Perhaps the most charming chapters in the book are those which describe the courting, the marriage, and the disastrous housekeeping of David and his child-wife, Dora, in which the little dog Jip plays such a conspicuous part. They are a pair of precious young noodles; yet the love-making, in spite of its absurdity, is so absolutely natural, and the foolish Dora so utterly affectionate, up to the pathetic scene of her death, that the incidents awaken a very strong sympathy.
Mr. Micawber, of course, is an exaggeration; but how many men have we known who possessed some of his essential traits,—his stilted diction, his sudden alternations of supreme joy and utter despair, his mania for letter-writing, his visionary hopes and schemes in the midst of his distresses? How perfect in its way is the final newspaper account of the public dinner in Australia given in his honor!
Mr. Peggotty’s search through the world for Little Em’ly seems to me now greatly overstrained, though I did not think so when I first read it. There is a very true touch in the description of the old Mrs. Gummidge, who had always been querulous and complaining until great sorrow fell upon the household, when she became at once helpful, considerate, and cheerful in comforting the distress of others. We have all seen examples of this kind of transformation.
Dickens has done mankind a service by portraying the dignity of simple things and the delicacy and nobility of character that often lie beneath a rough exterior, among those whom Lincoln used to call “the plain people,” of whom Lincoln was himself perhaps the most illustrious type. What could be nobler and in its essential character more gentlemanly than the behavior of Mr. Peggotty and Ham after the betrayal of Little Em’ly; what more delicate than Peggotty’s appreciation of Em’ly’s feeling toward him?
“‘She would go to the world’s furdest end if she could once see me again, and she would fly to the world’s furdest end to keep from seeing me. For tho’ she ain’t no call to doubt my love—and doen’t—and doen’t—but there’s shame steps in and keeps betwixt us.’”
Dickens’s style is often intensely vivid—for instance, in his description of a London fog in “Bleak House”; of the burning Marseilles sun in “Little Dorrit”; of the storm and shipwreck in “David Copperfield”;—all fine instances of word-painting. Yet the crudities are many and glaring, there is very little finish, and sometimes the diction is commonplace.
But there are occasional passages of extraordinary beauty, due possibly not so much to the style as the sentiment and the things described. Witness the following, where David describes his feelings when he had taken refuge with his aunt in her cottage at Dover, after his escape from Murdstone and Grinby’s:
“The room was a pleasant one, at the top of the house, overlooking the sea, on which the moon was shining brilliantly. After I had said my prayers, and my candle had burnt out, I remember how I still sat looking at the moonlight on the water, as if I could hope to read my fortunes in it, as in a bright book; or to see my mother with her child, coming from Heaven along that shining path, to look upon me as she had looked when I last saw her sweet face. I remember how the solemn feeling with which at length I turned my eyes away, yielded to the sensation of gratitude and rest with which the sight of the white-curtained bed—and how much more the lying softly down upon it, nestling in the snow-white sheets—inspired. I remember how I thought of all the solitary places under the night sky where I had slept, and how I prayed that I never might be houseless any more, and never might forget the houseless. I remember how I seemed to float, then, down the melancholy glory of that track upon the sea, away into the world of dreams.”
“David Copperfield” may not be the supreme work of fiction which some of us once fancied it, but it touches the heart very closely. It dignifies humble life and common things, makes us better friends with the world, and awakens those human traits which work for kindness and goodwill toward all mankind.