The World beyond the Dickens World

Abstract

Most of the action in David Copperfield takes place in carefully circumscribed locales: around the hearthside at Blunderstone, at the Peggottys’ cosy houseboat, at Betsey Trotwood’s cottage, or at the Wickfields’ home. But for brief spaces of time, while David makes his way to Betsey Trotwood’s after running away from his job at Murdstone and Grinby’s, the reader encounters quite another and a different world. David tries to pawn his jacket to get money to buy some bread, and in doing so he finds himself having to contend with a strange old man ‘with … trembling hands, which were like the claw of a great bird’, who shrieks at him, grabs him by the hair, and repeats, ‘Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!’ [DC.xiii.184]. David extricates himself from this strange man after much time and difficulty, runs down the highway, only to encounter a young tinker who interrupts his beating of his wife just long enough to steal David’s scarf from around his neck, and then resume knocking her about again [DC.xiii.187–8].

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.¹

‘But,’ says Mrs Harris, the tears a-fillin in her eyes, ‘you knows much better er than me, with your experienge, how little puts us out. A Punch’s show, a chimbley sweep, a newfundlandog, or a drunkin man a-comin round the corner sharp, may do it.’²