Copperfield Text / Essays & Tools / Dickens Resources / Forum / Creative Writing | Donate
|
|
Copperfield Text / Essays & Tools / Dickens Resources / Forum / Creative Writing | Donate |
Page 15
Dickens was himself experiencing a similar sense of vague dissatisfaction at this time and may have wondered if his wife were not partly responsible. Whether she was or whether Dickens was experiencing the angst that every major Victorian thinker suffered from we cannot know. David's problem is settled by Dora's early death and David's recognition that Agnes has loved him all along and that on a level he was not aware of he had loved her too. They marry, have a lovely family, and share a fulfilled existence.
The novel ends with David's apostrophe to his true wife: "Oh Agnes, Oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!" In his Preface to the novel, Dickens talks about "dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world" as he finishes David Copperfield. Both Dickens and David equate the world of vision with the world of actuality--one is as impermanent as the other. For David, Agnes is pointing to a world he hopes lasts beyond the worlds of shadow. In 1842, Dickens had written to Forster in response to the overwhelming triumph of his welcome in Boston: "I feel, in the best aspects of this welcome, something of the presence and influence of that spirit which directs my life, and through a heavy sorrow has pointed upward with unchanging finger for more than four years past." He is referring, of course, to Mary Hogarth.
