ENGL389
Given the absence of any rational first
person account, Mr Dick is often regarded
as little more than an ‘eccentric’ ‘nobody’
who comedically associates himself with
a royal be-heading, a reading he selfdeprecatingly endorses: ‘I’m only Mr Dick
[...] a simpleton, a weak-minded person’.
Tick (1969, p.143) argues that such a
reading misses the ‘principal “truth”’ of Mr
Dick, namely that, by analogy, he is an
‘image’ of his own creator. For Dickens,
a writer who found it difficult to confront
aspects of his own painful past, penning
a novel concerned with a character who
encounters the same obstacles suggests,
Tick argues, an ‘intended metaphor of
important meaning’. Evidence of Dickens’s
repression of his past is to be found in John
Forster’s biography and indeed in Dicken’s
autobiographical rendering of his ‘favourite
child’ David Copperfield. The ‘curtain’ that
David draws over the painful suffering of
his ‘old Blunderstone life’ is mirrored in the
‘curtain’ Dickens lifts to describe to Forster
the events of 1824, the ‘recollection of
which [...] haunted him and made him very
miserable’ (Forster, 1872, p. 28).
to be integral to an ‘intertwisted chain of
feelings and associations’ inextricably
linked to the capacity for forgiveness and
compassion (Dickens, 1988). Scrooge
similarly loses connection with his past in
A Christmas Carol and it is only the ‘Ghost
of Christmas Past’ who transforms him with
remembrance enabling him to ‘discover
the dried-up source of life within himself’
(Glancy, 1988, p. xx). William Dorrit, Mrs
Clennam and Mrs Steerforth add to the
cast who cannot face the truth of the past
and destructively employ suppression and
reinvention as a means of negotiating life.
Although similarities - most obviously in
name - undoubtedly link character and
creator, Mr Dick is, however, less Dickens’s
double than a cautionary reminder of the
cost of evading memories of personal
trauma. He is, in short, what Dickens might
have become had he not successfully
overcome his fears through the creation
of David and engagement with Forster. Mr
Dick’s attempts at his ‘Memorial’ amount
to little more than troubled words tainted
with royal distraction that find no home
and no readership as manuscript sheets
are indiscriminately ‘diffused’ by kites
into the London sky. Even at the novel’s
end the ‘Memorial’ remains postponed
in favour of the mindless transcribing of
legal documents and incessant ‘copying’
of ‘everything he could lay his hands on’,
tasks requiring neat penmanship but no
creative imagination. The conclusion of the
novel echoes its beginning with Betsey,
not Mr Dick, articulating his wellbeing: ‘he
was free and happy’ she claims. What Mr
Dick says is no more than a repetition of
his intention to complete his ‘Memorial’ and
his oft-repeated exclamation that David’s
aunt is the ‘most extraordinary woman in
the world’. He is stuck, seemingly content,
but nonetheless petrified in a creative
wasteland. Whilst he derives a Carlylean
satisfaction from being ‘usefully employed’
and earning his ‘sixpences’, the limitation of
Mr Dick’s endeavour is to be contrasted with
the creative rewards heaped upon David
and Dickens, both of whom successfully
face their demons to complete their
narratives and enrich their writing.
Unlike Mr Dick, Dickens is capable of
articulating his memories, painful though this
is. Through conversations with and letters
to Forster, through David’s experiences of a
‘labouring hind’ at Murdstone and Grinby’s,
in which we read of Dickens’s ‘secret
agony’ at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse,
and through the obsessive images of poor,
orphaned and neglected children that
permeate his writing, Dickens expresses
a vivid sense of the experience and fears
of his own self. Just as the novel’s title,
The Personal History and Experience of
David Copperfield the Younger, explicitly
acknowledges the role of ‘experience’ in
the formulation of its ‘hero’, so too David
learns that ‘experience and imagination’ are
essential components of his writing. Memory
and the therapeutic, instructional power of
remembrance is a central preoccupation
of not only this novel but much of the
Dickensian cannon. In The Haunted Man,
a work which immediately preceded David
Copperfield, forgetfulness becomes a curse
and even memory that haunts is shown
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