“First, I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits.” David Copperfield endures the catastrophes and finds the compensations. As a refugee from a weak mother, a wicked step father, and a cruel headmaster, David Copperfield journeys into purposeful friendship, love, and the life of a writer.
“David Copperfield” suggests that there are providential compensations for fatherless boys forced into a cruel world before they are ready. One compensation to David are books like “Don Quixote” and “Tom Jones.” “I should have been perfectly miserable, I have no doubt, but for the old books. They were my only comfort; and I was as true to them as they were to me, and read them over and over I don’t know how many times more.”
A second compensation is the marvelous companionship of the most colorful and eccentric characters in all of literature. The grandiose debtor Mr. Micawber repeatedly threatens in grandiloquent language to slit his own throat to escape the disgrace of penury, “This is the end of Wilkins Micawber!” Yet, in a flash he recovers his bedrock optimism and declares that he must continue “in case anything turns up.” –which he is “hourly expecting.”
Another favorite is the kindly Mr. Dick, who flies kites and talks to the beheaded Charles I, residing in exile in Dick’s brain. There is also Aunt Betsey Trotwood, who is as independent woman as you will find in 19th Century literature (she will not suffer donkeys to cross her lawn); yet, she does look to the addled Mr. Dick to ratify what she has already decided to do. There is Mr. Peggoty, who lives in a shipwrecked boat –“You’ll find us rough, sir, but you’ll find us ready,” and there is gruff and grunting Mr. Barkis, “who is always willin’!”
The central theme of “Copperfield” is echoed in Aunt Bestsy’s exhortation to David, “We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to frighten us, my dear. We must learn to act the play out. We must live misfortune down.(461)
David Copperfield is my favorite Dickens novel, which I have read three times (and one of those times out loud to my daughters). It rests on my altar bookshelf. The second half of my own childhood was not happy, but it softened my heart and provided raw material for character development. “Sometimes I have risen superior to my difficulties. Sometimes my difficulties have- in short, floored me. (246) As the Irish say, “the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.” Although my experience was not Dickensian, there was enough pain for me to identity with David Copperfield, who helps me to focus on the compensations rather than the catastrophes.
****
It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets.... As a man upon a field of battle will receive a mortal hurt and scarcely know that he is struck... I had no conception of the wound with which I had to strive. (748)