“Books for the Young Published by Grant and Griffith,” an illustrated Tales from Denmark by Hans C. Andersen, The Modern British Plutarch, and books on insects, African wanderers, and soldiers and sailors.15 These advertisements open a gap between the illustrated serial’s moment of publication at midcentury (at the height of the illustration revolution) and its initial setting in the 1820s, when the child David has no access to such modern illustrated reading material. Instead, he has two main sources of books: his nurse Peggotty’s scanty collection and his late father’s trunk of books (including The Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe). His two favorite childhood books from Peggotty’s collection are Thomas Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–89) and John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563). Neither is serialized; neither is modern. They are at least forty years out of date, even if they are modern reprints, and only the Foxe (one of the most popular British books of the post-Reformation era) is illustrated. Yet these old-fashioned books lie at the foundation of the imaginative and emotional life of David’s childhood, in turn inspiring his writing and storytelling in the modern world of midcentury. Ironically, however, the representation of that life (both childhood and adulthood) occurs in a form that mimics the illustrated serial novels of Dickens’s own heyday, from Pickwick onward.
As pointed out in the introduction, the form of the illustrated serial novel in parts suggested specific interpretive strategies as readers turned from the wrapper and advertisements to the two illustrations that preceded the installment’s letterpress. This form enforced the importance of visual interpretation, inviting readers to see aspects of the plot before reading the matching letterpress. In turn, once readers reached the point at which the letterpress matched the image, they engaged in an act of reinterpretation, reseeing the picture in light of their new knowledge. As in Jack Sheppard, where the scene of conflict under the bridge is seen first with no foreknowledge and then re-viewed when the letterpress has caught up with the image, this act of re-viewing is critical to David Copperfield’s unfolding, both for serial readers and, very significantly, for David himself, who imagines his life as a series of images read and then recalled in the light of new experience. In the analysis that follows, we attempt to reconstruct this Victorian experience of seeing and reseeing the proleptic images of the serial form.
Having perused the wrapper, with its balance of iteration and novelty, and the advertisements, with their flagrant modernity, Victorian readers of David Copperfield’s serial edition confronted the two illustrations to part 1. Whereas readers of the 1850 volume edition would open their books to the title page depicting David’s childhood playmate, little Emily, in front of the Peggottys’ boat-house and a frontispiece showing David’s Aunt Betsey peeping in the window of Blunderstone Rookery before his birth, serial readers opened part 1 to find two illustrations centered on the male protagonist: “Our Pew at Church” (fig. 1.1) and “I Am Hospitably Received by Mr. Peggotty” (fig. 1.2). On first viewing, these images convey a juxtaposition of church and domestic space, with the child at the middle of each (echoing the child-centered wrapper); however, plot revelations, references to childhood reading, and visual repetition subsequently transform these images, involving the reader in a complex series of reinterpretations involving layers of pathos and irony. In the first illustration seen by Victorian readers, Browne depicts a church scene arranged hierarchically, with the minister and pulpit at the top left, the arch of the church transept over the center, and the child seated beside his mother just right of center; in the second, the same child (again seated) occupies the center of an odd space with a low arched roof. He is smiled upon by adults, while a little girl peers out at him from behind a woman’s skirts. Comically, the second scene seems to be depicted from the child’s point of view, as the adults are hugely tall in proportion to the ceiling (one man’s head is behind a ceiling beam). Upon this first proleptic viewing, then, before launching into the letterpress, serial readers might suppose these to be reassuring, perhaps slightly comedic, images of childhood—although the illustrations might also prompt questions such as Where is the father of the boy in the church scene? (signally absent from the family unit) and What kind of dwelling is the oddly shaped space where the boy is seated? The subsequent letterpress and repetitive illustrations of the Peggottys’ home in an overturned boat hull prove an exercise for readers in reinterpreting these images, whereby the apparently serene church scene comes to seem fraught with the potential loss of David’s mother, Clara, to her second husband, Mr. Murdstone, and the Peggottys’ odd home achieves a kind of sanctity as a foster home for David after that marriage.
FIG. 1.1 Hablôt K. Browne, “Our Pew at Church,” illustration for Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, part 1 (May 1849), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
FIG. 1.2 Hablôt K. Browne, “I Am Hospitably Received by Mr. Peggotty,” illustration for Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, part 1 (May 1849), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
This reinterpretation starts when the letterpress matches the church scene. Interestingly, at this stage, the narrative (which is focalized through the young David) almost completely elides Murdstone’s threatening presence as his mother’s suitor. Murdstone is visible at the left, under the pulpit, but David’s narration draws no attention to him. Instead, the adult David narrates his memories of falling asleep in church, a funny story that secularizes the church as a locus of social interactions and overwhelming drowsiness and seems to match the initial perception of Browne’s image as comedic, even reassuring: “Here is our pew in the church. What a high-backed pew! . . . I look at my mother, but she pretends not to see me. I look at a boy in the aisle, and he makes faces at me. I look at the sunlight coming in at the open door through the porch, and there I see a stray sheep—I don’t mean a sinner, but mutton—half making up his mind to come into the church. . . . In time my eyes gradually shut up; and, from seeming to hear the clergyman singing a drowsy song in the heat, I hear nothing, until I fall off the seat with a crash, and am taken out, more dead than alive, by Peggotty” (DC, 1:11–12; emphasis in original). To serial readers, Browne’s church scene comes alive with humanity and comedy as its details emerge. The image is packed with detailed representations of drowsiness: an old woman sleeps in the lower left, musicians doze in the gallery, and a spider spins its web above the head of the dozy preacher. At the same time, Browne fills the scene with comic life: the heads of inattentive children turn away from the preacher; a small child tries to clamber over a pew, and Browne wittily embeds his own signature, “Phiz,” on a gravestone marked RESURGAM. As yet, no danger appears. Focalizing through his child self, the adult David 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
