David Copperfield and the Pursuit of Happiness

The man who is incapable of his own happiness. One who is always in pursuit of happiness. Result. Where is happiness to be found then. Surely not everywhere? Can that be so, after all? Is this my experience?" (entry 34). In these musing remarks, recorded in his 1855 notebook, Charles Dickens appears not to have been thinking about characters or motifs for his next project, but of "his own frenetic 'pursuit of happiness' and his frequent restlessness" (Kaplan 87). Middle-aged, increasingly disenchanted with his marriage, Dickens found himself almost obsessed, in the 1850s, with the idea of finding happiness—a fugitive emotion, an intangible condition that, in spite of his amazing success, still eluded him.

Dickens often tried to explain this painful state of mind by returning to David Copperfield (1849-50), a novel to which he was unusually attached during composition, and one by which he continued to be moved in later years. Although he called it his "favorite child," and wrote in his 1850 preface of his fondness for "the genial sun and showers that have fallen on these leaves...and made me happy" (6), writing David Copperfield brought Dickens painful recollections of both his neglected childhood and his unrequited love for Maria Beadnell. The novel stirred emotions Dickens found difficult to understand. His letters to John Forster indicate how, as he wrote the last lines of the serial, he was flooded with ambivalent feelings: "I am within three pages of the shore; and am strangely divided, as is usual in such cases, between sorrow and joy. Oh, my dear Forster, if I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel to-night, how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World" (qtd. in Johnson 676). Dickens publicly confessed the same sentiments in the prefaces to both the 1850 and 1869 editions, describing there his mixed feelings of pleasure and regret. Dickens loved David Copperfield, yet his pride and affection for this book were deeply interlaced with confused longings and mental agitation. In 1855, Dickens asked Forster, "Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?" (830). "Low spirits, low pulse, low voice, intense reaction," he wrote in an 1857 letter: "If I were not like Mr. Micawber, 'falling back for a spring' on Monday, I think I should sink into a corner and cry" (878). In the same year, he confessed to Wilkie Collins, "I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable—indescribable—my misery, amazing" (878). David Copperfield is shaped to satisfy the hero's desire for happiness, but Dickens identified with David's disappointments—his unhappiness, and his profound nostalgia for happiness lost.

Expressing, then, Dickens's own emotional state, David Copperfield is also an intimate study of the ambiguities, entanglements, and paradoxes of one of the most enduring legacies of liberalism: the conscious desire for happiness in one's life, and the right to pursue it. Although the novel asserts, quite movingly, that we have a moral responsibility to the people who are close to us, and that this responsibility may entail the sacrifice of our pleasures, David Copperfield also powerfully dramatizes the psychic demands and affective factors of egotistically seeking happiness—and of failing to find the perfect happiness which one imagines possible. Indeed, seeking happiness is both the novel's principle encumbrance and its vindication, the keynote of the narrator's memories of what has been lost and the state dreamily imagined in some future time of his life. It literally becomes the hero's burden—the condition of his...