The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Charles Dickens · a novel of a life told by its owner · sixty-four chapters · twenty monthly numbers from Bradbury and Evans, May 1849 to November 1850, and in one volume, 1850 · scored on Dickens’s English as he completed it, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of a life told by the one who lived it; fairy tale of the lost child, comic novel of character and serial melodrama, in one first-person retrospect
Mythos
The orphan dispossessed by a wicked stepfather, set to labour, who walks to the one kinswoman and is taken in; the godmother as a real woman, the holy fool and his kite, the sea that takes the seducer and the man he wronged together
Phase
From the narrator’s birth at Blunderstone, through childhood, school, the warehouse, his education, a marriage and the making of a writer, to his middle life
Presentation
Fiction; sixty-four chapters in twenty monthly numbers, the last a double number, with etchings by Phiz; first-person retrospective narration throughout, with four chapters of retrospect in the present tense
Register
From the child’s remembered perception and the comic speech of Micawber, Heep, Betsey Trotwood and the Yarmouth household to the dreadful sublime of the storm and the sentimental and melodramatic registers of the later half
Scale
One life and one memory, holding a family in ruin and its substitutes, a warehouse, schools, a law office, the fishermen’s sea, the debtors’ prison and the colony
Governing Proposition
A boy loses his mother and his home to a stepfather’s firmness, is set to labour in a London warehouse, walks to the one kinswoman he has and is taken in; he grows up, marries a child-wife and fails her, and becomes a writer who tells the whole of it. The wager of the novel is that a self is made by memory, and that memory is both the instrument that makes it and the distortion that shapes it; that the child’s eye sees what the man can only name later, and that a man’s first loves and first injuries go on choosing for him long after he thinks he has chosen.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” The novel opens on a question its narrator cannot yet answer, and its first chapter is called “I Am Born”. The man who asks is David Copperfield in middle life, a successful novelist, and the whole book is his: first-person retrospective narration from the first sentence to the last, a life told by the one who lived it, with all that he saw and all that he could not see in himself.
The book ran in twenty monthly numbers from Bradbury and Evans between May 1849 and November 1850, nineteen parts with the last a double number, with etchings by Hablot K. Browne, who signed as Phiz, and came out in one volume in 1850. The full title calls it the personal history, adventures, experience and observation of David Copperfield the Younger. It holds sixty-four chapters. The work scored here is the novel as Dickens completed it; the preface of 1850 and the preface of 1869, in which he called the book his favourite child, are context, and so are the Phiz plates.
The early chapters are among the highest in English for remembered perception: the garden at Blunderstone, the mother at the window, the sands at Yarmouth and the boat-house where the Peggottys live. The child sees, and the man names later. When his mother is courted and married by Mr Murdstone, the child watches the courtship without understanding it, and then lives under the Murdstones’ “firmness”, which ends with the boy biting a hand and being sent away. The reader sees the stepfather as the child did and as the man now does, in the same sentence.
Movement II
At Salem House the boy meets Creakle’s cruelty, sees Mr Mell’s shame, and is drawn to Steerforth’s charm without yet knowing what it costs others. The news of his mother’s death is delivered to him at school. With her goes his home. The child is set to labour in a London warehouse, Murdstone and Grinby’s, and the book sets down the abandonment with a shame its author never told in his own voice: Dickens had worked as a boy at Warren’s Blacking in 1824, and told it only in a fragment given to John Forster and printed in Forster’s Life after his death.
The boy lodges with the Micawbers, and the shame turns to farce without ceasing to be shame. Mr Micawber is in debt, and goes to the debtors’ prison; his periodic sentences rise and collapse; Mrs Micawber declares, again and again, “I never will desert Mr Micawber.” He gives the boy the book’s comic law of money: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness.” Into Micawber Dickens put his own father’s debts, and the comedy carries the private wound.
Here the book is most nearly whole under one physics. The warehouse is both the Micawbers’ lodging and the child’s humiliation; the Murdstones are grotesque and frightening at once. The comic and the dreadful share a law: the remembering voice of a man who has outlived both and still feels both. This is the book’s swerve in Dickens’s own work, a private shame carried into public fiction, and it is the source of everything his later first-person novel would turn against itself.
Movement III
The boy runs. He walks to Dover, to the one kinswoman he has, Betsey Trotwood, and she takes him in. Her cry of “Janet! Donkeys!” is comedy, and she is also the fairy godmother of the tale made into a real woman, sharp, generous and her own. The orphan dispossessed by a wicked stepfather, set to labour, who walks to the kinswoman and is taken in, is the fairy tale of the lost child at full depth, and the book builds it rather than borrowing it.
In the aunt’s house lives Mr Dick, who cannot keep King Charles’s head out of his Memorial, and who flies a kite that carries his words: the holy fool, kind and wiser than he seems. The boy is schooled again, under Doctor Strong’s kindness, and comes into the Wickfield house, where he meets Agnes. The narrator will be a long time seeing her; the book is shaped by what he cannot see in himself, and his blindness to her is one of the things the form knows that a chronicle would not.
In the Wickfield house is Uriah Heep, with his “’umble”. The book gives him an account of the charity school that taught him that word, and half sees that its villain was made by the deference demanded of him. His humility is a manner learned from charity and turned to use, and it passed, with Micawber and Barkis “willin’”, out of the novel and into the language. The comic voices are each an instrument; no two speak alike.
Movement IV
The young man works as a clerk at the law in Doctors’ Commons, learns shorthand and reports Parliament, and falls in love with Dora, the child-wife, whom he marries. He loves her and fails her, and the book does not let him escape the cruelty of the lesson. Annie Strong, in the Doctor’s household, names “the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart”, and David takes the phrase as the text of his own. Dora dies. The undisciplined heart is the book’s disclosure stated and dramatised at once.
Beside it runs the plot David set going without meaning to. He brought Steerforth to Yarmouth, to the boat-house and the Peggottys, and Steerforth takes Emily away. Her uncle’s search for her runs across years; Martha, her shadow, walks by the river in the London night; Rosa Dartle, in Steerforth’s mother’s house, carries her scar and her rage. Here the first person thins: David witnesses these plots at a distance, told to him or watched by him, and the register turns to stage melodrama that the rest of the book does not obey.
Micawber returns, and in his sudden competence explodes Heep: the comic sublime, the villain undone by the book’s great comic figure. Barkis goes out with the tide, grave and exact. Between the movements the narrator stops four times, in chapters titled as retrospects and written in the present tense, and stands among his past while time holds still. Memory becomes a part of the form, and the reader feels the man looking back as a presence in the room.
Movement V
The storm comes to Yarmouth. A ship is wrecked; Ham goes into the sea for a man on the wreck, and the man proves to be Steerforth. The sea that drowned the fathers of Ham and Emily takes the seducer and the man he wronged together. The chapter is built with total control of tempo, and it is the book’s dreadful sublime: the one power that has run under the whole novel since the boat-house on the sands rising to take what it is owed.
Then the book closes its accounts. The good emigrate to Australia, the colony as England’s exit for whatever it cannot hold; the bad go to prison, and in a late chapter Heep and Littimer reappear as penitents in a model prison, there to serve a satire on a topical question. The cast is disposed of by moral desert, under a law of reward the early chapters did not hold. The truths the first half saw without consolation are resolved into the Agnes ideal.
The last retrospect brings the narrator to Agnes, “pointing upward”: the book’s chosen close, and its weakest note, where the language goes general and the rhythm goes to the pulpit. The question of the first sentence is answered by a man who has written his own life and become its hero by the telling. The book has been read without a break since 1850, more in its first half than its second. A century on, Salinger opened The Catcher in the Rye by refusing “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”, and the refusal is a measure of what the book had made: a form for the life told from its first memory, that every later telling must take up or turn down.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and a serial of sixty-four chapters does not pass it whole. The spine is required: the child’s loss of mother and home to the Murdstones’ “firmness”, the warehouse and the flight to Dover, the aunt’s house, and the long education of what Annie Strong calls “the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart”. The Emily plot is bound to it through Steerforth, whom David brought to Yarmouth. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what could go: most of the Doctor Strong household beyond Annie’s phrase, Jack Maldon, much of Martha, the late chapter in which Heep and Littimer reappear as penitents in a model prison to serve a topical satire, and a share of the comic repetition. Perhaps a tenth of the book is serial padding or occasional satire.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a self is made by memory, and memory is both the instrument and the distortion. The child’s eye sees what the adult names only later (the Murdstone courtship, Mr Mell’s shame, Steerforth’s charm and its cost to others), and the book shows how first loves and first injuries go on choosing. The undisciplined heart is stated and dramatised: Dora is loved and failed, and the lesson is not softened. On class it discloses much: Heep’s “’umble” is the product of the charity school that taught it, and the book half sees that its villain was made by the deference demanded of him. Held below the top because the second half resolves its truths into the Agnes ideal and moral reward, where the first half had seen without consolation.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. The early chapters reach a height of remembered perception that few English books equal: the garden at Blunderstone, the boat-house on the sands at Yarmouth, the mother at the window, the news of her death delivered at school. The comic sublime is Micawber’s, in the formula of income and expenditure and in the explosion of Heep. The dreadful sublime is the storm at Yarmouth, where Ham goes into the sea for a man on the wreck who proves to be Steerforth. Barkis going out with the tide is grave and exact. Held below the top by the sentimental heights that fall short, Agnes “pointing upward”, Emily’s letters, Martha by the river, which the book reaches for more than once.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing in the first half. The orphan dispossessed by a wicked stepfather, set to labour, who walks to the one kinswoman and is taken in, is the fairy tale of the lost child at full depth, and Betsey Trotwood, crying “Janet! Donkeys!”, is the godmother as a real woman. Mr Dick, with King Charles’s head in his Memorial, is the holy fool whose kite carries his words. The sea is a single power: the boat-house, the drowned fathers of Ham and Emily, the storm that takes the seducer and the man he wronged together. The book made types that left it for the language: Micawber, Heep, Barkis “willin’”. Held a step down because the moral archetypes of the later half, the angel, the fallen woman and her shadow, are inherited and not built anew.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Dickens turned from the third person of his earlier novels to a first-person retrospective life, and put into it his own secret: the warehouse, his father’s debts, his first love. The stake was real, a private shame carried into public fiction, and the turn redirected his art toward Bleak House and Great Expectations. But the kind was not new: the novel of a life runs from Defoe through Fielding’s Tom Jones, told in the third person, and Wilhelm Meister to Jane Eyre (1847), two years before the first number. The swerve lies in the depth of the remembered child and the present-tense retrospect, not in the form; the serial frame, the comic cast and the moral close are the proven path. A decisive deepening of a known form, short of the gate.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Substitute a third-person chronicle and much of what the book knows is lost. The child’s perception survives in the adult’s sentence, double, so that the reader sees the Murdstones as the child did and as the man now does at once. A life told by its owner is shaped by what he cannot see in himself: his blindness to Agnes, his part in bringing Steerforth to Yarmouth. The four retrospects, in the present tense, make memory itself a formal element: time stops and the narrator stands among his past. Held below the top because the form is less an instrument in the second half, where the first person carries plots David witnesses at a distance, Emily’s flight and rescue, Annie’s vindication, the exposure of Heep, told to him or watched by him, and its knowledge thins.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over more than a century and a half of rereading, and the book yields: on memory and the making of a self; on Dickens’s concealed autobiography; on its women, Dora, Agnes, Emily, and Rosa Dartle with her scar and her rage; on class and Heep; on emigration as the answer to whatever England cannot hold. Critics return to Steerforth and David’s love for him, and to the gap between what the narrator says and what the book shows. Children who read it come back as adults and find another book. Held where it is because it is less inexhaustible on return than Bleak House or Great Expectations are often found to be, and its later chapters are reread for their faults as much as for new meaning.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is the English novel of the nineteenth century. The force: the book set down, for the novel in English, the remembered childhood as a world seen from inside the child, and made the life of a writer told by himself a central form; its force stands a little below the works that remade the novel. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Dickens’s own Great Expectations returns to the form and turns it against itself; Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man takes up the life of the writer from childhood; Salinger opens The Catcher in the Rye by refusing “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”, reach by negation; and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022) remakes it whole.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One hundred and seventy-six years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The text is whole and has been read without a break since 1850: in print continuously, taught, translated into the major languages, abridged for children, and adapted for stage, film and television many times; Micawber and Heep are words in English. Adaptation and fame are presence, and count for little on their own. What holds the axis off the widest presence: the book is read more in its first half than its second, and the sentimental close has weakened, not strengthened, with time. A survival of under two centuries does not outscore one of millennia, but at its age the book has shown what survival can show.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Dickens’s English, with no translation between. At its best the making is load-bearing and of the first order. The comic speech is a command few English writers have had, each voice its own instrument: Micawber’s periodic sentence collapsing into a shrug, Heep’s ’umbleness, the Peggottys’ Yarmouth, Betsey’s command, Barkis’s single message. The early chapters carry perception at a child’s height in an adult’s syntax, and the storm is built with total control of tempo. Charged: the serial’s padding; the sentimental prose gathered round Agnes, Emily and Martha, in which the language goes general and the rhythm goes to the pulpit; melodrama in Rosa Dartle’s speeches and Emily’s rescue; and a second half resolved by coincidence and by Micawber’s sudden competence.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Micawber’s comic letters and Martha by the river in the London night. One law holds them, the remembering voice of a man looking back on all he has seen, and in the first half the comic and the dreadful share a physics: the Murdstones are grotesque and frightening at once, and the warehouse years are both farce, in the Micawbers’ lodging, and shame. The law weakens later. The Emily plot is told in a register of stage melodrama the rest of the book does not obey; Agnes stands outside the comic world as an emblem; and the close disposes of the cast by moral desert, the colony for the good and the prison for the bad, under a law of reward the early chapters did not hold. The breaks are structural, not local.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Held, not listed. Consciousness, in its growth from infancy. The family, in its ruin, its substitutes (the aunt, the Peggottys, the Micawbers) and its marriages. Labour: the child’s warehouse, the clerk’s law in Doctors’ Commons, shorthand and parliamentary reporting, the fishermen’s sea and the novelist’s trade. Class, from the boat-house to Steerforth’s mother’s house; debt and the prison; schooling, from Creakle’s cruelty to Doctor Strong’s kindness; the sea as a natural order that governs lives; the colony as England’s exit. All of it passes through one life and one memory. Held below the top because the state, the law as institution and the sacred are held less than in the largest novels; the sacred is present chiefly as Agnes’s gesture.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8. A text read whole and without a break since 1850, whose people passed into the language; early chapters that reach a height of remembered perception few English books equal; the fairy tale of the lost child built at full depth; and a form, the remembered childhood seen from inside the child, that later writers took up, turned against itself and refused by name.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8. A serial of sixty-four chapters with perhaps a tenth that could go: most of the Doctor Strong household, Jack Maldon, much of Martha, the model prison and a share of the comic repetition. Next above it, The Inner Law at 8.2: the Emily plot and the Agnes close obey a stage morality and a law of reward that the comic and remembered world of the first half does not.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3 falls two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.7. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.6, in the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and it would stand there with the Gate met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Charles Dickens’s The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger, scored as the novel Dickens completed: sixty-four chapters, issued in twenty monthly numbers (nineteen parts, the last a double number) by Bradbury and Evans from May 1849 to November 1850, and in one volume in 1850. The preface of 1850 and the preface of 1869 are named as context and are not scored; the etchings by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) are context, not the work. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Dickens’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain; citations are by episode, save the first chapter, “I Am Born”. Facts that could not be verified, among them the book’s word count, the numbers of the retrospect chapters and of the storm and model prison chapters, the wording of the drowned Steerforth passage, and claims of particular debts to the book in other writers beyond those named, are not given. The months at Warren’s Blacking in 1824 are known from the fragment Dickens gave John Forster, printed in Forster’s Life of Dickens after his death.