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SEBASTIAN LEHNER
David Copperfield as an example of the Victorian socio-critical novel

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Page 29

As a consequence, under pretence of being a simple clerk for Mr Wickfield, he wants to gain power, influence, money and rise from a low social standing to the position of a wealthy man. And taking over the law firm seems to be the right means of achieving his goals for him. So here Dickens depicts and at the same time criticizes a typical case of somebody who wants to achieve upward mobility by the means of wickedness and crime. However, Heep has not only material reasons for betraying Mr Wickfield, but also sexual ones, as he wants to marry Agnes, Mr Wickfield’s daughter.

In the novel, Uriah Heep more or less symbolises the typical villain, who has no moral standards[41], who makes others suspicious at the first glance and who intelligently plans all his actions carefully for taking over the firm. So he is stealing money and putting pressure on Mr Wickfield to balckmail him and make him allow the marriage to Agnes, and at the same time he is still pretending in public to be the simple clerk of Wickfield, but in reality he is leading the firm himself: “the firm nominally conducted under the appellation of Wickfield (…), but in reality (…) by HEEP alone.”[42]. One can easily see that Heep shows an infinite eagerness to get richer and richer and more and more influental.

[41] cf. http://www.planetpapers.com/print.php?id=1473     [42] Dickens, Charles, David Copperfield, p.689

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