Abstract
Describing the class structure of mid-to-late nineteenth-century Britain, historian K. Theodore Hoppen asserts:
Just as the astronomer’s eyes are damaged by looking directly at the sun, so, by looking only at the strictly economic side of things (wages, salaries, property-ownership, and the like) it is easy to become persuaded by the nearer vision’s brightness into seeing only a continuous blur. A more contextual and tangential glance, however, can reveal distinctions as well as continuities, barriers as well as bridges, reveal, indeed, a world in which the recognition and maintenance of hierarchy were woven into the very fabric of daily life.1
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Notes
George Gissing, Collected Works of George Gissing on Charles Dickens, ed. Simon J. James, vol. 2 (Grayswood, Surrey: Grayswood Press, 2004), 62.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis (1849–50, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 664.
James Kincaid and J. B. Priestley assert that Micawber and his letters embody the comic, almost Edenic world to which David and those of the commercial world cannot return; see James R. Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 165
J. B. Priestley, The English Comic Characters (New York: Dutton, 1966), 221–3
J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 151.
Approaching the critique of letter-writing manuals from a different angle, Mary Favret and Barbara Maria 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’, privileging decorum over content; Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 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; Barbara Maria Zaczek, Censored Sentiments: Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Materials (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 33.
Caroline Bowles Southey, ‘Thoughts on Letter-Writing’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 60.11 (March 1822): 301–4
William Roberts, History of Letter-Writing from the Earliest Period to the Fifth Century (London: William Pickering, 1843), viii–ix.
According to the inventory of Devonshire Terrace, Dickens had 19 volumes of Richardson’s works; see Kathleen Tillotson], ed., The Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1844–1846, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)
J. H. Stonehouse, ed., Reprints of the Catalogues of the Libraries of Charles Dickens and W. M. Thackeray (London: Piccadilly Fountain Press, 1935), 97.
Graham Storey and K. J. Fielding, eds, The Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1847–1849, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 20.
Christopher Keirstead, ‘Going Postal: Mail and Mass Culture in Bleak House’, Nineteenth-Century Studies 17 (2003): 91–106
Reverend George Brown, The English Letter-Writer; Or, The Whole Art of General Correspondence (London: Alexander Hogg, 1790), 60.
Jon Lawrence, ‘Paternalism, Class, and the British Path to Modernity’, in The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain, ed. Simon Gunn and James Vernon (Berkeley: global, Area, and International Archive, 2011), 147–64
Charles Dickens and Caroline Chisholm, ‘A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters’, Household Words 1 (30 March 1850): 19–24
Jennifer Ruth also acknowledges the importance of the division between invention and copying. She explains that ‘David’s power of invention, the richness of his soil qualifies him for a higher professional sphere than might be attainable otherwise’, whereas copying is ‘a manual form of mental labor’, in Dickens’s novel; Jennifer Ruth, Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 67.
Trey Philpotts, ‘Dickens, Invention, and Literary Property in the 1850s’, Dickens Quarterly 24.1 (2007): 18–26
Richard Salmon, ‘Professions of Labour: David Copperfield and the “Dignity of Literature”’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 29.1 (2007): 35–52
J. W. Kaye, ‘Pendennis — The Literary Profession’, North British Review 13 (August 1850): 335–72
Mary 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’; Poovey, Uneven Developments, 101. Similarly, Alexander Welsh reads David’s silence concerning his novels as ‘confidence’ and ‘the confusion and redundancy of nearly every other producer of writing [in the novel]’ as characteristic of their inadequacies; Alexander Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 116.
Irène Simon, ‘David Copperfield: A Künstlerroman?’, Review of English Studies 43 (1992): 40–56
Matthew Titolo, ‘The Clerks’ Tale: Liberalism, Accountability, and Mimesis in David Copperfield’, ELH 70 (2003): 171–95
Sheldon Rothblatt, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education: An Essay in History and Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 184–5.
Rachel Ablow’s provocative reading of David’s exaltation of Agnes argues that ‘Agnes’s upward-pointing finger indicates a narrative of endless progress and self-improvement’; Rachel Ablow, The Marriage of the Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford University Press, 2007), 44. David’s and Dickens’s readers are cast as those who will follow Agnes’s and the novel’s example. I am convinced by Ablow’s reading of Agnes as an ideal that spurs David to self-improvement as a person, but I do not see this improvement as necessarily translating into an enhancement of his talents as a professional writer. I tend instead to follow Lynn Cain’s psychoanalytic approach that reads David’s emphasis on mortality here as stressing authorship’s capacity to transcend death; see Lynn Cain, Dickens, Family, Authorship: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Kinship and Creativity (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 117
Grant Allen, The Type-Writer Girl, ed. Clarissa J. Suranyi (1897, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004), 37–8.
Alan P. Barr identifies similar hesitancy in David Copperfield’s presentation of middle-class ideals as a whole. His article’s conclusion focuses that argument through the lens of David’s authorial career: Dickens ‘is tentatively hopeful that from David’s artistic achievements and modest, orderly domicile progress may be made toward greater civility and emotional expansiveness. Granted, the balance is left tilted toward the side of skepticism’; Alan P. Barr, ‘Matters of Class and the Middle-Class Artist in David Copperfield’, Dickens Studies Annual 38 (2007): 55–67
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© 2013 Laura Rotunno
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Rotunno, L. (2013). Mr Micawber, Letter-Writing Manuals, and Charles Dickens’s Literary Professionals. In: Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840–1898. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137323804_2
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