Today, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the association of eccentricity with Englishness might seem an age-old commonplace—a form of comic global cliché perpetuated by rollicking songs such as Noël Coward’s “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” The English, we are led to believe, take pride in being wacky or harmlessly bloody-minded, going “out in the midday sun” when others more sensible choose to stay indoors.2 But in this paper I want to argue that the association of eccentricity with Englishness is a relatively recent phenomenon and that its provenance lies in the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although in retrospect it seems valid to apply the term “eccentric” to numerous pre-Victorian literary texts—Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-67) comes immediately to mind—I argue here that the coupling of eccentricity with Englishness is only cultivated consciously in the early-to-mid-Victorian period (1830s to 1860s), through figures such as Charles Dickens and Mill. What is more, as the epigraph above will confirm, eccentricity is not treated flippantly at this time. On the contrary, it has a range of ideological possibility and moral substance much richer than it has today.
The earliest usages of “eccentricity” recorded in the OED refer to the field of astronomy, to planetary orbits with decentered axes, or to a lack of concentricity in the celestial sphere. Occasionally, with an archaic spelling, “excentric” is used figuratively to refer to odd human behavior. Only in the late eighteenth century do figurative usages begin to predominate. Frequently, the astronomical nuances linger in the coupling of the term “eccentric” with the idea of an excursion away from the beaten track of humdrum living. Eccentricity thus becomes an assertion of individual liberty that will not capitulate to containment but instead celebrates excess, an implication particularly evident in the titles of works about eccentrics.3
Recent explorations of English history and culture suggest that the notion of character played an intriguing role at a time when the national identity of Englishness was being forged. Character was frequently the articulating term that integrated the distinctiveness of the individual with the coherence of the nation. John Lucas and Linda Colley have both argued that liberty was one of the predominant cultural claims on which an Enlightenment sense of Englishness was founded in the early years of the eighteenth century.4 Since character stood as a manifestation of individual freedom within a nation that prided itself on the liberty of its citizens, to be a character in the sense of feeling free to assert one’s individuality was simultaneously to participate in defining the national character as free. Gerald Newman also notices this dual function, arguing that the distinguishing feature of the English claimed by myth makers of national identity in the mid-eighteenth century was sincerity. Through his sincerity a middle-class man of character could distinguish himself from rivals such as the aristocracy or, at an international level, the French. Like liberty, sincerity of character was the term through which individual and communal obligations could be negotiated.5
This dual imperative to balance the kind of difference that defines the individual as a character or discrete unit with the need for a degree of conformity that allows characters to function together toward social cohesiveness became particularly pressing in the early decades of the Victorian period. It played out in the expanding middle classes as the need to reconcile upward mobility and the drive toward personal betterment with the obligation to maintain the equilibrium of the family unit on which democratic politics and a capitalist industrial economy depend.
Dickens is an author unusually attentive to this dual imperative. His earliest works reflect his recognition that individualism could be readily available to the economically successful but beyond the range of the laboring poor and women in particular. Yet, if individualism were sacrificed to the interests of a broader common good, there would be little to prevent a middle-class world from devolving into dreary homogeneity. In Sketches by Boz, Dickens contemplates the resigned anonymity of numerous Londoners and invents the peripatetic Boz to roam at will and transform homogeneity into character through his powers of observation. In The Pickwick Papers, the colorful individualism of Sam Weller works as a foil to the staunch good sense of his employer, Pickwick; their relationship prefigures the way Dickensian eccentricity will link individual difference to common welfare in the later novels.
In its Dickensian form, eccentricity emerges as a nostalgic return to novelistic character of the preceding century, prompted and shaped by retrospective literary debates of the early nineteenth century. One of the most influential and memorable voices in these debates was William Hazlitt. In the sixth of his eight Lectures on the English Comic Writers, first published in 1819, he declares Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Richardson, and Sterne to be “our four best novel-writers,” attributing their greatness to the relative political stability and economic prosperity of George II’s reign, a period when, in Hazlitt’s words, “there was a general spirit of sturdiness and independence, which made the English character more truly English than perhaps at any other period.”6 There is an echo here of both the liberty noted by Lucas and Colley and the sincerity or capacity to be true to oneself identified by Newman.
The coding of such distinct character as specifically English, as opposed to French, is well illustrated by a passage from Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey, in the episode in which Yorick uses “a few king William’s shillings” to demonstrate to the Count de B**** at Versailles the “distinct variety and originality of character, which distinguishes [the English], not only from each other, but from all the world besides.”7 It is an argument that can also be found in Hazlitt’s fourth essay on the drama written for the London Magazine in April 1820, where he argues that it is precisely the loss of this capacity to represent individual difference that has weakened early-nineteenth-century English drama.8 Character needs to be preserved as part of a celebrated past heritage on the verge of becoming lost, but also reinvented to accommodate shifting cultural tensions. This, Dickens undertakes by reinventing character as eccentricity.
Even to mention eccentricity in relation to Dickens is surely to invoke his entire oeuvre, for all the characters in his novels—with the exceptions of the hero and heroine—seem to some degree eccentric. A number of features set David Copperfield apart from the rest of Dickens’s work, however, as an interesting example for study. First, David himself as a nascent author is represented as an apprentice to the eighteenth-century genius for character invention when he reads the cache of novels left by his deceased father in a secluded upstairs room at Blunderstone Rookery. Among his mentors, Smollett and Fielding predominate.9 David’s autobiography is therefore both a Bildungsroman documenting his development as an inventor of characters, and an account of his own training to be himself a man of character.
A second feature distinguishing this novel is that, as the personal history of a novelist, it draws on Dickens’s own autobiography in its first fourteen chapters and ironically provides material on which Dickens’s intimate friend and biographer, John Forster, draws to constitute Dickens as “Dickens.” As we shall see, David Copperfield thus illustrates Dickens’s use of eccentricity to reconcile individualism with communal responsibility and at the same time shows self-reflectively the role eccentricity plays in articulating what it means to Dickens to be the pre-eminent English novelist of the period.
In fashioning this role of English novelist for himself, Dickens implicitly declares his own nationalist sentiments while distancing himself from nationalism of the cruder, more aggressive variety popular after the end of the Napoleonic wars and prefigurative of late 1870s jingoism. As George Orwell has declared, “never anywhere does he indulge in the typical English boasting, the ’island race,’ ’bulldog breed,’ ’right little, tight little island’ style of talk.”10 Dickens’s nationalism takes the form of a moral rather than a political concern about the condition of England. He parodies boastful nationalism as a brand of complacency that works against the country’s best moral interests. It is embodied, for instance, in Mr. Podsnap of Our Mutual Friend as he blusters to “the foreign [French] gentleman,” that “[T]here is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an independence, a responsibility, a repose, combined with an absence of everything calculated to call a blush into the cheek of a young person, which one would seek in vain among the Nations of the Earth.”11
What is it, we may ask, that makes Podsnap so repugnant in his nationalism while Sterne’s Yorick is endearing and a character? I suggest it is the former’s lack of self-awareness, made apparent through authorial irony, as opposed to the self-irony practiced by the latter through first person narration. In the passage cited, Podsnap not only embodies precisely the opposite of the Englishness he touts—modesty, repose, and discretion are anathema to Podsnappery—but he also fails to see that what he says does not coincide with what he is. Self-awareness is the trademark of Dickensian eccentricity, making it the ally and guarantor of sincerity or sincerity’s Victorian counterpart, earnestness.
Eccentricity’s self-reflexive quality allows Dickens both to create a gallery of eccentrics and to define himself as the master eccentric, the “inimitable B [Boz],” as he calls himself in his correspondence with Forster.12 From this it might seem that inimitability—an essential selfhood or ontological uniqueness that refuses to be curtailed by convention—is the defining feature of the eccentric. Yet this is not the case in Dickens’s reinvention of the concept. As David Copperfield shows, the oddity of the most striking eccentrics in Dickens’s novels is ironically less that “originality” for which Mill will subsequently yearn than the capacity to masquerade, the power to don and remove masks that does not depend on some original essence but rather brings that essence into being.
One of the problems inherent in claiming sincerity or earnestness as a national characteristic is the difficulty of distinguishing it from its counterparts, hypocrisy and cant. The great symbolic advantage of the mask as a vehicle for establishing moral value is that it can produce the effect of a bedrock of previously concealed truth. It is up to the author to choose whether the truths revealed are ultimately values that appear to be unquestionable (such as earnestness and decency), or the threat to those values (hypocrisy and cant), which are thankfully exposed. Dickens exploits both possibilities in David Copperfield. Eccentrics in this novel do not simply wear masks or assume poses; they do so self-consciously. In memorable scenes of revelation or self-exposure, eccentrics repeatedly acknowledge their oddity to be a guise, thereby implying that behind it lies a bedrock of moral value. This is one way in which eccentricity operates as the site of negotiation between individual and communal imperatives. For repeatedly the unveiled eccentric’s core of moral values proves to be the generalized, implicitly Christian but class- and gender-neutral qualities of decency and earnestness that themselves echo eighteenth-century English sincerity. The political, economic, or psychic costs of these values—whether, for instance, it is easier for a financially secure member of the landed gentry to be decent than it is for an impoverished factory hand—are not a primary concern in Dickens’s novels. Instead, the operations of eccentricity establish a supposedly shared core of cultural values. For once eccentrics put aside the mask of oddity, they cease to appear as outsiders or creatures of extremes, and become recognizable as part of a moderate, humane commonalty.
Through the performance of masking and unmasking, the eccentric earns the moral right to displace the masks of hypocrites, those enemies of earnestness and decency who hide humbug and cant under the veneer of respectability. In fact, one might go so far as to say that Dickensian eccentricity is the moral antidote to self-serving hypocrisy, which is itself perceived to be a specifically English vice. Forster interprets hypocrisy in nationalistic terms when he reminisces about the reception of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843). Focusing on the inveterate cant of Mr. Pecksniff, he remarks, “The confession is not encouraging to national pride, but this character is so far English, that though our countrymen as a rule are by no means Pecksniffs the ruling weakness is to countenance and encourage the race.”13 Forster goes on to declare that such hypocrisy is not to be found in either of the neighboring societies of America or France; for the former is an “Eden” too newly established to harbor such deception, while the latter—in the view of French critic and Dickens enthusiast, Hippolyte Taine—no longer knows the kind of respect for morality that could encourage a hypocritical pretense to virtue.14 Pecksniff’s hypocrisy and Tom Pinch’s pliancy before it are therefore English vices, and by exposing them in his novels, Dickens implicitly defines himself as the national conscience and moral guide, even a Carlylean “Hero as Man of Letters,” who follows the gospel preached by Samuel Johnson to “Clear your mind of Cant!”15
The operations of eccentricity—both as a mask and agent of unmasking—working against the pressures of respectability to promote earnestness and decency, are everywhere apparent in David Copperfield. Let me consider four of the novel’s most obvious eccentrics. Aunt Betsey Trotwood, Mr. Dick, Miss Mowcher, and Wilkins Micawber all overtly participate in shaping David as a man of character: a “Man of Letters” hero, or national spokesman and celebrity. As Jerome H. Buckley argues, David himself, if not quite colorless, is certainly “at pains to establish his psychological ’normalcy.’”16 He has the quality of gentlemanly blandness, the capacity to stand in for everybody and nobody in particular that characterizes the hero in novels of the mid-eighteenth century. This genteel moderation, of which Pickwick is an early embodiment, depends for both its stability and its charm on the mediating activities of the more colorful eccentrics that surround him.17
To begin with Aunt Betsey: her imposing demeanor is apparently the effect of her stubborn refusal to conform to the behavior expected of a middle-class Victorian woman. Far from being gently compliant or willing to effect change by the discreet exercise of influence—of the kind recommended in the late 1830s by Sarah Stickney Ellis—Aunt Betsey “seldom conduct[s] herself like any ordinary Christian,” but bears herself with “a fell rigidity of figure” (p. 11). She is variously described as “pretty stiff in the back” (p. 165), having an “inflexibility in her face,” and features that are “unbending and austere” (p. 170). In these respects, she seems to mirror Jane Murdstone; yet, where the latter’s rigidity is directed toward upholding conventions and ensuring conformity and compliance, Aunt Betsey’s is directed toward resisting conventions and celebrating her individuality through unorthodox conduct. If initially David fears Aunt Betsey for her unpredictability, later he finds her eccentricity reassuring, especially when she uses it to resist the grim resolution of the Murdstones.
Gradually it becomes clear that Aunt Betsey’s eccentricity works in the interests of a new moral order in which the tyranny of humbug and cant is replaced by decency and earnestness. In David’s education and upbringing, the guardianship of the Murdstones is supplanted by that of Aunt Betsey and Mr. Dick, while Mr. Creakle is displaced by Dr. Strong. It is the eccentric Aunt Betsey who encourages David to train himself never to be false, and to find a partner who will foster in him a “deep, downright, faithful earnestness” (p. 425). Her worthiness to be the champion of these virtues is guaranteed when she reveals her eccentricity to be a façade assumed to counter the emotional and financial devastation she experiences at the hands of her dissolute husband. The moment when she tells her “grumpy, frumpy story” (p. 579) to David is the moment when Aunt Betsey reveals her eccentricity to be not a unique self expressing itself in earnest, but instead the mask behind which the self, conscious of its own failing, works for a more moral society. Many critics have justifiably emphasized Aunt Betsey’s outlandish qualities, but if, like A. O. J. Cockshut, we go so far as to argue that, being in the tradition of the fairy godmother, “she has no human need to conform herself to reality,” we run the risk of overlooking the way in which her eccentricity determines the moral stability of David’s world.18 She is a reformer, not in any material sense of political, economic, or class reform, but in the moral sense of making the world better, where “better” has the ring of genteel, middle-class, Christian humanism.
Mr. Dick, perhaps the nonpareil of eccentrics in David Copperfield, is also otherworldly and conscious of being so. He declares to David that this world is “Mad as Bedlam, boy!” (p. 177), and in a variety of ways he declines to be a part of it. By refusing to use his proper name (Richard Babley), Mr. Dick refuses the place he has been assigned in this symbolic disorder. He is most at ease when transported vicariously above the world by his kite. If he seems mad, Aunt Betsey treats his insanity as a pose. Repeatedly she urges him to drop what she regards as a pretense of idiocy, and when David asks her if Mr. Dick is “at all out of his mind,” she flatly responds, “Not a morsel” (p. 178).
Like Aunt Betsey’s, Mr. Dick’s eccentricity is a mask that he consciously dons to protect himself from the injustice of the world as he works to remedy that injustice. Eccentricity thus allows him to act as the agent of moral order when the world’s madness has reached an intolerable level. When, for instance, he intervenes to reconcile Annie Strong with her husband, Mr. Dick declares himself able to do so because his eccentricity—which he explicitly acknowledges—earns him immunity from the constraints imposed on ordinary people. He is so eccentric that he no longer signifies—he is a “nobody” (p. 551). While neither Dr. Strong nor Annie dares to initiate a conversation that would explain Jack Maldon’s standing in relation to Annie, Mr. Dick may do so without fear of indelicacy. The effect of Mr. Dick’s intervention is to correct an earlier unveiling scene when Uriah Heep, in a fit of righteous respectability, supposedly for Dr. Strong’s benefit, coerces Mr. Wickfield and David into admitting their suspicions that Annie Strong has been dallying with Jack Maldon. The subsequent revelation engineered by Mr. Dick reveals in turn Uriah’s hypocrisy and Annie’s virtue. More importantly, though, it reveals to David that his own marriage to Dora Spenlow is not “founded on a rock,” as the Strongs’ marriage is. From the earnestness of Annie’s confession, David recognizes his marriage as the product of “the first mistaken impulse of [an] undisciplined heart,” reflecting that worst disparity in marriage, “unsuitability of mind and purpose” (pp. 558, 560). Only after this revelation can David appreciate the role played by an angelic wife in shaping a “Man of Letters” hero into a man of moral character.
Notably, Mr. Dick’s eccentricity is combined with a childlike ability to dispense with the ceremony and propriety that the Murdstones advocate and get directly to the point of social well-being. When Aunt Betsey asks his advice on what to do with the destitute David, Mr. Dick focuses directly on the creature comforts the child so badly needs: “I should wash him!” (p. 170); “I should put him to bed” (p. 174); and “Have him measured for a suit of clothes directly” (p. 186). This capacity is also linked to a creativity and ingenuity that has the freshness of youth, and a special charm for children: at Dr. Strong’s school, Mr. Dick is a “universal favorite” (p. 218). More than a harmless wackiness, ingenuity of Mr. Dick’s kind is repeatedly represented in the novel as part of a national creativity and initiative, the kind of spirit of enterprise that in Hazlitt’s view flourished in George II’s reign but now, in Carlyle’s “Mechanical Age,”19 threatens to disappear into the mindless bureaucracy of the “Circumlocution Office” (Little Dorrit), endless legal obfuscation (Bleak House and David Copperfield), rote learning in the cruel schools of hard fact (Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, and Hard Times) and the dehumanization of workers into factory “hands” (Hard Times).
The third instance of striking eccentricity, that of Miss Mowcher, bears many similarities to the cases of both Aunt Betsey and Mr. Dick, except that here it is attributed to a working-class woman. Mowcher’s volatility—her delight in the arts of transformation and disguise—is a masquerade, enabling her to dislodge the masks of humbug that guarantee power to the aristocratic and genteel. Thus, where Steerforth flaunts David’s naïveté and vulnerability by referring to him as “Daisy” (p. 248), Mowcher exposes Steerforth’s self-serving dandyism by addressing him as “My flower!” (p. 279). While she lets it be known that she is privy to the domestic secrets of the nobility, she simultaneously exposes them as ineffectual and impotent. A feature of her volatility is her ability to be omnipresent, to move effortlessly across economic, class, and geographic boundaries, making “little darts into the provinces…to pick up customers everywhere, and to know everybody” (p. 287), so that her potential for disruption seems limitless. Her chief function in the plot is to undermine Littimer’s coercive propriety, which he uses to subdue communal resourcefulness and ingenuity of the kind displayed in the mutton-grilling scene at David’s London dinner party (chap. 28). Mowcher abandons her volatility when she discovers that she has been unwittingly complicit in the deception of the Peggotty family and the seduction of Little Em’ly and has thereby been working against decency and earnestness.20 Like Aunt Betsey’s, Mowcher’s eccentricity is revealed as a disguise that has hidden a closet sentimentalist. While initially it has the disruptive qualities of satire, it eventually gives way to the morality of the new social order in which humbugs and hypocrites such as the Murdstones, Littimer, and Uriah Heep are not tolerated.
The last eccentric I want to consider, Wilkins Micawber, shares some characteristics with the preceding examples but perhaps in his differences contributes the most interesting dimension of my argument. Like Aunt Betsey, Mr. Dick, and Miss Mowcher, Micawber acts as an agent of demystification and exposure, and he also expands the scope of David’s Bildung. Micawber’s utter inability to support himself and his family illustrates for David the ineffectiveness of a gentlemanly upbringing. As Chris Vanden Bossche observes, the Micawbers are a comic version of the upper-class Steerforth family David idealizes.21 Through Micawber, David is forced to learn lessons he might otherwise have managed to evade; for instance, he learns the skills of barter and pawn that enable him to survive his journey to Dover. And through Micawber’s eccentric sociability, David comes into contact with the host of paupers inhabiting the King’s Bench Prison who will later become the material of the novels he writes, not for a restricted genteel readership, but for all inhabitants of the British Empire. Micawber’s random eruptions into the course of David’s life serve as a recurrent reminder to the young author of the abject impoverishment that he has managed to escape, but which is nevertheless endured by so many of the English public for whom, as the contributor to a truly national literature, he must write.
Yet if Micawber appears to encourage David’s training in upper-middle-class gentility, there is also, as Alexander Welsh has remarked, a dimension of his behavior that is severely threatening to the bourgeois morality that underpins the novel.22 Micawber resolutely refuses to view his financial difficulties as shameful. Rather, to David’s chagrin, he boasts of them (p. 224), and this, in the 1830s and ’40s, would have been decidedly un-English if we are to believe Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who declares that “In other countries poverty is a misfortune,—with us it is a crime,” a view borne out repeatedly in Dickens’s novels.23 Characters such as Mr. Toots of Dombey and Son and Richard Carstone of Bleak House are driven to self-disgust by their own genteel incompetence. Not so Micawber; his personal peculiarity is to transform sordid financial deficiency into the stuff of high melodrama and histrionics, immersing himself in an endless carnival of threats by debtors, transports of mortification, epistolary and rhetorical flights, and consoling punchbowls.
Repeatedly Micawber gathers himself up to deliver to David solemn axioms for the attainment of social success—“Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!” (p. 154). At such moments Micawber seems poised to participate in the ideology of economic enterprise; but without fail, his apparent conformity transforms into a celebration of his own immunity to such social imperatives. Responsibility vanishes as he drinks “a glass of punch with an air of great enjoyment and satisfaction, and whistle[s] the College Hornpipe” (p. 154). Mrs. Micawber’s declarations of domestic loyalty to her husband similarly verge on participation in middle-class propriety. Her emphatic announcement, “I never will desert Mr. Micawber” (p. 151), is of a kind with Agnes Wickfield’s devotion to her father and David, or Sophy Traddles’s loyalty to Tommy. Yet in Mrs. Micawber’s case, steadfast earnestness collapses into hysteria, provoking a riotous scene in which the chorus “Gee up Dobbin” (p. 152), the heads and tails of shrimps, and the tears of both Micawbers and David mingle in a melodramatic chaos.
This transformation of the principles of earnestness and decency into the material of riotous comedy suggests the potential in Dickens’s eccentricity to be radically unsettling; however, Dickens does not often exploit that capacity. More often he constrains his eccentrics to work in the interests of social and national cohesion. As the site of a reforming individualism, eccentricity disrupts the status quo only to guarantee a new social order that may be more morally decent but is not necessarily more politically or economically just than its predecessor. If we look back again, for instance, at Aunt Betsey, we find that, for all its vigor, her eccentricity persistently works to support a domestic order that rewards middle-class enterprise, which the working classes are encouraged to emulate but certainly not to challenge. For instance, although she herself is represented as a participant in a very unorthodox romantic misalliance, generating its own riotous black comedy, she readily recognizes the dangers of her nephew’s marriage to the “wax doll” (p. 11) Clara, a woman incapable of acting in the best economic and moral interests of her husband, her family, or herself.
The discovery that Aunt Betsey’s eccentricity is a guise behind which lies a closet sentimentalist compromises the reforming force of that eccentricity. Similarly, Miss Mowcher’s volatility has the potential to disrupt the status quo radically, but in her final appearance in the novel, when she apprehends Littimer in the streets of Southampton, she proves herself a worthy vigilante, earning accolades from the public and the forces of the law for ensuring the arrest of one whose villainy lies chiefly in his wish to rise above his social station.
Only in Micawber’s eccentricity do we see elements of a more subversive potential. On the surface, his genteel resistance to middle-class expectations of a family man might be read as simply the counterpart to Uriah Heep’s seemingly “umble” (p. 203), but intently aggressive, self-help. There are many points of contrast between the two men. Uriah, on the one hand, is strongly associated with death: he is repeatedly referred to as “cadaverous,” is dressed in black, and has “a long, lank skeleton hand” (p. 191). His father was a sexton, and his mother, extending the customary Victorian mourning period of two years, continues to wear widow’s weeds although her husband has been dead for nearly five years (p. 203). Micawber, on the other hand, incarnates vitality. Through his sheer lust for life he manages to transform financial difficulties into the ritual consumption of luxury foods and beverages. Recurring references to his expanding family, underscored by descriptions of Mrs. Micawber’s perpetual feeding of the twins from “Nature’s founts” (p. 222), associate the Micawbers with an irrepressible fecundity.
Just as Aunt Betsey explodes the pretensions of the Murdstones, and Miss Mowcher unveils Littimer, Micawber’s definitive role in the plot of David Copperfield is, of course, to expose the opportunistic machinations of Uriah Heep. His eccentric delight in melodrama and histrionics is at its most flamboyant when he exposes Heep’s charity-school humility as an elaborate charade. What is peculiar about Micawber, however, is that his own histrionics are never clearly identified as an act. His delight in striking poses is so thoroughgoing that it is impossible to be sure whether his ability to be extraordinarily “elastic,” to use David’s term (p. 141), will ever be identifiable as the mask of eccentricity. The nearest we come to a scene of unmasking is in chapter 49, when Micawber’s investigations into Heep’s fraud are reaching a crisis point, and he meets with David and Tommy Traddles outside the King’s Bench Prison. Earlier, when Micawber starts to work for Heep, he dons a suit of legal black in what appears to be a gesture of conformity. For several chapters it is difficult for the reader to tell whether his conformity has not developed into that worst of English vices—complicity with hypocrisy and deception. When at last Micawber meets with David and Tommy Traddles, however, he has relinquished the suit of black and returned to his old garb, only slightly lacking his former panache. Unlike Miss Betsey’s rigidity, Mr. Dick’s insanity, or Miss Mowcher’s volatility, Micawber’s eccentricity does not fall away here to produce a core of decency. Rather, in resuming his old outfit, he turns away from hypocrisy and respectability back to eccentricity, as if eccentricity were indeed no mask but an ontological uniqueness struggling to reassert itself.
In his original dress Micawber is able to resume his peculiar role in the novel as the embodiment of a comical, but potentially threatening contrariness. As an eccentric, he has the power to unmask hypocrisy, but he may even go so far as to refuse to participate in the “thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness” (p. 512) that should be the effect of the new social order. Where Heep may represent the hypocrisy that pervades Dickens’s England and is condoned by the morally ineffectual (the Mr. Wickfields, Tom Pinches, and Twemlows), Micawber embodies an eccentricity that is too extreme to inhabit a society that hallows moderation.
It is perhaps for this reason that Micawber must meet a fate parallel to Heep’s. If the latter is ultimately to be transported, Micawber too must go “down under”; for as Stanley Tick points out, Micawber represents an expression of otherness that serves to test and modify David’s autobiographical discourse.24 In the mother country Micawber’s eccentricity is unsettling, immoderate, and therefore potentially un-English. Only in another country, at a safe distance from England, can he be convincingly recuperated as a pillar of symbolic order and decency, learning fiscal responsibility, becoming a district magistrate, and in a final epistolary flourish sent to David via old Daniel Peggotty, standing witness to the novelist’s moral influence on the farthest reaches of the British Empire.
As I have already remarked, because of the self-reflexive structure of this novel and of eccentricity as a trait, any observations about the relations between Micawber and David inevitably prompt one to extend the connection to include Dickens himself. From the time of the novel’s first publication in parts, readers have remarked on the fatherly behavior of Micawber to David and surmised the original of Micawber to have been the author’s father, John Dickens. To this we could add the possibility that Micawber represents a spirit of rebellion Dickens recognizes in himself. It is after all remarkable how many instances there are, both in Dickens’s collected letters and in Forster’s biography, of Dickens assuming the character of Micawber.
On 30 September 1849, as he is about to leave Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight for his favorite resort of Broadstairs in Kent, Dickens writes to Forster describing himself as “under the depressing and discomforting influence of paying off the tribe of bills that pour in upon an unfortunate family-young-man on the eve of a residence like this.”25 In subsequent letters he identifies both his compulsion to be constantly on the move and his oppression by the expenses of this itinerant lifestyle with Micawber. On 5 October 1849, he says in a letter to his friend John Leech, “I write, as my friend Mr. Micawber says, ’with a sickly mask of mirth,’ but I am rather behind time.”26 Shortly after this, he writes to Forster “speaking dolefully of some family matters” and subscribes the letter “each word forming a separate line, ’Yours Despondently, And Disgustedly, Wilkins Micawber.’”27 Then, in 1850, the day before the birth of his third daughter, Dora Annie, he writes of his wife Kate, “’Mrs. Micawber is still’ (15 August)…’I regret to say, in statu quo. Ever yours, WILKINS MICAWBER.’”28 It is as if assuming the position of Micawber enables Dickens to defuse his anxieties about precisely those demands of decent, middle-class living that Micawber’s eccentricity resists: the imperative for a family man to remain solvent; the necessity of his working indefatigably; and the questionable wisdom of keeping his wife interminably pregnant. In two later letters, Dickens’s anxiety about his ability to be a constantly productive and effective writer emerges in reiterations of Micawber’s memorable hope that “something will turn up.”29 Even a recipe for punch, reminiscent of Micawber’s brew, in chapter 28 of David Copperfield, appears in Dickens’s correspondence, replete with instructions about the peeling of lemons, the burning of rum, and the addition of boiling water.30 In each of these cases, Micawber seems to return as the embodiment of a rogue impulse in Dickens—an impulse to escape and, by sheer excess, to unsettle the very decency, earnestness, and moderation on which his authorial eminence is based.
Once relegated to another country, the unsettling quality of Micawber’s eccentricity is neutralized by distance and can become a difference that both distinguishes the Englishman from other colonists and, presumably, from the indigenous inhabitants of colonized countries, while at the same time clarifying David’s, and by extension Dickens’s, specifically English excellence. It is the hyperbolic difference that confirms the pre-eminent English author as reliably moderate—a man of genius in his capacity to champion moral decency without fanaticism. In this regard, Micawber’s open letter in the Port Middlebay Times, brought from Australia by Daniel Peggotty, reassures David “You are not unknown here, you are not unappreciated.…Go on, my dear sir, in your Eagle course!” (p. 733). This letter, written on behalf of the inhabitants of Port Middlebay, is testimony of David’s status as the pre-eminent English novelist. His influence is worthy to be felt throughout the empire, even among those territories that use literature as a forum for resisting English cultural sovereignty. Micawber’s message is also reminiscent of an effusive letter received by Dickens toward the end of 1849 from the self-appointed Russian translator of Dombey and Son: “’For the last eleven years your name has enjoyed a wide celebrity in Russia, and from the banks of the Neva to the remotest parts of Siberia you are read with avidity. Your Dombey continues to inspire with enthusiasm the whole of the literary Russia.’”31 If David’s reputation extends across the British Empire, the “inimitable Boz” is known and admired internationally.
Thus it is that eccentricity plays its double function. From within English society it is the mask of oddity that unmasks hypocrisy, constituting earnestness and decency as the bedrock of a moral society. Beyond the borders of England, within the broader empire, it takes the form of a rhetorical and affective excess that parades the Englishman’s cultural difference even as it helps to stabilize and disseminate English moral values. Because these values are so broadly defined, they are easy to identify with and readily create a sense of like-mindedness among readers. It is Dickens’s canny ability to indulge difference in the eccentrics of his novels while cultivating the sameness of apparently shared values that establishes his reputation as a master eccentric, pre-eminent Victorian novelist, and embodiment of the “genius, mental vigour, and moral courage” that Mill subsequently identified as the correlatives of eccentricity.