Holding the pens. — Forty-third illustration by Fred Barnard for the 1872 Household Edition of David Copperfield (illustrating a moment Chapter XLIV, "Our Housekeeping," but placed on p. 305). 10.8 by 13.7 cm (4 ¼ by 5 ⅜ inches) vignetted. Descriptive headline: "My Child-Wife," 321. [Click on the image to enlarge it. Mouse over text for links.]
Passage Illustrated: Dora Serves as David's Muse
Because, you clever boy, you'll not forget me then, while you are full of silent fancies. Will you mind it, if I say something very, very silly? — more than usual?" inquired Dora, peeping over my shoulder into my face.
"What wonderful thing is that?" said I.
"Please let me hold the pens?" said Dora. "I want to have something to do with all those many hours when you are so industrious. May I hold the pens?" [Chapter XLIV, "Our Housekeeping," pp. 322-323]
Commentary: A Young Writer's Domestic Bliss
Re-reading the chapters which provide the context for Barnard's Holding the Pens, one feels less charmed by Dickens's vision of domestic bliss, even if the scene blurs the distinctions between the domestic world managed by women and the professional world dominated by men. By the time that the reader encounters this scene early in the Copperfields' marriage, David as head of the household has established that Dora shows no capacity whatsoever for domestic management: she simply cannot cook or even execute a recipe (no mere oversight that she serves Traddles oysters in the shell, but has not thought to provide oyster-knives); she cannot manage the servants or tradespeople and their bills (under her superintendence, "Everybody [they] had anything to do with seemed to cheat [them]"); she cannot perform the simple arithmetic of the household accounts; and her notion of "housekeeping" centres around Jip's Chinese pagoda and little else! She may be an attractive and adoring pen-holder, but she only volunteers to be such because she feels utterly useless while her young husband, now a budding novelist, spends so many hours writing, and presumably this nocturnal activity (reflecting Dickens's own activity as a young writer) has heretofore excluded her almost entirely not merely from David's conversation, but even from his thoughts. Her request to be of assistance, then, amounts to the child's plea, "See me! See me!"
Blissfully happy as he reports himself as having been at that time, David nevertheless recalls that he sometimes would invent something meaningful for Dora to do: "I occasionally made a pretence of wanting a page or two of manuscript copied. Then Dora was in her glory" (323). Sometimes David in retrospect wishes Dora had had the intellectual equipment to be his "counsellor" instead of a pen-holder and copying machine. An objective, emotionally detached reader sees these obvious deficiencies in David's first marriage, even though years later in reflection David apparently does not, encountering the illustration proleptically, seventeen pages in advance of the text it realizes. Thus, the tender moment exemplifies youthful idyll of David Copperfield's marriage to Dora Spenlow. Hablot Knight Browne's illustration Our Housekeeping (July 1850) in contrast implies that the marriage was an amusing housekeeping disaster in which the unfortunate Dora was the source of the domestic chaos, yet contributed nothing to David's incipient writing career.
Related Material
- David Copperfield (homepage)
- Phiz's 40 serial illustrations for David Copperfield (May 1849 - November 1850)
- O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 1, 1862)
- O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 2, 1862)
- O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 3, 1862)
- Sol Eytinge, Junior's 16 Diamond Edition Illustrations (1867)
- W. H. C. Groome's 7 illustrations for the Collins Clear-type Pocket Edition, Vol. I (1907)
- Kyd's five Player's Cigarette Cards, 1910
- Harry Furniss's 29 Illustrations for Dickens's The Personal Experience and History of David Copperfield in the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910)
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Dickens, Charles. The Personal History of David Copperfield, illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). The Centenary Edition. London & New York: Chapman & Hall, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911 [rpt. from 1850]. 2 vols.
_______. David Copperfield, with 61 illustrations by Fred Barnard. Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872. Vol. III.
_______. David Copperfield. Illustrated by W. H. C. Groome. London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-type Press, 1907. No. 1.
Welsh, Alexander. "A Novelist's Novelist." David Copperfield, ed. Jerome H. Buckley. Norton Critical Editions. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Pp. 846-849. Rpt. from From Copyright to Copperfield
The copy of the Household Edition from which this picture was scanned was the gift of George Gorniak, Editor of The Dickens Magazine, whose subject for the fifth series, beginning in January 2010, is this novel.
Created 25 August 2016 Last modified 18 August 2022