The Plot Thickens. Lisa Surridge
mentions Murdstone only as “a gentleman with beautiful black hair and whiskers, who had walked home with us from church last Sunday” (DC, 1:13).
The scene’s transformation into one of foreboding comes later, when readers grasp what the young David has not: that Murdstone’s courtship of Clara will shatter David’s relationship with his mother and lead to their separation—and, finally, to her death. This interpretive transformation of the illustration occurs by means of two literary techniques: first, the juxtaposition of David’s adult (narrating) self against his younger (perceiving) self; and second, the relationships among reading material, memory, illustration, and David’s emerging consciousness of the adult world. In the first technique, the narrating David renders the impressions of his perceiving younger self, “a child of close observation” (DC, 1:10). These impressions—often rendered in present tense and without commentary—provide readers with information as to the unfolding relationship of Clara and Murdstone but do so from the perspective of the naive child: “I could observe, in little pieces, as it were; but as to making a net of a number of these pieces, and catching anybody in it, that was, as yet, beyond me” (DC, 1:16). A salient example of this narrative technique occurs, for example, when the adult David relates how Murdstone mocked him, joking with his friends in front of the unsuspecting child that “Brooks of Sheffield” was “not generally favourable” (DC, 1:17) to his marriage to Clara.
The second technique exploits the relationship among childhood reading, memory, and David’s coming to consciousness of his mother’s relationship with Murdstone. By means of this second technique, serial readers come to reinterpret part 1’s church illustration through David’s reading of his crocodile book, identified by scholars as The History of Sandford and Merton (probably owned by Peggotty in a cheap reprint).16 David first dimly perceives the possibility of his mother’s remarriage while reading this illustrated book of miscellaneous stories aloud to Peggotty: “Peggotty and I were sitting one night by the parlour fire, alone. I had been reading to Peggotty about crocodiles. . . . ‘Peggotty,’ says I, suddenly, ‘were you ever married?’” (DC, 1:12). His subsequent questions—such as “[I]f you marry a person, and the person dies, why then you may marry another person, mayn’t you, Peggotty?” (DC, 1:13)—raise the topic of his mother’s potential remarriage without addressing it directly. His reading aloud of the crocodile story to Peggotty alternates such significant, though subtle, dialogue about the possibility of remarriage with the suggestive contents of Day’s book about the reproductive habits of crocodiles: “I couldn’t quite understand why Peggotty looked so queer, or why she was so ready to go back to the crocodiles. However, we returned to those monsters, with fresh wakefulness on my part, and we left their eggs in the sand for the sun to hatch; and we ran away from them, . . . and in short we ran the whole crocodile gauntlet” (DC, 1:13). The passage works by means of ironic valances unavailable to the child: for Victorians, crocodiles were associated with rampant sexuality,17 and they implicitly figure Murdstone’s rapacious courtship of the young widow. David’s nascent understanding of Clara’s impending marriage to Murdstone is poignant precisely because it is barely understood by his child self yet is vividly recalled by his adult self, who fully comprehends the loss that it portends. Moreover, David’s loss of his close bond with his mother is ironically enmeshed with fireside reading, typically a family activity and one that he had formerly shared with his mother and Peggotty when they read the Bible together; now he shares the fireside with Peggotty alone. Readers do not yet know all that the narrating David remembers—his exile from home, his mother’s death, his infant brother’s death, and his mistreatment as a child laborer—but they can grasp enough to reread Browne’s church scene and see its subtle portents of change.
Michael Steig’s careful reading of the church illustration indicates how, read after the fact, the image foreshadows many aspects of Murdstone’s future relationship with Clara: “Mrs. Copperfield is the object of male attention in the person of a black-haired, bewhiskered gentleman who can be no one but Murdstone contemplating the ‘bewitching young widow’ and her small annuity as well, no doubt. . . . The stolen nest may also symbolize the innocence of Mrs. Copperfield, soon to be violated by the cunning Murdstone, and the spider and web assume sinister overtones as emblems of deceit and capture. The most prominent biblical emblem employed in the plate is Eve tempted by the serpent” (Dickens and Phiz, 115–16). Significantly, however, this interpretation was unavailable to serial readers upon first viewing; perhaps unconsciously, Steig bases his analysis on information gleaned later in the letterpress. In contrast to Steig, who sees the church illustration in the full knowledge of what Clara’s marriage to Murdstone will mean to David, serial readers of 1849 would have experienced something like David’s own slow and painful revelation: the church scene is first neutral, then endowed with comedy and finally with potential tragedy, deception, and loss. Just as Du Maurier wrote of viewing Browne’s images before, during, and after serial reading, serial readers of David Copperfield would thus have participated in a process whereby illustrations accrue layers of meaning, the new not canceling the old but forming a kind of palimpsest of various interpretations, from naive to tragically knowledgeable.
Part 1’s second image (“I Am Hospitably Received by Mr. Peggotty”) undergoes a similar dynamic transformation. As already noted, the arched shapes of part 1’s two illustrations suggest that church and boat-house represent contrasting sacred and secular spaces;18 however, as the serial unfolds, Murdstone’s rapacious presence retrospectively violates the sacred space of the church, whereas the oddly shaped boat-house transforms through a series of verbal nuances and visual repetitions into a site of familial happiness and sanctity. This shift in interpretation occurs at first by means of the letterpress, when the narrating David informs readers, just before his child self enters the boat-house, “It touches me nearly now, . . . to recollect how eager I was to leave my happy home; to think how little I suspected what I did leave for ever” (DC, 1:20). Even though the young David does not know that his mother will marry Murdstone in his absence, readers grasp from this passage that his relationship with her will be shattered; therefore, his encounter with the miscellaneous inhabitants of the snug boat-house (Peggotty, a spinster; her brother, Mr. Peggotty, a bachelor; Mrs. Gummidge, the widow of Mr. Peggotty’s friend; Ham, Mr. Peggotty’s orphaned nephew; and Emily, his orphaned niece) accrues significance as readers suspect that David, too, will need fostering or adoption. Re-viewed in this light, the illustration loses some of its comedy and gains pathos, as we see the young David (complete with his small traveling trunk and hat) become the focus of affectionate attention from the Peggottys even as he loses that centrality in his mother’s home. Browne’s detailing of the hearth at the center of the image, the steam from the kettle, the portraits on the walls, and the comically depicted—almost caricaturish—yet lovingly attentive figures brilliantly conveys the warmth of this motley group of people in their improvised home.
The novel adds to this sequence of dynamic reimaginings of the boathouse through a series of Browne’s illustrations that refer back to the first boat-house image by means of repetition and significant variation. The first of these is part 7’s illustration “We Arrive Unexpectedly at Mr. Peggotty’s Fireside” (fig. 1.3), which reprises part 1’s illustration of David’s first arrival at the boat-house but situates readers from a different vantage point, looking from the inside of the boat-house hull athwartships to the open door. This time, however, David is a young adult accompanied by his older friend Steerforth, highlighted by Browne at the center of the image as the group’s tallest figure. Like the church scene, this proleptic illustration appears innocent when viewed at part 7’s opening: readers do not yet know that Steerforth will later seduce and abandon Emily, who had previously been engaged to her cousin, Ham. Indeed, Browne imbues the scene with joy as Mr. Peggotty and Mrs. Gummidge express delight through gesture and expression; David’s outstretched arm welcomes his friend to the boat-house; and Emily nestles in Ham’s arms. Even the fact that the friends seem to have interrupted a celebration (all eyes are on Emily) does not detract from Browne’s joyful scene. Although the hearth is not in view, details of simple domesticity echo the companion illustration from part 1: the pitcher and mug on the shelf, the carefully curtained windows, and the picture on the wall convey the coziness of this unconventional home.