David Copperfield is familiarly discussed as a novel about growing up and putting away the frivolities of childhood, including a toy or child-wife. A celebrated Victorian Bildungsroman, it has attracted a long shelf of critical commentary analyzing its concern with maturation, its very Dickensian proliferation of deaths and problematical loves, and its intertwined themes of memory, discipline, and the craft of writing. The novel’s imagery and structure, the parallels (both internally within its narrative and to the contemporary literature), its characterizations, and its humor have been richly chronicled. While exploring the growth and maturation of the eponymous figure who so diligently reconstructs his past, only incidentally or tangentially, however, have scholars of Copperfield spoken of David’s embedded elegy to lost innocence, his transcription of his mourning for it. Bert Hornback encapsulates this critical tradition: “David’s ’progress’ is, in one sense, quite a simple one. As a child, David is required to relinquish his innocence, and the world which he meets beyond this innocence contains all the evil which the novel describes” (78). The actual experience of relinquishing this innocence, certainly significant, is simply overlooked or summarily regarded. I would like to argue that it is interesting, appropriate, and rewarding to examine David Copperfield as a novel that mourns and elegizes the loss of innocence and its enthusiasms.

The novel focuses on the development of David, which parallels his progress as a writer, and it emphasizes the centrality of memory in the evolution of its hero and the telling of his tale. But peel back that surface and coexisting with or underpinning the forward-looking story of success is the backward-glancing narration of a detailed mourning (four chapters are called “Retrospect”). For all of the deaths that punctuate David Copperfield, the determining, overarching loss that David experiences and mourns is the world of innocence, a loss he confronts repeatedly and that is periodically refracted in other figures.

David Copperfield is the novel in which Dickens was probably most attentive to the surrounding literature of the nineteenth century, poetry as well as fiction. This makes perfect thematic and psychological sense, considering that it is the first person narrative of someone who develops (much like his author) into a notably successful novelist. The specific allusions and echoes accumulate to reveal a pervasive concern with the process of mourning and of how one deals with loss. It may be only one of the tidy coincidences of literary history that Wordsworth’s Prelude, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and Dickens’s “autobiographical” fiction were all published in 1850, but that convergence (as Carl Dawson, among many, has examined) remains striking.

Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (1798) hones to poignant lyric a diminished reality; the “dizzy rapture,” William’s bounding “o’er the mountains” wherever “nature led” are gone; “That time is past.” In his “Growth of a Poet’s Mind,” he elaborated this theme into transcendent Romantic epic. Dickens implicitly acknowledges his predecessor. David experiences and has to deal with the sense of lost innocence that Wordsworth so resonantly described. Just as Dorothy remained a fixed image of what was, a point to which the speaker can return at the end of “Tintern Abbey,” so does David find Agnes Wickfield stalwartly waiting, pillar-like. Even the initial repetition of the five long years that have passed since William has returned to the Wye anticipates David’s awareness of having been away from England for three years. More tellingly, the place that memory and “spots of time” occupy in The Prelude is analogous to the emphasis on memory in the novel, in both instances serving as an artistic driving force.

The theme of loss at the center of Wordsworth’s poetry (whether in the Lucy poems or in The Prelude) is comparatively abstract; it reexamines the stability of individual identity, the continuity of experience from the past to the present, and the security of one’s place in nature. Blake’s contemporary Songs, famously progressing from Innocence to Experience, though they abound in precise (engraved) images, are similarly abstract in their focus. By contrast, the loss and mourning in In Memoriam are sharply identified; the poem is in memory of A. H. Hallam. The psychological dynamics in Tennyson’s quintessential Victorian elegy are perhaps closer to the comparatively universalized experience that David records. The poem and the novel (again) share a pattern of evoked memories, a process of grief and mourning leading to recovery, and even a comparable three-year convalescence.

The interspersed references to or echoes of Carlyle, Ruskin, Byron, Coleridge, et al. make the notion of a Zeitgeist seem more than just a catchy Germanism. Nineteenth-century writers expressed their acute awareness of this sense of loss and explored, sometimes agonizingly, the possibility of restoration. Whether the issue was lost faith (with its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”), lost/enclosed commons, dehumanizing (industrial) labor and its products, society’s smudge and ugliness, or love that has withered, this period that contributed so much to the modern notion of childhood returned over and again to that which was disappearing. Accompanying this manifold alertness to loss, is an attempt to grieve and come to terms with it. The most obvious analyst of this process was Freud, writing “Mourning and Melancholia” in 1917 and amplifying and modifying it in such later essays as “The Ego and the Id” (1923). He described himself as merely a codifier of what poets had long before understood and rendered, but his codifying analyses can still be useful in unraveling a work of art.

The nineteenth century was also the classic period of the art of the fairy tale, a genre that scholars like Bruno Bettelheim and Marina Warner have taught us to appreciate for its interwoven cultural and psychological insights. The web of fairy tale-like images and references in David Copperfield is yet another indicator of how the subtext is one of surviving the loss of innocence in a world that confusingly resembles a dark, uncertain, and dangerous woods.

Common alike in fairy tales, quest stories, and Bildungsromane are journeys, and a significant pattern or motif in David Copperfield is that of a journey. The principal or overarching journey is David’s, from his birth to his marriage to Agnes. Subsumed within this are the literal journeys of David—to Yarmouth, to London, to Dover and Canterbury, and to the salubrious Alps and back,—Dan Peggotty’s dogged pursuit of Emily, Emily’s elopement with Steerforth and her voyage back to London, and the Micawber entourage’s emigration to Australia. There are also the psychological or emotional and the professional-artistic trajectories: David’s transformation both as a lover-husband and as a writer (imaged in his moving away from and then back to Agnes).

Within David’s personal journey is an almost classic depiction of his losing his sense of innocence, the necessary initial stage of his evolving maturation. With unobtrusive propriety, the periodic fairy tale-like references, parallels, and images reinforce this process. The Murdstones resemble the evil stepparents who disrupt childhood paradises. As threatening monsters, they anticipate Creakle and Uriah Heep. David’s consignment to Murdstone and Grinby’s warehouse—besides consciously recalling Dickens’s blacking factory stint—brings to mind Cinderella’s posting to the ash heap. David’s own comments occasionally invoke the world of fairy tales. About to embark for Yarmouth, he wondered, if Peggotty “were employed to lose me like the boy in the fairy tale, I should be able to track my way home again by the buttons she would shed” (76; ch. 2). Visiting Spenlow’s house in Norwood, he “was wandering in a garden of Eden all the while, with Dora” (452; ch. 26). He subsequently determined, “What I had to do, was, to take my woodman’s axe in my hand, and clear my own way through the forest of difficulty, by cutting down the trees until I came to Dora” (582; ch. 36). Having hewn his way through the forest to his love, he felt like a “Monster who had got into a Fairy’s bower,” frightening her and making her cry (607; ch. 37). With some chagrin, he describes their domestic arrangement as “this make-belief of housekeeping” (715; ch. 44). Rosa Dartle has, David feels, an air “worthy of a cruel Princess in a Legend” (735; ch. 46). He overhears Rosa concede, in her tirade, that the undeniably lovely Emily is “an ill-used innocent, with a fresh heart full of love and trustfulness…[a] fairy spirit” (789; ch. 50). And in the aptly named chapter, “Absence,” David bemoans the loss of “the whole airy castle of [his] life” (886; ch. 58).

If the occasional fairy-tale quality spaced across the novel provides a vaguely fabular aura to David’s journey, his path is much more dramatically punctuated by a series of deaths —deaths that are entangled with love. It is tempting to take at face value the griefs he experiences as fundamentally deriving from the loss of those he has loved. I suggest it is more coherent and useful to see his story as one of lost innocence, in which the specific losses (these deaths—of his mother, infant brother, Dora, Steerforth, Ham) are reiterations of this loss. He of course began life in the shadow (and psychological luxury) of his father’s having already died, a death subsequently associated by Betsey Trotwood with an emotionally unequal marriage; Clara was endearing but immature and weak, grist, as it turns out, vulnerable to Murdstone’s lethal mill wheels. David’s arrival and childhood were almost defined by death; it is preeminently a paradise shattered by losses. Loved ones, like idylls, tend to die or to disappear into the distance. His infatuation with Emily, so engrossing, was doomed by its unreality to fade:

As in the seminal creation story in our literature, David’s expulsion from this carefree bliss is associated with mortality. Various monsters intrude upon it (one notoriously described as serpentine), and their intrusions threaten catastrophe. Murdstone’s hardness (he advertises it as firmness) distances David from his mother and the love she represents. It also leads to the deaths of Clara and of David’s brother. Reflecting back, David comments, “The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom” (187; ch. 9).

Clara’s character and her love for David are particularly associated with innocence and a childlike naiveté. Betsey had objected to her marriage to David’s father, “a favourite of hers,” because Clara was “a wax doll” (51; ch. 1). Her devotion and her death also importantly foreshadow the subsequent death of Dora. David’s marriage to Dora was facilitated by the sudden death of her father, Mr. Spenlow—a comic variant of the ogres who would obstruct young love. But the elimination of this (adult) impediment only allows David to reconstitute in his adored wife the figure of his mother. Dora resembles Clara in her frailty and incapacity before the demanding rigors of the practical world. Ultimately, she prevails in making David—admonished by Aunt Betsey—accept her as the plaything, the child-wife, she declares herself to be. Clara and Dora, like Emily, were unprotected, defenseless orphans. (As if to underscore the parallel, just as Clara’s infant died shortly after she did, so Jip, Dora’s lap dog, expires in his Chinese house as Dora passes away upstairs.)

Steerforth, another of David’s youthful loves, also dies—“drowndead” along with Ham, Emily’s abandoned love. But long before “The Tempest,” David accepted Steerforth’s death (to him), almost philosophically musing on his continued strong, if ambivalent attachment to the romantic, suave, commanding aspect of his school idol. “The Beginning of a Long Journey” opens:

We can understand why the alluring friend, whom Agnes warned was his “evil angel,” had to be cleared out from David’s forest—at least physically.

Besides these actual deaths, David experienced figurative deaths, the disappearances of such early loves as Emily and the transitory attractions of Miss Shepherd and Miss Larkins. Even his early love for Agnes necessarily goes underground for years, until he has recovered and matured sufficiently to perceive it. But all of these losses, physical and psychological, are recurrences of the fundamental, scarring loss of innocence David experiences and observes in the world. They re-enact the loss he mourns and surmounts.

Modern European literature about the process of mourning, like the literature portraying the process itself, is substantial. The primary text or starting point remains Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” but extensions and elaborations continue, with the appearance as recently as 2004 of Tammy Clewell’s, “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss.” The process, as Freud described it and others seek to refine and clarify it, illuminates the extent to which the psychological trajectory that David labors to make transparent falls into a recognizable pattern.

Freud was careful not to limit the loss that occasioned the subject’s mourning to a beloved person. “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (243). This accommodates the sense of a lost paradise elegized by Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” and still more decidedly in the “Intimations Ode” (“Whither is fled the visionary gleam?”). Freud’s formulation helps to reframe David’s grief. It is not simply the prelude to his maturation in the face of Dora’s death, but also—importantly—his reaction to the disruption of his vision of innocence, manifested in the series of deaths of those he loves.

Freud summarized the psychological work of mourning:

If, as I have been urging, David’s lost “love-object” is a carefree, exuberant response to the world, then the repeated buffetings that have forced him to abandon this attachment are the deaths of his mother (preceded by that of his father), of Steerforth, and of Dora. The process of yielding accomplished, he (his ego) is then “free and uninhibited” and can turn to Agnes.

David, in fact, becomes increasingly introspective and articulate about his sorrow towards the end of his history. After Dora’s death, he lets us glimpse his despondency: “I came to think that the Future was walled up before me, that the energy and action of my life were at an end, that I never could find any refuge but in the grave. I came to think so, I say, but not in the first shock of my grief. It slowly grew to that” (839; ch. 54). He looks to change and travel for restoration. Abroad, alone with his “undisciplined heart,” he had not yet any “conception of the wound with which it had to strive” (885; ch. 58). In tones approaching the lugubriousness of Coleridge’s “Dejection Ode” or the plaints of Byron’s world-weary wanderers, he writes of his “desolate feeling,” the“heavy sense of loss and sorrow” that dominated his mood (885; ch. 58).

The first pages of “Absence” go on to present an extraordinary self-analysis of his misery, a compilation of images drawn from well-known Romantic novels and poems on loss and death. David has become despairingly conscious of all that he has lost:

This remarkable catalog of emotional distress makes eloquently clear that no single incident is bedeviling him. What follows is the slow, initially dark-clouded pilgrimage to rejuvenation. Like Wordsworth and Shelley, he found “sublimity and wonder in the dread heights and precipices, in the roaring currents” (887; ch. 58). Like Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Mill, he would find psychological healing in Nature and beauty: “All at once, in this serenity, great Nature spoke to me; and soothed me to lay down my weary head upon the grass, and weep as I had not wept yet, since Dora died!” (887). The process of mourning and recovery that Dickens renders is not only artful, it simulates the realism of a personal experience.

Freud emphasized the primacy of memory in the letting go that mourning requires, and Tammy Clewell elaborates, explaining that mourning

Over and over again, the mature, authorial David asserts that his “Personal History” derives from his fruitful memory. This is insisted upon at the beginning of the second chapter, “I Observe.” He claims to know himself well: he was “a child of close observation,” and, as a man, he has “a strong memory” of his childhood (61; ch. 2). In “Another Retrospective,” his “child-wife…is a figure in the moving crowd before [his] memory” (834; ch. 53). Recollections of his young love, Emily, he tells us, are “Ever rising from the sea of my remembrance” (838; ch. 53).

Besides being suffused with memory, David Copperfield also very much follows the pattern Clewell abstracts from Freud. The hoarded, studied, and artistically shaped memories coalesce into a rapid emotional reorientation for David; “decisive” and “spontaneous” are accurate descriptors. Agnes’s letter arrives almost like an epiphany, concluding David’s agonizing; reading it, he claims, “night was passing from my mind” (888; ch. 58). He quickly resumes his career as a writer, now alert to the romantic possibilities in Agnes. Reestablishing himself artistically is preparatory to returning to England and Agnes.

As Peter Homas argues, memory is pivotally linked with mourning and recovery: “In the case of mourning, the giving up of the lost object proceeds gradually through repeated remembrances of it, each contradicted by reality. This can occur because the mourner is psychologically separate from the lost object” (17). As David accomplishes this separation, his view of a fairy world becomes increasingly remote.

David’s earliest recollected image includes the picture of his mother, “with her pretty hair and youthful shape” (61; ch. 2). David Kellogg effectively indicates how David merges the cherished image of his mother with that of his first wife, invoking the mourner’s characteristic initial response of denial in the process:

Memory, mourning, and his quest for identity all converge. As Jerome Buckley observed, “To David, memory reaching back is in fact the strongest sanction of identity, for the present consciousness is constantly colored by the remembered or never quite forgotten past.” In likening Dickens’s use of memory to the “central theme of the two greatest autobiographical poems in the language, The Prelude and In Memoriam,” Buckley specifically points out that “The curious wind from the past recurring throughout the novel, ’the wind going by me [David] like a restless memory’ is reminiscent of the elegy’s ’wind/ Of memory murmuring the past’” (232-33).

Coincident with the question of identity, remembering who you are—so as to achieve the transition from innocence and its loss to experience and its stability—is Dickens’s delight in names. Some are overtly comic—the “pagan” Peggotty, Wilkins Micawber, Miss Mowcher—some metaphoric or onomatopoetic—Murdstone, Uriah Heep, Creakle, Rosa Dartle, and Steerforth—some, like Blunderstone, Traddles, Dora, Agnes, and Spenlow, accrue meaning as the tale progresses. David’s is an especially suggestive onomastic romp. He enters life misnamed;“Betsey” emerges as David, variously to be called Daisy (by Steerforth) and Doady (by Dora). He is importantly rebaptised Trotwood (by Betsey), which he then earns and retains through his maturity, along with his reassumed professional name of David.

Dickens’s delight in playing with names is here, as is generally true of his fictions, palpable. In David Copperfield, he cannily charts the stages of David’s growth, the way people respond to him, and his ultimate resignation of his grief, through his various names. He is always “David,” but in his more guileless youth, that name often yields to others. His mother and Peggotty naturally refer to him as Davy or little Davy. It’s more pointed for the dominating, six-year-older Steerforth to call him Daisy at Creakle’s school and then reassert it (permission granted by David) seven or eight years later when David is seventeen and they meet up again. This clearly identifies the juvenile side of the narrator (who admits to never entirely relinquishing his romantic image of Steerforth). It is also congruent with Dora’s nickname for him, Doady. David may have been stripped, reclothed, and renamed Trotwood by Aunt Betsey when he arrived at Dover, soon to be cast free by Murdstone, and he may have chronologically reached his majority when he married Dora, but Dickens astutely shows that dispensing with a blissful innocence is not a simple or clear-cut, one-step event. David’s desire for the earlier world and its allure, evoked with seeming charm by “Daisy” and “Doady,” persists; he must struggle to make his rechristening prevail, just as he must go through the pains of grief and mourning before he can relinquish his mother, Dora, and even little Em’ly. He may have felt, at nine, “The mother who lay in the grave” to have been the mother of his infancy, but his “infancy” was not so expeditiously interred. It would require repeated steps for the “Young Innocent,” as Steerforth and Littimer call him, to put it at a secure distance.

This play of names associated with David is also a minor comic motif in the novel. Murdstone’s shady associates befuddle the young visitor by puzzling allusions to a Brooks of Sheffield. An increasingly insinuating Uriah Heep has awful difficulty making the switch from Master to Mister. And, with some prescience, Micawber chides David that he had unquestionably thought his favorite letter was A not D (630; ch. 39), a preference David is not yet cognizant of. Blunderstone itself, the rookery without rooks, extends the play upon names, reflecting David’s experience of loss. The rooks are gone, lost, or a cheat—another meaning of rook—indicating that the illusion of a rookery or nest was a blunder; it was more petrific than nest-like.

In retrospect, David discloses, with self-deprecating irony, that returning home from Yarmouth was a fantasy: “It touches me nearly now, although I tell it lightly, to recollect how eager I was to leave my happy home; to think how little I suspected what I did leave for ever” (76; ch. 2). Under the new domestic arrangement, he is greeted by an angry dog and finds his room relocated far from his mother. When he visits for the school holiday, David feels it strange “to be going home when it was not a home, and to find that every object I looked at, reminded me of the happy old home, which was like a dream I would never dream again!” (161; ch. 8). David is only one of the characters, like Emily, Dan Peggotty, the Micawbers, the Wickfields, and even the Steerforths, Heeps, and Spenlows, whose home is lost or threatened.

Even more pronounced than Dickens’s use of names and the alienated home as markers in David’s development is the theme of writing. Writing, for the young David, has its roots in reading. To escape from the oppressive Murdstone regime, he retreats to the trove of fables, from the Tales of the Arabian Nights to Peregrine Pickle, bequeathed by his father. These not only offer a refuge from the puritanical, Gradgrindish regimen, they also turn him into a story teller, initially providing private entertainments for Steerforth and ultimately fashioning him into a novelist of renown. Not surprisingly, as Juliet McMaster discovers, “His vision of a lost paradise is intimately bound up with the art of reading” (297). Beginning as a desperate escapee into a world of fables, he comes to forge his own tale of loss and resolution.

David’s mourning can be seen as mirrored in the struggle he has with writing. He must literally escape from under the damning sign pinned to his back, “Take care of him. He bites” (130; ch. 5). His correspondence with Dora Spenlow, espied by Jane Murdstone, temporarily derails his romantic hopes. He sets out to earn his way by mastering the inscrutable code of shorthand. Incrementally, with continued diligence and application (both of which he is careful to make the reader aware), David not only vanquishes “the noble art and mystery of stenography” (608; ch. 38), he establishes a career in creative writing—first desultorily with short pieces, then with acclaimed novels. But David’s current, most advanced prose is the memoir before us (paradoxically announced as not for publication). He has labored to achieve a style that is efficient, persuasive, precise, sophisticated, and, most important, transparent. This well-wrought prose presents itself as the authentic voice of the author, denuded of anything fabulous or sensational, equally distant from the Arabian tales, the undisguised sadism of Creakle’s sign, and the euphuistic epistles of Micawber. It correlates wonderfully with the speaker who has lost his illusions of a paradisial bliss, weathered his mourning, and is trenchantly recording the successful process—to a placid domesticity. Significantly, it coincides with the arrival of Agnes’s similarly guileless letter effectively summoning him back toward England and terminating his mourning. The imaginative style, like Dora, like his ebullient, youthful innocence, like Blunderstone and Yarmouth, has slipped from his life—along with his grieving.

David’s loss of innocence has, expectedly, a notable sexual dimension. At about eight, when he first encountered little Em’ly, he was young enough to indulge in all of the enthusiasms of prepubescent crushes and fantasies. Thinking back, David is “sure I loved that baby quite as truly, quite as tenderly, with greater purity and more disinterestedness, than can enter into the best love of a later time of life” (87; ch. 3). Though seemingly safe, warnings loom. There are hints at the kind of cautionary figure she would later become, abandoning Ham for an erotic sojourn with Steerforth. Emily lets slip that she is afraid of the sea and that she wants “to be a lady.” The sea, associated with open danger and the allure to which she later succumbs (partly for wanting to be made a lady), suggests the sexual or erotic figures David would warily encounter.

On first meeting Emily, David ironically describes how he and his mother “had always lived by ourselves in the happiest state imaginable, and lived so then, and always meant to live so” (84-5; ch. 3). Unsuspected by him, the very reason for his holiday jaunt, as we (and he) soon discover, is so that his mother can remarry, thus cashiering his happy existence. Leaving Emily, he claims, left a void, if he ever had one, in his heart. The void proved to be premonitory.

Much like Emily, Steerforth embodies the memoirist’s ambivalence about eroticism. David readily admits, when Steerforth is most calumnious, to his attraction. He finds him as beguiling as he had while watching him (innocently) asleep at Creakle’s. In his seduction of Emily and general drifting, we see the dangerous side of his sensuality. One of the casualties in Steerforth’s past is Rosa Dartle, whose temperamental scar (her inner, wasting fire of passion) compounds her fascination for David—a fascination he recognizes to be dangerous—even before he overhears her berating Emily (ch. 50).

Among the most comically exuberant of the novel’s passages is when David recounts his early infatuation with Dora, how engrossingly he loved her. What a “beautiful name,” he exults; “I was a captive and a slave. I loved Dora Spenlow to distraction!” (450; ch. 26). The intrusion of her confidential friend Miss Murdstone does not diminish his rapture. Not only does he feel himself “wandering in a garden of Eden,” but with Olympian humor, the adult stenographer of his youth reports having wondered “in the matrimonial cases (remembering Dora) how it was that married people could ever be otherwise than happy” (458; ch. 26). (Like his author, he has only to try it to see.)

Besides providing a good story with the advantages of self-chiding hindsight, all of these encounters combine to offer a picture of love, passion, sexuality, and marriage that, reasonably enough, gravitates from youthful, innocent abandon, including the delightful intoxication of courtship, to a more staid, settled reality, a transformation that is as grievous as it may be inexorable. As Uriah’s infiltration of the social world and his horrifying—to David—pretensions to Agnes illustrate, a serpent in the garden of love symbolizes the threatening side of eroticism. The sea is beguiling; it also forebodes death by drowning. Emily is adorable, as, in her way, is Dora; both are flawed and inadequate. Something, David increasingly senses, is missing in his storybook marriage.

Part of what John Lucas seizes upon as the core of David’s story, “the Growth of a Disciplined Heart” (170), asserts the need to constrain or discipline erotic impulses. One manifestation of this constraint is, as Rachel Ablow discerns, David’s inclination to bifurcate people he loves, disregarding the flawed portion and emotionally attaching himself to the idealized remnant. Only with the angelic Agnes can he transcend the mundane human drives and realities (Ablow, 33-36). Probably no critic goes so far as Robert Garnett in arguing that because David experiences sexual love as “dangerously destabilizing,” he ultimately turns to Agnes, whose erotic nature he frustrates by a lack of real sexual response to her (220-21). A “capacity for intense feeling, a certain heightened response to life,” which Robin Gilmour finds no longer possible for David (38), recalls Wordsworth’s pansy, which “Doth the same tale repeat” (“Intimations,” ll. 54-5).

Adam and Eve were exiled from Eden for transgressions commonly imagined to be sexual—that fruitful knowledge about which we persist in being so ambivalent. David witnesses, experiences, and seems to feel that eroticism is a threatening and unprofitable venture. His renaming by Betsey and his marriage at twenty-one are only precursors to his return to England and Agnes. That his second marriage is so briefly glossed (what more is there to say!) highlights the attitude of the book’s concluding paragraph: “O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!” David has transformed the exciting, ludic sensuality associated with youth into a quasi-religious gazing upward with Agnes. In a world where love, youth, and homes prove as ephemeral as innocence, the unearthly, exceptional Agnes alone can keep everything as it was when they were children: “Nothing seemed to have survived that time [his happy youth] but Agnes” (914; ch. 60), David concludes. He has, in his exile and return, introjected and successfully mourned the fading of this innocent world and even its sensuality. Still, the transaction does not seem entirely satisfactory, and the words of Hopkins in “Spring and Fall” seem wistfully apposite: “It is Margaret that you mourn for,” where Margaret’s “goldengroves unleaving” poetically captures the exilic experiences and disappointments awaiting Young Copperfield.

The concern with innocence, the apprehension of its evanescence, and the consequent grief or tribulation are not limited to the protagonist; they reverberate around him. The most immediate example is that of Emily; more pronouncedly than David’s, her crisis is sexual and her journey is tortuous, accompanied by betrayal and despair. Shadowing Emily is the figure of Martha Endell, the melodramatic incarnation of a fallen woman, with clear remorse for her fall from innocence. Mr. Dick, who rejects the more stately name of Richard Badger, is the epitome or Dickensian caricature of stymied innocence. Though he retained his childlike faculties, the cost was high: being cast out and then becoming a dependent. His patron, Betsey, is yet another incidental victim of a youthful indiscretion (a highly disadvantageous marriage) that costs and costs. No surprise, she is fanatical about chasing the intruding donkeys from the private garden she has willfully cultivated.

Annie Strong embodies an interesting, complementary narrative. The world, including David, appeared convinced of her duplicitous meanderings with the scalawag Jack Maldon. Because of this suspect connection, David was disillusioned and uneasy that Agnes’s relationship with Annie was inappropriate. He reports his discomfort: “The innocent beauty of her face was not as innocent to me as it had been.…It was as if the tranquil sanctuary of my boyhood [he was seventeen] had been sacked before my face, and its peace and honour given to the winds” (339; ch. 19). Even the equable Mr. Wickfield was ready to abide Uriah’s vigilante prosecution of Annie to Dr. Strong. Dramatically, Annie’s sturdy self-vindication chastened her doubters. It also set her apart from the pervasively vulnerable surrounding society. Along with Agnes, she stands as a fixed, instructive figure of rectitude—even more obviously at the cost of her sexuality. The rush to judgment, especially David’s, since we are primarily attuned to his retrospections, makes clear the fragility of innocence.

Annie’s speech pushes David to reconsider his judgment and to recognize the virtues of “a disciplined heart.” This becomes a personal reference for him throughout the remainder of the novel, one not without its awkwardnesses. In accepting the need for emotional discipline, David forsakes his youthful ebullience and openness. Eerily, however, the notion of discipline uncomfortably echoes Murdstone’s demand for firmness of character. And the ogreish stepfather’s insistence upon firmness sounds alarmingly akin to the young husband’s desire to form his bride’s mind and character. David’s intention disconcertingly mirrors the “satisfaction” Murdstone anticipated “in the thought of marrying an inexperienced and artless person, and forming her character” (100; ch. 4). In this, though, Dora is wiser than David and realizes the futility of his attempts; she will never achieve maturity and reason and practicality. Rather, she passes him on to Agnes. We again become aware that the successfully disciplined heart, successfully mended, exacts the price of ecstasy. David simply cannot respond to Agnes the way he did to Emily or to Dora, but he and his family will presumably prosper.

To round out the canvas, David witnesses instances of unsuccessful mourning—approximating the pathological alternative that Freud identified as melancholia. Mrs. Steerforth and Rosa Dartle in their different manners loved Steerforth and were immoderately invested in his prospects. When his unguided waywardness led to his destruction, both were devastated. Likewise, Ham may declare his enduring love for Emily and hold himself to blame, but there is no life for him beyond the loss of her. He, like Steerforth (and along with him), is overwhelmed by the turbulence of the seductive passions the sea represents. The climactic chapter, “The Tempest,” as Tolstoy for one recognized it, makes driftwood and spume of those who do not manage to clip their adolescent wings. David was duly sobered; immediately after delivering her son’s remains to Mrs. Steerforth, he undertakes his Wordsworthian, Byronic, Ruskinian, and even Arnoldian pilgrimage to the Alps.

The comprehensively remembered, lucidly and artfully retold journey of David, then, revolves around his painful—though hardly unique—loss of innocence and the concomitant grief and mourning. The story is replete with allusions to fairy tales, to nineteenth-century literature, and to the profession of writing (rooted in observing, remembering, and reading)—all of which contribute to this core emotional process. The Victorians garnered a reputation for valuing the hearth, marriage and the family; but the novels, those tell-all middle-class domestic mirrors, whether they be by Eliot, Meredith, Hardy, or even Thackeray or Dickens, expose an uneasy, compromised reality. David, as a writer, is peculiarly implicated in and aware of the compromise. As the artist-hero, he—unlike Dora, Mr. Dick, and others—must outgrow his innocence, if he is to succeed and be effective. This involves an unavoidable loss, one that he records and that he and Dickens acknowledge.

Source

From Dickens Quarterly 24, no. 2 (June 2007): 63-77. Copyright © 2007 by Dickens Quarterly. Reprinted by permission of Dickens Quarterly.

Works Cited