If I have anything new to say, it isn’t about marriages in the book or about David’s memory. I wrote about those topics in February and March of 2011 in two of my four posts about DC. (Good Heavens! Did I really write four posts on one book? How did I find the time while I was working? I definitely don’t have the time now that I’m retired.) In revisiting those posts, there is one detail I seem to have left out. It occurred to me nine years ago that David’s vivid memories actually fulfill the predictions of the neighborhood ladies at his birth that he would see ghosts.
My new contribution isn’t that Steerforth and Dora look different as I reread the book and mature. Many critics before have written about David’s “undisciplined heart.” Even though the David who writes the first-person narrative is older and wiser than the David we watch in the story, he invites the reader to see the world as his younger self did, through his undisciplined heart, and I, for one, believed what David first said about his school hero and his future wife and tried to love them as much as he did. But David and I both learned as we got older.
No, what I wish to add to the conversation concerns the power of Dickens’s influence across oceans and across generations.
First, something very familiar jumped out at me when I read these sentences:
With the unerring instinct of her noble heart, she touched the chords of my memory so softly and harmoniously, that not one jarred within me; I could listen to the sorrowful, distant music, and desire to shrink from nothing it awoke. How could I, when, blended with it all, was her dear self, the better angel of my life?I don’t remember noticing the connection before, but this time I couldn’t help but be jolted by the phrases chords of memory and better angel. The second was certainly common before Dickens made use of it, and the first might have preceded him. But the close proximity (is there such a thing as distant proximity? I apologize for the redundancy) of the two striking turns of phrase must have had an influence on Abraham Lincoln since they appear together again in the last sentence of his first inaugural address just eleven years later. Now, I’ve read that William Seward wrote the peroration of that speech, so perhaps the future Secretary was responsible for the innocent, complimentary plagiarism. But surely Lincoln, the eloquent humorist, was familiar with the works of the creator of Sam Weller, Dick Swiveller, Captain Cuttle, and Wilkins Micawber.
Second, I believe that David Copperfield had thoroughly simmered in Tolkien’s mind by the time the later writer invented one of his best characters. Uriah Heep’s pale skin and hands that feel like dead fish might constitute a true connection without being absolutely convincing. But look at these paragraphs involving the odious junk dealer who buys little David’s clothes from him:
‘Oh, what do you want?’ grinned this old man, in a fierce, monotonous whine. ‘Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!’Now let any honest person read that passage and tell me that that junk dealer isn’t the progenitor of Gollum!
I was so much dismayed by these words, and particularly by the repetition of the last unknown one, which was a kind of rattle in his throat, that I could make no answer; hereupon the old man, still holding me by the hair, repeated:
‘Oh, what do you want? Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo!’--which he screwed out of himself, with an energy that made his eyes start in his head.
‘I wanted to know,’ I said, trembling, ‘if you would buy a jacket.’
‘Oh, let’s see the jacket!’ cried the old man. ‘Oh, my heart on fire, show the jacket to us! Oh, my eyes and limbs, bring the jacket out!’
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