In David Copperfield, Uriah Heep, utterly detestable in character, is the natural product of the system of training under which both he and his father were brought up. Uriah said:
“Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of umbleness—not much else that I know of—from morning to night. We was to be umble to this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the monitor medal by being umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by being umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being such a well-behaved man that they were determined to bring him on. ‘Be umble, Uriah,’ says father, ‘and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be umble,’ says father, ‘and you’ll do!’ And really it ain’t done bad!”
It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed. I had never doubted his meanness, his craft and malice; but I fully comprehended now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful spirit must have been engendered by this early, and this long, suppression.
David himself tells how he suffered after the death of his mother from the cold neglect of Mr. Murdstone and Jane Murdstone. No child can be so destitute as the child who is neglected through dislike.
And now I fell into a state of neglect, which I can not look back upon without compassion. I fell at once into a solitary condition—apart from all friendly notice, apart from the society of all other boys of my own age, apart from all companionship but my own spiritless thoughts—which seems to cast its gloom upon this paper as I write.
What would I have given to have been sent to the hardest school that ever was kept! to have been taught something, anyhow, anywhere! No such hope dawned upon me. They disliked me, and they sullenly, sternly, steadily overlooked me. I think Mr. Murdstone’s means were straitened at about this time; but it is little to the purpose. He could not bear me; and in putting me from him he tried, as I believe, to put away the notion that I had any claim upon him—and succeeded.
I was not actively ill used. I was not beaten or starved; but the wrong that was done to me had no intervals of relenting, and was done in a systematic, passionless manner. Day after day, week after week, month after month, I was coldly neglected. I wonder sometimes, when I think of it, what they would have done if I had been taken with an illness—whether I should have lain down in my lonely room and languished through it in my usual solitary way, or whether anybody would have helped me out.
But the greatest lesson in wrong training given in David Copperfield is the character development of Steerforth. He was ruined by the misdirected love of his mother, and his life is a fine psychological study.
He was a boy of unusually good ability and great attractiveness. He possessed by nature every element of power and grace required to make him a strong, true, and very successful man; but the love of his mother degenerated to pride and admiration, indulgence was substituted for guidance, and the strong woman became weak at the vital point of training her boy. She allowed him to become selfish and vain by yielding to his caprices. She thought she was making his character strong by allowing no restraint to be put upon it. She failed to distinguish between license and liberty. She had conceived the ideal of the need of freedom, but she knew naught of the true harmony between control and spontaneity. She allowed the spontaneity, and gloried in his resistance to control. She was blind to the balancing element in “the perfect law of liberty.” She made her boy a powerful engine without a governor valve. So his selfhood became selfishness, and his character was wrecked. Among other immoral opinions that he gained from his mother’s training was the idea that he belonged to a select class superior to common humanity. How Dickens hated this thought! Rosa Dartle asked Steerforth about
“That sort of people—are they really animals and clods, and beings of another order? I want to know so much.”