The Plot Thickens. Lisa Surridge
who learns from his imaginative participation in the other’s experience” (Nature, 261). Significantly, the novella renders this “inward story” of grief and coming of age by means of a series of both drawn and imagined portraits, images that are viewed and agonizingly re-viewed, as a serial novel would be read and recursively reread over time.
Both texts are intensely self-conscious about the self’s relation to history and technology: David Copperfield situates the emerging author in the world of newspaper reporting, novel writing, and life writing in the 1820s and 1830s, and Cousin Phillis takes as its background the railway expansion and print explosion of the 1840s. This self-consciousness extends to the technology of the illustrated serial novel: both narratives represent the self in relation to reading, to illustration, and, crucially, to intervals of time, the hallmark of the serial fiction that rose to prominence just as these protagonists gained their maturity.4 Indeed, both texts represent the narrators’ first-person accounts of their memories as a series of recursive visual tableaux or word pictures that, like serial illustrations, are read and reread against one another, accruing palimpsestic layers of significance through iteration, reinterpretation, and juxtaposition.5
“Impressed on My Remembrance”: Selfhood, Memory, and the Tropes of Serial Illustration in David Copperfield
David Copperfield is widely regarded as Dickens’s most autobiographical novel: its protagonist’s initials (DC) reverse Dickens’s own (CD), David’s servitude at a bottle factory imaginatively renders Dickens’s early experience at a blacking warehouse, and David’s profession as a parliamentary reporter and, later, writer mimics Dickens’s own successful career trajectory. David Copperfield followed the enormous successes of Pickwick and Oliver Twist, the relative disappointment of Master Humphrey’s Clock (which folded in 1841), the controversy of American Notes (1842), the sentimental appeal of A Christmas Carol (1843), and the revival of Dickens’s popularity with Dombey and Son (1846–48). Like Dombey, the novel was published by Bradbury and Evans, who took a quarter share of the profits; the rest went to the author. David Copperfield’s monthly serial sales were slightly disappointing: around 20,000, as compared to 32,000 for Dombey (Schlicke, Oxford, 153). However, Dickens dubbed the novel his “favourite child” (qtd. in Schlicke, Oxford, 150), and many critics regard the novel as the high point in Dickens’s career; this critical acclaim started with Dickens’s friend and biographer, John Forster, who considered it his masterpiece (Schlicke, Oxford, 154).
By the time David Copperfield was published, Dickens’s partnership with Browne was firmly established; indeed, Browne’s collaboration with Dickens on David Copperfield represented “perhaps the happiest blending of the two sensibilities” (Schlicke, Oxford, 61). Their working relationship originated in 1836, when Browne was recruited to provide the steel etchings for Pickwick after its first illustrator, Robert Seymour,6 had committed suicide and the etching skills of the second, R. W. Buss (who had learned to etch in a fortnight for the job), had proved unsatisfactory.7 Browne, who had apprenticed at the atelier of engravers William and Edward Finden (whose steel plates appeared in annuals such as the Keepsake),8 joined Pickwick for the fourth issue. He redrew Buss’s plates and re-etched all of Seymour’s,9 starting a partnership with Dickens that would last until 1860, after A Tale of Two Cities.10 After Pickwick, Browne illustrated Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), and Dombey and Son as well as collaborating with George Cattermole on the wood engravings for Master Humphrey’s Clock. Throughout their professional relationship, Dickens believed firmly in the primacy of the author’s vision; he worked closely with Browne to achieve a creative fusion, traveling together to scout locations for Nickleby, vetting sketches, and demanding changes to both positions and expressions of characters and details of dress and setting (Cohen, Charles Dickens, 64, 70, 82, 90, 95).11 An example of Dickens’s artistic control is provided by the provisional sketches that Browne made of David’s arrival at Aunt Betsey’s after his walk to Dover from London, one showing the aunt “sitting flat down on the garden path” (Cohen, 101), another showing David looking comically jaunty, though ragged; Browne’s query, “So?” (qtd. in Cohen, 102), shows how he sought and followed Dickens’s feedback, here avoiding the comedic in favor of the pathetic. Indeed, Dickens expresses the author’s primacy in an 1867 article on book illustration, in which he notes that, in contrast to sixties artists, those such as Browne and George Cruikshank excelled at putting “before the reader’s eyes” a novel’s “remarkable scenes [as] described by the author” (Dickens, “Book Illustrations,” 151). To readers, however, Dickens and Browne’s joint creative efforts appeared as “dual-medium fictions” (Patten, Dickens and “Boz,” 245) that combined visual and verbal signifiers.
Not only does the serial of David Copperfield combine the visual and the verbal, but also the novel uses the illustrated serial form as a powerful representation of the protagonist’s inner life. Price observes that in David Copperfield, reading is intrinsically linked to selfhood, with books functioning as “material prompt[s]” (How, 72) for inward life. Moreover, this novel’s illustrated serial form complicates and enriches this imbrication of reading and selfhood: the wrapper and its advertisements literally embed David’s “personal history” in references to books as material commodities, even as books function metonymically for David as potent signs of inner life. Significantly, David’s rich interior life is rendered in the form of the illustrated serial, with scenes of heightened emotion imagined as pictures and then recalled and reinterpreted over the course of the novel. The text’s final chapter offers a gallery of the novel’s key scenes, glimpsed by David as he looks backward down the road of his life. Visual images thus provide the formal device by which the text renders inwardness even as the novel registers its own implication in the global marketplace of midcentury print culture.
When its first part appeared in booksellers’ windows in May 1849, the illustrated serial of David Copperfield was identifiably a “commodity-text” (Feltes, Modes of Production, 9): its green wrapper branded it as a Dickens novel, and Browne’s wrapper design (see fig. 0.2), with its “series of figures ascending on the left and descending on the right” (Steig, Dickens and Phiz, 114), echoed the designs of its predecessors Pickwick, Oliver Twist, and Dombey and Son. Indeed, in his preface to the volume edition, Dickens refers to putting forth “two green leaves once a month” during Copperfield’s serial run, punning on his own creative fertility in this, his fifteenth work, and his publishers’ use of green wrappers to brand his fiction (David Copperfield [2004], 11). Designed by Browne before he saw any letterpress, when he knew only that the novel would be a “novel of development,”12 the wrapper presents a “generalized” cycle of life “from cradle to grave” (Cohen, Charles Dickens, 100). Copperfield’s initial readers would have seen this wrapper first and only then turned through a series of advertisements—branded as the Copperfield Advertiser—before arriving at Browne’s two steel-etched plates that, in turn, preceded the letterpress of the serial part. The wrapper’s center offers clues to the new work: the title, with its reference to David’s Personal History, predicts the serial’s first-person point of view, a first for Dickens. Moreover, the wrapper predicts the text’s child-centered focalization: framed between the names David (above) and Copperfield (below), an infant surveys the globe turning.13 This central illustration focuses the novel in relation to the world’s regular turning: just as the novel would unfold David’s recollections of childhood and adolescence in relation to the passage of time and the cycle of human life, so Victorian readers would unfold Dickens’s green leaves once a month in regular relation to the unfolding of their own lives from May 1849 to November 1850.
While the wrapper is poised between iteration and novelty, the advertisements inserted into Copperfield’s monthly parts announce the illustrated serial’s imbrication in midcentury commercial and illustrated print culture. The inside front and back leaves feature advertisements for wool mattresses and down quilts, and the Copperfield