Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, adapted by Matthew Francis

Every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage.

How fascinated the mid-Victorians were about the individual past! As the English middle-class increased and prospered during the 19th century, as the novel became the dominant literary genre, reaching thousands upon thousands of newly-literate households throughout the nation and the empire, as pundits and politicians applauded the self-made man over the hereditary aristocrat, so exploded a passionate interest in individual life stories, whether biographical or fictional. "The history of the world," declared historian Thomas Carlyle (a revered friend of Charles Dickens) in 1840, "Is but the biography of great men" and "that most important modern person" was "the Hero as Man of Letters."

During the nineteen months of serial publication of David Copperfield (1849-1850), two other supreme works of memory appeared in England, Wordsworth's The Prelude and Tennyson's In Memoriam. Thackeray's semi-autobiographical Pendennis appeared serially at the same time. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's powerful first-person examination of a woman's life from childhood on, had been published in 1847. The great Victorian authors—and the great Victorian reading public as well—wanted to know, in these pre-Freudian days, what had shaped the soul of this representative man or woman? What journey begun in childhood had led them to the fullness of adult maturity?

It's now a truism of literary study that all fiction grows out of the life of the writer. The correspondence goes far, far beyond the obvious use of biographical materials. To a largely unconscious degree, the fictive process is a sly, subtle transformation of the people in a writer's life and a shadowy, twisted reinvention of its events. Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) is a prime example of this process. In most of Dickens' many novels the reader can track, in endlessly looping variation, the novelist's unconscious obsessions, his friends, family and life experiences, his deep social concerns, and his inability to release his own past.

Copperfield, on the other hand, is a thoroughly conscious, deliberate foray into the writer's own biography. Writing it, Dickens was completely aware that this novel was a way of investigating—and perhaps reconciling with—the stuff of his own life. In the late 1840s, Dickens--more and more preoccupied with his personal past and by then a hugely successful author and editor--began writing an autobiography. But when he came to the part where he won and then lost his first great love, Maria Beadnell, Dickens found memory so cripplingly painful that he burned the manuscript. At the suggestion of a friend, he turned instead to writing his first book in the first person and poured his life story into the "I" voice of David Copperfield. The first six months of composition were an agony, but then Dickens discovered the method of "a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction" and confidently claimed to "have done it ingeniously." Into the mix—altered to suit David's life—went Charles's idyllic early childhood, shattered by poverty and by working, at age 12, in a blacking factory. He added his fragmented, harsh schooldays, his childish, pretty mother, his charming but improvident father, the family shame of debtors' prison, the early death of his adored young sister-in-law, people known and places lived in, and—above all—a London described from the most intimate knowledge of its streets, bridges, and houses. Dickens retained the most affectionate connection to this novel throughout his life, calling it his "favorite child," "some part of myself," and saying that, upon completing it, he felt "turned inside-out!" He named his third daughter "Dora" for David's doomed child-wife and, sadly, she died in infancy.

David Copperfield is what is called a bildungsroman, a novel of a boy growing into adulthood and learning the emotional lessons that will make him a good man. All the events of the plot are there to propel him into his destiny. All the other characters are there to measure his progress. In David's case, the emotional boy must learn the perils of "the undisciplined heart." He must learn to be less like the self-indulgent Steerforth, more like selfless Dan Peggotty, to reject Murdstone's brutality on the one hand, while retaining affection for but not modeling himself on the hapless Mr. Micawber, to see through the villainous 'umbleness of Uriah Heep but to respect the honorable humility of Ham, and to value a mature relationship with Agnes while outgrowing his childish love for Dora.

Melodramatic? Unrealistically structured? Sentimental? Full of idiosyncratic characters? Hmmm, it's—well, it's theatrical. It is only a short step from the sprawling pages of the novel to a staged adaptation like this one, and Dickens has been frequently adapted for performance. He was possessed (truly "possessed") of a theatrical imagination, interrupting writing during the composition of his stories to stride around his study, declaiming, muttering, whispering the different voices aloud, or to stand before the mirror making grotesque faces before hurrying back to describe them on the page. As a youth, he considered becoming a professional actor before beginning to write, and continued to act as a devoted amateur all his life. Indeed, he wrote a number of plays for private theatres (all flops) and it was his romance with the actress Ellen Ternan that finally destroyed his long marriage to Catherine Hogarth. His reading tours of England and America, in which he assumed all the voices and gestures of his characters, were the ultimate delivery of his fictional wares, his own one-man theatre. The Dickens reading tours were a sensational phenomenon between 1858 and 1868, but they consumed his health to such a degree that his doctors forbade them in 1869. He died six months later.

© 2006 by Eileen Warburton

For further reading:
Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (New York: Harper, Collins, 1991).


RHODE ISLAND COUNCIL FOR THE HUMANITIES

Discussion Sunday at 2nd Story Theatre is made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Discussion Sunday do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Wayne Booth, in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction brings to bear the moral dimensions of the stories we give airtime and to the characters we invite to inhabit our minds. What influence do these virtual companions have on us? Do they challenge us to examine ourselves? Do they help us to become better lovers, parents, or neighbors? Do they open us to new worldviews - by offering us a "relationship" from which we may explore nuances of truth, beauty, or goodness? Is this the work of a killjoy - to assert such serious questions where simple amusement is presumably intended? Or, is "ethical reading" inescapable and can it's explication expand our pleasure in fiction? After all, why spend 2 hours with David Copperfield? What does he do for us? Are we asked to do more than simply smile at a cute boy or politely gesture "good day" to the man he becomes? Considering his example of a bold and undying belief in his own worth, his capacity to meet life's hardships with an unbroken spirit, and his unwillingness to give up on love in the face of repeated losses, I believe he merits grateful fellowship.

How is David able to muster the plucky resilience he displays in the face of seemingly overwhelming adversity? He seems to bear no enduring psychological scars despite the death of parents, neglect, abuse, and exploitation. Is he a Dickensonian superhero – inherently invincible and ready for action? Charles Dickens is known to have favored David among all his child characters and admitted that the novel was his most autobiographical work. At mid-life and in mid-career, Dickens stops to review his life through the affirming view of his undefeatable David. Could he be Dickens superhuman self-image conjured to help him cope with the struggles of mid-life?

What is the source of David's hardiness? Given his relative imperviousness to loss and abuse, it would appear that Dickens would have David simply be born ready-made of superior constitution, rather than have him develop from "formative" experience. This makes David Copperfield an interesting relic of a pre-Freudian era - a time when one's destiny was written in the bloodline, a time when nature was the undisputed victor over nurture in the battle for the principal determinant of our psychological selves. Nobility or peasantry was a question of birthright. From this view, David is not too different from the crocodiles he contemplates. David notes that "crocodiles lay their eggs in the sand" and leave their offspring to fend for themselves. Compassed by instinct, they need no mentoring or loving nurturance. They simply are what they are – immutable miniature adults from the start. Interestingly, Dickens described himself as a child as a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".

Though William Wordsworth coined the phrase "the child is the father of the man", it was Freud that moved this poetry into the common realm of how we understand who we are. In short, Freud tells us that our adult personalities are largely fashioned (nurtured) from critical childhood experiences. If David had been a Freudian creation, his early life would have surely produced a different man than what Dickens conceives. One could imagine the Freudian adult David riddled with doubts about his capacity to attract and hold love, or embittered and cynical from traumatic "battle fatigue", or powerlessly yielding to a life dictated by chance. These are the all too often seen adult scars of childhood abuse and neglect.

Yet despite David's antithetical nature to the Freudian model of psychological development, Freud himself claimed David Copperfield to be his favorite novel. Perhaps this was a moment that Freud himself retreated into the delights of his "Pleasure Principle" – reading Copperfield as a fantastical fairy tale, a dream of the omnipotent child. If so, the journey back to the "Reality Principle" is a poignant one. If only we could be messianic superheroes like David.

An alternative take on David is that he taps into a realm of temperament and self-agency neglected by Freud theories. After all, we Post-Freudians now appreciate that we are neither the exclusive product of childhood history nor the simple fleshing-out of a DNA code - we are a mysterious combination of both and more. The something more is perhaps best captured by the idea of free will. To a large and wondrous degree we are free to choose our destinies, to rise above the limits of birth and breeding and cultivate a life of conscious choice over unconscious compulsion. This is the foundational hope of all enlightenment projects – be they the work of psychotherapy or theatre attendance or the many other ways we live in the Age of Reason. David Copperfield is welcome company; he is an icon of hope gently saying, "You can do it too".

© 2006 by Rendueles Villalba

This essay was prepared as a companion piece to Shrink Rap, which will take place immediately following the performance on Saturday, December 2.

Ed Shea and local psychiatrist Rendueles Villalba, MD lead informal, post-show discussions to examine the play from the psychological perspective. Ed and Rendueles will often host one specialist whose field is germane to the discussion of the play. Shrink Rap is included in the price of admission.