Somebody told me a few years ago that a mutual friend had described me as ‘a loner’. I latched onto it like a metaphorically drowning man might grasp an imaginary lifeline. Then Covid-19 came along and gave me a test run out here in the countryside where the sound of many hands clapping (to convince themselves they were helping the NHS) could be heard faintly across the fields, and more people than usual stopped to chat across the hedge as they walked what had previously been the unaccustomed lanes.
During that first enforced lockdown I published on the blog a hundred stories over a hundred days; a hundred and one days to be precise as one story was extra long and I split it into two! I thought of it as my Bocaccio project, in recollection of the Decameron (a hundred stories set in the mouths of rich young Florentines fleeing the plague of the thirteen hundreds). My stories weren’t all new. Several had been published before, and later I took them all down and gathered them into the print only collection Previously, which, because it is so fat, I think of as The Brick!
After that I ceased posting to the blog and for two years it lay fallow and the writing went elsewhere. But now, BHDandMe’s Blog is back. It’ll be a monthly mix of essay, short story and poem by Brindley Hallam Dennis and Mike Smith the two names I’ve lived my life as (neither chosen by me, but both, in their undeniably different ambiences, seeming to fit). We’ll begin with a piece about Charles Dickens’ novel, David Copperfield
What of Agnes?
(in Charles Dickens’ The Personal History of David Copperfield)
By Mike Smith
I recently watched Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel, The Personal History of David Copperfield. I’ve seen it several times, and enjoy it greatly, and as with several other adaptation of that writer’s works, it always makes me want to go to the book and read it again.
On this occasion it was a single line in the film, slipped in almost unnoticed near the end that became the focus of my reading: that and the opening sentence of the novel itself, the possible significance of which had escaped me on previous readings. Here’s that opening sentence (the single line, we’ll get to later):
‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’
When you consider the events of the novel, and the number of characters involved in it, there are quite a few possible contenders for the title of hero: Ham, Mr Peggotty, his sister, even Traddles, and certainly Aunt Betsey, and Mr Dick. Emily and Martha are heroic in their endurance, and Mrs Gummidge could make a strong claim. Even Micawber, and undoubtedly Mrs Micawber strive and come through, as heroes often do. But all these, and you might think there are more, are heroes of the events of the story. Dickens’ first person narrator, in the persona of David Copperfield is suggesting an alternative hero ‘of my own life’.
There’s no point in me being coy here. The title of this piece gives the game away, as does a page heading a quarter of the way into the novel, in my nineteenth century, double column, quarto edition. Iannucci had set me off to read Dickens with Agnes in mind.
Something that struck me on this reading – a function, I suspect of the ageing process, as well as of the writing – was the absolute sincerity of Dickens’ proxy voice. The film adaptation captures something of that, along with the sense of place and of period, the appearances of mid-Victorian London and, is that Lowestoft, passing itself off as nineteenth century Yarmouth? It captures in spades the heightened emotional life of Copperfield and his suite of characters, saved from sentimentality by its comic overtones – something I’m not sure Dickens was doing. In fact, my reading of the novel brought the surety that Dickens took and presented these displays of what might seem overblown paroxysms of hysteria rather than of mere strong feelings with absolutely serious intent. It’s how we feel, about ourselves and each other, and how we feel what other people feel about themselves, and us, and others, that Dickens is out to show us, and to get us to respond to.
That’s not to deny the fun in a Dickens story, nor the melodrama, nor even the sentimentality, but behind them all is the grim reality that Vonnegut so pithily summed up in the saying he sprinkled throughout Slaughterhouse Five: So it goes. You’ll even find a near version of it in Copperfield, if you look hard enough. The film foregrounds the fun, and the melodrama, and the action. We’re invited to watch as they unfold, and the story, trimmed, slimmed, and stripped down, is compressed into a sensible time scale. What it does not do, and cannot, is what Dickens does repeatedly, which is to bring us to a halt, to a pause for reflection; perhaps to read a sentence again and ponder its truths or to consider the justice of a word, the insight of a thought or observation. The events of a Dickens story, and of this one perhaps more than any that I have read, are a framework on which to build those moments of consideration. Copperfield might be telling us his story, but Dickens is offering us the chance to consider why it’s worth our time to read it.
It isn’t necessary to know much about Dickens’ own life to notice the parallels, or at least the lines that nudge close from time to time. In the foreword to my (1869) edition, he says it is his favourite novel, and says as much in one of the letters in The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens (ed.Jenny Hartley, Oxford,2012), though there I see a hint that it’s how well the novel has gone down at readings which might be at least part of the attraction!
Consider the jarring dislocation of Copperfield’s return to Blunderstone from Yarmouth, to find ‘a strange servant’, a new father, and a big dog, which might be seen as an echo of the disruptions in Dickens’ early life. And Micawber’s brushes with the debtor’s prison must echo what happened to the author’s father. The ‘bottling factory’ of the novel recalls the ‘blacking factory’ of Dickens’ own life. And the doubts that Copperfield begins to experience about his marriage to Dora must, I imagine, have drawn on the memories of Dickens’ own marriage failure.
But there is no living figure that I am aware of in Dickens’ life equivalent to Agnes in Copperfield’s. That is, there is no figure present so early and so importantly, who remains so to the time at which he was writing this book. In that sense Agnes is an invention rather than a transposition, unless she is the transposition of one who died young. Could Agnes be the embodiment of Dickens’ regret for a lost love that could never be retrieved except in fiction? There is Maria Beadnall, later Winters, who wrote to him in the 1850s after a quarter of a century of separation, but in his replies to her included in the Selected Letters she is compared to Dora and not to Agnes!
From the Selected Letters, and the biography (Ackroyd’s) which I have read, Dickens comes over as a frenetic figure, whose joie de vivre doesn’t so much flow free as come out under pressure. His daily routines seem to have been packed with writing – of fiction, articles and those letters, some fourteen volumes and counting I believe – with socialising, producing magazines and plays, campaigning for a variety of charitable and social causes, and, of course, the rounds of reading tours that Iannucci references to frame his telling of the tale. And his travelling both within Britain and abroad seems remarkable, even by today’s standards.
Yet we don’t need to know who Dickens was or what he was like to enjoy and to be moved by this story, or any other. What it meant to him and where it came from in his own life experiences is an academic issue. It’s what the book means to each of us who read it. And it is to each of us that Dickens, in that first sentence has given a clue to what we might look for and hope to find, not about Charles Dickens, or even David Copperfield, but about ourselves.
If Agnes were to be the hero of Copperfield’s story, what notion of her might we take into our own stories?
Reading of Copperfield’s escape from ‘Murdstone and Grinby’, two thoughts came to mind. The first was that, in the film version, this was the point at which Iannucci began to reassemble Dickens’ own telling of the tale (though not without changes). But much of what happens in the book over the next few chapters is happening to a much younger man than the one we watch in the film.
The second thought was to recollect a flight I made once, out of London in the dead of night, on foot to begin with and fleeing from emotional turmoil. I recall standing, asleep on my feet, somewhere in the midlands, having been dropped off by a motorist who kept himself awake at high speed by juddering along the cats eyes. I recall owls circling my head as I stood, waiting for the daylight of a Sunday morning, to resume my hitch-hike towards my parents’ house. Copperfield’s account of his night outside Salem House, sleeping under the hayrick brought my journey sharply back, but I had not yet to meet Agnes, nor was I moving towards her.
Agnes Wickfield appears not quite a quarter of the way into the novel, in the chapter entitled ‘I make another beginning’. Dickens, because of the serialisations perhaps, gives his chapters titles, and all the right hand pages in my edition carry a supplementary title, a heading such as you might find in a newspaper column. My guess is that if you put them all together you would have an outline of the entire story. ‘I see Agnes for the first time’, it says above the page on which she arrives, and that’s not quite the same as saying, for example ‘I meet Agnes’.
There’s a deal of preparation has gone into this encounter. Copperfield is taken to the Wickfield house by his saviour, Aunt Betsey, and his, and our first glimpse of Agnes is of what he and we take for her portrait: ‘a lady with a very placid and sweet expression of face, who was looking at me’.
That this sentence might have ended at ‘face’ and made perfect sense might nudge us to notice just what Dickens has added here. That ‘looking at me’ makes the portrait active rather than passive, and active in direct relation to Copperfield. Looking isn’t a casual glance. It’s a connection, and a discerning one. Mr Wickfield separates Agnes out from the other characters in the story by asserting that she is ‘my motive’, adding ‘I have but one in life.’ Having given us her importance to her father, Dickens lets Copperfield tell us what he sees:
‘a girl of about my own age came quickly out and kissed him. On her face, I saw immediately the placid and sweet expression of the lady whose picture had looked at me downstairs. It seemed to my imagination as if the portrait had grown womanly, and the original remained a child. Although her face was quite bright and happy, there was a tranquillity about it, and about her – a quiet, good, calm spirit –that I never have forgotten; that I never shall forget.’
I quote the whole piece because there is so much in it to unpack. The words, their order as individuals and in their groupings; their meanings. Placidity and sweetness might not be our preferred qualities these days, but Dickens is giving us his template, the template of his times, and, more importantly, the dream-template, I suspect, of his busy and trauma packed life. There’s also the possibility that the tranquillity is what we might call resolution in the face of adversity, the placidity, endurance, and the sweetness a sense of wholesomeness rather than of toxicity or corruption. Copperfield sees the meaning in Wickfield’s words immediately: ‘I guessed what the one motive of his life was.’ And at the end of the quoted paragraph, ‘I never have forgotten’ and ‘I never shall forget’ span time from the moment of that first meeting to the moment of this fictional writing. We shall not forget her either, as we don’t forget our own Agnes.
In a sense, Agnes isn’t so much a character as an ideal, which might make us consider that Dickens in dealing in ideals rather than people.
Perhaps because it is what Agnes ‘is’ as opposed to what she does or what she says, Copperfield’s presentation of how she behaves towards her father remains for a time the focus of our attention. But as the story progresses will begin to see that in his descriptions of her a mirror his being held up to his own feelings.
E.M.Forster, I think it was (in Aspects of the Novel), who told us that Dickens’ characters were flats, agitated so vigorously that we were fooled into thinking them round. Could that be because Dickens is not aiming for realism, but for representations of ways of being, and it is what his characters represent, in a moral, and in an emotional sense, revealed through their words and actions that Copperfield, our narrator, is always telling us. And through his telling, and his response to how he sees them, we see him. And we see ourselves too.
For Dickens is one of those writers who is always telling us what we could be, and what, perhaps, we ought to be. Sometimes too, he asks us what we might have done, or what we might do, or what we have done in situations like those his novels reveal.
In this novel there are so many characters, and all of them are caught up in relationships with one or more of the other characters. Even the butcher, who knocks down the young Copperfield, and loses a tooth to the older one, is in a sort of relationship with our narrator, who towards the end of the story, fills us in one what became of him. Even Mrs Gummidge, who sits and complains for the first four fifths of the book, is finally revealed to be in a close visceral relationship with Mr Peggotty. And that old seafarer is connected to just about everyone. There are numerous pairs: Ham and Em’ly; Steerforth and Em’ly; Steerforth and Copperfield; Doctor and Mrs Strong; Traddles and ‘the best girl in the world’; Mr and Mrs Micawber. Copperfield with Dora, and several others before her.
But from that first meeting at the Wickfield house, never foregrounded, but always there, the relationship between Copperfield and Agnes, simmers away in the background. After almost every event in which he is involved it is to Agnes he turns for reassurance, for guidance, and for advice. And at every one of those turnings the narrative, Copperfield’s own account, repeats the description of what Agnes is, and adds to it the effect that being in her presence has upon him. It is the nature of that effect, rehabilitative, redemptive, sustaining, that makes Copperfield’s story worth reading, and worth telling. Dickens, in several instances of which I am aware, and no doubt in many others, makes it plain how special this story was to him, and I’m sure that it was so because in this story he tells us, through Copperfield, how he, and we are, were and might be made. And that is by someone like Agnes. If only we come to recognise them.
There are something like twenty or thirty short-ish chapters between the meeting of Agnes and Copperfield, and his first inklings that she might be already the love of his life. By the time that penny drops, we, I think, are well aware of it. That first faltering intimation comes as he intrudes unintentionally on a scene in which Mrs Strong expounds upon her love for the Doctor, her much older husband. He, conscious of their age difference and harried by his mother-in-law, has mistakenly distanced himself from his wife, believing that she cannot really love him and that his marriage to her has been, in effect, an abuse of her. In a long speech she corrects this illusion, and gives an ‘idealised’ – perhaps appalling to modern minds – account of what a marriage should be. Two particular statements resonate with Copperfield, and perhaps with us. The first is that the worst ‘disparity in marriage’ is ‘unsuitability of mind and purpose’. This so strikes Copperfield that he repeats it, twice, at the end of the chapter, and a third time a little later as he reflects upon what he has witnessed. He repeats too, the second: ‘the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart.’
Reflecting upon these two ideas, Copperfield begins to see his own marriage to the child-like Dora in a new light, and to see his relationship with Agnes afresh too. As a storyteller, Dickens now has the problem of getting Dora out of the way without damaging our view of the ostensible ‘hero’. Iannucci does it quite neatly: Dev Patel’s Dickens simply writes her out, at her own suggesting! Dickens, in truth, does pretty much the same, though it takes a little longer. Aunt Betsey, ever a voice of reason, where donkeys aren’t concerned, takes to calling her ‘Little blossom’, and Copperfield, with a nice literary touch, reminds us that blossoms wither, and fall, and die.
In the book a series of chapters tying up the loose ends of what I think of as the ‘side stories’, along with a lonely trip abroad, provide a decent period of mourning before Copperfield’s crucial confrontation with Agnes. By this time he has recognised the depth of his feelings towards her, but has half convinced himself that he’s left it too late. We, of course, know that he hasn’t, which is what draws us to read on. The scene comes in which he has to tell her his feelings, and when he does so, she closes that section of the chapter – it’s marked by a line of white space after – with the simple statement: ‘I have loved you all my life.’
This is the single line that Iannucci slips almost unnoticed into his film, and for me it’s the line I’ve been waiting for. It’s the Obligatory Line, to twist a concept of McKee’s (Story, Robert McKee). If The Personal History of David Copperfield were a short story, it would end here; well, at least according to my theory of the short story. But it’s a novel, and there are other characters in whom we’ve invested, and we want to know what became of them, besides which, the narrator needs to sign off formally from where he is, telling the tale on Dickens’ behalf.
And when I’ve got there I see that the last line of the book is yet another evocation of Agnes, and what she is and what she represents:
‘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!’
A case, I think, for suggesting that for Copperfield at least, she is the hero of his ‘own life’.
There’s a sort of postscript perhaps needed here, for all that I’ve said is based on assumptions about what a hero, or a heroine, actually is. Some of that’s tied up with our feelings about them. Can a character we loathe or despise ever be a hero? Would an extraordinary display of courage or endurance, even as they maintained their evil in thought and action, make them one? Is MacBeth such a one? Or would there need to be some rehabilitation, a change of heart or mind? In this case that’s academic, for Agnes is goodness unchanging, and Copperfield has moved from that ‘undisciplined heart’ to a constancy of his own. He has also become David Copperfield; no longer Daisy, or Trotwood, or Doady or, as Murdstone calls him ‘boy’.
My current thinking on this is that if one were take Copperfield out of the story Agnes would still remain the same. She would comfort Em’ly. She would defend her father against Heep. She would see through Steerforth. She would be a good friend to Mrs Strong. She would be, in short (as Micawber might say) Agnes. But Copperfield without her would be entirely lost. Her story, a friend of mine suggested, would not be as interesting as his, and I think that’s true, but that first sentence idea which Dickens has Copperfield put into our heads, is not that someone else might be the hero of Dickens’ novel, or of its story, nor even of David Copperfield’s, but of that character’s ‘own life.’
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