick Walker, and he wore a ragged apron and a paper cap. He informed me that his father was a bargeman, and walked, in a black velvet head-dress, in the Lord Mayor’s Show. (Ch. 11)
Presumably as a member of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen, always prominent in the annual procession (indeed prior to the Mayor's State Coach (built in 1757) the procession had often been on barges along the river). Though he belongs to a lower class than David aspires to, yet this one detail shows Mick as conscious of a firmly established place in society, just what the orphaned David lacks.
(The Lord Mayor's show, which now takes place on the second Saturday of November, has been held annually for perhaps 800 years, including right through the blitz, but it was cancelled in 2020. More so than in Dickens' time, it's now perceived as representing a moneyed elite rather than a spectrum of trades. XR disrupted it in 2021, protesting about the City's continued funding of fossil fuel extraction.)
*
David shrinks from Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes because of his "condition" -- that's Dickens' word, but it means social class. Simply put, young David has learned to think of himself as genteel. Middle class, as we'd say today.
'There are expressions, you see, Master Copperfield -- Latin words and terms -- in Mr. Tidd, that are trying to a reader of my umble attainments.'
'Would you like to be taught Latin?' I said, briskly. 'I will teach it you with pleasure, as I learn it.'
'Oh, thank you, Master Copperfield,' he answered, shaking his head. 'I am sure it's very kind of you to make the offer, but I am much too umble to accept it.' (Ch. 17)
The other main user of this word, apart from David, is Uriah Heep. Uriah and his mother proclaim that their "condition" is why they must always be umble, always disclaim any suggestion of parity, never make real friends with David, just seek to betray him. But they're right, aren't they, to see David as their instinctive class enemy? He's physically horrified by the touch of Uriah's hand, instinctively judgmental of their spare, mean, uncultured home. When Uriah gains power over the Wickfields, isn't David's horror partly, or mainly, about the monstrosity of this upset of class hierarchy?
That David once worked in a London warehouse alongside Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes, these working-class boys, is his secret agony.
David's oldest, most beloved and most loyal friend is, however, working class: Peggotty, his mother's maid. (She is actually Clara Peggotty: the same first name as David's mother. But for that very reason David prefers not to remember that she has a first name, and calls her plain "Peggotty".)
And how David adores Peggotty and her family! But then in Yarmouth there's no risk to his status as a gentleman. On the contrary, Mr Peggotty and Ham go out of their way to perform their good-natured ignorance and narrowness: to underline David's superiority in point of education and gentility.
Mr Murdstone is right, in a way, when he talks of David's attachment to "low and common company"(Ch 8), when a servant or her family are in question. There's even something refreshing about his fights with the butcher in Canterbury. But to be on easy terms with the lower classes is something even Steerforth can do. To be one of them is an entirely different thing.
When David determines to flee the agonizing shame of his warehouse job, he basically leaves Peggotty out of it. Given his desperation, it might seem strange: Peggotty has made it absolutely plain that she'll always help him unconditionally. Instead, he sets off ragged and penniless in search of a woman he's never met and where he has little expectation of being welcomed. His unknown aunt Betsey Trotwood can give him the one magic thing that Peggotty never can: not love nor warmth nor food nor clothes, but "condition". And the first solid sign of that, of course, is education. Whether a thoroughly bad school like Mr Creakle's, or a good school like Doctor Strong's, David must have an education, or he's nothing. In his own eyes.
Surely Dickens himself was never in a position to claim, like David, that he was "growing great in Latin verses". After the blacking warehouse, he had just two years at a school (Wellington House Academy, Camden); it was brutal and run down, more like Creakle's than Strong's. And then he was straight back into work, as a junior in a law office. More like a Uriah than a David, in some respects.
Names are important in David Copperfield, and the biblical story of David betraying Uriah resonates strangely. (I think I read about this first in Jane Vogel's 1977 book Allegory in Dickens.) Maybe the biblical David would have expressed himself about Uriah rather as Steerforth does about Ham: "And that fellow with her, eh? Upon my soul, he’s a true knight. He never leaves her!" (Ch 22). I suppose I sense strongly at times that David and Uriah are a "double"; for instance when each thinks the other may become a partner in Mr Wickfield's law firm (Ch 16), when Uriah sleeps in David's lodgings, or in regard to their feelings about Agnes. The thought comes that David's visceral loathing for Uriah is a bit like how the Murdstones feel about David.
Be that as it may, one of Miss Mowcher's many surprises is this:
'. . . Do you know what my great grandfather’s name was?’
‘No,’ said Steerforth.
‘It was Walker, my sweet pet,’ replied Miss Mowcher, ‘and he came of a long line of Walkers, that I inherit all the Hookey estates from.’ (Ch 22)
Dickens felt compelled, after complaints from Mrs Seymour Hill, to drastically alter his plans regarding Miss Mowcher's role. So she became a force for good, but in this pre-change scene he evidently intended her as a procuress whose extensive travel into the provinces is really about recuiting young girls for the pleasure of libertines -- though the code in which she and Steerforth converse goes quite over young David's head. (Apparently the unnamed woman who attempted to place Emily in a brothel on her return to London was to have been Miss Mowcher.)
[Information from Gareth Cordery, "Remaking Miss Mowcher's Acquaintance" (Dickens Quarterly vol 29 no 1 (2012), pp. 11-31).]
*
David Copperfield once occupied a high and central place in canonical English literature; to some extent it still does. After all, Dickens is our greatest novelist, and this novel was his favourite. It was written at or near the height of his trajectory. It was the favourite of many readers, too. It had unforgettable characters, great scenes, etc. And it did not seem to have what some contemporary readers didn't like in the later Dickens, the troubling exposure of English society's rotten foundations.
But I can't help feeling that David Copperfield is a very strange book.
I mentioned to my Dad that I was re-reading David Copperfield. He gave a sort of grimace. I was rather surprised, because I knew he was a Dickens fan, as I am. But I hadn't realized how exclusively he liked the later novels. He didn't take to DC at all. Among other things, he didn't much like David himself. Unlike Pip in Great Expectations, he added.
The first time I read David Copperfield, I was an undergraduate at the University of Exeter. It was in the holidays, but I had "stayed up", as I often did. I was meant to be working on my Medieval Art portfolio. Students who stayed up got moved into a different hall of residence from their usual one: so it was rather like a holiday. There were no lectures or immediate deadlines, of course, and I was not very social, and anyway most of my friends were away, so there was gloriously nothing to do but read. I stayed up all night reading David Copperfield: that's how I remember it. Perhaps it was a day and a night and a day. Perhaps I went out at some point and bought myself a remaindered LP: a volume of This is Loma, maybe, or one of Michael Nesmith's trilogy with the First National Band. This through-the-night reading wasn't a unique experience: I'd also done it with Jane Austen and with Dostoyevsky at one time or another. This time it left me with a strange phantasmagoric image of the novel: of a great but impalpable experience, badly remembered, of few details, and those all mixed up together. I must have been half-asleep much of the time.
I think I read it again not many years later, and this current reading, some forty years on, is my third. But I don't think I've ever got David Copperfield straight in my head.
These are notes, as I'm reading. I'm only a quarter of the way through. I'm aware that I'm throwing down these thoughts, without referring to the text or quoting much. But I'll bung them out now. Someone might enjoy the immediacy. And there might be insights now that will be long forgotten by the time I reach the end.
Don't you often feel that all the most precious ideas you were gifted while reading have somehow evaporated and are unrecoverable when you've reached the end? Like Senancour on his mountain? But perhaps, since we can't quite remember anything but how these ideas seemed to flow so inspiringly, they were really only a half-formed jumble of triviality and disjointed visions and prejudice?
*
There are moments when I think there's something missing from David Copperfield. When it occurs to me that there's some dull, bare pages, that the description often lacks Dickens' usual zest and inventiveness. That its Dover and Canterbury, for instance, feel more than a little perfunctory: judging him by his own supreme standards. Not to mention its London: a strangely unexciting sort of bourgeois kind of place, this Norwood and Highgate and Putney, compared e.g. to the visions of Bleak House or Martin Chuzzlewit or Oliver Twist. David's deperate journey from London to Dover, on the other hand, is alive with vivid realisations, and terror of the underclass: the trampers, the miserly shopman who keeps sounding "Goroo"...
There are moments, too, when the author seems clunkily repetitive as he feels out the procedure for his new novel: for instance, when he says of a scene that he had cause to remember it in times to come: there's a crudity in this underlining of fateful significance. Typically, these scenes feature attractive young women. David's idyllic earliest years are in an all-female household (David himself aside), but you could make a case for David Copperfield being one of the most unguardedly sexist of English novels.
"Straight in my head" brings up the other theme that is insistently hammering at me as I read, this third time. Dickens was a real pioneer at writing about mental afflictions, non-standard mental behaviour, madness, eccentricity, troubled psychology: I don't know what to call it, really -- and that's not just about being PC, it's because the spectrum of non-standard behaviours portrayed by Dickens is so wide that it eludes labelling. The theme had always been there: in Smike, or Barnaby, or Nell's father, for instance. Some of these earlier portraits may be thought a bit stereotyped or literary, perhaps. But often, the crazy behaviour in Dickens seems to me wholly convincing and real and taken from life: Tattycoram in Little Dorrit is a brilliant example. And David Copperfield seems to me especially full of it: Mr Dick is far from alone. Think of the Micawbers' dizzying switches from perfect happiness to utter misery: to give just one example.
As the punch disappeared, Mr. Micawber became still more friendly and convivial. Mrs. Micawber’s spirits becoming elevated, too, we sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’. When we came to ‘Here’s a hand, my trusty frere’, we all joined hands round the table; and when we declared we would ‘take a right gude Willie Waught’, and hadn’t the least idea what it meant, we were really affected.
In a word, I never saw anybody so thoroughly jovial as Mr. Micawber was, down to the very last moment of the evening, when I took a hearty farewell of himself and his amiable wife. Consequently, I was not prepared, at seven o’clock next morning, to receive the following communication, dated half past nine in the evening; a quarter of an hour after I had left him:—
‘My DEAR YOUNG FRIEND,
‘The die is cast—all is over. Hiding the ravages of care with a sickly mask of mirth, I have not informed you, this evening, that there is no hope of the remittance! Under these circumstances, alike humiliating to endure, humiliating to contemplate, and humiliating to relate, I have discharged the pecuniary liability contracted at this establishment, by giving a note of hand, made payable fourteen days after date, at my residence, Pentonville, London. When it becomes due, it will not be taken up. The result is destruction. The bolt is impending, and the tree must fall.
‘Let the wretched man who now addresses you, my dear Copperfield, be a beacon to you through life. He writes with that intention, and in that hope. If he could think himself of so much use, one gleam of day might, by possibility, penetrate into the cheerless dungeon of his remaining existence—though his longevity is, at present (to say the least of it), extremely problematical.
‘This is the last communication, my dear Copperfield, you will ever receive
‘From
‘The
‘Beggared Outcast,
‘WILKINS MICAWBER.’
I was so shocked by the contents of this heart-rending letter, that I ran off directly towards the little hotel with the intention of taking it on my way to Doctor Strong’s, and trying to soothe Mr. Micawber with a word of comfort. But, half-way there, I met the London coach with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber up behind; Mr. Micawber, the very picture of tranquil enjoyment, smiling at Mrs. Micawber’s conversation, eating walnuts out of a paper bag, with a bottle sticking out of his breast pocket. (Ch. 17)
Yet the Micawbers aren't outstandingly mad, in Canterbury. Think of the agitated, over-protective drinker Wickfield: or Doctor Strong, a Casaubon portrayed here as pitiful victim. When, in Chapter 14, we have Betsey Trotwood, Mr Dick, Mr Murdstone and Miss Murdstone in the same room, it's hard to say if any one of them would class as sane. (I think this, at the same time as thinking what a flat confrontation scene it is, compared to the horrors of the Murdstones in earlier chapters.)
*
I'm thinking about David and Pip. We meet them both as children and we mostly see them as late teens or young men (very young men, as the Victorian phrase used to be). In Great Expectations we see Pip behaving badly and snobbishly, but the book is explicit about Pip learning the error of his ways, so we find it easy to forgive him.
David Copperfield is far more enigmatic in this respect. David is very genuinely an oppressed victim in the early part of the book, and at that stage we're uncomplicatedly on his side. But later we can see that his judgment is extremely unreliable. He can't see Steerforth for what he is. His youthful girlfriends, and later his first wife, don't seem well chosen. We register that David bears some responsibility for e.g. his unsatisfactory marriage, and for bringing Steerforth into Peggotty's home. But the narrator David is unintrusive, and doesn't make many explicit judgments on his youthful self. We remain uncertain whether David fully learns the error of his ways, whether the mature David sees his own story as we do, and even whether Dickens does.
‘And I have no doubt she loves you like a brother?’ said I.
‘Humph!’ retorted Steerforth, looking at the fire. ‘Some brothers are not loved over much; and some love—but help yourself, Copperfield! We’ll drink the daisies of the field, in compliment to you; and the lilies of the valley that toil not, neither do they spin, in compliment to me—the more shame for me!’ A moody smile that had overspread his features cleared off as he said this merrily, and he was his own frank, winning self again.
(from Chapter 20)
Even a first-time reader will probably have doubts of that misapplied "frank": this, we understand, is how young David sees it: Steerforth is seen as "frank" when he merely keeps his secrets and doesn't hint that he's keeping them. But no correction is explicitly made: even in Chapter 56 David continues helplessly to obey Steerforth's request to "Think of me at my best". And if he hasn't revised his views by then, then why later, when he is the narrator?
These questions are touched on, but not really resolved, in this slippery paragraph:
He maintained all his delightful qualities to the last, until we started forth, at eight o’clock, for Mr. Peggotty’s boat. Indeed, they were more and more brightly exhibited as the hours went on; for I thought even then, and I have no doubt now, that the consciousness of success in his determination to please, inspired him with a new delicacy of perception, and made it, subtle as it was, more easy to him. If anyone had told me, then, that all this was a brilliant game, played for the excitement of the moment, for the employment of high spirits, in the thoughtless love of superiority, in a mere wasteful careless course of winning what was worthless to him, and next minute thrown away—I say, if anyone had told me such a lie that night, I wonder in what manner of receiving it my indignation would have found a vent! Probably only in an increase, had that been possible, of the romantic feelings of fidelity and friendship with which I walked beside him, over the dark wintry sands towards the old boat; the wind sighing around us even more mournfully, than it had sighed and moaned upon the night when I first darkened Mr. Peggotty’s door.
(Chapter 21)
The narrator David seems to reject the imputation as a "lie", to have "no doubt" of his own more favourable interpretation of Steerforth's behaviour. And yet the emphasis on "If anyone had told me, then,..." seems to confess that someone had certainly told him now. And in very general terms, the someone will prove to be Agnes. But more than that, it's the David who knows that Agnes is right.
But judging Steerforth is difficult, for after all he's another double of David. Not the one he fears to resemble, but the one he longs to resemble. When David meets Steerforth again, it turns out that they've both attended the same entertainment ("Julius Caesar and the New Pantomime") at Covent Garden (Ch 19). "I believed that I was nearer to his heart than any other friend" (Ch. 21). 'That's the boat,' said I. 'And it's the same I saw this morning,' he returned. 'I came straight to it by instinct, I suppose.' (Ch 21).
When David makes this return to Yarmouth as a fully fledged young gentleman -- well, suppose Steerforth hadn't been with him, wouldn't his childhood sweetheart's desire to be a "lady" naturally place David himself in the frame as a potential rival to Ham? Steerforth shows what David might have been.
*
Compared to Great Expectations, David Copperfield isn't so clearly pitched as a moral fable about gentility. And yet, gentility is an ever-recurring theme.
The dinner was very long, and the conversation was about the Aristocracy—and Blood. Mrs. Waterbrook repeatedly told us, that if she had a weakness, it was Blood.
It occurred to me several times that we should have got on better, if we had not been quite so genteel. We were so exceedingly genteel, that our scope was very limited. A Mr. and Mrs. Gulpidge were of the party, who had something to do at second-hand (at least, Mr. Gulpidge had) with the law business of the Bank; and what with the Bank, and what with the Treasury, we were as exclusive as the Court Circular. To mend the matter, Hamlet’s aunt had the family failing of indulging in soliloquy, and held forth in a desultory manner, by herself, on every topic that was introduced. These were few enough, to be sure; but as we always fell back upon Blood, she had as wide a field for abstract speculation as her nephew himself.
We might have been a party of Ogres, the conversation assumed such a sanguine complexion.
‘I confess I am of Mrs. Waterbrook’s opinion,’ said Mr. Waterbrook, with his wine-glass at his eye. ‘Other things are all very well in their way, but give me Blood!’ (Ch 25)
These are easy targets for David's satire. He knows he's not of the Aristocracy. But when, later in the same chapter, he reports his own hatred of "this red-headed animal", the fear of Uriah's power, the utter loathsomeness of him aspiring to marry Agnes, -- well, isn't this violent disgust about "Blood" too?
There's more class warfare in Chapter 46 -- the confrontation with the respectable Mr. Littimer, who has always made David feel particularly cloddish. In his account Littimer emphasizes Emily's low class: "her connections being very common", "Being given to low company" . . . David eventually lashes out: "'I could wish to know from this -- creature,' I could not bring myself to utter any more conciliatory word, ..."
"Creature" is a class insult, like "tool". It emphasizes that Littimer is only a servant, whereas David is a professional author. It's a revenge for Littimer having had the nerve to comment on Emily's low class. But it's a revenge that can only be executed by one who feels securely established in the class of gentlefolk. In a way it emphasizes the distance David has himself travelled from Mr Peggotty's hut.
*
I'm still reading Copperfield ... I'm about two thirds of the way through, now.
David is supposed to be a generally honest narrator, but sometimes a little cloud of unreliability drifts across this clear sky. Here, maybe:
I must have been married, if I may trust to my imperfect memory for dates, about a year or so, when one evening, as I was returning from a solitary walk, thinking of the book I was then writing—for my success had steadily increased with my steady application, and I was engaged at that time upon my first work of fiction—I came past Mrs. Steerforth’s house. I had often passed it before, during my residence in that neighbourhood, though never when I could choose another road. Howbeit, it did sometimes happen that it was not easy to find another, without making a long circuit; and so I had passed that way, upon the whole, pretty often.
(Opening of Chapter 46)
It seems odd that David's suddenly "imperfect memory" is vague about exactly how long he'd been married when he also remembers that he was writing his first novel. The ending of the previous chapter had conveyed David's unspoken or unadmitted feelings about his marriage. Is this more of the same? The paragraph continues to be a little evasive about how rarely, or not, David went past Mrs. Steerforth's house. Cloudy memory, or cloudy reliability? On the next page Mrs. Steerforth's parlour-maid will reveal that it's only a day or two since the previous time David walked by. Is there a hint to the reader that David spends quite a lot of time apart from his wife, and that his thoughts draw him back to associations with his first love Emily? Or Steerforth himself?
*
I think it's possible to bring together some of these scattered observations. It seems to be of the essence that the elder David does not make judgments about the younger David; and that, consequently, we don't quite know where he stands. Dickens sticks to this radical and new conception for his novel, but it sometimes makes him uneasy, and hence those crude narrative underlinings about particularly remembering a particular episode, or, e.g. in Ch 41 when everyone understands that David is now inevitably going to marry Dora, and Aunt Betsey "took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night", and Agnes was "always cheerful from that time".
Why won't the elder David state a view of his younger self's blindnesses or unsettled ardours? Or to put it better, why does Dickens feel that he wants this novel to travel along without a moral framing?
That brings up another reflection, that in the world of David Copperfield there is very little evidence that people really ever change. Its view of character is that it plays out over the course of a lifetime according to an irresistible course that is scarcely possible to divert. David's unavailing efforts to change Dora's character are an obvious instance. Or consider Mr and Mrs Micawber, the Murdstones, Steerforth, Wickfield, Heep, ... This perhaps accounts for the novel's emphasis on the mad and the eccentric. For paradigmatically, mad and eccentric behaviours confront us with the impossibility of doing anything to change them.
With this goes another quite striking thing: the almost total absence of religion from the world of David Copperfield. The church claims, through God's intervention, to be able to change the course of people's lives. In this novel there are a lot of people who could do with a conversion experience, but none of them even look at it. They look right past it, and plug on with their journeys through life, wearing their grooves deeper and deeper. And really, when the child David is making his desperate journey along the Dover Road, it's quite strange that -- unless I've forgotten -- he never thinks of going into a church.
*
I should perhaps have reported earlier, when talking about Steerforth as a double of David, a recurrent impression while reading: that the characters in the novel, Steerforth in particular, only really exist to the extent that they impact on David's own story. That Steerforth's Oxford, for instance, is so lightly sketched not just because Steerforth dismisses it but because Steerforth doesn't really exist except in his relation with David. (And later, when David assumes that he's gone back to Oxford, Steerforth is really with Emily in Yarmouth.)
To take another example, Mr Omer's daughter Minnie gets engaged to Joram during the funeral ride for David's mother and half-brother. It's of course an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that things only seem to happen in people's lives when the novel's hero is in the vicinity.
David Copperfield is, on the whole, very focussed on recounting only what David himself saw and heard. It's interesting to compare it with an earlier novel told in the first person, Scott's Rob Roy (1818). Here too the narrator (Frank Osbaldistone) looks back on his youth, and there's an element of bildungsroman. But the odd impression of characters having no independent existence from the hero is absent from Scott's novel. In fact it's the histories of major characters like Nicol Jarvie, Rob Roy, and Andrew Fairservice, the parts of their lives that Frank doesn't share, that occupies the heart of the novel and the bulk of its conversation. Frank certainly has a story of his own, but the novel is just as much about bringing us, through its characters, into the Glasgow and the Highlands of the early eighteenth century.
David Copperfield comes from an entirely different conception. Its history of Yarmouth, for instance, is incidental (and almost absent). It didn't matter. What Dickens wanted to show was the impact of Yarmouth on a small impressionable child, in all its immediacy. A child accepts the actual, doesn't search for explanation. And for the reader, too, David's Yarmouth was not to be explained or described but experienced. His fancies are more important than the facts.Yarmouth is vivid (whereas Canterbury and London are not, in my opinion) but that's because of the potency of its psychic impact on the hero. Vivid or not, the scenes in the novel have a quality of stage-set. Things happen on this stage, whenever possible: not off it. We are most aware of this when the stage management is crude: when David just happens to be present for Emily's meeting with Martha, or for the Strongs' showdown. Of course action is sometimes narrated by others. But even when Traddles gives David a quite long account of his marriage, our main focus remains front and centre: on where David is, on his emotions seeing his old friend, his thoughts while listening to him.
[Image source: https://victorianweb.org/victorian/art/illustration/phiz/226.html . The wrapper for each of the original monthly parts. Phiz was under instruction not to give away anything specific about the planned novel or its characters, so far as he knew about them.]
*
The appearance of the horizon portended a lasting tempest; the sky and the water seemed blended together. Thick masses of clouds, of a frightful form, swept across the zenith with the swiftness of birds, while others appeared motionless as rocks. Not a single spot of blue sky could be discerned in the whole firmament; and a pale yellow gleam only lightened up all the objects of the earth, the sea, and the skies.
From the violent rolling of the ship, what we all dreaded happened at last. The cables which held her bow were torn away: she then swung to a single hawser, and was instantly dashed upon the rocks, at the distance of half a cable's length from the shore. A general cry of horror issued from the spectators. Paul rushed forward to throw himself into the sea, when, seizing him by the arm, "My son," I exclaimed, "would you perish?"—"Let me go to save her," he cried, "or let me die!" Seeing that despair had deprived him of reason, Domingo and I, in order to preserve him, fastened a long cord around his waist, and held it fast by the end. Paul then precipitated himself towards the Saint-Geran, now swimming, and now walking upon the rocks. Sometimes he had hopes of reaching the vessel, which the sea, by the reflux of its waves, had left almost dry, so that you could have walked round it on foot; but suddenly the billows, returning with fresh fury, shrouded it beneath mountains of water, which then lifted it upright upon its keel. The breakers at the same moment threw the unfortunate Paul far upon the beach, his legs bathed in blood, his bosom wounded, and himself half dead.
The famous storm scene at Yarmouth must surely owe something to this scene in Paul et Virginie (by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 1788). Admittedly Yarmouth is not Mauritius. Paul was trying to rescue his beloved, while Ham is trying to rescue a man he has good reason to hate. Above all Dickens transformed the scene by his emphasis on the observer David, and by creating the strange sensation that the storm is somehow taking place within David himself. Nevertheless the similarities of structure and spirit are remarkable.
[Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's novel makes a brief but memorable appearance in Chapter 13 of Little Dorrit.
'I can't Arthur,' returned Flora, 'be denounced as heartless by the whole society of China without setting myself right when I have the opportunity of doing so, and you must be very well aware that there was Paul and Virginia which had to be returned and which was returned without note or comment, not that I mean to say you could have written to me watched as I was but if it had only come back with a red wafer on the cover I should have known that it meant Come to Pekin Nankeen and What's the third place, barefoot.'
(The "third place" is Canton, apparently.)
]
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| 'Go along! No boys here!' |
[Image source: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=1008752317 . A Hachette children's edition, 1952.]
Labels: Charles Dickens
