David Copperfield and The Princess Casamassima

David Copperfield and The Princess Casamassima by Frederick Nies and John Kimmey, University of South Carolina It is odd tiiat diere are no major studies of Dickens's influence on James when there are so many books and articles that analyze the impact of otiier nineteentii-century writers on his work. It is particularly odd tiiat diere are only general comments regarding the English novelist's influence on The Princess Casamassima, his most Dickensian novel with its vivid and varied London scenes and its broad social and political sweep.1 Instead, critics stress in detail his debt to Turgenev, Keats, Balzac, and Zola.2 No doubt one reason for this neglect is tiiat die American writer's diemes, subject matter, and art of fiction differ completely from diose of the Englishman. Anotiier is his unfavorable criticism of his predecessor's methods, especially witii respect to characterization. In his view Dickens's "figures are particular without being general . . . individuals witiiout being types" (TF 202). Yet in The Princess he makes pointed references to die autiior and David Copperfield as if to signal die connection. Not only does Hyacinth read the Victorian novelist to his guardian, Amanda Pynsent, but also he twice spots a disheveled gendeman in Paddington who reminds him of Micawber, Dickens's great comic character who once lived in "Pentonville, London" where James's hero resides. James's interest in Dickens and his Bildungsroman began at an early age. When he was a small boy, he hid one night under a table instead of going to bed just to listen to a cousin read to his mother about David's life from die novel's first installment. He confesses in Notes of a Small Boy that "diere sprouted in those years no such other crop of ready references as the golden harvest of Copperfield" (AB 69). He specifically mentions hearing in subsequent readings about "die vast excursion of the Micawbers" witiiout understanding it until years later. Then as a teenager in London during the 1850s he toured die city identifying various pedestrians as the Artful Dodger or Bill Sikes. His essay, "An English Easter" (1877), contains two significant references. He speaks of stopping at Chatham and wondering if this is not die "place where little Davy Copperfield slept under a cannon on his journey from London to Dover to join his aunt Miss Trotwood" (EE 58). And in a passage from the same essay that he deleted when reprinting it in Portraits of Places (1883), one year before proposing The Princess to Thomas Bailey Aldrich (SL 79), he refers to seeking out her cottage in Dover and goes so far as to speculate where it might have been located. 180 The Henry James Review In 1880 James diought of doing a book on Dickens for Macmillan in die English Men of Letters series but decided against die idea. One reason could be as he indicates in his autobiography that he hesitated to treat in an extensive critical way the author who had "entered so early into die blood and bone of our intelligence" (AB 68). The writer belonged to some sacred, invulnerable part of his youth. It is revealing tiiat James never wrote an essay on him and reviewed only one of his novels, Our Mutual Friend. Years later in "Old Suffolk" (1897) he mentions visiting Copperfield's birthplace and marveling "once more at the depth to which early impressions strike down. This one in especial indeed has been die privilege of diose millions of readers who owe to Dickens die glow of die prime response to the romantic, tiiat first bite of the apple of knowledge which leaves a taste for ever on the tongue" (EH 179). Finally, diere is die occasion when die twenty-four-year old James met "die master" at a dinner party in Boston and was awestruck in his presence, finding him an "essential radiance."3 These testimonies to die novelist's effect on him as well as his lifelong interest in Dickens's fiction suggest that James's involvement with die man and his work was a very personal one. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Princess, which like David Copperfield...