I won’t pretend to know why Dickens gave Copperfield such a strong memory of his early childhood. I look forward to reading what others have written about that. But it made me feel as though I were observing Copperfield’s life, rather than being told how he remembers it. This might seem to go against the whole premise of the novel’s narration, since from the title page onward we are often reminded that we are reading Copperfield’s personal history, and by the end we know that he wrote it late in his life. I think, though, that this narrative premise, together with his strong memory, is exactly what created the effect of observing rather than remembering.
Whenever we begin something long, like a book, or a film, or learning a new skill, or even our life, shorter parts feel longer early on than they do later. Early on, things are new and full of possibility. We take in all the fresh detail without knowing what will last or be most important. I remember when I was a teenager and started to think of my life in weeks rather than days; now I tend to think in months as time moves further by, and I’m sure one day soon it will feel right to think in years. A day now has less of the vast possibility it had when I was much younger.
Likewise the early chapters of David Copperfield feel (or felt to me, anyway) slower in pace than the later chapters. Some of this is a change in how Dickens composed the scenes. Young Copperfield is much more likely to linger on things as he waits restlessly, or travels to new places. For the older Copperfield, the more wellworn paths he travels (between London and Yarmouth or Dover for example) feel very familiar and trivial to take. Yet just as important as the scenes is the time between them. As the personal history winds on, we start skipping years instead of months between sequences, eventually skipping a whole decade at the end. The older Copperfield gets, the further apart are the moments he puts next to each other in his history.
When we try to tell the story of our own life, from memory, we might also linger on the early years, but much of it will be hard for us to remember in detail. Early childhood is murky, and the older we get, the later in childhood the murkiness begins. Some moments stick in our memory, but the hours and day and weeks around them don’t. Every now and then Copperfield says that he can’t exactly remember something; this adds something to the novel’s realism, but it doesn’t happen nearly often enough to be lifelike, since he still remembers things that no person has any lasting memory of: the hours after his birth, for example. There are murky details for Copperfield, but the moments themselves are clear.
This isn’t to say that Dickens should have been more realistic about Copperfield’s memory. It’s just the opposite. The childhood scenes made me feel a bit like I was a child again. Of course, there were ironies and jokes which I only understood because I’m an adult, but the sense of time, the observations, the emotional world were childlike. And as Copperfield became a teenager, with no memories except those of his childhood but with that adolescent sense of needing to distance himself from it, it felt like I was living those years with him too. The boundaries between these periods were subtle, just like in life, where we realise we had already moved on to another stage some time ago. And, at least on my own reading, which was my first with this book, the details of earlier chapters gained a murky quality to them even as they helped move the events of the later chapters, and even though the chapters themselves have an uncanny clarity. On rereading those early chapters, I find things I had forgotten or not noticed, much like when we look through photo albums or schoolwork from our youth.
So Dickens made me feel that I was living through the same moments as Copperfield, living in that I was not only seeing and hearing it through his words, but also in that I remembered them as I would remember my own life. And Dickens did this by making Copperfield’s narrative feel less like memory and more like observation. I don’t know how we could otherwise feel that we were remembering Copperfield’s life ourselves.