Dickens the Novelist: A Love Letter

Dawn Potter

[first published in the Sewanee Review (summer 2011)]

This Christmas, I did what I have not done since childhood, in those years when I annually swiped my sister’s highly desirable Arthur Rackham-decorated hardback and holed myself up in a corner with Scrooge and a box of Cheez-its: I prepared for the holiday by rereading Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

A Christmas Carol is a snug, well-organized, moralizing fairy tale; and I enjoyed it this season, as I always enjoy it; but I had to conclude, regretfully, that I didn’t adore it. Though I have a high tolerance for Victorian sentiment, even I became tired of festive holly branches and oversized Christmas geese and kindly dancing warehouse owners and jolly kissing games and pathetic but cheery invalids and that endless parade of pedagogical phantoms. Unlike Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit and so many of Dickens’s other novels, A Christmas Carol is an aphorism, a holiday card, a cheerful handshake. It celebrates and instructs; but it refuses to branch and spin and leap, to overflow history and reinvent memory, to skewer and mourn and laugh and hopelessly, restlessly yearn. I’ve spent most of a lifetime alongside Dickens’s novels; and to me, the imaginative risk and intelligence of these brilliant structural and physical adventures are the essence of this writer’s greatness. They are what make him, as F. R. and Q. D. Leavis declare in a joint preface to their series of critical essays collected as Dickens the Novelist, such a “profound, serious and wonderfully resourceful practising novelist, a master of [his art].”

Nonetheless, Dickens, even in his lesser moments, always manages to stun me; and on this year’s reading of A Christmas Carol, he did it again by page 13:

Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up upon its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot-air; and though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be, in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.

Copying out this passage, I begin to realize how closely my own rhetorical style resembles Dickens’s. Having read his novels so intensely for so many years, I’m not altogether surprised at my mimicry, though I hadn’t really recognized the extent of my grammatical imitations. Like him, I have a tendency to build my clauses on principles of repetition and opposition: “It was not . . . but. . . . It was not . . . but. . . . ” Those rhetorical repetitions also infiltrate our descriptive imagery (“with ghostly spectacles turned up upon its ghostly forehead’) and the words we choose to shift readers from one independent clause to another (“That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be, in spite of the face and beyond its control”). I, too, have an old-fashioned reliance on the subtle rhythmic and emotive powers of a judiciously placed adverb, as in Dickens’s “curiously stirred.” (Do not get me started on the ignorant adverb-hating tendencies proselytized by contemporary self-help writing manuals.) I also pay close attention to punctuation as sentence drama, in particular the vast theatrical differences between a comma and a semicolon (another much-maligned grammatical tool). But all of this, while technically intriguing, really only spotlights what Dickens and nobody else can do: to conjure up, in a handful of words, a situation or a character who feels incredibly, three-dimensionally, clumsy and dirty and smelly and real while being as impossible and as far-fetched as Aladdin or Ali Baba. (Well, maybe Shakespeare can do it too, in his own way.)

Consider, for instance, the two sentences that open the quoted paragraph: “Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.” Now, I myself have never seen a bad lobster in a dark cellar. Nor I can I think of anyone else who might have. Possibly I could find a bad lobster in a supermarket dumpster, but would the parking lot’s high-powered security lights negate the corpse’s dismal glow? Time and dumpsters being what they are, I have scant hope of verifying the accuracy of Dickens’s unsavory simile. Yet I don’t care. Without a scrap of forensic evidence or zoological insight, I can see the putrid, phosphorescent gleam of Marley’s dreadful face on the blackened door. At the same time, in true Dickens style, the simile may be horrible, but it’s also ridiculous, a product of the writer’s inimitable blend of gothic melodrama and comic-strip farce. One almost expects the bad lobster to undertake a speaking role.

What Dickens does so blithely and with such off-handed charm in A Christmas Carol—to ignite a distinct physical reality by means of an outlandish, even silly, comparison—becomes, in his major novels, a sleight-of-hand so deft and miraculous and sensitive that words fail me. Even in a relatively minor, transitory scene, such as this one from Great Expectations, his descriptions caper and glitter and dive like a gorgeous, gaudy, high-wire circus act:

It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spiders’ webs, hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade. On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy, and the marsh-mist was so thick that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village—a direction which they never accepted, for they never came there—was invisible to me until I was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom devoting me to the Hulks.

The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me. This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dikes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, “A boy with somebody else’s pork pie! Stop him!” The cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of their eyes, and steaming out of their nostrils, “Halloa, young thief!” One black ox, with a white cravat on—who even had to my awakened conscience something of a clerical air—fixed me so obstinately with his eyes, and moved his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as I moved round, that I blubbered out to him, “I couldn’t help it, sir! It wasn’t for myself I took it!”

I could blunder my way back through those two paragraphs, with the goal of mumbling something to you about figurative comparisons and grammatical inversions and personification. But who cares? I might as well be a cross-eyed medical student attempting to dissect an eyeball with a dull axe. This, I think, is why I have such trouble writing about Dickens. I become so painfully aware of the limits of my imagination, so humbled by his shining mind, that I can barely speak. At the same time, however, he is unquestionably the root of my rereading obsession: I return to his novels more often than to any others, and I go to them for the same reason that I make mashed potatoes when I’m sad—because they are a familiar comfort, a stay during times of chaos, a predictable and nourishing satisfaction. They take care of me.

I love Great Expectations and Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby and Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend. But above all the wondrous others, I love David Copperfield. Though I’m loath to commit myself on paper, this may in fact be my favorite book in the world. And just yesterday, I joyfully learned that it was also one of Tolstoy’s favorite books. What could be more cheering? According to Mrs. Leavis, “we know from numerous independent sources of Tolstoy’s conversation throughout his long life, as well as from his own written tributes, that David Copperfield was a serious and indeed fundamental influence on his work as a novelist.” In Tolstoy’s words, “Dickens was a genius such as is met with but once in a century.” And apparently, among all of Dickens’s novels, David Copperfield headed the list; for the Russian reread it many times over the course of his long life, even struggling, at least once, with the original English. “If you sift the world’s prose literature,” he said to his family, “Dickens will remain; sift Dickens, David Copperfield will remain.”

Mrs. Leavis records that “in 1905 he told [his friend and physician Dushan Petrovich] Makovitsky: ‘How good Dickens is! I should have liked to write about him!’” She quickly points out, however, that “he never seems to have done so directly.” I wonder why not. Surely Tolstoy, of all novelists, couldn’t have suffered from anything comparable to my own tongue-tied lumpishness. Mrs. Leavis, for her part, gives no credence to any such reaction, announcing in her standard imperious manner that “Tolstoy’s consistently high valuation of David Copperfield must mean that Dickens’s intentions and achievements there, in some fundamental way . . . , were perceived by Tolstoy to have an immediate relevance to his own creative problems, in helping him to formulate what he, through Dickens’s eyes, saw as the essential difficulties of living that pressed on him.”

Oh, those essential difficulties of living that press upon us. At this point I immediately become distracted and close the volume. All I want to do now is to climb into bed and read David Copperfield cover to cover and then War and Peace cover to cover, and to hell with Mrs. L’s bossy arguments and explanations in their favor. I know this is unbecoming and anti-intellectual and that it only reinforces my provincial self-absorption. And believe me, I give Mrs. Leavis grateful credit for writing such an evocative line about the difficulties of living, even though it did make me lose interest in her critique. But I suppose my problem is one of priorities—and maybe this was Tolstoy’s problem as well: why should we bother to read or write about David Copperfield when we could just reread David Copperfield?

I’m painting myself into a sticky corner here, I know. Of course, I have learned a great deal from other people’s musings about literature. Of course, I am gratified when other people choose to read my own musings. Of course, I am engaged in just such musings at this very moment. Yet the book itself stands at the center: erect and irreplaceable; in glory, in shadow; invulnerable and always alone—though a reader can have a hard time believing that a work she loves does not require her protection. I know I have taken this tack myself when I’ve written in defense of particular characters or ways of seeing, and the Leavises have a similar protective mission in Dickens the Novelist: “to register specific protests against the trend of American criticism . . . as being in general wrong-headed, ill-informed . . . , and essentially ignorant and misdirecting.”

No doubt, there are excellent reasons to crush what the pair balefully refers to as “self-indulgent vapourings [that] give no satisfaction to anyone but their perpetrators.” But in truth, David Copperfield remains indifferent. So why am I driven to write about the novel? Better, perhaps, to ask why I am driven to write at all; better to call these jottings a love letter, not an essay: for dear David Copperfield, I am writing to say that you—word by word, sentence after sentence, reading upon reading upon reading—you, David Copperfield, have invented my vision of the world.

I might begin, perhaps, with this image—“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.” I have always believed so wholeheartedly in that grater-like finger, though, until I was in my twenties, I knew nutmeg only as a sandy, scentless powder stored in an aged A&P tin. And then, as a Christmas gift, the dairy farmer I was working for gave me, of all things, a pocket nutmeg grater, which was so exactly like my existing image of the maidservant Peggotty’s forefinger that I nearly cried. I can’t tell you why it mattered so much, why I was so happy to have her finger in my hands. But still, twenty years later, whenever I take that grater out of the spice cupboard, always Peggotty is my first thought, not custard pie or spinach soufflé.

And then there’s David, neither an ass like Pip of Great Expectations nor a good little cipher like Oliver Twist but the child that I have always wished myself to be: curious and watchful, especially of the flawed and various adults who surround him; innocent, trusting, well intentioned but also clumsy and imperfect; comical, wistful, gentle, and babyishly in love with love:

When we had exhausted the subject of the stars, . . . little Em’ly and I made a cloak of an old wrapper, and sat under it for rest of the journey. Ah, how I loved her! What happiness (I thought) if we were married, and were going away anywhere to live among the trees and in the fields, never growing older, never growing wiser, children ever, rambling hand in hand through sunshine and among flowery meadows, laying down our heads on moss at night, in a sweet sleep of purity and peace, and buried by the birds when we were dead! Some such picture, with no real world in it, bright with the light of our innocence, and vague as the stars afar off, was in my mind all the way.

In many tales, maybe even in most, such a passage would be embarrassing; but in David Copperfield the sentiments are not only funny and sweet but somehow profoundly real, as if the novel’s imaginative heart were fueling a larger, common body of hope and yearning and dear affection.

I suppose that Tolstoy must have had some parallel reaction to David’s character, who seems to reappear, at times and in altered and more sophisticated form, in Anna Karenina’s Levin and War and Peace’s Natasha and Pierre. Without question, both Dickens and Tolstoy were acutely conscious of the oxymoronic ambiguities of joy and pain, how one entwines with and supports the other; but in their rendering of these four great characters, neither writer allowed himself to veer toward the masochistic ironies of, say, Lucy Snow, heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Rather, each of the four, and David most especially, is able to release himself to himself, to exist earnestly and seriously, even at moments of great fear or deep unhappiness, even in recollection of such moments:

As I walked to and fro daily between Southwark and Blackfriars, and lounged about at meal-times in obscure streets, the stones of which may, for anything I know, be worn at this moment by my childish feet, I wonder how many of these people were wanting in the crowd that used to come filing before me in review again. . . ! When my thoughts go back now, to that slow agony of my youth, I wonder how much of the histories I invented for such people hangs like a mist of fancy over well-remembered facts! When I tread the old ground, I do not wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on before me, an innocent romantic boy, making his imaginative world out of such strange experiences and sordid things.

Several years ago I wrote a poem titled “Why I Didn’t Finish Reading David Copperfield,” a first-person fictional narrative in the voice of a high school girl who wants desperately to be in love. When I wrote the poem, I was operating under the influence of the David voice—its sweetness, its sad longing—and I tried to create a character who shared both his comic wistfulness and his earnest yearning to become love. But the influence of his voice on my writing had an unfortunate and self-perpetuating side-effect: readers and listeners consistently believed that the poem was autobiographical, that I had once been the girl riding the school bus who could not finish reading a Dickens novel. Even the journal editor who first published the poem went so far as to assure me that she, too, has always disliked Dickens.

As you might imagine, I’m unhappy about such mistakes. With so many allusions to David Copperfield woven into the fabric of the poem, shouldn’t it be self-evident that, in order to write the piece, I must have known the novel intimately? Apparently not, though the reasons, I suppose, may vary. By and large, people don’t read David Copperfield for pleasure anymore, so how could I possibly have expected them to identify my plot references, let alone the influence of David’s voice? But on the other hand, that voice is so appealing, so convincing, that it does indeed seem real. Among readers and critics who remain familiar with the novel, many continue to confound David with David’s inventor—“insinuating, through critical stupidity,” as the Leavises bitterly aver, “false assumptions about the subject’s art, character, personality, and history.”

The Leavises are cranky, but they are evidently right. In his own preface to a reprint edition of David Copperfield, Dickens showed that he did indeed draw a distinct line between himself and his creation: “Of all my books, I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.”

In other words, Dickens’s well-loved child was not David Copperfield but David Copperfield. Notwithstanding any borrowings from the author’s own history or personality, David the character was merely a single imaginative element within a larger creation. The novel itself was the favorite child of the writer’s fancy, this tale that he coaxed from a disconnected mass of words, molding Peggotty’s rough forefinger and David’s tender commentary and his stepfather Mr. Murdstone’s “old, double look, . . . his eye darkened with a frown,” and ramshackle Mrs. Micawber’s perpetual suckling infant and Dora’s baby-doll flirtations and Uriah Heep’s clammy machinations and the swift similes and rhetorical pauses and flourishes that rush me from one drama into the next.

I love David Copperfield so much that I can hardly bear the idea of taking it apart to critically examine its insides. I really don’t care how or why it works. All I want is to keep rereading it forever. As David says about his friend the Micawbers, “I had grown so accustomed to [them], and had been so intimate with them in their distresses, and was so utterly friendless without them, that the prospect of being thrown upon some new shift for a lodging, and going once more among unknown people, was like being that moment turned adrift into my present life.”