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CHAPTER 1

Imagining the Self

Illustration and the Technology of Selfhood in David Copperfield and Cousin Phillis

In 1842, the opening issue of the Illustrated London News announced that, during the previous decade, illustration had revolutionized print culture:

For the past ten years we have watched with admiration and enthusiasm the progress of illustrative art, and the vast revolution which it has wrought in the world of publication, through all the length and breadth of this mighty empire. To the wonderful march of periodical literature it has given an impetus and rapidity almost coequal with the gigantic power of steam. It has converted blocks into wisdom, and given wings and spirit to ponderous and senseless wood. It has in its turn adorned, gilded, reflected, and interpreted nearly every form of thought. It has given to fancy a new dwelling-place, to imagination a more permanent throne. It has set up fresh landmarks of poetry, given sterner pungency to satire, and mapped out the geography of mind with clearer boundaries and more distinct and familiar intelligence than it ever bore alone. Art . . . has, in fact, become the bride of literature; genius has taken her as its handmaid; and popularity has crowned her with laurels that only seem to grow the greener the longer they are worn. (“Our Address,” 1)

This extraordinary passage identifies the period of the 1830s and early 1840s as having wrought in literature a revolution equivalent to that propelled by steam in the world of industry. Indeed, as discussed in the introduction, this period witnessed the heyday of the annuals; the grand successes of Pickwick, Jack Sheppard, and Oliver Twist; and the launch of the Penny Magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, and Punch. The new cheapness of literature and new technologies of illustration had prompted a flowering of new literary forms and made these available to a wider audience. That much we have already seen. But the Illustrated London News’ article goes further, suggesting that wood engraving on “blocks” had not only become ubiquitous in printed material but had actually altered how people understood and imagined their world: “It has given to fancy a new dwelling-place, to imagination a more permanent throne.”

This passage suggests that the ways in which early Victorians understood, “interpreted,” and “mapped” their world and their very selves arose from specific technologies of representation¹—in this case, the type-high wood blocks that made possible the seamless integration of letterpress and image. Indeed, by 1843, the Illustrated London News would describe its own illustrated newspaper pages as representing “the brain daguerreotyped” (“Newspaper History,” 56)—that is, as an early Victorian version of photographic reproduction in which the image was transferred by the camera to a light-sensitive, silver-plated sheet of copper polished to a mirror-like sheen. This figuration of print matter as an early photograph of the brain provides a striking image of visual culture as a technology of the self. As the Illustrated London News professed in the same year, the illustrated press had, in a short time, extended its reach beyond daily events to readers’ most profound inner lives, promising “to employ the pencil and burin in the work of illustrating not only the occurrences of the day, but the affections, the passions, the desires of men, and the faculties of the immortal soul” (“Our First Anniversary,” 1).

The Illustrated London News’ focus on illustration’s capacity to manifest Victorians’ inner lives coincided with a burgeoning literary movement to represent the self—a veritable flowering of autobiographies, both actual and fictional. “[T]hroughout the Victorian period,” as David Amigoni notes, “a vibrant self-reflectiveness emerged” (introduction, 23) in nineteenth-century works about the self, from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (1905). In prose, this interest in the self appeared in works “cast in a life-writing form,”² including the fictional autobiographies of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Pip (in Great Expectations). Critics note that books and reading lay at the heart of Victorian life writing and ideas of selfhood. Linda H. Peterson, for example, observes that the autobiographical impulse generally takes two metaphorical forms: that of the mirror (or self-presentation) and that of the book (or self-interpretation) (Victorian Autobiography, 2). The two illustrated serials discussed in this chapter participate in the latter form, wherein construction of self starts in and is related to the “act of reading” (3), traditionally of scripture but later of autobiography. In this chapter, we propose that at midcentury, following the explosion of the illustrated press, the technology of the illustrated book became a potent metaphor for inner life, memory, and self making. Leah Price has suggested that the physical book represents a route to selfhood not by virtue of its contents but instead because the unread book offers an “alibi for inwardness and abstraction” (How, 72). Our argument is related, but we focus not on the symbolic function of the book as object but rather on the material form of a particular kind of book—specifically, the illustrated serial novel—and how it provided a means of imagining the self for midcentury Victorians.

How, we ask, did the illustrated serial fictions that followed the explosion of illustrated print materials in the 1830s and 1840s represent selfhood and memory in relation to the media revolution that Victorians had just experienced? To address this question, we offer two case studies of illustrated serials that represent the emergent selfhood of their protagonists on the cusp of this shift in print culture. The first is Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, serialized in monthly parts from May 1849 to November 1850 and illustrated by Hablôt K. Browne with a wrapper and two steel etchings at the beginning of each part, with the final double issue of November 1850 containing two images plus the title page and frontispiece. This illustrated midcentury serial explores David’s childhood and adolescence in the 1820s and 1830s and his coming to adulthood in the 1840s, locating his mother’s unhappy remarriage and subsequent death, as well as his own reporting career, failed first marriage, and eventual happiness, against the emergence of illustrated mass print culture a generation before its own publication. The narrating David casts his memories in the form of the midcentury illustrated serial novel, rendering the past as a series of recursively viewed visual tableaux.³ Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis, serialized in the Cornhill Magazine over four months from November 1863 to February 1864 and illustrated with a single wood engraving by George Du Maurier, is also set back a generation from its publication, this time to the 1840s. It similarly evokes the visual technology of the illustrated serial novel as it explores the young engineer Paul Manning’s painful coming of age in the moment of the railway expansion. The illustrated serial is narrated in the first person by Paul and depicts his cousin Phillis, occupant of her family’s farm, which in turn represents England’s agrarian past, now interrupted by the railway’s coming. The novel focuses on Phillis’s enamorment with Paul’s workmate and friend, the careless railway engineer Edward Holdsworth, and her grief when Holdsworth pursues career opportunities and love abroad. It deploys what Robert Scholes, James Phelan, and Robert Kellogg call the device of “the eye-witness”: “[T]he story of the protagonist becomes the outward sign or symbol of the inward story of the narrator, who learns from his imaginative participation in the other’s experience” (Nature, 261). Significantly, the novella renders this “inward story” of grief and coming of age by means of a series of both drawn and imagined portraits, images that are viewed and agonizingly re-viewed, as a serial novel would be read and recursively reread over time.

Both texts are intensely self-conscious about the self’s relation to history and technology: David Copperfield situates the emerging author in the world of newspaper reporting, novel writing, and life writing in the 1820s and 1830s, and Cousin Phillis takes as its background the railway expansion and print explosion of the 1840s. This self-consciousness extends to the technology of the illustrated serial novel: both narratives represent the self in relation to reading, to illustration, and, crucially, to intervals of time, the hallmark of the serial fiction that rose to prominence just as these protagonists gained their maturity.⁴ Indeed, both texts represent the narrators’ first-person accounts of their memories as a series of recursive visual tableaux or word pictures that, like serial illustrations, are read and reread against one another, accruing palimpsestic layers of significance through iteration, reinterpretation, and juxtaposition.⁵

“Impressed on My Remembrance”: Selfhood, Memory, and the Tropes of Serial Illustration in David Copperfield

David Copperfield is widely regarded as Dickens’s most autobiographical novel: its protagonist’s initials (DC) reverse Dickens’s own (CD), David’s servitude at a bottle factory imaginatively renders Dickens’s early experience at a blacking warehouse, and David’s profession as a parliamentary reporter and, later, writer mimics Dickens’s own successful career trajectory. David Copperfield followed the enormous successes of Pickwick and Oliver Twist, the relative disappointment of Master Humphrey’s Clock (which folded in 1841), the controversy of American Notes (1842), the sentimental appeal of A Christmas Carol (1843), and the revival of Dickens’s popularity with Dombey and Son (1846–48). Like Dombey, the novel was published by Bradbury and Evans, who took a quarter share of the profits; the rest went to the author. David Copperfield’s monthly serial sales were slightly disappointing: around 20,000, as compared to 32,000 for Dombey (Schlicke, Oxford, 153). However, Dickens dubbed the novel his “favourite child” (qtd. in Schlicke, Oxford, 150), and many critics regard the novel as the high point in Dickens’s career; this critical acclaim started with Dickens’s friend and biographer, John Forster, who considered it his masterpiece (Schlicke, Oxford, 154).

By the time David Copperfield was published, Dickens’s partnership with Browne was firmly established; indeed, Browne’s collaboration with Dickens on David Copperfield represented “perhaps the happiest blending of the two sensibilities” (Schlicke, Oxford, 61). Their working relationship originated in 1836, when Browne was recruited to provide the steel etchings for Pickwick after its first illustrator, Robert Seymour,⁶ had committed suicide and the etching skills of the second, R. W. Buss (who had learned to etch in a fortnight for the job), had proved unsatisfactory.⁷ Browne, who had apprenticed at the atelier of engravers William and Edward Finden (whose steel plates appeared in annuals such as the Keepsake),⁸ joined Pickwick for the fourth issue. He redrew Buss’s plates and re-etched all of Seymour’s,⁹ starting a partnership with Dickens that would last until 1860, after A Tale of Two Cities.¹⁰ After Pickwick, Browne illustrated Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), and Dombey and Son as well as collaborating with George Cattermole on the wood engravings for Master Humphrey’s Clock. Throughout their professional relationship, Dickens believed firmly in the primacy of the author’s vision; he worked closely with Browne to achieve a creative fusion, traveling together to scout locations for Nickleby, vetting sketches, and demanding changes to both positions and expressions of characters and details of dress and setting (Cohen, Charles Dickens, 64, 70, 82, 90, 95).¹¹ An example of Dickens’s artistic control is provided by the provisional sketches that Browne made of David’s arrival at Aunt Betsey’s after his walk to Dover from London, one showing the aunt “sitting flat down on the garden path” (Cohen, 101), another showing David looking comically jaunty, though ragged; Browne’s query, “So?” (qtd. in Cohen, 102), shows how he sought and followed Dickens’s feedback, here avoiding the comedic in favor of the pathetic. Indeed, Dickens expresses the author’s primacy in an 1867 article on book illustration, in which he notes that, in contrast to sixties artists, those such as Browne and George Cruikshank excelled at putting “before the reader’s eyes” a novel’s “remarkable scenes [as] described by the author” (Dickens, “Book Illustrations,” 151). To readers, however, Dickens and Browne’s joint creative efforts appeared as “dual-medium fictions” (Patten, Dickens and “Boz,” 245) that combined visual and verbal signifiers.

Not only does the serial of David Copperfield combine the visual and the verbal, but also the novel uses the illustrated serial form as a powerful representation of the protagonist’s inner life. Price observes that in David Copperfield, reading is intrinsically linked to selfhood, with books functioning as “material prompt[s]” (How, 72) for inward life. Moreover, this novel’s illustrated serial form complicates and enriches this imbrication of reading and selfhood: the wrapper and its advertisements literally embed David’s “personal history” in references to books as material commodities, even as books function metonymically for David as potent signs of inner life. Significantly, David’s rich interior life is rendered in the form of the illustrated serial, with scenes of heightened emotion imagined as pictures and then recalled and reinterpreted over the course of the novel. The text’s final chapter offers a gallery of the novel’s key scenes, glimpsed by David as he looks backward down the road of his life. Visual images thus provide the formal device by which the text renders inwardness even as the novel registers its own implication in the global marketplace of midcentury print culture.

When its first part appeared in booksellers’ windows in May 1849, the illustrated serial of David Copperfield was identifiably a “commodity-text” (Feltes, Modes of Production, 9): its green wrapper branded it as a Dickens novel, and Browne’s wrapper design (see fig. 0.2), with its “series of figures ascending on the left and descending on the right” (Steig, Dickens and Phiz, 114), echoed the designs of its predecessors Pickwick, Oliver Twist, and Dombey and Son. Indeed, in his preface to the volume edition, Dickens refers to putting forth “two green leaves once a month” during Copperfield’s serial run, punning on his own creative fertility in this, his fifteenth work, and his publishers’ use of green wrappers to brand his fiction (David Copperfield [2004], 11). Designed by Browne before he saw any letterpress, when he knew only that the novel would be a “novel of development,”¹² the wrapper presents a “generalized” cycle of life “from cradle to grave” (Cohen, Charles Dickens, 100). Copperfield’s initial readers would have seen this wrapper first and only then turned through a series of advertisements—branded as the Copperfield Advertiser—before arriving at Browne’s two steel-etched plates that, in turn, preceded the letterpress of the serial part. The wrapper’s center offers clues to the new work: the title, with its reference to David’s Personal History, predicts the serial’s first-person point of view, a first for Dickens. Moreover, the wrapper predicts the text’s child-centered focalization: framed between the names David (above) and Copperfield (below), an infant surveys the globe turning.¹³ This central illustration focuses the novel in relation to the world’s regular turning: just as the novel would unfold David’s recollections of childhood and adolescence in relation to the passage of time and the cycle of human life, so Victorian readers would unfold Dickens’s green leaves once a month in regular relation to the unfolding of their own lives from May 1849 to November 1850.

While the wrapper is poised between iteration and novelty, the advertisements inserted into Copperfield’s monthly parts announce the illustrated serial’s imbrication in midcentury commercial and illustrated print culture. The inside front and back leaves feature advertisements for wool mattresses and down quilts, and the Copperfield Advertiser promotes household products as well as books and periodicals.¹⁴ Perhaps the most explicit integration of David Copperfield into contemporary commercial culture occurs in part 8 (December 1849), in which, on the back inside leaf, tailors E. Moses and Son promote their own and Dickens’s products in a short poem, “The Proper Field for ‘Copperfield’”:

WHERE shall we find a proper field

For circulating “Copperfield?”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If all who favour MOSES’ mart

Would join and take a monthly part,

The theme of our consideration

Would have a wond’rous circulation.

(DC, 8:back inside cover)

While the wrapper connects the child David to the rotation of the globe, the Advertiser connects Dickens’s serial to global capitalism: the monthly part appears as a commodity item like a ready-made suit, an umbrella, or a mattress. There is an ironic tension, then, between the form of the novel, which promotes the idea of the unique self, and the commodification of the serial as an industrial product for mass circulation.

A further ironic aspect of the Copperfield Advertiser is its inclusion of a rich variety of print materials, including “Books for the Young Published by Grant and Griffith,” an illustrated Tales from Denmark by Hans C. Andersen, The Modern British Plutarch, and books on insects, African wanderers, and soldiers and sailors.¹⁵ These advertisements open a gap between the illustrated serial’s moment of publication at midcentury (at the height of the illustration revolution) and its initial setting in the 1820s, when the child David has no access to such modern illustrated reading material. Instead, he has two main sources of books: his nurse Peggotty’s scanty collection and his late father’s trunk of books (including The Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe). His two favorite childhood books from Peggotty’s collection are Thomas Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–89) and John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563). Neither is serialized; neither is modern. They are at least forty years out of date, even if they are modern reprints, and only the Foxe (one of the most popular British books of the post-Reformation era) is illustrated. Yet these old-fashioned books lie at the foundation of the imaginative and emotional life of David’s childhood, in turn inspiring his writing and storytelling in the modern world of midcentury. Ironically, however, the representation of that life (both childhood and adulthood) occurs in a form that mimics the illustrated serial novels of Dickens’s own heyday, from Pickwick onward.

As pointed out in the introduction, the form of the illustrated serial novel in parts suggested specific interpretive strategies as readers turned from the wrapper and advertisements to the two illustrations that preceded the installment’s letterpress. This form enforced the importance of visual interpretation, inviting readers to see aspects of the plot before reading the matching letterpress. In turn, once readers reached the point at which the letterpress matched the image, they engaged in an act of reinterpretation, reseeing the picture in light of their new knowledge. As in Jack Sheppard, where the scene of conflict under the bridge is seen first with no foreknowledge and then re-viewed when the letterpress has caught up with the image, this act of re-viewing is critical to David Copperfield’s unfolding, both for serial readers and, very significantly, for David himself, who imagines his life as a series of images read and then recalled in the light of new experience. In the analysis that follows, we attempt to reconstruct this Victorian experience of seeing and reseeing the proleptic images of the serial form.

Having perused the wrapper, with its balance of iteration and novelty, and the advertisements, with their flagrant modernity, Victorian readers of David Copperfield’s serial edition confronted the two illustrations to part 1. Whereas readers of the 1850 volume edition would open their books to the title page depicting David’s childhood playmate, little Emily, in front of the Peggottys’ boat-house and a frontispiece showing David’s Aunt Betsey peeping in the window of Blunderstone Rookery before his birth, serial readers opened part 1 to find two illustrations centered on the male protagonist: “Our Pew at Church” (fig. 1.1) and “I Am Hospitably Received by Mr. Peggotty” (fig. 1.2). On first viewing, these images convey a juxtaposition of church and domestic space, with the child at the middle of each (echoing the child-centered wrapper); however, plot revelations, references to childhood reading, and visual repetition subsequently transform these images, involving the reader in a complex series of reinterpretations involving layers of pathos and irony. In the first illustration seen by Victorian readers, Browne depicts a church scene arranged hierarchically, with the minister and pulpit at the top left, the arch of the church transept over the center, and the child seated beside his mother just right of center; in the second, the same child (again seated) occupies the center of an odd space with a low arched roof. He is smiled upon by adults, while a little girl peers out at him from behind a woman’s skirts. Comically, the second scene seems to be depicted from the child’s point of view, as the adults are hugely tall in proportion to the ceiling (one man’s head is behind a ceiling beam). Upon this first proleptic viewing, then, before launching into the letterpress, serial readers might suppose these to be reassuring, perhaps slightly comedic, images of childhood—although the illustrations might also prompt questions such as Where is the father of the boy in the church scene? (signally absent from the family unit) and What kind of dwelling is the oddly shaped space where the boy is seated? The subsequent letterpress and repetitive illustrations of the Peggottys’ home in an overturned boat hull prove an exercise for readers in reinterpreting these images, whereby the apparently serene church scene comes to seem fraught with the potential loss of David’s mother, Clara, to her second husband, Mr. Murdstone, and the Peggottys’ odd home achieves a kind of sanctity as a foster home for David after that marriage.

FIG. 1.1 Hablôt K. Browne, “Our Pew at Church,” illustration for Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, part 1 (May 1849), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.

FIG. 1.2 Hablôt K. Browne, “I Am Hospitably Received by Mr. Peggotty,” illustration for Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, part 1 (May 1849), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.

This reinterpretation starts when the letterpress matches the church scene. Interestingly, at this stage, the narrative (which is focalized through the young David) almost completely elides Murdstone’s threatening presence as his mother’s suitor. Murdstone is visible at the left, under the pulpit, but David’s narration draws no attention to him. Instead, the adult David narrates his memories of falling asleep in church, a funny story that secularizes the church as a locus of social interactions and overwhelming drowsiness and seems to match the initial perception of Browne’s image as comedic, even reassuring: “Here is our pew in the church. What a high-backed pew! . . . I look at my mother, but she pretends not to see me. I look at a boy in the aisle, and he makes faces at me. I look at the sunlight coming in at the open door through the porch, and there I see a stray sheep—I don’t mean a sinner, but mutton—half making up his mind to come into the church. . . . In time my eyes gradually shut up; and, from seeming to hear the clergyman singing a drowsy song in the heat, I hear nothing, until I fall off the seat with a crash, and am taken out, more dead than alive, by Peggotty” (DC, 1:11–12; emphasis in original). To serial readers, Browne’s church scene comes alive with humanity and comedy as its details emerge. The image is packed with detailed representations of drowsiness: an old woman sleeps in the lower left, musicians doze in the gallery, and a spider spins its web above the head of the dozy preacher. At the same time, Browne fills the scene with comic life: the heads of inattentive children turn away from the preacher; a small child tries to clamber over a pew, and Browne wittily embeds his own signature, “Phiz,” on a gravestone marked RESURGAM. As yet, no danger appears. Focalizing through his child self, the adult David mentions Murdstone only as “a gentleman with beautiful black hair and whiskers, who had walked home with us from church last Sunday” (DC, 1:13).

The scene’s transformation into one of foreboding comes later, when readers grasp what the young David has not: that Murdstone’s courtship of Clara will shatter David’s relationship with his mother and lead to their separation—and, finally, to her death. This interpretive transformation of the illustration occurs by means of two literary techniques: first, the juxtaposition of David’s adult (narrating) self against his younger (perceiving) self; and second, the relationships among reading material, memory, illustration, and David’s emerging consciousness of the adult world. In the first technique, the narrating David renders the impressions of his perceiving younger self, “a child of close observation” (DC, 1:10). These impressions—often rendered in present tense and without commentary—provide readers with information as to the unfolding relationship of Clara and Murdstone but do so from the perspective of the naive child: “I could observe, in little pieces, as it were; but as to making a net of a number of these pieces, and catching anybody in it, that was, as yet, beyond me” (DC, 1:16). A salient example of this narrative technique occurs, for example, when the adult David relates how Murdstone mocked him, joking with his friends in front of the unsuspecting child that “Brooks of Sheffield” was “not generally favourable” (DC, 1:17) to his marriage to Clara.

The second technique exploits the relationship among childhood reading, memory, and David’s coming to consciousness of his mother’s relationship with Murdstone. By means of this second technique, serial readers come to reinterpret part 1’s church illustration through David’s reading of his crocodile book, identified by scholars as The History of Sandford and Merton (probably owned by Peggotty in a cheap reprint).¹⁶ David first dimly perceives the possibility of his mother’s remarriage while reading this illustrated book of miscellaneous stories aloud to Peggotty: “Peggotty and I were sitting one night by the parlour fire, alone. I had been reading to Peggotty about crocodiles. . . . ‘Peggotty,’ says I, suddenly, ‘were you ever married?’” (DC, 1:12). His subsequent questions—such as “[I]f you marry a person, and the person dies, why then you may marry another person, mayn’t you, Peggotty?” (DC, 1:13)—raise the topic of his mother’s potential remarriage without addressing it directly. His reading aloud of the crocodile story to Peggotty alternates such significant, though subtle, dialogue about the possibility of remarriage with the suggestive contents of Day’s book about the reproductive habits of crocodiles: “I couldn’t quite understand why Peggotty looked so queer, or why she was so ready to go back to the crocodiles. However, we returned to those monsters, with fresh wakefulness on my part, and we left their eggs in the sand for the sun to hatch; and we ran away from them, . . . and in short we ran the whole crocodile gauntlet” (DC, 1:13). The passage works by means of ironic valances unavailable to the child: for Victorians, crocodiles were associated with rampant sexuality,¹⁷ and they implicitly figure Murdstone’s rapacious courtship of the young widow. David’s nascent understanding of Clara’s impending marriage to Murdstone is poignant precisely because it is barely understood by his child self yet is vividly recalled by his adult self, who fully comprehends the loss that it portends. Moreover, David’s loss of his close bond with his mother is ironically enmeshed with fireside reading, typically a family activity and one that he had formerly shared with his mother and Peggotty when they read the Bible together; now he shares the fireside with Peggotty alone. Readers do not yet know all that the narrating David remembers—his exile from home, his mother’s death, his infant brother’s death, and his mistreatment as a child laborer—but they can grasp enough to reread Browne’s church scene and see its subtle portents of change.

Michael Steig’s careful reading of the church illustration indicates how, read after the fact, the image foreshadows many aspects of Murdstone’s future relationship with Clara: “Mrs. Copperfield is the object of male attention in the person of a black-haired, bewhiskered gentleman who can be no one but Murdstone contemplating the ‘bewitching young widow’ and her small annuity as well, no doubt. . . . The stolen nest may also symbolize the innocence of Mrs. Copperfield, soon to be violated by the cunning Murdstone, and the spider and web assume sinister overtones as emblems of deceit and capture. The most prominent biblical emblem employed in the plate is Eve tempted by the serpent” (Dickens and Phiz, 115–16). Significantly, however, this interpretation was unavailable to serial readers upon first viewing; perhaps unconsciously, Steig bases his analysis on information gleaned later in the letterpress. In contrast to Steig, who sees the church illustration in the full knowledge of what Clara’s marriage to Murdstone will mean to David, serial readers of 1849 would have experienced something like David’s own slow and painful revelation: the church scene is first neutral, then endowed with comedy and finally with potential tragedy, deception, and loss. Just as Du Maurier wrote of viewing Browne’s images before, during, and after serial reading, serial readers of David Copperfield would thus have participated in a process whereby illustrations accrue layers of meaning, the new not canceling the old but forming a kind of palimpsest of various interpretations, from naive to tragically knowledgeable.

Part 1’s second image (“I Am Hospitably Received by Mr. Peggotty”) undergoes a similar dynamic transformation. As already noted, the arched shapes of part 1’s two illustrations suggest that church and boat-house represent contrasting sacred and secular spaces;¹⁸ however, as the serial unfolds, Murdstone’s rapacious presence retrospectively violates the sacred space of the church, whereas the oddly shaped boat-house transforms through a series of verbal nuances and visual repetitions into a site of familial happiness and sanctity. This shift in interpretation occurs at first by means of the letterpress, when the narrating David informs readers, just before his child self enters the boat-house, “It touches me nearly now, . . . to recollect how eager I was to leave my happy home; to think how little I suspected what I did leave for ever” (DC, 1:20). Even though the young David does not know that his mother will marry Murdstone in his absence, readers grasp from this passage that his relationship with her will be shattered; therefore, his encounter with the miscellaneous inhabitants of the snug boat-house (Peggotty, a spinster; her brother, Mr. Peggotty, a bachelor; Mrs. Gummidge, the widow of Mr. Peggotty’s friend; Ham, Mr. Peggotty’s orphaned nephew; and Emily, his orphaned niece) accrues significance as readers suspect that David, too, will need fostering or adoption. Re-viewed in this light, the illustration loses some of its comedy and gains pathos, as we see the young David (complete with his small traveling trunk and hat) become the focus of affectionate attention from the Peggottys even as he loses that centrality in his mother’s home. Browne’s detailing of the hearth at the center of the image, the steam from the kettle, the portraits on the walls, and the comically depicted—almost caricaturish—yet lovingly attentive figures brilliantly conveys the warmth of this motley group of people in their improvised home.

The novel adds to this sequence of dynamic reimaginings of the boathouse through a series of Browne’s illustrations that refer back to the first boat-house image by means of repetition and significant variation. The first of these is part 7’s illustration “We Arrive Unexpectedly at Mr. Peggotty’s Fireside” (fig. 1.3), which reprises part 1’s illustration of David’s first arrival at the boat-house but situates readers from a different vantage point, looking from the inside of the boat-house hull athwartships to the open door. This time, however, David is a young adult accompanied by his older friend Steerforth, highlighted by Browne at the center of the image as the group’s tallest figure. Like the church scene, this proleptic illustration appears innocent when viewed at part 7’s opening: readers do not yet know that Steerforth will later seduce and abandon Emily, who had previously been engaged to her cousin, Ham. Indeed, Browne imbues the scene with joy as Mr. Peggotty and Mrs. Gummidge express delight through gesture and expression; David’s outstretched arm welcomes his friend to the boat-house; and Emily nestles in Ham’s arms. Even the fact that the friends seem to have interrupted a celebration (all eyes are on Emily) does not detract from Browne’s joyful scene. Although the hearth is not in view, details of simple domesticity echo the companion illustration from part 1: the pitcher and mug on the shelf, the carefully curtained windows, and the picture on the wall convey the coziness of this unconventional home.

FIG. 1.3 Hablôt K. Browne, “We Arrive Unexpectedly at Mr. Peggotty’s Fireside,” illustration for Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, part 7 (November 1849), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.

However, the illustration becomes imbued with foreboding as the letterpress reveals progressively darker consequences of Steerforth’s introduction to Emily and Ham. The first such transformation occurs fully twenty-eight pages into the thirty-two-page part: the letterpress reveals that David and Steerforth’s arrival has interrupted Emily and Ham’s engagement announcement:

I laid my hand upon the latch; and whispering Steerforth to keep close to me, went in. . . . Mr. Peggotty, his face lighted up with uncommon satisfaction, . . . held his rough arms wide open, as if for little Em’ly to run into them; Ham, with a mixed expression in his face of admiration, exultation, and a lumbering sort of bashfulness that sat upon him very well, held little Em’ly by the hand, as if he were presenting her to Mr. Peggotty; little Em’ly herself, blushing and shy, but delighted with Mr. Peggotty’s delight, as her joyous eyes expressed, was stopped by our entrance (for she saw us first) in the very act of springing from Ham to nestle in Mr. Peggotty’s embrace. (DC, 7:220)

At this point, serial readers’ initial impression of this as a joyful image might seem confirmed; however, the letterpress subsequently reveals that Ham and Emily’s embrace occurs in one instant and dissolves in the next: “The little picture was so instantaneously dissolved by our going in, that one might have doubted whether it had ever been” (DC, 7:220). This passage forces readers to reinterpret the image as one of extreme fragility: Ham’s tenderness toward Emily is quickly supplanted by a scene of Emily sheltering in Mr. Peggotty’s arms as Steerforth inserts himself literally and figuratively between her and her fiancé. This second scene (unpictured by Browne but vividly described by David) provides the imagined counterpart of part 7’s illustration. The drawn image shows the happiness that might have occurred had Steerforth never entered the boat-house; the undrawn but vividly remembered image captures Mr. Peggotty sheltering Emily while Ham is excluded. Significantly, the latter image foreshadows what will occur late in part 10, when Emily runs off with Steerforth, Ham mourns Emily’s loss, and Mr. Peggotty sets out to find her. Browne’s illustration to part 7 thus shows the moment of happiness on the cusp of its dissolution, both memorializing its preciousness and anticipating its loss; the still image thereby becomes dynamic, just as Cruikshank’s still image conveys the roiling energy of the great storm in Jack Sheppard. The interior boat-house scenes, then, are both Janus-faced: in the first, David’s welcome promises him a new family as he loses his own; in the second, David’s reentry participates in the engagement announcement and spells its doom.

The final image of the boat-house appears on the novel’s title page (fig. 1.4), which comes at the beginning of the volume edition but at the beginning of the final double serial part, meaning that readers of these two different editions saw these images in dramatically different order.¹⁹ Browne’s vignette depicts Emily, as a child, on the shore sitting by some fishing gear with the boat-house behind her; the domesticity of this odd home is conveyed by the chimney smoking and the laundry flapping in the wind; and potential darkness is suggested by breakers rolling in to shore and storm clouds gathering overhead. For readers of the volume edition, who confronted this image before reading any of the letterpress, this image of a little girl must have seemed incongruous for a novel titled David Copperfield. Perhaps such volume-edition readers might have understood it retrospectively as a scene focalized through the child David’s eyes; as such, it communicates innocence and “winsome[ness]” (Steig, Dickens and Phiz, 130), even as it foregrounds Emily’s solitude. For serial readers, however, who viewed the title-page image analeptically after reading eighteen monthly installments that recounted Steerforth’s seduction of Emily and his betrayal of the Peggottys, it memorializes Emily’s lost innocence and the happy boathouse home. For such knowing readers, the very fact that the boat-house is a wrecked boat imbues it retrospectively with prophetic qualities, suggesting Ham’s and Steerforth’s deaths by shipwreck.²⁰ This analeptic title page represents to serial readers the culmination of four related images of the boat-house, all dynamic and repetitive.²¹ The monthly parts thus offered readers a circular experience, returning readers visually to the novel’s opening chapters (the child Emily on the beach) even as the letterpress reached its conclusion (with Emily in Australia). In sum, the experience of reading the serial’s text-image relationships was recursive, whereby readers saw images proleptically, reassessed them at the point when they matched the letterpress, and then compared them to other like images in a series of complex iterations, reinterpretations, and juxtapositions.

FIG. 1.4 Hablôt K. Browne, title page for Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, parts 19 and 20 (November 1850), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.

Fascinatingly, the illustrated serial version of David Copperfield both manifests this recursive text-image structure and deploys this same structure self-reflexively as a means of representing its protagonist’s inner self. Just as the Illustrated London News suggested that images had become a means of portraying the “brain daguerreotyped” (“Newspaper History,” 56), so the serial version of David Copperfield deploys the serial novel as a way of representing how the mind creates and reinterprets memories. The narrating David’s process of remembering formally resembles the recursive structure of the illustrated serial novel: at key junctures, David renders memories as visual tableaux that carry intense emotional significance;²² these remembered scenes recur in the letterpress, accruing layers of meaning with each repetition. Significantly, these intense visual scenes are almost never illustrated by Browne; instead, they remain as evoked tableaux, very like the undrawn scene already mentioned in which Emily jumps into Mr. Peggotty’s arms. These undrawn but vividly imagined tableaux structure David’s memories: first, he sees but does not fully understand them; subsequently, he re-views and reinterprets them in the light of acquired knowledge and experience. Like the serial reader of his own illustrated life story, David therefore continually revisits key scenes after he first sees them, refining his understanding of their meaning as he acquires painful wisdom. The most significant examples of this technique occur in association with David’s three great griefs: the separation from his mother, Emily’s sexual fall, and Steerforth’s death by drowning.

The first example of such a visually rendered scene occurs in part 1, when David first separates from his mother as he leaves for the holiday at the boat-house, “little . . . suspect[ing] what [he] did leave for ever” (DC, 1:20). In narrating this parting, the adult David emphasizes his younger self’s ignorance that Clara will marry Murdstone in his absence; retrospectively, he imbues their separation with heightened emotion, significance, and loss. His use of anaphora, visual stasis, and narrative dilation marks this as one of the text’s touchstone memories:

I am glad to recollect that when the carrier’s cart was at the gate, and my mother stood there kissing me, a grateful fondness for her and for the old place I had never turned my back upon before, made me cry. I am glad to know that my mother cried too, and that I felt her heart beat against mine.

I am glad to recollect that when the carrier began to move, my mother ran out at the gate, and called to him to stop, that she might kiss me once more. I am glad to dwell upon the earnestness and love with which she lifted up her face to mine, and did so. (DC, 1:20; our emphasis)

David’s narration represents memory as a form of repetition, concretizing that repetition at the level of the sentence. His intense departure scene from his mother is replayed with complex overlayering in part 3, when David returns from school and then departs again after a brief holiday. This overlayering begins with part 3’s illustration “Changes at Home” (fig. 1.5), which shows David peeking around a doorframe, finding his mother with her new baby at her breast. Viewed proleptically, this image conveyed to serial readers that Clara has had a baby, framing David’s return with readers’ advance knowledge of his potential displacement by his new sibling. As Philip V. Allingham observes, Browne treats Clara as a version “of the mid-Victorian ‘Angel in the House’” (Allingham, “Changes”). Notably, too, he frames her figure with extradiegetic images of biblical scenes: the Prodigal Son (emphasizing David’s return from afar) and Moses in the Bulrushes (suggesting both maternal protectiveness and the threat of death). The grandfather clock behind David suggests the time that has elapsed since he saw his mother.

The letterpress that matches the illustration complicates it still further because it describes David responding to the sound of his mother singing by returning to memories of his childhood: “I think I must have lain in her arms, and heard her singing so to me when I was but a baby. The strain was new to me, and yet it was so old that it filled my heart brim-full; like a friend come back from a long absence” (DC, 3:79). The letterpress suggests, then, that the illustration represents at once David’s return from school and his return to his own babyhood, which he sees represented in the tableau before him: in a complicated palimpsest, the baby thus figures both David’s brother and himself. Furthermore, the image of the clock becomes multivalent, standing both for the passage of time and for the capacity of memory to arrest time—that is, to return one abruptly into vivid recollection of a specific past moment.

Part 3 continues this dynamic reinterpretation of Clara’s visual image when David returns to school, a parting that proves final because she dies before he comes home again. As the adult David recalls this parting, he replays his departure for the boat-house from part 1, when he left his mother at the garden gate; the departure scene in part 3 uses visual stasis in addition to repetition to create emotional intensity. Here we witness Dickens as a consummate “maker of pictures”:²³ “I was in the carrier’s cart when I heard her calling to me. I looked out, and she stood at the garden-gate alone, holding her baby up in her arms for me to see. It was cold still weather; and not a hair of her head, or a fold of her dress, was stirred, as she looked intently at me, holding up her child” (DC, 3:88; our emphasis). This second visual tableau of Clara saying goodbye would become central to David’s selfhood, being replayed in dreams at school: “So I lost her. So I saw her afterwards, in my sleep at school . . .—looking at me with the same intent face—holding up her baby in her arms” (DC, 3:88; our emphasis). The recalled tableau conveys both parting and togetherness because, by means of Browne’s illustration of Clara cradling the baby, the infant has come to represent both the new baby and David’s infant self. Finally, the letterpress later renders this tableau from Clara’s point of view, as recounted retrospectively by Peggotty. Touchingly, Peggotty tells David that Clara suspected their farewell would be final and told Peggotty that she would “never . . . see [her] pretty darling again” (DC, 3:95). This rare instance of Clara’s focalization matches the emotional intensity of the adult David’s narration of their parting; in retrospect, both son and mother attribute a common meaning to the tableau of departure even though at the time of parting, the young David was unaware of its significance and Clara unable to express her premonition of death.

FIG. 1.5 Hablôt K. Browne, “Changes at Home,” illustration for Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, part 3 (July 1849), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.