How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (20 page)

The taxonomy that the novel elaborates doesn’t just distinguish real writing surfaces from imagined or counterfactual or metaphorical ones. Its metaphors also distinguish different
kinds
of writing surfaces, corresponding to different technologies of inscription. At one end of the novel, David’s back is reduced to a blank slate by the arithmetic lessons that drive him to rub chalk into his skin; at the other, “the palms of my hands, hot plates of metal” imply a body waiting to be engraved, not inscribed (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
339). More literally, Creakle removes the sign reading “HE BITES” in order to make good his threat that “you won’t rub out the marks that I shall give you”: like Micawber drawing “the ruler from his breast (apparently as a defensive weapon),” Creakle confuses bodies with pages (689).
²⁹
But he’s not the only one to equate handwriting with bringing up by hand: the whisper that “impressed” David with Creakle’s cruelty echoes Murdstone flogging David “with an impressive look” and Steerforth’s graffiti “cut very deep and very often” as closely as it will be echoed in turn by the donkey’s owner “leaving some deep impressions of his nailed boots in the flower-beds” (84, 90–91, 199). Even before the cane makes David the butt of an oral image—a biter bit by what Creakle calls the “tooth” of his cane—Mr. Creakle’s long-awaited entrance into the novel is announced by a print metaphor: “A profound
impression
was made upon me, I remember, by the roar of
voices in the schoolroom suddenly becoming hushed as death when Mr. Creakle entered after breakfast, and stood in the doorway looking round upon us like a giant
in
a
story-book
” (90; my emphasis).

Where children’s bodies became writing surfaces, their minds were compared to writing surfaces. A longer philosophical tradition made multiple media available as possible analogues for the mind: Locke’s tabula rasa itself comes from Plato’s comparison of the soul to a
wax
tablet, while Rousseau’s comparison of education to “engraving” imagines the mind as a metal sheet, not a paper one (A. Richardson 131). The metaphorical slates and real boards that punctuate David’s childhood forbid us to take for granted the nature of the surface to which his mind is compared and his body assimilated. Within the novel itself, writing media extend beyond paper to cloth (David’s clothes labeled “in indelible marking-ink” as well as the sailor’s waistcoat with “Skylark” spelled out across its chest), brass (the Micawbers’ doorplate), mugs, walls (real or imagined), and even desks (marked by graffiti) (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
206, 154, 10). This array reflects Dickens’s long-standing interest in the historically changeable—but also socially specific—range of alternative writing surfaces. In a discussion of clerks in
The
Uncommercial
Traveller
, blotting pads are described as “the legitimate modern successor of the old forest-tree: whereon these young knights (having no attainable forest nearer than Epping) engrave the names of their mistresses” (Dickens,
Uncommercial
Traveller
337).

Where critics in the age of the ballpoint fixated on the metaphor of inscription, nineteenth-century writers drew finer distinctions within that metaphor: was the body being compared to paper or parchment, and were the marks on it assimilated to writing or printing? A generation before Creakle’s school, the Lancastrian system had replaced the traditional manuscript signs pinned to dunces’ foreheads with preprinted punishment labels bearing captions such as “Idle,” “Talking,” “Playing,” and “Dirty boy” (Rickards and Twyman 104). And the child’s scarred skin might more aptly be compared to parchment than to paper: as a clerk like Dickens would well have known, parchment itself
is
skin. In Gaskell’s contribution to a Dickensian round-robin, a memory of parchment may be buried in a mother’s almost cannibalistic lament that “London is as bad as a hot day in August for spoiling good flesh, for [her son] were a good-looking lad when he went up, and now, look at him, with his skin gone into lines and flourishes, just like the first page on a copybook!” (Reynolds 89).

Like a piece of parchment, too, David’s skin bears witness to his history. Years after he notices that in Mr. Creakle’s classroom “My head is as heavy as so much lead,” Dora can still remark, “‘Oh, what ugly wrinkles in my bad boy’s forehead!’”; “and still being on my knee, she traced them
with her pencil; putting it to her rosy lips to make the mark blacker, and working at my forehead with a quaint little mockery of being industrious” (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
92, 586). (Melville would mechanize the metaphor in the voice of the narrator of “The Tartarus of Maids” watching two women working in a paper mill: “I looked upon the first girl’s brow, and saw it was young and fair; I looked upon the second girl’s brow, and saw it was ruled and wrinkled” [325].) Where Agnes “reads” David’s “thoughts,” Dora can only write his face; where Agnes’s depth psychology helps David develop, Dora can age him only visually (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
788). Yet Agnes’s own face, too, is marked by an “indelible look” (24). The pencil’s power to reduce David to a flat character prevents the novel from confining the violence of inscription safely to Creakle’s schoolroom or even Heep’s showdown. In a novel where rulers are more often used to mark schoolboys’ skin than to line schoolboys’ paper, even the most loving relationships equate impression with aggression. Here again, however, Dickens’s metaphors draw fine distinctions among writing surfaces: the novel’s media ecology reduces David to a manuscript only after assimilating him to something more like a published book, bound between boards labeled not with his name but rather with “HE BITES.”

In the context of David’s stenographic career, the analogy between skin and slate may point back to Cassian, the patron saint of stenographers, martyred by being stabbed to death with his pupils’ styli. With two differences: in
David
Copperfield
, the metonymic relation between scarring and writing gives way to a metaphorical one, and the man attacked by boys gives way to a boy attacked by men. The only case in which a child is the attacker—Steerforth scarring Rosa with a hammer—occurs before the novel begins; all David sees, belatedly, is the scar “lengthening out to its full extent, like a mark in invisible ink brought to the fire . . . I saw it start forth like the old writing on the wall” (278). When David evoked the visions rising in his mind “as if they were faintly painted or written on the wall,” a solid but counterfactual inscription provided the metaphorical counterpart to real but intangible images. Here, in contrast, an imaginary wall competes with an implied sheet of paper as terms of comparison for very real skin.

The violence of inscription may help explain David’s oddly bifurcated experience at school. Forbidden (and pleasurable) oral performances of remembered texts differ as starkly from required (and painful) physical punishment for forgotten lessons as—well, as night and day. What redeems David from the tale the sandwich board tells about him by day is his own ability to tell tales by night—not to an encyclopedic public of butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers, but rather to a clandestine coterie of schoolboys centered on his self-styled aristocratic patron, Steerforth.
Transforming him from the wearer of a written sign to the reciter of printed books, David’s storytelling prefigures his later career not only in its “hard work” but in its schedule: both the telling of stories and the learning of shorthand depend on early rising (94).
³⁰

The novel is structured, then, by a double progression: first, a fall from women’s speech to men’s writing (usually on David’s hapless body); second, a rise from David’s own feminized speech (whether at school or in the bottle warehouse) to the writing that he himself comes to perform on arriving at manhood. From “the gentleness of my mother’s voice” as she reads aloud and prompts his lessons in stage whispers, David is exiled to a classroom whose “quiet” is underlined by chirographic overload: the “scraps of old copybooks” littering the floor, the graffiti carved into the desks, and the “beautifully written” sign that David himself is forced to display (80–82).

Like Captain Somebody’s collision with the Latin Grammar, David’s nighttime storytelling sessions translate absent books into mental images that are externalized in turn, whether in the form of playacting at home or recitation at school. And both performances derive from the same lumber room: like
Jane
Eyre
banishing the act of reading to its backstory,
David
Copperfield
represents only the state of having read. In the presence of a “litter” of paper, ink, and other school supplies, but the absence of printed storybooks, oral transmission turns David himself into a walking reprint series.

Where David’s domestic education pitted the abstract pleasures of acting out remembered texts against the physical pain of being beaten or boxed with a book, here a mental storehouse of stories is contrasted with the schoolchild’s bodily suffering. What the pedagogy of pain shares with the pedagogy of pleasure is that both equate learning to write and read with coming to
be
written and read. The only difference is whether what’s marked is the child’s mind, or his skin. In the Renaissance, according to Walter Ong, pain was integral to the learning of Latin—and vice versa.
³¹
At the same time as he translates that symbiosis into a modern vernacular idiom, Dickens also adds a corollary: the pleasures of orality provide a foil for the pain of inscription, or more precisely of being inscribed. It makes sense, in that context, that Steerforth should try to change writing instruments into vocal aids—counteracting David’s hoarseness, for example, with cowslip wine “drawn off by himself in a phial, and administered to me through a piece of quill in the cork” (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
94). Instead of ink, wine; only a hundred pages later, once David begins to sell off the Micawbers’ books to the tipsy bookseller, does the oral storyteller too disinterested to be paid in any currency stronger than home brew morph into the businessman who reduces books to money that can be exchanged in turn for drink. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny:
David’s life can be parsed either as a fall from a gift economy to the market, or as a Whiggish progression from the face-to-face audiences figured here by Steerforth’s pseudoaristocratic “patronage” to the anonymity of a modern, professionalized public sphere.

In laying the sign on David’s own back open to the “back of the house,” which lacks the expected division from the middle-class front, the novel embodies the underside of Dickens’s own ambition to be read by a representative cross-section of English society. The servants and tradesmen who read David’s sandwich board form a dystopian mirror image of the figures whom Victorian critics conventionally used to embody the classlessness of novel reading. For Bagehot, Dickens was the one writer “whose works are read so generally throughout the whole house, who can give pleasure to the servants as well as to the mistress, to the children as well as to the master” (Bagehot 459); according to
Fraser’s
review of
David
Copperfield
, its author “has done more for the promotion of peace and goodwill between man and man, class and class, nation and nation, than all the congresses under the sun . . . [His novels] introduce the peasantry to the peerage, the grinder at the mill to the millionaire who owns the grist” (“Charles Dickens and David Copperfield” 700).

What do those claims about the power of reading to transcend class do to the story of David’s own fall out of the middle class and ascent back into it? For one thing, they complicate the child’s downward mobility, because storytelling is the one act that spans the divide between a before and an after, school and warehouse, which the novel otherwise so strenuously keeps apart. Where the return of the middle-class schoolmates who can “read” David is preceded by his being “read” by the servants, the baker, and the butcher, conversely David’s storytelling to Steerforth prefigures his storytelling to the other boys in the warehouse. And just as the sign erases the distinction between front and back of the house, so the only time his workmates venture to call him by his first name is when they become “confidential” under the influence of his storytelling (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
159). The novel leaves open whether to explain that fact by the theory that stories debase their teller or on the contrary that they cut across class lines. What is clear, however, is that storytelling in the warehouse looks back on the one hand to storytelling in the dormitory, and on the other to self-display in the schoolyard. The narrator’s assertion at the bottle warehouse that “how much I suffered it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my power to tell” mirrors his statement that “what I suffered from that placard, nobody can imagine”—so closely, in fact, as to make a reader wonder whether that “saying already” refers to the schoolyard rather than the workplace (57, 81).

Helen Small has argued that the mid-Victorians’ hope that novel reading in general (and reading Dickens in particular) could suspend or
transcend class divisions culminated in the public readings of the end of Dickens’s life, where the transformation of texts into speech became inseparable from the dream of uniting the nation in the act of listening (Small). In contrast, the sandwich board figures the mass reading of visual signs as a nightmare. Trollope’s celebration of a society whose cohesion is measured by the fact that novels are “read right and left, above stairs and below,” is reversed in the democratically “open” schoolyard where the backstairs outdo the front stairs in reading and objectifying the future author (Anthony Trollope,
An
Autobiography
220). In the warehouse window as in the bare schoolyard, shame can best be vehicled through writing. To be labeled is to be exposed—not just for David, but for the Micawbers, whose social decline is emblematized by the fact that “the centre of the street door was perfectly covered with a great brass-plate, on which was engraved ‘Mrs. Micawber’s Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies’” (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
154).