The Plot Thickens. Lisa Surridge
(Allingham, “Changes”). Notably, too, he frames her figure with extradiegetic images of biblical scenes: the Prodigal Son (emphasizing David’s return from afar) and Moses in the Bulrushes (suggesting both maternal protectiveness and the threat of death). The grandfather clock behind David suggests the time that has elapsed since he saw his mother.
The letterpress that matches the illustration complicates it still further because it describes David responding to the sound of his mother singing by returning to memories of his childhood: “I think I must have lain in her arms, and heard her singing so to me when I was but a baby. The strain was new to me, and yet it was so old that it filled my heart brim-full; like a friend come back from a long absence” (DC, 3:79). The letterpress suggests, then, that the illustration represents at once David’s return from school and his return to his own babyhood, which he sees represented in the tableau before him: in a complicated palimpsest, the baby thus figures both David’s brother and himself. Furthermore, the image of the clock becomes multivalent, standing both for the passage of time and for the capacity of memory to arrest time—that is, to return one abruptly into vivid recollection of a specific past moment.
Part 3 continues this dynamic reinterpretation of Clara’s visual image when David returns to school, a parting that proves final because she dies before he comes home again. As the adult David recalls this parting, he replays his departure for the boat-house from part 1, when he left his mother at the garden gate; the departure scene in part 3 uses visual stasis in addition to repetition to create emotional intensity. Here we witness Dickens as a consummate “maker of pictures”:23 “I was in the carrier’s cart when I heard her calling to me. I looked out, and she stood at the garden-gate alone, holding her baby up in her arms for me to see. It was cold still weather; and not a hair of her head, or a fold of her dress, was stirred, as she looked intently at me, holding up her child” (DC, 3:88; our emphasis). This second visual tableau of Clara saying goodbye would become central to David’s selfhood, being replayed in dreams at school: “So I lost her. So I saw her afterwards, in my sleep at school . . .—looking at me with the same intent face—holding up her baby in her arms” (DC, 3:88; our emphasis). The recalled tableau conveys both parting and togetherness because, by means of Browne’s illustration of Clara cradling the baby, the infant has come to represent both the new baby and David’s infant self. Finally, the letterpress later renders this tableau from Clara’s point of view, as recounted retrospectively by Peggotty. Touchingly, Peggotty tells David that Clara suspected their farewell would be final and told Peggotty that she would “never . . . see [her] pretty darling again” (DC, 3:95). This rare instance of Clara’s focalization matches the emotional intensity of the adult David’s narration of their parting; in retrospect, both son and mother attribute a common meaning to the tableau of departure even though at the time of parting, the young David was unaware of its significance and Clara unable to express her premonition of death.
FIG. 1.5 Hablôt K. Browne, “Changes at Home,” illustration for Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, part 3 (July 1849), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
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