Peggotty; little Em’ly herself, blushing and shy, but delighted with Mr. Peggotty’s delight, as her joyous eyes expressed, was stopped by our entrance (for she saw us first) in the very act of springing from Ham to nestle in Mr. Peggotty’s embrace. (DC, 7:220)
At this point, serial readers’ initial impression of this as a joyful image might seem confirmed; however, the letterpress subsequently reveals that Ham and Emily’s embrace occurs in one instant and dissolves in the next: “The little picture was so instantaneously dissolved by our going in, that one might have doubted whether it had ever been” (DC, 7:220). This passage forces readers to reinterpret the image as one of extreme fragility: Ham’s tenderness toward Emily is quickly supplanted by a scene of Emily sheltering in Mr. Peggotty’s arms as Steerforth inserts himself literally and figuratively between her and her fiancé. This second scene (unpictured by Browne but vividly described by David) provides the imagined counterpart of part 7’s illustration. The drawn image shows the happiness that might have occurred had Steerforth never entered the boat-house; the undrawn but vividly remembered image captures Mr. Peggotty sheltering Emily while Ham is excluded. Significantly, the latter image foreshadows what will occur late in part 10, when Emily runs off with Steerforth, Ham mourns Emily’s loss, and Mr. Peggotty sets out to find her. Browne’s illustration to part 7 thus shows the moment of happiness on the cusp of its dissolution, both memorializing its preciousness and anticipating its loss; the still image thereby becomes dynamic, just as Cruikshank’s still image conveys the roiling energy of the great storm in Jack Sheppard. The interior boat-house scenes, then, are both Janus-faced: in the first, David’s welcome promises him a new family as he loses his own; in the second, David’s reentry participates in the engagement announcement and spells its doom.
The final image of the boat-house appears on the novel’s title page (fig. 1.4), which comes at the beginning of the volume edition but at the beginning of the final double serial part, meaning that readers of these two different editions saw these images in dramatically different order.19 Browne’s vignette depicts Emily, as a child, on the shore sitting by some fishing gear with the boat-house behind her; the domesticity of this odd home is conveyed by the chimney smoking and the laundry flapping in the wind; and potential darkness is suggested by breakers rolling in to shore and storm clouds gathering overhead. For readers of the volume edition, who confronted this image before reading any of the letterpress, this image of a little girl must have seemed incongruous for a novel titled David Copperfield. Perhaps such volume-edition readers might have understood it retrospectively as a scene focalized through the child David’s eyes; as such, it communicates innocence and “winsome[ness]” (Steig, Dickens and Phiz, 130), even as it foregrounds Emily’s solitude. For serial readers, however, who viewed the title-page image analeptically after reading eighteen monthly installments that recounted Steerforth’s seduction of Emily and his betrayal of the Peggottys, it memorializes Emily’s lost innocence and the happy boathouse home. For such knowing readers, the very fact that the boat-house is a wrecked boat imbues it retrospectively with prophetic qualities, suggesting Ham’s and Steerforth’s deaths by shipwreck.20 This analeptic title page represents to serial readers the culmination of four related images of the boat-house, all dynamic and repetitive.21 The monthly parts thus offered readers a circular experience, returning readers visually to the novel’s opening chapters (the child Emily on the beach) even as the letterpress reached its conclusion (with Emily in Australia). In sum, the experience of reading the serial’s text-image relationships was recursive, whereby readers saw images proleptically, reassessed them at the point when they matched the letterpress, and then compared them to other like images in a series of complex iterations, reinterpretations, and juxtapositions.
FIG. 1.4 Hablôt K. Browne, title page for Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, parts 19 and 20 (November 1850), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
Fascinatingly, the illustrated serial version of David Copperfield both manifests this recursive text-image structure and deploys this same structure self-reflexively as a means of representing its protagonist’s inner self. Just as the Illustrated London News suggested that images had become a means of portraying the “brain daguerreotyped” (“Newspaper History,” 56), so the serial version of David Copperfield deploys the serial novel as a way of representing how the mind creates and reinterprets memories. The narrating David’s process of remembering formally resembles the recursive structure of the illustrated serial novel: at key junctures, David renders memories as visual tableaux that carry intense emotional significance;22 these remembered scenes recur in the letterpress, accruing layers of meaning with each repetition. Significantly, these intense visual scenes are almost never illustrated by Browne; instead, they remain as evoked tableaux, very like the undrawn scene already mentioned in which Emily jumps into Mr. Peggotty’s arms. These undrawn but vividly imagined tableaux structure David’s memories: first, he sees but does not fully understand them; subsequently, he re-views and reinterprets them in the light of acquired knowledge and experience. Like the serial reader of his own illustrated life story, David therefore continually revisits key scenes after he first sees them, refining his understanding of their meaning as he acquires painful wisdom. The most significant examples of this technique occur in association with David’s three great griefs: the separation from his mother, Emily’s sexual fall, and Steerforth’s death by drowning.
The first example of such a visually rendered scene occurs in part 1, when David first separates from his mother as he leaves for the holiday at the boat-house, “little . . . suspect[ing] what [he] did leave for ever” (DC, 1:20). In narrating this parting, the adult David emphasizes his younger self’s ignorance that Clara will marry Murdstone in his absence; retrospectively, he imbues their separation with heightened emotion, significance, and loss. His use of anaphora, visual stasis, and narrative dilation marks this as one of the text’s touchstone memories:
I am glad to recollect that when the carrier’s cart was at the gate, and my mother stood there kissing me, a grateful fondness for her and for the old place I had never turned my back upon before, made me cry. I am glad to know that my mother cried too, and that I felt her heart beat against mine.
I am glad to recollect that when the carrier began to move, my mother ran out at the gate, and called to him to stop, that she might kiss me once more. I am glad to dwell upon the earnestness and love with which she lifted up her face to mine, and did so. (DC, 1:20; our emphasis)
David’s narration represents memory as a form of repetition, concretizing that repetition at the level of the sentence. His intense departure scene from his mother is replayed with complex overlayering in part 3, when David returns from school and then departs again after a brief holiday. This overlayering begins with part 3’s illustration “Changes at Home” (fig. 1.5), which shows David peeking around a doorframe, finding his mother with her new baby at her breast. Viewed proleptically, this image conveyed to serial readers that Clara has had a baby, framing David’s return with readers’ advance knowledge of his potential displacement by his new sibling. As Philip V. Allingham observes, Browne treats Clara as a version “of the mid-Victorian ‘Angel in the House’” (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
