Books

Dickens and his 'values'

Richard West

One of the joys of David Copperfield is the way that it loses nothing but ac- tually gains with familiarity. Whereas I used to allow myself seven or more years between each reading, I have now reduced this to four; and after the latest reading, during a visit to Central America, I found myself tempted to re-read some of the choice bits immediately afterwards. This book has enthralled me although I am not a Dickensian. Some of Dickens's novels I have not even managed to read. Others I do not wish to read again. The only ones I real- ly enjoy are Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nicklehy, The Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit and Great Expectations. Not even Great Expectations seizes me like David Copperfield, though I think it a bet- ter novel.

One has to agree with G. K. Chesterton that in David Copperfield Dickens produc- ed 'creatures who cling to us and tyrannise over us, creatures whom we would not forget if we could, creatures whom we could not forget if we would, creatures who are more actual than the man who made them'. I used to believe that these creatures, as Chesterton calls them, were not really characters but caricatures of good or evil, or simply grotesques. Yet somehow David Copperfield and his friends and enemies grow more real the longer we know them. When first we meet Steerforth, he seems a figure of quite impossible glamour and arrogance, because so he appears to the young David Copperfield; but later, having known many Steerforths, we see the despair and desperation behind that criminal charm. I could not believe in Uriah Heep until I met him, in different personifica- tions, flourishing in the learned professi, ons, in politics and journalism, forever whining about his 'umble, working-class background.

As for the characters that I once found too good to be true, such as Agnes, Trad- dles and Mr Dick, they too have a sadness, a sense of mortality, that arouses sympathy. Characters such as Peggoty, Betsey Trot- wood and Mr and Mrs Micawber are old and dear friends whom one never tires of meeting again.

There is another quality about David Copperfield, that I cannot remember find- ing in any other book: it holds the affection even though one has come to see it with altered sensibilities and through the eyes of a quite different character. When I read the book first, at the age of ten or so, I of course identified with the young David Copperfield, as a victim of schoolmasters and other grown-ups. On the next two or three readings, I just as naturally identified with David Copperfield as a young man falling in love and struggling to establish himself as a writer. Now, many years later, I have to identify not with David but Mr Micawber, pursued by duns, frequently 'floored' (to borrow his favourite word) and not always quite sober, but comforted by family, punch and the undying con- fidence that something will 'turn up'. The Micawber family no longer appear so com- ical but they have gained in social realism.

It is generally agreed that David Copper- field was Dickens's nearest approach to autobiography and therefore his most heart-felt book. Perhaps for that reason it is the book (of those 1. have read) that states most clearly his views on morality, politics and society. One would like to regard such matters as unimportant compared to the story of David Copperfield and its characters, but unfortunately, in these last few years more than ever before, the name of Dickens is hauled into public controver- sy. The word 'Dickensian' is constantly used by people like social workers and trade union leaders (and how one wishes that Dickens were here to turn his mockery on such people) to describe social conditions which, so they believe, are as bad as those denounced by Dickens. The same sort of people also denounce the 'Victorian values' that they attribute to Mrs Thatcher. Sometimes the two are confused. At Liver- pool, in the last General Election, I heard a Labour candidate say that his primary school had 'incorporated all the Victorian and Dickensian values that Mrs Thatcher espouses'. Like most such people, he knew nothing of Dickens or the Victorian age; and yet he was certainly right. Dickensian and Victorian values are the same thing. Books like David Copperfield were not only adored by the great Victorians such as Gladstone, Tennyson and the Queen herself, but helped to create the ethos and the received idea of the British in the second half of the 19th century. As the hero of Dickens's most successful novel, David Copperfield might be described as the beau ideal of Victorian manhood. David and Dickens were seen at their most Victorian in their rage against tyranny, cruelty and hypocrisy.

The Victorians thought of themselves and should be honoured as social reformers who managed in just over 60 years to rid the country of much of the class oppression, savagery, vice and corruption that had prevailed in the first few decades of the cen- tury. They began by tackling the kind of abuses that Cobbett denounced in the 1820s: the penal system, the game laws, the drastic punishments and the bribery in the armed forces, and then the whole system of 'tax-eaters'. The much derided Victorian sexual morality was, at the start, an angry response from the middle class against the debauchery, selfishness and the ostentation of kings like George IV, their courtiers and much of the old aristocracy. In the same way, pious expressions such as the Oxford Movement were honest reactions against the complacency and the torpor of the Church of England. The same honesty made the Victorians face up to the misery and injustices of Ireland. Although their wealth came largely from manufacture and trade, the Victorians acknowledged the hor- rors that went with industrial growth. They introduced factory acts, they limited children's and women's labour; they repeal- ed the Corn Laws and gave the vote and education to an ever greater proportion of the urban masses.

In his condemnation of abuse, Dickens was neither a solo voice nor even especially radical by Victorian standards: he merely expressed himself with genius. In David Copperfield, written during the Chartist crisis, there is an indirect reference to the troubles, when the odious Jack Maldon looks at the papers and says there is no news: 'There's an account of the people being hungry and discontented down in the North, but they are always being hungry and discontented somewhere'. However, Dickens feared the mob, and elsewhere in David Copperfield there are hints of class snobbery, as in young David's reaction to his fellow workers at Murdstone and Grin- by's; also his fear and disgust for the tramps on the Canterbury road.

In some respects, Dickens was what we would now call reactionary. He much disapproved of the good food and pamper- ing given to prisoners like Uriah Heep in the latest progressive prison. It is a nice touch that one of the magistrates who administer and approve this new-fangled prison should turn out to be Mr Creakle, the former sadistic headmaster at the Salem House school. (A modern Creakle would probably be a NALGO official in charge of a council home for children 'in care'; or perhaps a community relations officer.)

In matters of the economy, Dickens was a monetarist of an extreme kind, as express- ed in Mr Micawber's maxim: 'Annual in- come, twenty pounds, annual expenditure, twenty pounds, ought and six, result misery... ' Although making fun of him, Dickens does not let us ignore how Mr Micawber's improvidence causes unhap- piness to the family he neglected and to the friends from whom he borrowed. Dickens's own childhood was blighted by just such a father. Of course, nowadays it is the state and the politicians who are profligate, who run into debt and wait for something to 'turn up' — like off-shore oil or a loan from the International Monetary Fund. As a result, the modern Micawber is always in

debt not to the milkman or grocer or landlord but to the still more fearsome duns of the Inland Revenue, rates, Value Added Tax and National Insurance.

With regard to sexual morality, Dickens was somewhat equivocal, perhaps because of his own unhappy marriage and adultery.

But he did believe in the institution of mar- riage, so that David's long postponed wed- ding to Agnes brings the book to its natural end. Marriage, to Dickens, was important not so much as a source of happiness bet- ween men and women, as a pre-condition of happiness for the children, whose plight is the main theme not only of David Cop- perfield but Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Hard Times, Great Expecta- tions, A Christmas Carol and others. The care and protection of children was first and paramount of `Dickensian' and indeed of Victorian values.

It is possible to present David's step- father Mr Murdstone, and .his spiteful sister, as representatives of Victorian Chris- tianity, but joylessness is only one of their odious qualities. The Murdstones batten upon the widowed Mrs Copperfield, as later they batten upon another young woman, in expectation of her inheritance. Their cruelty is subordinate to their avarice, and for this reason they cheat young David out of his money and send him to work at the age of 11 to Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse in London. Avarice was their motive but it is not that which makes them abhorrent in David's and Dickens's view. Their crime is having deprived a child of af- fection, of education, the comradeship of other children, in short of childhood. Little David's only friends in London, Mr and Mrs Micawber, seem to regard him as an adult, they confide in him about their `pecuniary embarrassments', and get him to pop their goods at the pawnbrokers.

Even Salem House school was better than no school at all, since David at least had the friendship of Steerforth and Traddles, and a sense of being a boy among boys. Even Mr Creakle's cane was not more harsh than the turning of little children into adults; and in this respect we may be even worse than the Creakles. At Salem House school the boys suffered during the day from sums, spelling and Latin and French irregular verbs but at night in the dormitory they regaled each other with tales of imagina- tion. This was perhaps a better education than filling the children's heads with adult notions on politics, race, sociology and sex, as is the modern wont. I was tempted to say that only Dickens could truly portray a modern 'educationist', but he did, in the person of Mr Gradgrind in Had Times: "And what," asked Mr Gradgrind, in a still lower voice, "did you read to your father, Jupe?" "About the Fairies, Sir, and the Dwarf, and the Hunchback, and the Genies", she sobbed out; "and about..."

"Hush!" said Mr Gradgrind "that is enough. Never breathe a word of such destructive nonsense, any more. Bounder- by, this is a case for rigid training..." . Not long ago, I read in the Sunday Times that two Australian sociologists had con- ducted a survey of schools in the Hard Tittles county of Lancashire to find what the eight-year-olds knew about birth con- trol, a subject that would have appealed to Mr Gradgrind. The sociologists and the Sunday Times were shocked to discover that whereas in Sweden, eight-year-old children could name as many as five kinds of contraceptive device, some of the Lan- cashire children could not name any.

The childhood of David Copperfield was made miserable by the remarriage of his mother to a harsh and unfeeling man. Nowadays, parents are less likely to die before their children have reached maturi- ty, but they are very likely to get divorced and perhaps remarry. Few modern step- parents would prove as cruel as the Murd- stones; probably few were, even in Dickens's time. But coldness and neglect may possibly be as hurtful as beatings and compulsory church. Modern divorced parents deny this; but what do the children really feel? It was Dickens's greatest achievement that in David Copperfield he reminded grown ups of how they had felt as children, and taught them to look on their own children with greater love and con- sideration. That was the true Dickensian, Victorian value.