The Innocent Observer

Toward the end of the 1840s Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë perfected what was to become very nearly a subgenre of the nineteenth-century novel, the story of a child who suffers vicariously the sins of the age. Both David Copperfield and Jane Eyre depict first a background of economic deprivation: David working at the warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby and Jane surviving the short rations of Lowood Institution. From this follows an evocation of social guilt, of injured innocence and its loss. Both novels use a strategy as old perhaps as narrative itself, viewing the social order through the unclouded eye of the naive observer. David Copperfield and Jane Eyre, like innocent travelers through Utopia, examine social life in a way that the civilized adult mind is unable to do. They respond to what they see with the innocence of accurate perception. The effect, as in the second book of Gulliver's Travels, is to see conventional things through a microscope.

Both Dickens and Brontë use the child's eye to examine the pitiless virtues of the age. Education and religion are enormously important in Jane Eyre and in David Copperfield because they institutionalize public morality. Lowood is founded upon a respectability whose actual, experienced form is hypocrisy. Salem House is based upon a discipline whose actual, experienced form is fear. Family life, even more important than education or religion in these books, shows public morality in private relationships. It allows issues to be taken up that in the Victorian novel must be suggested, symbolized, or even disguised. These are the issues of sexual attraction and emotional constraint. Dickens has done more than to suggest the dark, satanic places of the marketplace—he has painted the dark, satanic places of the mind. Among its other accomplishments, David Copperfield is the definitive Victorian novel of childhood's end.

In David Copperfield, blackness connotes sexuality as well as social and religious passions. Mr. Murdstone has "beautiful black hair"; glossy "black whiskers"; and a kind of "shallow black eye" which hides the mind's intentions.¹ Like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, David looks up at the gigantified human body to see that "his hair and whiskers were blacker and thicker, looked at so near, than even I had given them credit for being" (p. 22). This is associated with a kind of grim masculinity unconsciously feared:

Gradually, I became used to seeing the gentleman with the black whiskers. I liked him no better than at first, and had the same uneasy jealousy of him; but if I had any reason for it beyond a child's instinctive dislike . . . it certainly was not the reason that I might have found if I had been older.

[p. 21]

In terms of novelistic codes of description we know that dark brutality, contrasted to the whiteness and fragility of female characters, refers to sexual attraction. It implies dominance as well as erotic feeling—something that Victorian prose, from the Brontes through the "realistic" Trollope, is reluctant to approach except through emblems or symbols. David's mother is fascinated by Murdstone, a man whose sexuality and rage are the two most visible objects of David's perception.

There are two kinds of rage in these early scenes of David Copperfield. One is the barely repressed violence in Edward Murdstone, which finds its outlet in "a delight in . . . executing justice" (p. 58). The other, and not the least, is the suppressed hysteria and rationalized jealousy of the protagonist: his dejection and sobbing, his furious resistance and fever of resentment. But both are described with the deceiving objectivity of the innocent observer.

David returns home from Yarmouth after the Murdstone marriage to see a huge watchdog—"deep-mouthed and black-haired like Him"—spring out "to get at me" (p. 43). The dog is a kind of avatar, or incarnate form, of what he dreads as much as of what he hates. Another is Jane Murdstone, a household Fury "dark, like her brother, whom she greatly resembled in face and voice" (p. 47). She is the guardian of the underworld, associated throughout the story with cellars and closets, with locked boxes...