Once upon a time, staying in an Airbnb in the arsehole of nowhere and in need of some undemanding bedtime reading, I picked up a copy of a Jack Reacher story, Make Me. It was fine at first: I rattled happily through the first hundred pages, put the book down, switched off the light and drifted off into dreamland…
The following evening, I picked the book up again and… I dunno, the spell had been broken. I got to the end, but it was like dentistry. And that’s something that I’ve noticed with other books, too: the first session sustains my interest, but then I take a break and when I resume it’s almost as if I’m reading a different book.
Why is this? Obviously the very act of breaking off creates a disruption and perhaps real life distractions make one less susceptible to the author’s magic. But maybe the book has somehow failed, and the reason I broke off where I did wasn’t because it was late and I was tired, but because—even if I didn’t consciously register the fact—the book had gone flat. It is, after all, a lot easier to get a story off the launchpad than to sustain it in orbit.
It happened again when, staying in another holiday cottage, I found a battered edition of David Copperfield in the bookcase.
I first attempted this novel—Charles Dickens’ eighth, published in 1849—when I was about seven; I was far too young and quickly ran aground. Since then I’ve read both Bleak House and Great Expectations several times; struggled through Hard Times and Dombey and Son; and abandoned Nicholas Nickleby.
I dithered over attempting David Copperfield; but once I took the plunge I found myself appreciating this very sad book with so many people flickering in and out of David’s recollections, most of them more or less self-defeating and many of them dead.
I was about halfway through the book when the holiday came to an end. I considered asking the cottage owner if I could take it with me and mail it back… but decided against this. Failing to find an acceptable edition in the local shops, I eventually downloaded a PDF from Project Gutenberg. As a result, by the time I resumed reading, several days had passed.
Almost from the moment I found my place and got back down to it, I realised that the spell had been broken. I knew that I would finish the book—but that it would be with gritted teeth.
I had reached a point in the story where all the characters have been set up. Steerforth has seduced and abducted Little Em’ly. David’s Aunt Betsy has been bankrupted. David is working as a proctor… and has met and fallen in love with Dora.
And here’s where the book takes a sharp downhill turn. David marries Dora.
It’s a commonplace criticism of Dickens that he couldn’t write women; but Dora really does take the biscuit. She tends to be described as adorable but impractical. Actually, she is quite astoundingly stupid, and David’s inability to recognise that he has married a half-wit seriously undermines his credibility. Here he is discussing a ‘page’ (a servant) who has stolen, among other things, Dora’s watch:
‘You have been silent for a long time, and now you are going to be cross!’ said Dora.
‘No, my dear, indeed! Let me explain to you what I mean.’
‘I think I don’t want to know,’ said Dora.
‘But I want you to know, my love. Put Jip [her dog] down.’
Dora put his nose to mine, and said ‘Boh!’ to drive my seriousness away; but, not succeeding, ordered him into his Pagoda, and sat looking at me, with her hands folded, and a most resigned little expression of countenance.
‘The fact is, my dear,’ I began, ‘there is contagion in us. We infect everyone about us.’
I might have gone on in this figurative manner, if Dora’s face had not admonished me that she was wondering with all her might whether I was going to propose any new kind of vaccination, or other medical remedy, for this unwholesome state of ours. Therefore I checked myself, and made my meaning plainer.
‘It is not merely, my pet,’ said I, ‘that we lose money and comfort, and even temper sometimes, by not learning to be more careful; but that we incur the serious responsibility of spoiling everyone who comes into our service, or has any dealings with us. I begin to be afraid the fault is not entirely on one side, but that these people all turn out ill because we don’t turn out very well ourselves.’
‘Oh, what an accusation,’ exclaimed Dora, opening her eyes wide; ‘to say that you ever saw me take gold watches! Oh!’
‘My dearest,’ I remonstrated, ‘don’t talk preposterous nonsense! Who was make the least allusion to gold watches?’
‘You did,’ returned Dora. ‘You know you did. You said I haven’t turned out well, and compared me to him.’
‘To whom?’ I asked.
‘To the page,’ sobbed Dora.
And so on. David’s failure to realise that he is wasting his time marks him as every bit as stupid as his wife. Doubly stupid, since he hasn’t grasped what the reader has long anticipated: that his creator, Charles Dickens, intends to knock Dora off and marry David to Agnes, who has somehow contrived to remain doggishly devoted to him throughout all his thick-headedness.
The other major problem is the static nature of Dickens’ supporting cast. Again, this isn’t a new perception: it has, I think, long been recognised that Dickens’ minor characters are stuck in time, doomed mindlessly to repeat the same behaviours and catchphrases.
The main exhibits in David Copperfield are, of course, Wilkins Micawber and Uriah Heep. The former is entertaining at first, but palls—especially as it becomes apparent that his delusional existence harms, not just himself, but those around him, too.
Heep—whose constant insistence upon his humility quickly becomes tiresome—is, I think, more problematic. Dickens makes an attempt of sorts to allow him to justify himself:
‘Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of ‘umbleness—not much else that I know of, from morning to night. We was to be ‘umble to this person, and ‘umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the monitor-medal by being ‘umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by being ‘umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being such a well-behaved man, that they were determined to bring him in. “Be ‘umble, Uriah,” says father to me, “and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be ‘umble,” says father, “and you’ll do!” And really it ain’t done bad!’
But in the end, Heep is merely a cog in Dickens’ machine and winds up where he belongs: in prison.
Anyway, it may have taken me more than sixty years, but I can finally tick David Copperfield off my list–even if I skipped significant sections of the last few chapters, as Dickens works through his own list, assigning his characters, alive or dead, to their final resting places.
What I think it demonstrates is how much easier it is to get a novel going than to sustain it; and how, as inspiration flags, any author will fall back upon tried and tested ducks and dodges.
Ultimately what the book lacks is structure. It tries to stitch itself together with a complex web of threads—Em’ly and Steerforth; Heep and Micawber; David, Dora and Agnes—but in the end the binding isn’t strong enough. There is much in David Copperfield that is genuinely great; but pretty much all of that lies in the first half.
Anyway, Dora dies, dutifully and decorously, offstage. David isn’t even present. But Dickens lets him off the hook and allows him to persist as a sort of Messiah in his own story. Everybody seems to worship him—even Heep. Agnes never loses patience with him, but of course that’s Agnes’s function: to worship David—as we, too, are apparently expected to do.
Featured image is by Fred Barnard. On this illustration, see further: Peggotty’s Boat-House on the Norfolk Tales, Myths and More! blog
Donald Hounam 