“‘LETTERS!’ … ‘I BELIEVE HE DREAMS IN LETTERS!’” so exclaims Betsey Trotwood of Mr. Micawber, the epistolary aficionado of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (664; ch. 54). David's aunt Betsey is not the only one to wonder at Micawber's prolific, albeit prolix, nature. His letters have made him a favorite of nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers alike; his “in short” has become one of the most memorable Dickensian tag-lines. But however much attention Micawber's epistolary endeavors garner, this notice fails to raise him to the position of respected writer–the position reserved for the eponymous hero of the novel.1
See Simon, especially 45–54, for her explanation of David's aesthetic control and order; Sroka 43–47 emphasizes David's realistic approach to his past and reads it as indicative of his artistic prowess. Baumgarten 44–45, 54, Cronin 233, and Welsh 108–10, link David's diligence to his emergence as the novel's successful, respectable writer.
In the usual line of thinking, David stands as the ideal literary man while Micawber molders in the world of fantasy and comedy in which J. B. Priestley, James Kincaid, and J. Hillis Miller so securely position him.
2 Kincaid and Priestley assert that Micawber and his letters embody the comic, almost Edenic world to which David and those of the commercial world cannot return (Kincaid, Dickens 165, 179–88; Priestley 221–23, 230). Miller goes a step further, suggesting that Micawber's letters “even if they assert his acceptance of his doom … effectually escape from reality by transcending it linguistically” (151). These and other critics stress that David's superior literary skills instill his writing with an order and self-assuredness that accord with his actions, as opposed to the disparity between Micawber's careworn letters and carefree life. See Bottum 451–54, and Lawrence Frank 82–91, for discussions of David's psychological growth as it affects his literary work; McGowan, 9–10, and Buckley 235–37, describe the assured self-knowledge supposedly obvious in David's writing. Further, even when attributing David's love of language to Micawber, critics emphasize that David does not imitate Micawber's style but rather sees its excesses as that which his writing must and does overcome. See Ferris and Tick for specific contrasts of Micawber's and David's writing styles. Others address more global implications of authorship in order to establish David's superiority. For example, Poovey focuses on the economic position of literary laborers in the Victorian period, exploring David's negotiations between the roles of artistic genius and literary capitalist; see 89–125. Echoing Poovey, Houston shows how David's equation of his artistic mastery with his feminine side “mask[s] his materialistic motivations” (214), stressing how this merging of male and female visions of authorship differentiates him from the novel's others writers; see especially 217–23. Baumgarten similarly emphasizes David's writing as an attempt to balance his public and private selves and claims writing secures his social, economic, and psychological success.
Though David the author gains much more critical praise, Micawber as correspondent is arguably the novel's most memorable author. Micawber's unforgettable epistolary style, however, is not simple comic exaggeration. His letters are culturally significant; they are variations on ones many British correspondents would have written in the 1800s, for they are similar to those found in one of the most conventional, moralistic venues of the day: British letter-writing manuals.3
Though other characters write letters, the only other character, not of the Micawber clan, whose letters are printed in toto for readers' perusal is Emily. These letters, the first explaining and apologizing for her departure, the second detailing her situation but pleading for assurance that her family is healthy, and the third expressing her gratefulness for her friends' continued love, stand as variations upon letters such as Richardson's “From a Daughter to her Father, pleading for her Sister, who had married without his Consent” and “From a young Maiden, abandoned by her Lover for the sake of a Greater Fortune” (84–85, 155–57). In reproducing such letters, Dickens introduces the one typical, manual-popularized letter-writing role that he cannot fulfill through Micawber: the dutiful female correspondent.
The similarities between the manuals' and Micawber's letters position his writings in a long, specific epistolary tradition. This historical context helps explain his rather startling financial and political success in Australia at the novel's end.
4 The fact that Micawber shares so many similarities with Dickens's father also helps explain why Dickens might allow this character unrealistic successes.
It also wrests Micawber's writing out of a hyperbolic imaginative realm and places it in a surprisingly conventional one. Micawber's letters stand as a cultural analog that reveals the complexity, rather than merely accentuates the comedy, of his character.
In introducing a contemporaneously popular style of writing to place alongside David's, Dickens's novel does more than complicate the plot; it questions whether the literary standards embodied in David's writing should be unequivocally privileged. Specifically, Micawber's use of a highly conventionalized generic form when compared to David's vision of the literary artist and his or her task opens the novel to questions of how these writers create and how individual vision and generic selection affect their creations. The result of this exploration is that David Copperfield shows how both David and Micawber, a mere letter writer, can attain the title of literary artist; the novel complicates the definition of the Victorian literary man.
Letters have long held a significant position in literature and all that surrounds “high” culture. An 1801 letter-writing manual, republished in 1820, opens:
As a great part of the intercourse of mankind has ever been transacted by letters, it is a just reflection upon any man, especially in this more refined age, not to be able to acquit himself handsomely in this respect. The occasions to do this are so very numerous and the shame of doing it ill so great, in low as well as in high life, that every endeavour to render them more perfect in this accomplishment, is at least entitled to a candid reception. (Complete v)
These lines and even the titles of other similar manuals, such as the 1827
London Letter Writer; Containing Elegant Letters on Love, Duty, Friendship, and Business … Written in a Concise and Familiar Style, and Suited to Both Sexes or the 1847
Art of Letter-Writing Simplified; by Precept and Example: Embracing Practical Illustrations of Epistolary Correspondence, of Every Age, in Every Station and Degree, and Under Every Circumstance of Life, capture the serious, and amazingly encompassing, approach to letter writing maintained during the nineteenth century. Letters could secure one's position in the “correct” social circles, for the assumption was that if the letters were elegant, if they were respectful of social rules and customs, so too were their writers. Upon this basis, the profitable business of letter-writing manuals, commonly termed “letter-writers,” thrived.
The manuals were collections of model letters that readers could copy and send as if they were their own compositions, and, by the mid-nineteenth century when David Copperfield was published, they had already enjoyed a long history in Britain.5
For the most comprehensive histories of pre-nineteenth-century British letter-writers, see Camargo, especially 17–28, in which he examines medieval letter manuals, and Hornbeak, whose study of the manual tradition opens in 1568, the year in which the first truly British letter-writer appeared, and extends through 1800.
Exemplifying their popularity in the eighteenth century was the still most famous and most imitated letter-writing manual: Samuel Richardson's 1741
Familiar Letters on Important Occasions. This text set a standard and even provided actual letters that continued to shape the 1800s letter-writer tradition. One of the few studies of the genre, Katherine Gee Hornbeak's
The Complete Letter-Writer in English identifies one hundred and seventy-one letter-writers that were published between 1741 and 1920 “which borrow from Richardson's letter-writer” (xii). And such borrowing was often extensive. Hornbeak describes an 1890s letter-writer,
The Favourite Letter Writer, in which “seventy-eight of its one hundred and ten letters
are Richardson's” (120). Hornbeak goes on to list Richardson's most often republished letters, including classics like “From an Uncle to a Nephew, on his Keeping bad Company, bad Hours, &c. in his Apprenticeship” and “From a Father to a Son, on his Negligence in his Affairs.” Her research finds that, of
Familiar Letters's one hundred and seventy-three letters, “one hundred and forty-two, or eighty-two percent, [were] reprinted in various complete letter-writers” (Hornbeak 123). Albeit revised by the manuals' users and the manuals' compilers, Richardson's letters long continued to answer the questions facing so many correspondents: what shall I say and how shall I say it?
Radical changes in the Post Office of the 1800s created an even greater interest in and need for the letter-writing manuals. Before 1840 many British citizens literally could not afford to use the Post. In “1812 a single letter from London to Edinburgh–the cost in 1765 had been but 6d –had increased to 1S 2d” (Robinson 157). And from 1812 until 1840, British correspondents faced the highest postal rates ever recorded. But in 1840, the rate for a letter between any two points within the United Kingdom plummeted to just one penny. Because of the 1840 institution of penny postage, a huge, new population of correspondents emerged, many of whom were not only first-time correspondents, but also newly literate. Indeed, much support for penny postage rested on the assumption of this reform's encouragement of education.6
See Vincent, especially 35–38, for descriptions and transcriptions of the fervent assertions of penny postage's capacity to give people an incentive and opportunity to use and improve skills learned in school, or, in fact, to provide a tangible reason for education.
A common claim was that people would want to become literate or better skilled in reading and writing so they might easily correspond with friends, family members, business associates–the very audiences so vividly imagined by the manuals. Dickens's own pages supported penny postage.
7 Dickens's fascination with and knowledge of the Post Office often manifested itself in his writings in Household Words. For instance, in an 1850 issue, his “Valentine's Day at the Post-Office” offers amazingly detailed descriptions of the actual postal sorting processes as well as statistics concerning how many paid, unpaid, and stamped letters traveled through the Post Office; an 1852 issue contained “Post-Office Money-Orders” that provided similarly detailed statistics and descriptions of this postal service, attributing its greatly increased use to penny postage, and his 1857 “Curious Misprint in the Edinburgh Review” exactingly chronicles the career of Rowland Hill, often termed the Father of Penny Postage. Dickens also forcefully denounced the misuse of the post. In a May 1850 Household Words article, “The Begging-Letter Writer,” he vehemently wrote against “begging letters,” correspondence often composed by notorious swindlers.
A play first published in the
Post Circular, the newspaper of the Mercantile Committee formed to support calls for postal reforms, “was bound into 40,000 copies of a part of
Nicholas Nickleby and a further 100,000 copies were printed” (Daunton 18). In this play, Queen Victoria, after exclaiming “‘Mothers pawning their clothes to pay the postage of a child's letter!’, summoned [Rowland] Hill [penny postage's most fervent proponent] and commended his scheme to the Prime Minister” (Daunton 18). This story of an anonymous mother and child's letters, which, tellingly, occupies a central position within the work of a renowned novelist, captures the effect of penny postage on Victorian Britain: penny postage made everyday writing a matter of national significance. Letter-writers offered new writers a chance to enjoy this new-found opportunity.
The letter-writers' ability to answer these new correspondents' practical questions constitutes one reason for their enduring popularity. These manuals also offered letters for a plethora of life's occasions. They actually do seem to fulfill their titles' claims to completeness and universality. The manuals provided, for example, letters that might be sent upon the death of a friend, concerning an unpaid debt, in response to one's daughter receiving a marriage proposal, even to console a friend who lost her beauty because of smallpox.8
A small pox letter–a testament to friendship and a clear-sighted discussion of the virtue of all kinds of beauty–can be found in The Complete Letter-Writer 177–78.
Often too, these manuals included “a compendious grammar of the English language” that furnished not only grammatical rules, but also suggestions concerning style, both in the sense of word choice and the letter's physical presentation.
9 As did a host of its 1820s and 30s progenitors, Cooke's 1841 text, in a manner followed by other contemporary manuals, explicitly advertised its grammar instruction in its title. Both Cooke's text and the 1847 Art of Letter-Writing include grammar sections that are placed prominently before any letter examples are given.
The corollary promise, as articulated by the 1821
Universal Letter Writer, was that “constant attendance on the above [rules for letter writing], for a few months, will soon convince the learner, that his time has not been spent in vain. Indeed, [with] an assiduous attention to the study …, writing letters to his correspondents [will] become equally easy as speaking in company” (6). From this vantage point, the manuals were that from which their users could “graduate,” for, after diligent study, a unique personal voice, rather than that of the letter-writers, would speak through their letters.
Such attention to the seeming rudiments of epistolary writing helps delineate the manuals' target audience: people attempting to enter higher social circles. It was common for the manuals to include, as does the 1830s Every-Body's Letter Writer, “Complete Directions for the Correct Mode of Addressing Persons of Rank” that provided rules for correspondence with “Men of Trade and Profession,” “Incorporate Bodies,” “Governors under the Crown,” even the “Royal Family” (23–24). In fact, within the span of a mere four pages of this manual, one finds “From a Young Tradesman, asking his Father's consent to Marry” and “To a Nobleman, Soliciting Patronage” (11, 15). In these manuals, correspondence was not constricted to the writers' familial or social circles. Providing information on the knighthood and the line of succession as well as guides for preparing letters directed to members of Parliament, William Kingdom's 1842 Secretary's Assistant; Exhibiting the Various and Most Correct Modes of Superscription, Commencement, and Conclusion of Letters to Persons at Every Degree of Rank, republished in 1850 and again in the 1880s, even more obviously flaunts the manuals' assertion that letters– and their writers too–could cross social boundaries.
Hand in hand with the manuals' class consciousness went their moral instruction. When these manuals asserted that they equipped people for every occurrence in life, this meant they taught their audiences not only how to write in response to every occurrence, but also how to conduct themselves correctly in any situation. The inclusion of “polite” in so many titles is no accident. Moreover, in any manual, a reader would find letters like “From an aged Lady in the Country, to her Niece in London, cautioning her against keeping company with a Gentleman of bad character,” “From a Gentleman on the Utility of Studying the Sciences,” or “From a young Gentleman, in expectation of an Estate from his penurious Uncle, to a young Lady of small fortune, desiring her to elope with him to Scotland,” followed by “The Lady's prudent Answer” (Cooke 16, 141–46, 54–55). These were not simply letters to send to young people; they instructed parents in rearing children, warned young people of the world's temptations, and reflected the standards of “polite” society. As these examples suggest, the letter-writers were not just “copy books.” Rather, underlying the manuals was the belief that a person would become like the persona he or she adopted when writing letters and that righteousness would prevail because of the morality of one's writing.10
In a sense, Richardson's Pamela offers “proof” of this maxim asserting letters' moral powers. This novel developed from letters contained in Familiar Letters, specifically letters 138–39; his manual itself promised to “mend the heart, and improve the understanding” of its users (xxvii).
Elizabeth Frank's manual typifies this ideal when asserting its capacity to “enlarge their [the manuals' users'] experience of the affairs of the world, without endangering their morals, [… and to] inculcate, in a peculiarly striking and influential manner, the most important principles of virtue and piety” (iii).
11 Elizabeth Frank's manual was printed both in London in 1814 and in Philadelphia in 1816. I quote from the available Philadelphia edition.
These manuals' intent extended beyond composing letters to creating “good” British citizens.
And these manuals were incredibly popular. They even rose to the height of being classified alongside “Baby-jumpers and perambulators, copying presses and pen and pencil menders, needle-threaders and sewing-machines,” all modern “conveniences” (Seton 166). This very popularity, not surprisingly, led to satiric comment.12
Approaching the critique of letter-writing manuals from a different angle, Favret and Zaczek, historians of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British epistle, assert that letter-writers instituted something akin to sexual and political censorship. Favret accuses letter-writers of seeking “to ‘socialize’ what was a potentially volatile form of expression,” in other words, privileging decorum over content (24). Zaczek more incisively describes the letter-writers' authoritarian stance, stressing that these works caution that “a letter … is a signed document, and as such may be prone to all sort of mishap…. To avoid such risks, [the manual] suggests … a number of ‘safe topics’ whose disclosure would not cause any harm” and delineates who qualifies as suitable correspondents (33). According to Favret's and Zaczek's findings then, the manuals' goal was social conformity, not necessarily moral improvement.
An outright polemic focused on the insincerity of contemporary letters appeared in the March 1822
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. While not explicitly referring to the manuals, the writer describes a machine that shares many letter-writer traits: “Why should not a sort of mute barrel-organ be constructed on the plan of those that play sets of tunes and country dances, to indite a catalogue of polite epistles calculated for all the ceremonious observances of good-breeding” (Southey 301). Also adopting the manuals' inclusion of model letters, the
Blackwood's writer ends the article with an example of the pernicious letters, complete with a “translation” of the letter's true sentiments: “My dear Lady D– … That sweet love Alethea has always, you know, been my peculiar favourite” translates into “You tiresome old toad: … That pert minx Alethea has always been my peculiar aversion” (Southey 303–04).
Many others also accused the manuals of emptying letters of sentiment, originality, personality, even thought. George Seton, author of Gossip about Letters and Letter-Writers, caustically attacks the manuals, stating that “the nuisance of having either to think or to feel is materially modified, if not entirely removed, by these useful manuals” (166). Under these conditions, letter writing becomes formulaic, so much so that some brag “‘Do you say it [the letter] is studied, made up, rehearsed, contrived, artistic? Let me see it, then; let me run it over; tell me age, sex, circumstance; and I will tell you if it be studied or real’” (“Letter-Writing” 430). Punch takes up where these writers leave off, offering “Punch's Complete Letter Writer,” begun in 1844 and renewed in 1848. This text mimics manual classics like the letters from the embarrassed debtor and the penitent son. Of course, the debtor exposes himself as a shyster, and we quickly learn of the son's repeated attempts, and failures, at repentance. The father's response to the failed prodigal further condemns the son and his letter: “All your long letter may be boiled down like spinach, into three words, ‘Pay my debts’” (Kelly 197–98). Punch's manual shows the hypocrisy perpetuated by “correct” letters and the manuals containing them.
These critiques present a rich catalogue of letters from those who violate the manuals' promise that well-written letters indicate their writers' moral and social worthiness. In the end, however, these critiques reinforce many of the letter-writers' moral precepts. These writers champion epistolary excellence that, as an 1843 commentator on epistolary art put it, consists in the letters “affecting nothing, dissembling nothing, imitating nothing; –in their fidelity to the feelings; in their character of genuineness” – the very habits letter-writers explicitly attempted to instill in their readers (Roberts viii–ix). The Blackwood's writer, for example, maintains readers will automatically reject the correspondence that “murders thought, quenches fancy, wastes time, spoils paper, wears out innocent goose quills” (Southey 301). Similarly, no addressee in any of Punch's manuals is fooled by a conniving correspondent.13
Besides its “Complete Letter Writer,” Punch published “Punch's New General Letter-Writer” in 1841; the “Confessions of a Begging Letter-Writer,” replete with example letters, in 1843; and “The Royal Complete Letter Writer” in 1848.
In other words, while the critiques warn that people will use the manuals to compose manipulative letters, they also assert that the manipulators will be found out. They endorse the letter-writers' central tenet that one's letters reflect one's true nature that will be judged accordingly. So, by the 1850s, British letter-writers taught a form of writing frequently deemed empty, even deceitful, and yet concurrently promoted widely-accepted moral ideals. Micawber's letters flesh out this conflict's consequences for the Victorian social and literary worlds.
The Familiar Letters of Mr. Micawber
DICKENS'S FAMILIARITY with Richardson and eighteenth-century writings in general, as well as his interest in postal politics, makes it likely that he was acquainted with correspondence manuals like Familiar Letters on Important Occasions and its nineteenth-century imitators.14
According to the inventory of Devonshire Terrace, Dickens had nineteen volumes of Richardson's works (Tillotson 718). Stonehouse's catalogue of Dickens's library accounts for these nineteen volumes, revealing that they include eight volumes of Clarissa, seven of Sir Charles Grandison, and four of Pamela (97). In a letter of 1847, Dickens notably admits “Richardson is no great favorite of mine, and never seems to take his top-boots off, whatever he does” (Storey and Fielding 20). Perhaps through Micawber, Dickens felt able to loosen Richardson's boots.
The echoes between Micawber's letters and the epistles found in such manuals, which the following pages detail, implicitly argue for the probability of that connection. And yet, whether Dickens read or consciously used letter-writing manuals as a source for Micawber and his writing is not the central issue. Instead, I foreground these similarities to show how both the letter-writers and Dickens's novel link Victorian letter writing with social aspirations. So while Micawber's letters–replete with elaborate metaphors and exaggeration–make him one of the more unique and memorable characters in Dickens's fiction, these letters must simultaneously be read as drawing on familiar letter forms interconnected with the perennially familiar desire for social acceptance, if not ascension.
Micawber's most typical epistolary composition apologetically bemoans his imminent financial ruin. For example, in his first letter to David, he writes:
Under these circumstances, alike humiliating to endure, humiliating to contemplate, and humiliating to relate, I have discharged the pecuniary liability contracted at this establishment, by giving a note of hand, made payable fourteen days after date…. When it becomes due, it will not be taken up. The result is destruction. The bolt is impending, and the tree must fall. (225; ch. 17)
With similarly contrite strains, a manual's poverty-stricken tradesman writes, “For many years the business in which I embarked was very prosperous, but latterly some heavy losses, the pressure of the time, and other afflictions, have caused a failure” (
Every-Body's 15). With Micawber-esque sentence structure and exaggeration, a struggling teacher of the mid-1800s launches into his tale of woe:
An early marriage, at Gretna Green, irrevocably estranged my relations from me, blasted all my prospects in life, and doomed me … to become a teacher of youth, in which capacity, on the small salary of a school-assistant, I have had to contend with the serious cares of rearing fourteen children, the eight youngest of whom, with their poor mother, who has been a cripple from the painful effects of rheumatism, are still dependent upon me for support … (Seton 162–63)15
Seton includes this example in his discussion of letters requesting loans, noting that “very elaborate examples [of such letters] are quoted in the public prints” (160). He attests, writing in 1869, that it was composed “upwards of twenty years ago” but offers no further publication information (162).
Besides the tonal resonances, the relative similarity in these writers' circumstances, or, at least, their comparable piling up of ills, link Micawber, the young tradesman, and this distressed father in a specific epistolary tradition: that of the debtor's letters.
Micawber's letters, however, not only speak of financial problems, but also of paid debts; as he joyfully announces, “our common friend, Mr. Thomas Traddles (who has not yet left us, and is looking extremely well), has paid the debts and costs, in the noble name of Miss Trotwood; and … myself and family are at the height of earthly bliss” (671; ch. 54). In like manner, one manual's recently solvent borrower celebrates his indebtedness while simultaneously pledging future assiduity: “I shall be as frugal and industrious as possible, and the whole of my time shall be employed in the closest attendance to the duties of my station, and shall acknowledge your kindness with gratitude as long as I live in the world” (Universal 17). Even invoking Micawber's famous “in short,” another manual's correspondent similarly thanks a generous friend: I “know not indeed, at this time, any other way to show my gratitude, than by my hearty thanks for the same…. In short, Sir, my heart is full, and would overflow with gratitude, did I not stop” (Complete 75).
Micawber's letters also intimate a knowledge of the letter-writers' characterization of the debtor's wise friend. In Reverend George Brown's 1790 manual, reprinted in 1800 and 1802, for example, the wise friend advises his debt-afflicted acquaintance to “take a walk to the Fleet, or the King's-Bench prisons, and there you will find as many builders [the occupation of the friend to whom he writes] as there are windows in your houses” (60). As if inspired by that friend's epistle, Micawber proclaims that “it is [his] intention to fly from [him]self for a short period, and devote a respite of eight-and-forty hours to revisiting some metropolitan scenes of past enjoyment. Among other havens of domestic tranquillity and peace of mind, my feet will naturally tend toward the King's Bench Prison” (599; ch. 49). This willingness to face justice, characteristic of all Micawber's letters but most pronounced in the Heep letter, further intertwines him with the letter-writers' instructive tradition. Micawber concludes his letter against Heep with anticipations of his own retribution: “For myself, my Canterbury Pilgrimage has done much; imprisonment on civil process, and want will soon do more” (648; ch. 52). Micawber's vision of punishment's benefits is a letter-writer standard; as another manual correspondent writes: “I know you can look upon adversity with an eye of consideration, discerning therein the hand of Providence; … there is a blessing annexed to them [all troubles], if they be suffered with patience; your virtue that stands inward, may now be made apparent to the world” (Every-Body's 13).
Significantly, the closer Micawber nears social responsibility, the more his letters assume an instructive, rather than submissive, tone. Micawber even adopts an avuncular voice, composing letters of advice borne of past troubles. In a letter to David, Micawber writes, “Let the wretched man who now addresses you, my dear Copperfield, be a beacon to you through life. He writes with that intention, and in that hope. If he could think himself of so much use, one gleam of day might, by possibility, penetrate into the cheerless dungeon of his remaining existence” (226; ch. 18). Richardson's letter “From an Uncle to a Nephew”– one of the most frequently reprinted letters of Familiar Letters (Hornbeak 123, n24)–similarly includes “Let me intreat [sic] you then, my dear kinsman, for your family's sake, for your own sake, before it be too late to reflect” and the admission that “I have gone thro' the like servitude with pleasure and credit. I found myself my own master full soon for my discretion” (7, 6). So too is this uncle compelled to correspond by “nothing but my affection for you” (8). The righteousness of all parties is ostensibly insured by these letters, for the writer does not merely offer written instructions but himself as an example of his words' efficacy. Notably, the 1847 Art of Letter-Writing testifies to this claim, containing the penitent response from the erring nephew to the concerned uncle: “If but a faint ray of hope would break in to lead me to suppose I should ever regain your confidence and esteem, I should then indeed be happy. Of my transgressions, let me confess, I am truly, deeply sensible” (22).
Recognizing that Micawber's letters echo those of the letter-writers, one should assume that, as the manuals promise, Micawber would be a paragon of virtue and piety. And even though Micawber does not pay his debts, cannot hold a job, and just barely provides for his family, in some ways he assumes a respectable aura. Considering his financial circumstances, readers would expect Micawber to write letters pleading for money and rationalizing his failures. But he does not write “begging letters,” Micawber rather admits his culpability, correctly terms himself a “Beggared Outcast,” and even enumerates the exact extent of his debt (226; ch. 18).16
By the 1860s, begging letters became such a problem the Mendicity Society attempted to sort the sincere from the fabricated. In 1867 “upwards of 2000 begging-letters were investigated … of which more than half were found to be undeserving of notice” (Seton 160).
While some might read these statements as subtle requests for loans, the novel stresses that Micawber never asks for money, only friendship. Here too, Micawber follows letter-writer etiquette. The manuals preach honesty even in the face of destitution. For example, the letter “From a Gentleman to his Friend in distressed Circumstances, who had endeavoured to conceal his Poverty,” in which the gentlemen admonishes his friend for concealing his “present distress,” addresses the friendship-threatening situation that could have arisen between Micawber and his friends had he not been so honest (
Universal 50).
17 “From a Gentleman to his Friend in distressed Circumstances …” includes these striking lines: “I am extremely concerned to find you have so ill an opinion of me, as to hide your misfortunes…. it makes me fear you never esteemed my friendship, if you could imagine that any alteration in your circumstances should ever be able to change my love” (Universal 50). Such a philosophy provides good reason for Micawber's unmitigated honesty.
Micawber may err on the side of overly specific descriptions of his circumstances, but his devotion to his friends is unmistakable. And, in this willingness to admit his mistakes, his eagerness to act as moral instructor for David, and his respect for honest, consistent correspondence, Micawber inhabits the letter-writing roles substantiated as morally and socially responsible by the epistolary guides. In fact, one could say his letters allow him to maintain relationships with those like David, Traddles, and the Wickfields. His letters–in intriguing opposition to his irresponsible lifestyle–show his desire to attain an upstanding existence by literally corresponding to the rules of society.
18 David's initial introduction to Micawber's writing stands as the potential exception to Micawber's deference to social rules, for he is writing “a petition to the House of Commons, praying for an alteration in the law of imprisonment for debt” (144; ch. 11). Yet even in this capacity, his composition is socially conventional. Contemporaneous letter-writing manuals included extensive sections on such petitions. For example, the 1847 Art of Letter-Writing includes instructions for addressing petitions to “the Queen in Council, to the Houses of Lords and Commons” (49). Cooke's 1841 Universal Letter Writer promoted itself by noting that added to its “polite” letters was the Complete Petitioner, a thirty-two-page section that includes petitions not just from the impoverished in want of loans or legal intervention on their behalf, but also “From a Person under Sentence of Death for Murder” and “From a Person Afflicted with the Venereal Disease, to be admitted into the Locke-Hospital” (188–89, 205).
Dickens's crafting of Micawber's letters, that connects them with British letter-writing manuals, thus complicates the tendency to read Micawber as a simple parasite on society. If nothing else, Micawber is aware of social expectations. This awareness is the basis of Micawber and Uriah Heep's short, but intense, relationship that ultimately reveals the novel's evaluation of letter-writers' social contribution. As Micawber learns from letter-writing manuals, Heep is tutored by those knowledgeable in such socially appropriate theories; as Heep stresses, “Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of umbleness” (490; ch. 39). Further, as Micawber's letters allow him to assume different yet always situationally appropriate roles, Heep learns how to adapt to social circumstances. From Heep's description, one assumes his father was an exemplar of adaptation, for his father's accolades include “the monitor-medal [… a position as] sexton [… and the reputation] among the gentlefolks, of being such a well-behaved man” (490; ch. 39). Heep's rise to success in the Wickfield household attests that he learned well. Heep and Micawber know what society demands of them, through practice have become adept at fulfilling those roles, and, in so doing, inhabit similar social spheres. Micawber and Heep live by social observation and imitation.
Critics, however, typically stress the distance between these characters, rightly stressing Heep's selfishness and opportunism.19
Kincaid, for example, emphasizes the dichotomous nature of Heep's and Micawber's worlds, positioning Heep in “the threatening and hostile world of practical or commercial ‘reality’” and Micawber in “the comic world of the imagination” (Dickens 165). Priestley asserts “Uriah Heep would never have dreamed of employing such a person; Micawber would never have remained in the office a week; and even supposing that both actions were possible, he would never have been able to conceal his knowledge of Uriah's shady transactions” (240).
But this dismissal too quickly glosses over Heep's and Micawber's similar modes for social survival that, when given attention, better emphasize the novel's examination of the hypocrisy inherent in the Victorian social standards perpetuated by the letter-writers. While Heep and Micawber recognize and can mimic those standards, they never find full acceptance in privileged social circles. They accentuate the division existing between obeying social customs and truly “belonging” to the middle- and higher-class Victorian world. Micawber's and Heep's lack of money and education are only the two most obvious barriers to such living. How the characters deal with these barriers not only distinguishes Micawber from Heep, but also captures the debilitating effects bred by the letter-writers that claimed such barriers could be overcome. Unlike Heep, Micawber is unwilling to use his ability to feign social propriety to defraud Wickfield.
20 Given his highly developed, or, at least, continually practiced, epistolary skills, Micawber's aversion to fraud is all the more remarkable. Contemporary epistolary commentators continually showed how letter writing could be an instrument of fraud. Every model letter of Punch's “Confessions of a Begging Letter-Writer” is “one tissue of lies” solely fashioned for financial gain (68). Similarly stressing letters' potential remunerative powers, another Punch correspondent, responding to a friend's melodramatic request for a loan, writes, your letter “is charmingly written … cultivate this style of writing: I am certain money is to be made by it” (Kelly 153–54). Micawber shares the charming style, but Dickens's novel refuses to absolutely indict his sincerity. The novel never hesitates to criticize Heep.
Heep will use the social system against itself and ends up in jail. Micawber will not abuse the system yet wins no security because of his truthfulness. So, in the end, while Heep focuses on the disparity between his hopes and his life, Micawber naively trusts in the letter-writers' rhetoric that promises happiness and higher social status … after just a few months' study and practice. Thus, it is neither accident nor mere comic effect that Micawber announces his divorce from Heep's dealings in a letter. His epistolary occupations link him with upstanding society; he believes the right letter can make the man.
Micawber's commitment to this ideal constitutes a severer critique of the manuals than Punch and the other contemporary periodicals provide, for the target is not those who misuse the manuals to compose manipulative epistles. The novel portrays Micawber as one who believes in the manuals' “useful,” “elegant,” “polite” letters. David Copperfield targets the manuals' equation of elaborate sentences with sincere emotional outpourings, flamboyant phrasing with artistic elegance.21
Embodying David Copperfield's critique of the manuals is Every-Body's Letter Writer, that, in its “Preliminary Observations on the Art of Letter-Writing,” observes that “perspicuity and conciseness are the chief merits of the letter,” and yet in its opening letter showcases this line: “I have beheld you, unobserved, with the profoundest attention, till, at last, I was led to behold you with admiration: and discovering such amiability in your countenance, was induced by the sensibility, which it indicated, to flatter myself your mind is susceptible of impression, and would not deny encouragement, where truth, honor, and sincerity are advocates” (3–4, 5).
It exposes the disjunction in the manuals' union of their “good” letters with “high” culture. In accentuating the manuals' figurative flourishes and social assumptions then, Micawber's letters and life poignantly censure the letter-writers' often unrealistic representations of middle- and higher-class society.
In other ways too, David Copperfield does not allow the letter-writer world view to stand uncontested. A wealth of the novel's humor arises from the gap between Micawber's actions and his letters. And the humor continues even when Micawber finds success in Australia. After his family's move to Australia, Micawber miraculously pays all his debts, becomes a newspaper correspondent, an orator, as well as Port Middlebay's Magistrate. In the midst of this startling revolution, Micawber continues with his epistolary effusiveness; the difference is that, in Australia, his actions and writings merge as the letter-writers promised. Importantly, the suggestion never arises that his letters, in any way, aid in paying his debts, but his life finally reads like the manuals' epistolary success stories. And, as if offering a tribute to this success, there exists “an advertisement of a collection of … letters by” Micawber in the Australian newspaper in which David reads of the Micawbers' prosperity (747; ch. 63). Micawber becomes the Australian Richardson.
But though a radical change appears to have occurred in Micawber and the novel's treatment of him in this conclusion, the novel continues to expose the distance between the world the letter-writers create and the Victorian world. The novel's turn to Australia, factually a penal colony, but, in this novel, a place obviously populated by Dickens's fancy, trumpets the constructed nature of Micawber's world.22
Dickens's “A Bundle of Emigrants' Letters” published in an 1850s Household Words suggests he held a strikingly optimistic view of emigration. Armed with letters from actual Australian emigrants, Dickens strongly argues for the colonial experience, stating that “from little communities thus established, other and larger communities will rise in time, bound together in a love of the old country still fondly spoken of as Home, in the remembrance of many old struggles shared together, of many new ties formed since, and in the salutary influence and restraint of a kind of social opinion, even amid the wild solitudes of Australia” (20).
For example, Emily Peggotty voluntarily emigrates to Australia to recreate her life after her affair with Steerforth, wholeheartedly accepting the social banishment imposed on “fallen women.” The Australian natives also embody a rectitude amenable to British ideals. A reputable and even-tempered “ship's cook that was turning settler” proposes to Mrs. Gummidge, and Martha finds pastoral-like happiness with another Australian exemplar (744; ch. 63). Most surprisingly, Micawber's warning against “ever incurring pecuniary liabilities which they were unable to liquidate,” rather than stimulating smirks as it does from his British audiences, “brought a tear to the manliest eye present” in a congregation of Port Middlebay citizens (746; ch. 63). One finds analogs of all these characters and situations in letter-writing manuals and thus, in a strikingly literal way, Micawber finally inhabits the world his letters so often created. However, this does not mean the novel endorses the manuals' promises. Rather, while the letter-writers assert such a life can come to its users if they follow the manuals' dictates, the novel shows that not only would the writers need to recreate themselves, the world itself would also have to be rewritten.
Familiar Letters and Literary Letters
CRITICS READILY accept the theory that Micawber fundamentally contributes to the novel's social criticism–a strain of thought the previous letter-writer analysis furthers. When reading David Copperfield as a portrait of an artist as a young man, an examination of an artist's origins and theories, however, most deem Micawber of only minimal importance. He supposedly joins Dr. Strong and Mr. Dick as authorial doubles that provide simple, comic alternatives to place in comparison with David, the superior writer.23
See Baumgarten 48, McGowan 9, and Ferris 49 for testimonies to David's superior authorial skills in contrast to Micawber's. For a slightly different view, see Sroka, who, though conceding some similarity between David's and Micawber's writings, asserts that Micawber's letters from Australia “reflect his maturation, his new ability to face the present responsibly” (50). Sroka, however, does not define what marks the evolution of Micawber's writing style; he merely notes a change in the writings' success that he seems to base on their publication.
In other words, Micawber belongs to the ranks of the other character doubles, like Steerforth, symbolizing David's sexual urges, and Heep, his desire for social mobility, from whom David successfully separates himself. However, Micawber's writing–specifically its connection to popular culture and social status–is an integral influence in David's authorial career and cannot be relegated to such a subordinate position in the story of his artistic growth. Micawber's presence in David's story allows
David Copperfield to address the complications surrounding the task of being a literary artist in Victorian England.
24 See Poovey's “The Man-of-Letters Hero David Copperfield and the Professional Writer” in Uneven Developments for an astute reading of the Victorian literary profession and its entanglement in class and gender issues.
At first glance, Micawber's writing appears to be better defined as copying than creating. Indeed, the common term for the possible source of his letters, “letter-writers,” provocatively underscores the passivity they engender. Though a person must, of course, choose to use a manual, the manual's user is arguably a mere recipient of any boon these letters provide. The manual is the “real” writer; the manual's words, not its user's, win that person friends and social position. The manual's user, in fact, is doubly passive for this “writer” must depend not only on the manual for the words, but also on an audience to recognize these words' worth. And, though any writer depends on readers' reactions, letters, inherently and literally, ask for a response so that the correspondence may continue; correspondents are particularly at the mercy of an external audience.
Understandably then, as David privileges individual vision and inspiration as the basis for “true” artistic production, he sees Micawber's reliance on popular rhetoric and exaggerated audience awareness as indicative of his inability to create art. Following this logic, David's disquiet with his friend's writing most vocally arises in his evaluation of Micawber's letter damning Heep–Micawber's most public letter. David opens his analysis of this letter with “Mr. Micawber had a relish in this formal piling up of words,” continues with the assertion that “we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us … so, the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration,” and concludes “a nation … has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words” (645; ch. 52). He not only asserts that Micawber does not control his words, but also intimates that his words control him. According to David, Micawber does not truly create but rather tries to marshal words that, in the past, have been powerful.
David's objections assume an even more evaluative tone when observing Micawber's presentation of the Heep letter. Here, David repeatedly stresses the joy that Micawber gains from this work. David depicts Micawber's stance when beginning the letter as “sufficiently cool,” attributing this demeanor to his “enjoyment of his epistolary powers [… that] seemed to outweigh any pain or anxiety that the reality could have caused him” (642, 643; ch. 52). Later David describes Micawber when returning to his recitation as “almost smacking his lips,” as exhibiting “a mixture of the lowest spirits and the most intense enjoyment,” and finally as “[m]uch affected, but still intensely enjoying himself” (645, 647, 648; ch. 52). David's critique condemns Micawber for being more interested in exercising his audience's emotions than presenting the truth of Heep's ill use of Mr. Wickfield.25
Part of David's objection arises from his inability to see the connection between what Micawber writes and joy. Such a connection is, however, present, for, in the Heep letter, Micawber exposes injustice and frees worthy people from suffering.
Through David's eyes, Micawber's letter is all show, no substance.
At the same time, there exist within David's writings intimations that the “formulaic” style, the language of popular culture, has an appeal.26
Kincaid, also noting David's tendency toward the formulaic, writes “David is striving to write an unswerving Horatio Alger story, describing the ability of a strong character to mold the shape of his own destiny” (Annoying 58). However, Kincaid also acknowledges that continual catastrophes– abrupt changes in David's life that make him start anew–interrupt David's neat, causal success story. Highlighting these two predominant strains in David's autobiography, Kincaid argues that the artistic task David undertakes is self-contradictory. Supplementing Kincaid's more psychologically focused reading of this contradictory movement: that “the novel clearly may be seen as insisting on an advance that is really a decline, a successful working-out of problems that is really a capitulation to them” (Annoying 59), I claim that this contradiction contributes to the novel's portrayal of the writer's continual struggle between following an “original,” personal vision and finding success through the conventions of the marketplace.
Significantly, the main source of this appeal is the connection between conventional writing's popularity and its cultural power. Micawber's adoption of familiar epistolary language, though it does not pay his debts, allows him conditionally to enter social circles from which he would otherwise be barred. His letters enable him to adopt the façade of middle-class respectability. Likewise, David's novels–by virtue of their popularity with wide and diverse readerships–admit him into a privileged social world and prominent literary circles. David's novels secure him wealth and a high social status. They provide him social mobility. Acknowledging the link between writing and creating one's social identity, David rather openly embraces the idea that, in large part, sustained letter-writers' popularity and Micawber's letter writing: that a man can be equated with his writing. David most notably develops this union of the writer's “worth” and his work when recording his labors learning shorthand – a style of writing certainly divorced from originality and artistic inspiration. Out of this expansive tale, one of the longest sections specifically detailing his writing, he creates a memorable self-portrait in which he asserts he finds that the “habits of punctuality, order, and diligence” gained through his shorthand study were “the source of [his] success” (517; ch. 42). He parallels perfecting his use of shorthand to perfecting himself, not just as a user of shorthand, but also as a writer of successful novels.
David, however, is quick to draw a line between how he and Micawber use their writing “perfection.” Micawber's success ostensibly breeds in him a desire for continued popular acclaim as a letter writer. In contrast, David's success places him in such a privileged position that he chooses to write an autobiography, that is, to turn away from the conventionalized work that established him as a popular writer and devote himself to self-examination. David uses popular success as a stepping stone to the expression of his “true” artistry. Uncritically envisioning the autobiography as free from audience considerations and formulaic conventions, David gravitates to this genre, that, as John Sturrock writes, “starts in the writer's sense of his singularity, it also singularizes as it goes” (14). This is exactly the aim David sets for himself: establishing himself as a unique artist. Focusing only on this singularity, David does not, at least initially, see that, while the autobiography celebrates individuality, it also remains a highly conventional genre. The demands of shaping a life into a readable autobiography tear the writer away from an immersion in self and thrust him into the world of literary tradition and conventions. To write a successful autobiography, the writer must follow the genre's formulas, even accentuate what he or she shares with the audience, which could include other writers, even correspondents like Micawber.27
Similarly describing the “autobiographical act,” Sturrock claims that “the writer must first turn away from society, … subsequently to turn back toward society qua autobiographer, who offers to the world, or it may be to posterity, a text that will be the means of his recuperation by the community” (290). Failing to do this, David chooses solitude over society.
While David initially maintains a balance between presenting himself as an “original” artist and one in solidarity with “all” Victorian writers, after he writes of Micawber's letter damning Heep, he increasingly attempts to refuse any connection with convention. David's references to his writing, already strikingly intermittent, become more vague and infrequent. He disassociates himself from the most popular styles of writing. Noting that inspiration, not external approbation, guide him and stressing how fancy would take “strong possession of” him, David tries to cast a sort of mystery over his work (699; ch. 58).28
Poovey asserts that the lack of detail concerning David's writing conveys “the twin impressions that some kinds of work are less ‘degrading’ and less alienating than others and that some laborers are so selfless and skilled that to them work is simultaneously an expression of self and a gift to others” (101). Similarly, Welsh reads David's silence concerning his novels as “confidence” and “the confusion and redundancy of nearly every other producer of writing” as characteristic of their inadequacies (116). For both Poovey and Welsh then, David's silence signals his sense of superiority. On the other hand, Simon posits that David “does not speak of his artistic powers … because he has no wish to single himself out as a man different from his fellow-men” (55). However, in this autobiography in which so many of his fellow men–Micawber, Mr. Dick, and Dr. Strong–are authors and do speak of their writings, David's silence achieves important separation. This separation could even be read as David's goal, as it allows him to become a writer above all others, in his own words, one formed by “nature and accident,” not by his slavish attention to the general readership's desires (David 589; ch. 48).
He attempts to create a world in which it is undeniable that he is the literary artist and Micawber is a common, everyday writer. In the end, David so punctuates the private nature of his writing that he threatens to undercut his privileged position.
29 I am not the only critic to question whether the novel unequivocally positions David as the superior artist. For example, both Shires and Kellogg read David Copperfield's conclusion as a portrait of an author mediating, but not conclusively resolving, the split between individual artistic satisfaction and public acclaim; see Shires 129–33 and Kellogg 68–71.
He writes: “My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company. O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!” (751; ch. 64). In this almost funereal description, David retreats from his friends, family–all of those with whom he populated his autobiography. Even Agnes, though ostensibly afforded paramount position in his world, becomes sublimated within him. He exalts an existence in which he is separated from the world and from which his return is uncertain.
Positioned against this increasingly removed, even solipsistic portrait of David as an artist, Micawber the writer explodes with vitality. The novel's concluding description of Micawber captures him publishing letters in newspapers and writing his final letter not just on his own behalf, but “on that of the whole of the Inhabitants of Port Middlebay” (747; ch. 63). These final descriptions seem only to emphasize the extremes to which these writers have been driven. Micawber appears to be selling himself to larger and larger audiences, while David retreats beyond the reach of readers. And yet to intimate that Micawber has and will always write solely for an external audience oversimplifies his writing. As it does with David, this novel also complicates Micawber as an author.
Admittedly, David and Tommy Traddles respond to Micawber's letters favorably; they meet him where requested and support his plans for retooling himself. But they also see Micawber for what he is: a debt-dodger who will not devote himself to a job. Micawber's letters do not transform him, as the letter-writers predicted, into a respected middle-class citizen. They endear him to indulgent friends and readers, but they convince neither their recipients nor Micawber himself that he will significantly change. If they had such power, Micawber would not compose a contrite letter and immediately set off for an extravagant night on the town with his family. Moreover, the novel does not attribute Micawber's success in Australia to his letters. Dickens's humor pays off the Micawber family debts and raises them to social and political power in Australia. So, even though Micawber is not the prime example of a logical man, even he would admit the absurdity of his continual letter writing if its only goal were to propel him to social success.
In emphasizing the gap between the actual and manual-promised results of Micawber's letters, the novel presents the unstintingly prolific Micawber as one seeking, like David, something beyond mere audience approval. The question is: what is it he seeks and how does his writing further this pursuit? Much of Micawber's “artistic” vision is gleaned from letter-writers and his immersion in social milieux where even when debt accumulates so also can the ability to feign propriety. Through this juxtaposition of world views, Micawber's letters become an exposé of Victorian England as experienced by the lower and working classes. For example, Micawber exaggerates the already exaggerated language of the letter-writer. In so doing, he accentuates what the letter-writers promise: wealth, wisdom, and security if one believes in and obeys society's rules. The result of this extreme emphasis is that his letters capture just how far removed the manuals' promise of social success is from the life of Victorian laborers and debtors in which belief in such promises most typically led to poverty, confusion, and insecurity. Micawber's continual reliance on the manuals' rhetoric rather than his cultivation of an original voice too is purposeful, for it emphasizes that he feels able to speak only through the words of his social, moral, and literary “superiors.” He uses the same language when an inmate in debtor's prison and when Magistrate of Port Middlebay. His study of the manuals is not confined to a “few months” as The Universal Letter Writer had projected (6); Micawber never graduates–or never chooses to graduate–beyond the letter-writers to a language uniquely his own.
This focus on Micawber's choice of language and subject reveals that Micawber and David undertake similar authorial practices. They both write about what they know best, about the subjects they can most articulately examine. David writes about himself and his desire to be seen as artistically original and socially privileged. Micawber's letters stress his unity with the legions of the Victorian poor and knowledge of their unending quests for success. Both also exploit and struggle against the conventions of the genres in which they write–acts that, as shown, reveal the complexities and contradictions in both the genre's and these individual authors' goals. Foregrounding these similarities between David's and Micawber's writing does not transform Micawber's purple prose into great art, but it shows that Micawber can create in a way comparable to David's, positioning his consciously chosen voice into dialogue not just with audiences, but also with social and artistic ideas.
And so David Copperfield appears to diminish the chasm between the imitator or low-class hack and the popular novelist with marked artistic aspirations. By raising Micawber's writing above the trite and superficial to something thoughtful and socially conscious, the novel countenances the idea that even the most conventional techniques can yield texts worthy of serious examination. This move aptly reflects the Victorian literary marketplace that, as contemporary commentators optimistically argued: is “open to the whole world. There are … no qualifications to be tested– no degrees to be taken–no diplomas to be granted, before the man of letters begins his practice and gathers his constitution around him. All the more honourable, therefore to succeed in it” (Kaye 369–70). Or similarly, a writer in an 1852 Westminster Review claims that in the literary world, “interest can do nothing, patronage can do nothing …; the appeal lies direct from the author to the public, and distinction must be won and carved out by merit alone” (“Profession” 525).30
The nineteenth-century British Künstlerroman, of which David Copperfield is a prime example, was also fluent in this egalitarian discourse. In these novels, artists could come from humble beginnings, and, to an extent, they could even derive strength from their position within the “mass” population. As Beebe writes, the nineteenth-century Künstlerroman hero “instead of separating himself from mankind, … feels that his mission is that of the prophet who leads his neighbors out of the wilderness … the goal of these books is to bring the ‘I’ of the artist into harmony with the ‘others’ of society” (80). Or, in Poovey's words, “the individual writer was represented as unique and the new incarnation of the self-made, self-sufficient man (if not always a ‘prophet’ or ‘genius’) by virtue of the fact that he was like–not different from–the other men which whom he was free to compete” (108). Artistic strength here arises from a writer's willingness to immerse him- or herself in the world. After that, one might be distinguished, but only through one's words.
Like these writers,
David Copperfield appears to foster the ideal that all writers had equal opportunity to enter the Victorian literary marketplace and would succeed or fail purely on the basis of their skill.
Dickens's novel seems to present this democratic portrait of the literary artist not to voice a warning against all which threatens “Art,” as did many–even a rather optimistic 1847 Fraser's writer anxiously declared that “Literature is a profession in which the author has not only to struggle against his brother authors, but also against a host of interlopers” (“Condition” 294). David Copperfield seems to refuse a definitive hierarchy of writers. But ultimately, the novel does not conclusively stamp out that which threatens these egalitarian representations of the Victorian literary man. Explaining that the Victorian writer was typically represented as “simultaneously an individual distinct from all others and a representative (English)man,” Mary Poovey pinpoints the crucial problem with that description: “all individuals did not have the same opportunities to the ‘national inheritance’”; in other words, not all could attain the middle-class lifestyle that defined “national character” and bestowed “representative” status (113, 110). This is not a purely economic qualification. At the novel's end, Micawber has paid his debts and has a lucrative job; the way David and Micawber use this social security constitutes the difference between them. Micawber openly exploits his serendipitously won success. In just one newspaper issue, besides a letter to David, “There was another letter from him [Micawber] in the same paper … there was an advertisement of a collection of similar letters by him [… and] the Leading Article was also by him” (747; ch. 63). David, on the other hand, becomes increasingly silent about his career and much more successfully erases the taints of the public and economic from his writing. David is the gentleman author; Micawber remains the interloper. As Poovey claims, class differences did make a difference–a lesson the letter-writing manuals suppress, but Micawber personifies, and a lesson against which Dickens's novel struggles but never fully discredits.
Dickens's novel does not end with a newly integrated vision of the literary artist, one who displays an ease with both popular culture and “high art.” Nor do David's or Micawber's roles change. David does not emerge from his retreat; Micawber does not temper his attention to the public or begin his private autobiography. Moreover, the novel exiles Micawber to Australia with all the other characters who no longer “fit” into David's world. Just as Emily's banishment removes the specter of David's past and potentially transgressive sexual desires, Micawber's move to Australia separates David from the writer he might have become – one “merely” popular. And yet, the banished thrive. Again, no hierarchy is absolutely secure.
As critics have aptly proven, it is easy to read David Copperfield as a text that perpetuates hierarchies. It is not only easy to adopt this reading, it is reassuring, for with a hierarchy one maintains order. Uncovering the complexities of Micawber's and David's relationship to the role of literary artist, however, reveals that this novel hovers between perpetuating and dissolving authorial hierarchies. For such an end to arise not only from a fictional autobiography–itself a merging of two seemingly mutually exclusive genres–but also from Dickens himself, who embodied both but remained in neither of his “writerly roles”–the favorite of many artistic and social elites and the amazingly successful literary capitalist–is, in short, imminently logical.
%20-%20https://sketch.com%20--%3e%3ctitle%3e3ECBBF50-FD08-412A-943D-2CFC5E025A16%3c/title%3e%3cdesc%3eCreated%20with%20sketchtool.%3c/desc%3e%3cg%20id='Stylesheet'%20stroke='none'%20stroke-width='1'%20fill='none'%20fill-rule='evenodd'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(-926.000000,%20-668.000000)'%20id='BUTTONS'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(100.000000,%20597.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='BTN-/-RIGHTS'%20transform='translate(816.000000,%2065.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='ICON-/-Rights'%20transform='translate(10.000000,%206.000000)'%3e%3cpath%20d='M13.5752841,0%20L1.34943182,0%20C0.59375,0%200,0.586666667%200,1.33333333%20L0,22.6666667%20C0,23.4133333%200.620738636,24%201.34943182,24%20L17.6505682,24%20C18.40625,24%2019,23.3866667%2019,22.6666667%20L19,5.36%20L13.5752841,0%20Z%20M13.5752841,1.89333333%20L17.0838068,5.36%20L13.5752841,5.36%20L13.5752841,1.89333333%20Z%20M1.34943182,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,5.36%20C12.1988636,6.10666667%2012.7926136,6.69333333%2013.5482955,6.69333333%20L17.6235795,6.69333333%20L17.6505682,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,22.6666667%20Z'%20id='Shape'%20fill='%23595959'%20fill-rule='nonzero'%3e%3c/path%3e%3ccircle%20id='Oval'%20stroke='%23595959'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20fill='%23595959'%20cx='9.5'%20cy='13.5355339'%20r='5.5'%3e%3c/circle%3e%3cpolyline%20id='Path-2'%20stroke='%23FFFFFF'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20transform='translate(9.500000,%2013.035534)%20rotate(45.000000)%20translate(-9.500000,%20-13.035534)%20'%20points='8%2016.0355339%2011%2016.0355339%2011%2010.0355339'%3e%3c/polyline%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)
