David Copperfield Read-Along, Chapters 51, 52 & 53

Index

Chapter 51

Mr Peggotty gives us the flashback goods. Littimer’s story was that Emily had a break down and that he ‘locked her away for her own safety!’ Emily, represented by Mr Peggotty, doesn’t exactly say as much, but her story leaves open the possibility that he could have meant ‘until she did what I wanted and fucked me–she’s already not Pure because she fucked Steerforth, so what’s the difference?’ Whaaat a creep!
However it went down, Emily escaped via a window. She ran down the beach in the night in a fugue state, slashing her feet to ribbons. One of her friends among the local community of sailors (who controlling-ass Steerforth didn’t want Emily to talk to),  fisherman’s wife, finds her.
Emily tells her friend what happened. The Italian woman is like ‘listen, my away-at-sea husband doesn’t need to know you were ever at my house or the social implications of any of this. He’s not here, I am. You need some fucking shoes and a lot of wine. Just like, a ludicrous amount of wine.’
Earlier Emily asked the sailors not to call her Lady, because she was another fisherman’s daughter like them, and said they could call her just that if they liked. (I find this a kind of sweetly-expressed longing for her community.)
Emily gets so feverish/fugue-statey she can’t remember Italian at all. Then one day one of the local kids is like ‘yo fisherman’s daughter, check my bomb shell!’ (except Italian so like, ‘mi bombo shello’ or whatever). Emily’s like oh thank Christ, I understood that.
Dickens never met a weird medical state he didn’t like. u got a case of spontaneous combustion? GOTTA WRITE IT. Someone forgot a whole language after a fever due to Feelings?

Dickens:

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See also Tale of Two Cities‘ fascination with the father’s PTSD fugue state. (This is a Known Thing in Victorianist crit, not my observation.)
Emily’s 22 year-old abandoned ass makes it back to London like she’s just been on the Gap Year With Her Boyfriend from hell. A woman approaches Emily and chats her up about her old needle working apprenticeship. She says she can get Emily work to do and put her up for the night. Emily’s like god, what a piece of luck! But alas, this is a brothel-keeper recruitment pitch aimed at conveying Emily to a secluded area she doesn’t know well, rendering her more vulnerable and indebted, and pressuring her into the work. (I’m not sure they’d stop at pressure, either.)
But!! it turns out Martha has been through this whole shitty process. Thus Martha knew to let these predatory pimps search for Emily for her. Martha’s been making regular enquiries at the places they do their hunting for vulnerable girls coming into the country and/or the capital. Thus Martha swooped down like NOT TODAY BITCH!! and got Emily back to her shitty sublet in one piece.
Emily had tried to send her family some money while she was with Steerforth, and had some on her person when she ran away. David helps Mr Peggotty send that total sum back to the Steerforths as a concluding ‘fuck you’.
Mr Peggotty and Emily are going to emigrate to Australia. Before this book ends 50% of the cast will be: Australian. David and Mr Peggotty head down to Yarmouth to settle the family’s affairs.
Nothing ties up a Victorian plot arc like good kush appropriated native land.
This chapter has some beautifully, nuanced treatments of the delicate psychological structures of consent.
Emily and Martha’s old employer talks about how his daughter is performatively hard on her ‘fallen’ co-workers as a sort of public display. But he believes that in herself, his daughter feels much more kindly to them, and that she, like him, wants to contribute money towards a fund to help the girls re-establish themselves.
Ham feels he pressured Emily to say she’d marry him, simply by really wanting it and on the basis of their strong friendship. If he hadn’t done so, he suspects she might have felt able to tell him about her discontent and about the pressure Steerforth was bringing on her.
This and the stuff with Dr Strong comprises a considered, thoughtful and loving treatment of how situational obligation or inequality can yield up a ‘yes’ that might not fully mean yes.

Chapter 52

Here was are at “Explosion”, the odd semi-climax of the novel. David is largely and strangely uninvolved in His Own Life ™ here. He hasn’t seen the key villain the better part of the cast goes to confront for the year and a half and change of his marriage–not since the morning after the big gay slap. It’s like a boss battle where David’s just a party member, doing Heals in the background.






Meanwhile Uriah tragically tries to have a conversation with David, convinced that David hates him back enough to have bothered engineering all this.

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This is cunty even for Uriah:

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Like, this is the energy:

When only you can remember the time someone patronised you twelve years ago, BUT YOU REALLY, REALLY REMEMBER IT!!!!!

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The past is a wild ride.

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Micawber’s convened this episode of Jeremy Springer to reveal the multi-layered financial fraud/soft-power blackmail scheme Uriah’s been crafting and executing over the course of a decade. Uriah is pissed, and trying to keep shit in the sphere of social deniability where he exercises the most power and control.
‘None of your plots against me, I’ll counterplot you’ is very Shakespeare. It’s a fun joke about David as a writer, and a nod to the David and Uriah’s long meta-dispute over the shape of the novel, who has agency and the benefits of protagonism.
This is a great mask drop. Again, it’s fairly sad that Uriah’s still trying to directly address David, to Involve him per usual. He can barely be fucked with anyone else present (though all of them save the uninvolved Traddles, he’s wronged more directly).

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I find the novel’s one hint that Uriah might actually want Agnes (rather than baroquely lying about that for his personal convenience, as he does about so much) thoroughly confused and confusing. It’s coupled with a disclaimer than he can’t appreciate or care for Agnes’ virtues. What’s he want then, her body? Power over her? Social power? Financial power? Only the first and possibly the second could even be read as ‘about Agnes’, heterosexual desire for her. Does Uriah not love Agnes ‘right’, or does he simply not love her?
Victorian registers of conversation about sexuality could easily and quickly have conveyed the texture of a venal, ‘lowering’ desire. Dickens is very capable of expressing the idea, and does elsewhere. Instead, we only have the vagueness of Uriah’s ‘odious passions’. His gaze is described as passing from David to Agnes, just as his speech often interpolates David into any reference to or praise of her.
It makes me think of all the the stuff about marriage as a financial institution with crippling social costs that alienate disadvantaged parties from themselves with Alice and Edith in Dombey and Son. Uriah’s class status ‘feminises’ him by placing him in that position, by rendering his marriage a toxic necessity, alienated from his feelings, at best a tool for an emotional act of vengeance rather than any kind of reaching towards fulfilment. 
It kind of also makes me think of the mess of the infamously confused ‘I’m not fucking Spock, or am I??’ paragraph in the Roddenberry novelisation of ST:TMP. Explanations can break themselves. Mess can be a site of difficult articulation and interpretation. 
Micawber has written up a vast call-out post, complete with links. He took the ashes of the Receipts from Uriah’s old fire-grate. He is going to read it all to them. He can do this all day.
Micawber attempts to beat Uriah with a ruler, but is prevented by his homies.

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Uriah: every day I curse the god that made me guzzle dumb bitch juice and endure a twelve-year infatuation with a bougie. I could have gotten so much done without this shit, I could have fucked that girl neither of us actually fancies!!

David: could u, tho?

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Stop Micawber at all costs.

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The Drama Liver-For

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I’m not surprised so many adaptations try to mumble through what’s happened here, because finance crime is vague. But at the same time, it was the future, and Dickens got it. It’s where the money is today/what makes the world go ‘round. It’s also a crystallisation of Uriah’s infiltration of the bourgeois meritocracy/social permissibility shell game. Thus making his crime ‘jewel theft!!’ is dumb as fuck.
It took Micawber OVER TWELVE MONTHS OF WORK to run this investigation. He still only really nails Uriah on one stupid mistake (Uriah’s bank book was not burned, only toasted).
Some prize bitch moments from Heep, but chiefly I remain embarrassed that he keeps trying to get David interested in this show-down when David’s only here to eat popcorn and get his money back, and he still has a lot of popcorn, thanks!

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This dense net of fraud is far more complex than simply stealing David’s money, and amounts to a kind of psychological torture.

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This reminds me of having worked as a paralegal on financial fraud cases. It feels like a massive loan fraud case we undertook, in which a loan officer-cum-forger bankrupted (among others) a family of horse farmers and destroyed that couple’s marriage. The unfathomable, ever-worsening situation caused them to blame themselves and each other, sowing confusion and distrust between them.
In a way the feeling of powerlessness, cowed timidity, restriction and guilt, as though you caused all this by being irresponsible, are exactly like being poor and dependent on someone else’s charity? Uriah’s revenge on Wickfield (and the system he’s a proxy for) consists of switching their positions.
MVP Tommy Traddles gets shit done here, telling Uriah he can give over the relevant documents or he can go to jail. I’m not sure how Team Protagonism could actually do that, when this hasn’t been proven and brought to trial, and would indeed be very difficult to try. I think they’re implicitly relying on their being posher to carry a good deal of weight. The police may well believe them over Uriah, and may well detain who they say to, at their request. They might not be so compliant if everyone had the same accent. I mean, how do you easily explain this to random cops in 1845 and get them to act fast?
I suppose Uriah did need an accurate copy of the books to keep running the firm. He wouldn’t have been terrible foolish to believe that whatever happened, he’d always have time to ditch the evidence. Micawber wanted everyone here because his instinct for am dram is incredible, but it was probably also the only way to pull this off. Alternatively it’s really good evidence of Micawber’s personal preparation for where his narrative eventually goes.
Via narration, David says Uriah’s not bold. Given that Uriah just stole this entire house and company and is snarling at people to shoot him before he’ll submit, this is weird. We’re calling back to classed ideas of Gentlemanly responses to conflict (u wanna fucking duel him??). It’s also reminiscent of Three calling the Master an Unimaginative Plodder, even as the Master is shrinking people and hiding them in lunch boxes while making killer daffodils. ‘Unimaginative’ is not. The complaint I would go with. At this time.

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So Malvolio is like


I never loved you anyway!!
The prosperity gospel is a load of shit.
3. CATCH YOU LATER, FOR VENGEANCE!!

You’d really think he was leaving the narrative, but in fact he will rebound by trying to destroy the English banking system.

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We’ll rendezvous with sis later, in Maximum Security Prison.
David, shocked that the narrative allowed him to get owned by a good Last Word and has to go to another scene to recover. He hangs out with the Micawbers. Betsey, also present, is like ‘you seem Poor, why not move to Australia?’ The Micawbers are like FUCK YEAHHHHHH!!!

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Chapter 53

This is a really wrenching chapter. Dora gets sicker, and dies. Jip the dog dies when she does. David cries and feels like shit.
As Dora reckons with the end of her life and try to reconcile herself to what’s happening to her, she also thinks about the core issues of her marriage.
In Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit and other texts, Dickens is amusingly bitchy about insistent affectations of youthfulness in people old enough to know better. Dora is very much bound for such a womanhood. But here Dickens enters into the psychology of it, giving Dora some real weight.
To be honest Dora’s death makes the thinness of Andrei Bolkonsky’s first wife, who’s in the narrative to die, look comparatively insulting (even as I also think her death is affecting). But comparatively fewer people bitch about Tolstoy’s treatment of female psychology?

Index