LONE, LORN CREATURES: THE MATRIX OF TRAUMA, MEMORY
AND IDENTITY IN DICKENS' ORPHAN HEROES
by
Shannon C. Whissell
B.A., The University of Northern British Columbia, 1998.

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
in
INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
(English and History)

© Shannon C. Whissell, 2001
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
February 2001
All rights reserved. This work may not be
reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy
or other means, without the permission of the author.

11

Abstract
While orphan protagonists have long been a trope in western literature, Charles
Dickens expands this tradition by using his orphan characters as both fictional creations and
socially relevant representations. Literary theorists Baruch Hochman and llja Wachs posit
that the "orphan condition" is a nearly universal sense of loss of self and abandonment which
can result from a variety of childhood traumas. Thus, while the characters under study are
bereft of parents, and are thus literal orphans, their stories speak to a broader readership
through the reader's psychic identification with the orphan. Trauma theory explicates the
process of bearing testimony, an act by which the survivor of trauma can redeem a sense of
self by sharing the story with an auditor. David Copperfield and Great Expectations, when
situated at the matrix of trauma, identity, and language formed by trauma theory, can reveal
the sometimes limited efficacy of fiction as a form of testimony.
The plethora of orphan texts published in the nineteenth century warrant particular
explanation. Thus, it is necessary to investigate the changes to the conception of childhood
in the early- to mid-Victorian period as well as to understand the generalized anxiety of the
middle class in this period of great change. The legal, social, economic and existential
context for the Victorian orphan reveals powerful factors which combined to make the
working class mid-Victorian orphan both a spurce of fear in society and a source for
sympathetic representation in literature.
David Copperfield is the most obviously autobiographical of Dickens' novels, yet
judged as testimony, it is a failure. This failure stems from two separate causes: first,
Dickens strips Copperfield of the rage and fear inherent in the orphan condition and instead

lll

focuses his energies in the culturally normative values of diligence and earnest striving, and
second, the Jack of emotional reporting in David Copperfield makes the novel a story of plot
and character rather than a testimony which focuses on the self. Although Great

Expectations is a far briefer and less autobiographical novel than David Copperfield, Pip's
fuller investigation of his orphan state and the repercussions of that trauma allows this tex t
to acquire the status of testimony.

~

IV

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract

11

Table of Contents

IV

Acknowledgments

v

Dedication

VI

INTRODUCTION

1

Chapter One

"Dire Neglect of Soul and Body": Victorian Culture,
Orphans and Childhood

18

Chapter Two

"An Orphan in the Wide World": Truth, Testimony
and Trauma in David Copperfield

39

Chapter Three

"I Called Myself': Pip and the Realization of the Self

69

CONCLUSION

80

Works Cited

86

Acknowledgments

v

This thesis would not have been a work I am proud of, indeed it may not have been
finished at all, without the precise, constructive, and encouraging feedback I received
from Kate Lawson. I appreciate not just the time, but the caring professionalism and
expertise which Kate showed me and my work.
I am also grateful for the faith which both Mary-Ellen Keirn and Stan Beeler showed
in my ability to write this thesis, to contribute to the learning of others, and to
succeed academically at the graduate level.
Finally, I am grateful to my friends and family, particularly my parents, Geoff
Hughes, Shannon Nichvolodoff and Melinda Worfolk, for giving me the
encouragement, inspiration, and time to work.

VI

Dedication
To Joshua and Nathan,
who did homework with me, encouraged me,
asked critical questions far beyond their years,
and never openly resented the time required by this 'baby.'
And

To Viola Beat,
who always knew I could do it (no matter what "it" was)
and taught me it was okay to love books.

1

Introduction: Orphans and Trauma
Traumatic childhood loss has long been a powerful literary trope. Texts such as The
Winter's Tale (1609-10), Moll Flanders (1722), and Tom Jones (1749) established the
orphan or foundling character in English literature, and Charles Dickens continued this
tradition by using his orphan characters as both fictional creations and socially

~

representations. As illustrated by the publication of Hochman and Wachs' book Dickens:
The Orphan Condition (1999), developments in the growing field of trauma theory can
illumine both the works and life of Charles Dickens. As Hochman and Wachs recognize:
"However complex the plot of a Dickens novel, however florid its rhetoric , however urgent
its moral statement, the orphan condition, with its pain and its pathos, is always close to the
center of its concerns" (11). This thesis extends Hochman and Wach's work by firmly
situating Dickens and his works in an analysis of the cultural milieu of mid-Victorian
England. Thus, recognizing the psychic and personal nature of trauma is essential to
understanding the readers' persistent acceptance of the orphan protagonists; comprehension
of the "orphan condition" is fundamental to grasping Dickens' greatest novels; and
awareness of the mid-Victorian culture is important as the source of Dickens' representation
of orphan trauma. Combining historical methodology and psycho-literary theory, this thesis
will examine the processes of trauma at work in Victorian culture. In particular, the thesis
will investigate the conditions of working-class parentless Victorian children, will address
briefly Dickens' experience of trauma in childhood, and will examine the intersection and

2
1

revelations of these two influences in David Copperfield, and Great Expectations·

According to Dickens' biographer and good friend John Forster, "Charles Dickens,
the most popular novelist of the [nineteenth] century, and one of the greatest humourists that
England has produced, was born at Landport in Portsea on Friday, the seventh of February,
1812" (Book 1, Section 1). Charles was a sickly child and an avid reader, much like the boy
characters he would later create. Dickens' father John was a civil servant and the family
moved several times because of changes to his work situation. The elder Dickens was
plagued with financial difficulty, and the family lived with constantly reduced financial
means. This uncertainty made a huge impact on Charles, particularly as it resulted in the
family moving from picturesque Chatham to a poor suburb of London called Camden Town.
Following the move, Charles was no longer enrolled in school: "'As I thought,' he said on
one occasion very bitterly, 'in the little back garret in Bayham Street, of all I had lost in
losing Chatham, what would I have given, if I had had anything to give, to have been sent
back to any other school, to have been taught something anywhere!"' (Forster Book 1,
Section 1). Charles was nine years of age at this point, and within three years the family's
financial situation became critical.
In February of 1842, the month of Charles' twelfth birthday, he was sent to work in a
blacking factory and three weeks later his father was confined to the Marshalsea Debtor's
Prison. Of this time Dickens recorded in his autobiographical fragment, "My whole nature

1

Throughout the thesis, the main Dickens texts will be referred to by their initials, thus David Copperfield will
be DC, and Great Expectations will be GE. All other texts, including other texts by Dickens, will be referred to
by their full titles.

3

was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now,
famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and
children; even that I am a man ; and wander desolately back to that time of my life" (qtd. 'in
Forster Book 1, Section 2). Dickens continued to work at the factory for a short time after his
father was freed from the Marshalsea, but within a year John Dickens quarreled with the
relative who had hired Charles, and the child was finally relieved of his duties and sent back
to school. Although the actual length of the employment was probably not more than one
year, at the time Dickens had no idea how long he might be required to stay there, and this
uncertainty made the situation all the more alienating (Ackroyd 60). His work experience
and neglect by his parents were the antithesis of Dickens' happy earlier childhood and the
contrast between the two disparate periods constantly created conflicts in his mind and
revealed themselves in his literary career as his sense of abandonment was never overcome.
His father's financial failures also inspired in Dickens an ambition and devotion to selfpromotion which motivated him throughout his life.
Upon leaving school at the age of sixteen, Dickens was employed as a law clerk,
taught himself shorthand in preparation for becoming a newspaper reporter, and ultimately
began to write professionally (Ackroyd 66). As Dickens began making a career for himself,
he increasingly distanced himself from his family, as his father was repeatedly charged with
insolvency (Ackroyd 80). Dickens published short stories and social criticisms in several
journals during this period and several of these works were collected and published as

Sketches by Boz in 1836 (Ackroyd 98). This was followed with Dickens' first serialized work
The Pickwick Papers (Ackroyd 102). His first orphan novel, Oliver Twist, began serial

4

publication while Pickwick was still being published. The story of the lowly orphan rising
above his circumstances and progressing steadily from squalor to gentility was one that
would be repeated throughout Dickens' literary career.
Although Dickens wrote several novels which feature orphans as the central
character, David Copperfield and Great Expectations are particularly apt for investigating
orphan literature as expressions of trauma and testimony because Dickens wrote them in first
person autobiographical style. Futhermore, they focus on male orphan children, and thus·are
more interpretable as quasi-testimonies. While Oliver Twist and Bleak House both focus on
orphan children, Oliver is not the narrator of his own tale and thus does not represent a
testimony, and Esther Summerson in Bleak House ultimately finds her mother, only to lose
her again. Moreover, both Oliver and Esther have unknown or hidden origins through much
of their stories, and thus represent a sub-type of orphan tale, the foundling or bastard
narrative.
A significant cultural hierarchy exists between the farnilied orphan, as represented by
David Copperfield and Pip, and the illegitimate bastard as represented by Oliver Twist.
Jenny Bourne-Taylor outlines a history of literary bastards, and enumerates several
prototypes that she believes combined in the nineteenth century. These types included the
"masculine malcontent," who, like Edmund in King Lear or Don John in Much Ado About
Nothing, moves about on the edges of the power realm but is made bitter because of his
bastard condition (Bourne-Taylor 120). Conversely, the "heroic bastard" is a "metalegitimate" figure with crucial national or religious significance, such as Hercules or King
Arthur (Bourne-Taylor 120). Much like the unselfconscious Victorian gentleman, the

5

"bastard child of nature" is a natural aristocrat, such as Oliver Twist or Moses, and their
innate goodness and leadership ability shine through despite being thrown into adverse
circumstances (Bourne-Taylor 121). Finally, Bourne-Taylor recognizes a development
concurrent with the rise of the novel, in which the "bastard as ultimate hybrid" comes into
being (Bourne-Taylor 121). Accordingly, "The liminal, fluid figure of the bastard cuts across
narrative and genre, and not only represents the best and the worst of the self, but also
embodies ambivalence in all its forms" (Bourne-Taylor 121). At its core, bastardy questions
assumptions about normalcy. While having an unknown family is more marginalizing than
simply being orphaned, it is also more freeing from social strictures and thus more likely to
cause those strictures to be questioned. Neither David Copperfield nor Pip can change their
social status to the extent that the bastard Oliver Twist can, precisely because their families,
and thus the limits of their places in society, have always already been known. Oliver Twist,
published in 1837-9, comes early in Dickens' career, and it appears that the author was
unable to imagine an active role for Oliver. As a result, Oliver Twist is told in the third
person and does not contain a fictionalized representation of testimony. In the later novels,

David Copperfield and Great Expectations, Dickens recognizes the inherent rage of the
orphan condition and splits it from the protagonists by displacing it into Orlick and Heep,
among others. This thesis will argue that this displacement does not allow David
Copperfield to achieve a whole integration of his identity, while Pip is able to express his
subjective experience and thus able to integrate his trauma into his self-concept.
While the word "trauma" originally referred to a bodily wound, it has come to have a
much broader meaning. Ian Hacking traces back to 1885 the historical transfer of "trauma"

6

from a strictly medical term to a psychic, moral, cultural, and political one (76). Dickens
thus predates "the knowledge of memory" and simultaneous understanding of trauma which
Hacking situates in the later Victorian period (70); however, Dickens' orphan texts both
indicate and unite the emergent sciences investigating trauma and memory and reveal that
Hacking's firm dating of this knowledge is somewhat arbitrary. Hacking chronologically
places the politicization of trauma after Dickens, but orphans' alienation from their families
and their societies indicates that their existence was a political issue and that, for orphan
children, the Victorian era was full of threat and insecurity. In addition, orphans were seen as
threatening to the bourgeois family and growing bourgeois power, and thus orphan
narratives are symptomatic of pre-established Victorian anxiety.
Dickens' revealing portrayals of childhood and of Victorian scientific and literary
investigations of trauma are foreshadowed in the Romantic poets ' awareness of, and
emphasis placed on, childhood and memory. Stephen Gill states that Wordsworth's vision of
childhood "had in part created the conditions in which Dickens and 'others of the like kind'
could flourish" (Wordsworth and the Victorians 115). Furthermore, "Dickens ... recognized
in Wordsworth a fellow spirit on topics such as the factory system, the new poor law, and
education ... [so that] behind Oliver and Smike and Little Nell stands the Wordsworthian
child" (Gill Wordsworth and the Victorians 115). More importantly, however, in terms of
investigating childhood memory, Wordsworth glorifies childhood in The Prelude not simply
for its own sake, but as the "fair seed time" of the soul and for the redemptive functions
which the memories of childhood experiences later perform (Gill William Wordsworth 60).
Indeed, in Romantic ideology it is the combination of childhood experience and adult

7

remembrance which is essential in the formation of the self, and remembrances which unite
the child and the dead parent are particularly (in)formative. While the Romantic recognition
of this "seed time" remains accurate, it has become clear through the work of trauma
theorists that the events experienced in childhood which form and shape the later identity
can be either "fair" or traumatic. Cathy Caruth explores textual self-examination as recorded
by Locke, Kant, Wordsworth and Freud and finds that "each of these texts reproduces a
surprisingly similar scene: the scene of the encounter between a parent and a child, an
encounter that uncannily takes place not as an exchange among the living, but as a relation to
the dead" (Empirical vii). It is precisely this relation to a dead past and/or a dead parent
which constitutes the self in orphan characters as both their imagined and their remembered
interactions are shared. Caruth finds in Locke that dissociated trauma, trauma which cannot
be linked back to a specific childhood memory, is instead linked to an aspect of the self
which is regarded by the trauma victim as essential or "natural" (Empirical29). Dickens'
explorations of the self in his orphan characters also represent this relational scene and
establish the vital connections between memory, identity and traumatic loss.
Because it investigates the complexities of life and fiction, trauma theory will ·
provide a vital understanding of both Dickens and his characters. According to Caruth:
The phenomenon of trauma has seemed to become all-inclusive, but it has done so
precisely because it brings us to the limits of our understanding: if psychoanalysis,
psychiatry, sociology, and even literature are beginning to hear each other anew in
the study of trauma, it is because they are listening through the radical disruption and
gaps of traumatic experience. ("Trauma" 4)

8

These gaps are investigated variously by Caruth, Annette Wieviorka, Elaine Scarry, and Dori
Laub, who together illuminate the complex matrix formed by trauma, language, testimony
and identity; Dickens can be read as working within this matrix to define himself and to
create his characters. Trauma, memory, language and the self interrelate in the act of sharing
testimony, or bearing witness, which is a crucial step in recovering from trauma. Laub
indicates that there are three levels of witnessing, and each of these steps serves a particular
purpose: the first level of witnessing, autobiography, bears the function of being a witness to
oneself; the second level bears witness on behalf of others who cannot witness; and the third
level, analysis, witnesses the effects of witnessing ("Event" 75). While Dickens provides
examples of the first two levels of witnessing trauma in his characters and novels, this thesis
will exemplify the third level by analyzing Dickens' two novels .
Because in all its complexity and impact "trauma at root questions the relationship
between the psyche and reality" (Caruth Unclaimed 97), self-knowledge may be disrupted by
trauma. Thus, the development of trauma theory provides an avenue to aid modem
hermeneutical desires to know oneself and to understand identity formation. Understanding
the process of recovery from trauma is complex in large part because "trauma" is a term that
bears many meanings. According to Caruth, trauma is an event which is experienced too
soon and too unexpectedly to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness
until it is re-experienced through language and becomes part of the individual's identity
("Trauma" 4 ). Similarly, Laub points out that "massive trauma precludes its registration: the
observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out,
malfunction" ("Bearing Witness" 57). In addition to these theoretical definitions, the modem

9

criteria for the recognition of trauma are outlined by the American Psychiatric Association's
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV (DSM-IV):
Trauma is the direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or
threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to one's physical integrity; or
I

witnessing an event that involves death, injury or a threat to the physical integrity of
another person; or learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat
of death or injury experienced by a family member or other close associate. (424)
Thus, trauma can have lasting psychic influence through a wide range of experiences. In
addition, the DSM-IV introduces a new category of disorders, deemed "disorders of extreme
stress not otherwise specified," that categorize chronic trauma such as that experienced by
orphans. This addition is significant because the effects of this chronic trauma are more
likely to be "characterologically imprinted" than are the effects of acute traumas (Caruth
"Trauma" viii). The typical reaction to trauma is to try to avoid any reminder of the traumainducing event while inexorably re-experiencing it in myriad forms . This quandary is
mainly due to the fact that individuals experience trauma in a paradox: it is inescapable and
yet not fully available to knowledge at the time that it is initially experienced (Caruth
"Recapturing" 151). Recognizing this dilemma indicates that trauma is either encountering
death, which is a single event, or the ongoing experience of surviving that encounter, which
is a process. Thus, trauma creates an "oscillation between a crisis of death and ... [a] crisis
of life" (Caruth Unclaimed 7). Like the "gaps of traumatic experience," this "oscillation"
must be investigated through testimony, and therefore through language.
Victims of trauma can thus use language both to uncover that which is unintelligible

10

and to share that knowledge once it is made known . Hochman and Wachs propose that
Dickens can only make sense of a society that abandons its children by articulating the
traumatic and subjected realties which those orphans live out (100). In articulating those
realities, moreover, Dickens also identifies the traumas and fears of his mid-Victorian, and
subsequent, readers. While Dickens was not an orphan, he had personal psychological access
to the orphan experience of neglect, abandonment, and lack of security (Hochman and
Wachs 26). Dickens considered himself a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-careof boy," even before being forced to work in his adolescence (qtd. in Forster Book I, Section
I). Kaplan describes Dickens throughout his life as terror stricken, having no faith in his
parents, and having "the sense of being frighteningly alone" (42). Charles Dickens'
experiences in the blacking warehouse at twelve years of age created the trauma against
which he constantly writes. By transmuting his experience in to that of the orphan, Dickens
was able to repress his own story and still express its drama in his novels.
As Dori Laub states, "one has to know one's buried truth in order to be able to live
one's life" ("Truth" 63). Dickens, however, is unable to see fully the truth of his trauma, as
he fails to see fully the truth of himself, and his memory thus warps the story as the story, in
tum, retains its power to warp his self-perception (Laub "Truth" 64). The multiple
complications and results of this attempt to bear witness are visible within the novels being
investigated here. More explicitly, David Copperfield's arm's-length treatment of his own
reality makes a coherent sense of self inaccessible, whereas Pip provides a bleak but realistic
testimony of the orphan life as he integrates his trauma into his sense of self without the
delusions of David Copperfield. In these instances, Dickens provides opportunities to

11

investigate both his own experiences as an alienated Victorian child and his experiments
with the use of language in overcoming his own traumas.
Annette Wieviorka asserts that trauma can be integrated into a sense of self through
bearing public testimony, thus illuminating the importance of language in surviving trauma
(24). In this analysis, language is not merely a combination of words and syntax. Instead, as
Gaughan restates Bahktin ' s definition, language is "not just a cultural inheritance that the
individual adapts to but . .. a diverse collection of highly individual ideological
interpretations of the world" (81). Thus, language is not merely the words themselves, but all
the various ways in which individuals may make meaning from the words. Furthermore, "for
Dickens, as for Bakhtin, language is a social act. The way language is used not only defines
the world explicitly in systematic terms, it also defines that world in what is not asserted
directly and openly" (Gaughan 83). However, Hochman and Wachs qualify this definition by
claiming that imagination expressed through language damages the effects of testimony
(188). Dealing with trauma imaginatively compounds loss by leading to a reduction of
reality and thus to a greater loss of self and alienation from viable relationships with others
(Hochman and Wachs 188-9). These qualifications do not negate the vital power and
necessity of testimony however, particularly as it is borne out by Elaine Scarry's definition
of pain as both making and unmaking a world which no one else can share but which must
somehow be shared through language (4). Writing is an attempt to be understood when
individual experiences, and thereby the individual him or herself, is ignored and negated.
This complicated role of language in integrating trauma in to the identity is the
central tension of both Dickens' work and this thesis. While Dickens wrote persistently

12

throughout his career about orphans and other traumatized children, the majority of his
stories fall in to the category of dealing imaginatively with trauma and thus diminishing the
healing power of the language. The analysis of David Copperfield will reveal how creative
writing minimizes the integration of trauma into the identity, as David Copperfield himself
becomes an author but fails to develop a complete sense of self. David Copperfield is one of
Dickens' most acclaimed works and is considered by many to be highly autobiographical, but
it gives little insight into the development of identity or the reclamation of self after trauma.
By comparison, Great Expectations deals much more fully with the emotional life of the
orphan hero Pip, and thus reveals the way in which language can be used to ease
psychological distress into an understanding of the self. Therefore, language is a crucial
medium in each of the stories being investigated, as is reflected not just in Dickens' life but
in his orphan characters as well.
Children who survive an environment of hatred or even simple neglect can ultimately
overcome its legacy of victimization, guilt, and silence by reclaiming language as a tool of
communication and self-assertion. This language use is not only important for survivors who
experience "an imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one's story, unimpeded by
ghosts from the past against which one has to protect oneself," but also for other members of
the stratified society who live in an environment of silence and continuing disorientation
(Laub "Event" 78). Story and testimony are not synonymous in this thesis, however, as story
is interpreted as the events or plot of one's life, so testimony reveals the underlying
motivations and emotional repercussions of those events. These definitions apply equally to
Dickens and his characters. While one must come to know his or her story, merely knowing

13

the events does not help with integration of the events into memory and identity. Language
mirrors the work of pain; both simultaneously make and unmake the individual, and the
world, through the descriptions and testimonies which are told as well as those stories which
remain hidden but produce shadows of themselves in the individual.
Dickens' life work depicts the simultaneous display and concealment achieved
through language. For the victim of trauma, sharing the story of that trauma with another
human being is a vital step in recovering a healthy identity. This imperative is at work in
Dickens' life, as "Dickens's fiction questions all the forms that give shape to the selfstatus, work, citizenship, marriage, parenthood, and property- and it does so from the
subjective vantage point of what may be termed the orphan imagination" (Hochman and
Wachs 11). This publicized exploration of the self and the orphan imagination is vital; Laub
specifies that not telling the story of one's trauma, not re-creating it linguistically,
perpetuates the tyranny of that trauma and gives it power to continue shaping the victim's
psyche and life ("Event" 80). In further delineating this recuperative process of turning
trauma into testimony, van der Kolk and van der Hart see a four step process of movement
from denial of the trauma, to acceptance of its possibility, to acceptance of details, and
finally to the association of the memory with emotions (162). This process indicates that
recovery from trauma does not require mere acceptance of the traumatic event, in the case of
the orphans their abandonment by their families and their society, nor does it require mere
integration of the trauma into the identity- answering the question "how can this happen to
me?" Recovery from trauma means establishing both a subjective "I" who must speak the
trauma and a subjective and separate "you" who must hear the trauma in order to re-create it

14

between the two people. As Laub states, each individual needs someone to whom she/he can
say "thou" in hopes of being answered and "recognized as a subject" ("Event" 82).
Similarly, Adamson and Clark point out that the experience of shame is a social act created
by the desire to be recognized on one part and the refusal of the acknowledgement by
another (7). Thus trauma and shame co-conspire but also have the same solution. This is not
a mystical or ephemeral process but a problematic linguistic one. As Caruth points out, the
language which surrounds and defines trauma to both the audience and the witness "Is
always somehow literary: a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding"
(Unclaimed 5). David Copperfield fails to complete his identity because he cannot

linguistically separate others from their impact on him. Only Pip, whose "you" and "I" are
clearly separate yet subjective, has what appears to be a healthy though ambiguous
conclusion. The creation of a speaker and an audience through a linguistic act of bearing
testimony is thus essential to redeeming the self.
The result of massive traumatic disturbance is exacerbated in children because their
identity is not yet fully established and their mastery of language is incomplete. Three factors
most crucially influence healthy identity development: secure, well-defined relationships
with the immediate family, an understanding of and connection with the culture of origin,
and the maintenance of an intimate peer group (Welsh and Bierman 581-4). In the lives of
David Copperfield and Pip, at least two of these aspects are consistently missing -- the
secure family and the connection with society. Furthermore, adolescent identity
development is already problematized because "the central task of adolescence is carving out
a new identity amidst the physical and emotional upheavals of the period" (Steinberg 267).

15

In light of the importance of childhood to identity formation, Hochman and Wachs develop

an excellent definition of the orphan condition, the condition that informs and guides
Dickens' work. Accordingly, being an orphan does not merely mean being parentless, but
refers to "A state of mind that besets the orphan child and the adult whom that child
eventually becomes, but that also, ultimately, informs some part of everyone's imagination"
(Hochman and Wachs 14). This cultural imagining is reinforced by the literary
representation and recognition of childhood loss.
Mid-Victorian foundlings, orphans, and child labourers were all indications to the
middle-class of societal failure, and thus these children were causes of both widespread
cultural fear and individual trauma. Orphans, who fell outside Victorian middle-class
confines, threatened society in general and thus partook in a culture of trauma through their
unsupportable presence on its margins. The fiction of the mid-Victorian period vividly
portrayed the paradoxically tenuous and threatening lives of orphaned children. For example,
David Copperfield and Pip embody specific instances of this cultural trauma. Specifically,
David Copperfield reveals middle-class fears of their tenuous position while Pip embodies
the dangers of loose class strictures and growing class mobility. Each of these stories
indicates an individual fissure that could cause corporate cultural psychic trauma in a
struggling society.
Usage of specific terms in this thesis will correspond to their usage in the midVictorian period as implied by the texts and as outlined in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Thus, an "orphan" is anyone who has lost at least one parent prior to reaching maturity, and,
secondarily, "one bereft of protection, advantages, benefits or happiness previously enjoyed"

16

("Orphan"). The primary definition of orphan was reinforced by legal defintion under the
New Poor Law of 1834 as those "having lost one or both Parents, under Fourteen years of
Age" or "Children who have been deserted by their Parents" (British Parliamentary Paper,
"Return" 1844). "Illegitimacy" and "Bastardy" both denote a child born out of wedlock, but
each will be used advisedly because of their legal and/or social connotations; "bastard" acted
in the Victorian era as a curse, as it does now, while "illegitimacy" continues to refer to
anything "not in accordance with or authorized by law" ("illegitimate", "Bastard"). The
"Foundling," "a deserted infant whose parents are unknown [or] a child whom there is no
one to claim," though relatively rare in mid-Victorian English society, will be discussed
where appropriate as a powerful cultural figure which invokes a reaction distinct from that of
the orphan whose family is recognized ("Foundling").
The years between the beginning of the serial publication of David Copperfield
(1849-50) and the conclusion of the serial publication of Great Expectations (1861) are the
central focus of this project and will serve as detailed points of study on what was admittedly
a long continuum of cultural change. In addition, the relevant laws passed before this period
(e.g. The New Poor Law of 1834) set the stage for this examination and indicate the milieu
of adjustment in which Dickens wrote. Dickens' writings contain rich portrayals of female
orphans as well as the males focused on in this thesis, but women's expressions of testimony
in the nineteenth century functioned in a different manner, and the female orphan experience
incurred different threats to the self and identity. Thus, gender will be discussed only in
terms of defining the Victorian gentleman and the influence of that persona. The period
spanning the early to mid-Victorian period paradoxically saw an increasing charity towards

17

and an increasing fear of the orphan child, as will be revealed through investigations of the
public debate, parliamentary proceedings, journalism, and laws of the period.
Because of their combined literary and social relevance, understanding the social
placement of orphans in the mid-Victorian period will be crucial for this thesis, particularly
in terms of their revelations of trauma. Chapter One of this thesis will provide an in-depth
investigation of the changing role of childhood in the early and mid-Victorian period and
will establish the place of orphans, foundlings and bastards within that role. David

Copperfield and Great Expectations will then be analysed in Chapters Two and Three as two
very different incarnations of Dickens' testimony and of the complications of imaginative
work in bearing witness. Finally, the conclusion will unite these two texts through
comparison.

18

Chapter One: "Dire Neglect of Soul and Bodl":
Victorian Culture, Orphans and Childhood
The Victorian period has maintained its status as the site of academic argument
because it is perceived as a time of incredible social change yet apparent social cohesion.
However, this is only one of many over-generalizations and paradoxes of the period which
dissolve upon closer inspection. The period's complexities are visible in all areas.
Approaches to children in the period varied from utter neglect, to intrusive policing, to
romanticized pampering: the class-biased ideologies behind these varieties only partially
explain their existence. Victorian icons such as Charles Dickens have received varied and
conflicting interpretations, despite the wealth of primary sources in novels, speeches, and
letters which ought to clarify the contradictions. Furthermore, Victorian laws and their
enforcement often existed at odds with one another. Through this tangle of evidence and
supposition, few clear conclusions can be drawn; however, while the repercussions of the
era's changes were varied, it is undeniable that childhood was greatly modified both for
better and for worse in the early to mid-Victorian period, and that these changes were often
most visible at the intersections of the class lines, such as when middle-class law makers,
creators of culture (for example writers and artists, among others), and social reformers
made decisions about pauper orphans. This chapter will set the legal, social, economic and
existential context for understanding representations of the Victorian orphan.
The early-Victorian period is generally dated from the coronation of Queen Victoria

2

Dickens' phrase in describing Ragged School pupils to Angela Burdett Coutts (Letters v. 3 562).

19

in 1830 and to 1847, and the mid-Victorian period is generally defined as the years between
1848 and 1860. The mid-Victorian period was a time of unavoidable flux. Mary Poovey
points out that the values and identities now simplistically regarded as "Victorian" were at
the time constantly questioned and redefined even by those who are considered iconographic
Victorian figures (2-3). That these definitions were increasingly accepted as truth in the
Victorian era yet needed constant re-articulation and reinforcement indicates a level of deep
cultural anxiety. During this period of great change, values increasingly centered upon those
of the masculine middle-class. Catherine Hall explains the development of this gendered and
classed identity:
The middle-class is treated as male and the account of the formation of middle-class
consciousness is structured around a series of public events in which women played
no part .... [These events] are usually seen as the seminal moments in the emergence
of the middle-class as a powerful and self-confident class .... The class, once formed
is seen as sexually divided but that process of division is taken as given. (95)
Hall identifies "masculinity" as it was constructed by the mid-Victorians as active,
protective, public, and industrious while she interprets mid-Victorian femininity as
constructed as passive, nurturing, private, and moral (51). Hochman and Wachs believe that
the painful paradox of orphan life in Dickens' novels results from Dickens' incapacity (or
hesitancy) to comply with and replicate the period's valorization of the masculine middleclass industriousness and negation of the self, and ultimately with his refusal to confirm
middle-class mid-Victorian values because of their class specificity and inherent hypocrisy
(25). The ideologies that Dickens rejected failed to represent the lives of many Victorians,

20

particularly women, and, as this thesis will argue, orphans. Many individuals who worked to
evade these strictures without calling castigation upon themselves from the easily threatened
masculine leaders also discounted these ideologies.
Mid-Victorian childhood was also systematically redefined to correspond to these
middle-class values and to provide a training ground for their replication. John Tosh, in
investigating fatherhood in the early and mid-Victorian middle-class, identifies key
masculine characteristics for the mid-Victorian middle-class as including "honour and selfrespect, . .. physical capabilities such as athleticism and endurance [and] absolute virtues
such as frankness and purity" as a greater emphasis was placed on the individual and selfgovernance (54). Masculinity functioned not merely as a defining identity for middle-class
men, but also as a measure against which they judged women, the upper-class, labourers and
children and generally found them lacking. In the middle-class, this manliness was learned
by Victorian male children from the time of their "breeching" onwards. 3 Gender separation
was further reinforced, according to Catherine Hall, in that the growing mercantile middleclass "increasingly wanted their homes to be separate from their workplace and their wives
and daughters to be dependent on them; these had become powerful symbols of belonging to
the middle-class" (110). Thus, for instance, although he becomes a barrister, David
Copperfield's friend Tommy Traddles cannot truly be considered a success by middle-class
mid-Victorian standards because his office is his home and his wife is his assistant.
However, in giving Traddles personal satisfaction but a precarious social position, Dickens
3

At about age six, boys started wearing breeches rather than the unisex play clothes of infants; this change was
a public symbol of the beginning of gender training. Tosh points out that "while nursery infants were played

21

gives a face to the incongruity between Victorian social and personal expectations. All
middle-class mid-Victorian men who recognized the instability of their changing society
experienced this incongruity, at least subconsciously, and recognition of the instability meant
recognition of the threat from the rising working-class.
Cultural stressors such as the change of faith from God to science, economic
transformations following the Industrial Revolution, the political power shift from landed
gentry to the middle-class, and the resistance of women, workers and the colonies, all
threatened the longed-for sense of individual and corporate identity and socio-evolutionary
progress in the mid-Victorian middle-class. The nasty but impotent Mr. Pumblechook in
Great Expectations reveals the empty construction of middle-class male power in the
Victorian period, the inescapable recognition of which threatened many real middle-class
men who would be rulers, at least in their own domains. These precarious positions required
reinforcement, mostly in terms of defining the 'other' more closely. The most blatant
imposition of this constructed difference between the classes may have been embodied in the
sweeping changes of the Poor Law Amendment Act (commonly called the New Poor Law)
of 1834. Poor Laws were crucial in providing a legal framework of class stability to the
"parvenu" Victorian civilization (Gilmour 1), which otherwise had reason for angst. The Old
Poor Law had purportedly been relatively free from the stigma and shame that the New Poor
Law attached to poverty (Hopkins 168). Thomas Jordan delineates the ideological change
behind the amendments, stating that the New Poor Law "emphasized low costs and moral
entitlement to public relief ... at the price of immurement and derogation" (1). Historical
with (or ignored) without distinction of sex, the breeching of boys introduced discrimination" (57).

22

geographer Ian Levitt has found that by the middle of the nineteenth century a distinction
existed between poverty and pauperism. He argues that the middle-class viewed poverty as
an unfortunate result of industrialization and economic growth while they increasingly
distinguished pauperism as a social disease and the fault of the sufferer (160). This semantic
argument supports the statement that "the Poor Law Commissioners had succeeded too well
in founding a system based not on physical cruelty but on psychological deterrence and on
shame and fear" (Hopkins 187). While the psychological trauma of the New Poor Law is
widely recognized, its social and economic efficacy are more contentious issues.
Mid-Victorian officials used fear to deter paupers from seeking help. Furthermore,
the New Poor Law was poorly enforced and variably implemented, so socio-economic
effects were inconsistent and changes are provable only in specific, localised circumstances.
The reports of the Select Committee on the Poor Law Amendment Act contain examples of
the variety of effects of the law. Reverend Thomas Sackett, Rector of Petworth, reported in
1837 that in the Petworth Union the implementation of the act had been "very injurious to
the deserving labouring man with a large family," but had been "mercifully administered" to
the aged or infirm and had "with respect to the young umarried and able-bodied people, ...
produced in some instances providence" in forcing young labourers to be more careful with
their money (Report 1). It is obvious from Reverend Sackett's testimony that the children of
the working-class were negatively affected, as the married labouring man had the same
expenses as before but with decreased wages and the cessation of out-of-door relief. 4 As
4

Out-of-door relief, a common practice of giving available food stuffs to needy people who asked at the parish
door, was outlawed under the Poor Law Amendment Act.

23

Sockett stated, "A labouring man ... cannot keep his family in anything beyond bread"
(Report l). In addition, as Jordan points out, "orphans and others dependent on charity had

no advocate, and they were frequently abused by parish overseers and factory owners" (55).
Reverend Sockett explained to the Select Committee that wages paid to labourers were
lower in the region under the New Poor Law because men were willing to work for almost
nothing due to their "dread of the poor-house" ("Report" 2). Reverend Sockett later made
clear that any savings his parish had acquired under the New Poor Law had come about
because of the emigration to Canada of 106 individuals 5 (including children) sponsored by
the local landowner (4), so that in Petworth the law had improved conditions for neither the
labourers nor the church. Testimony given before the Committee frequently contradicted the
stereotype of the lazy labouring-class man, and Reverend Sockett was careful to make clear
that the labourers he spoke of were hardworking and not prone to drinking (Report 2). The
masculine middle-class defined themselves based on values of self-control and
industriousness, and simultaneously conferred negative attributes such as sloth, imprudence,
and immorality onto the working-class.
Middle-class Victorians believed a social threat existed in what they construed as the
loose morals of the labouring-class, the class to which most socially threatening orphans
belonged. Physical and psychological threats coexisted, and, as Barret-Ducrocq points out,
middle-class interpretations of working-class living conditions as immoral rather than
inadequate were "seen as early signs of malfunction in a healthy social body" (2). Similarly,

5

The exception to this is the case of forced deportation and emigration, which had both negative and positive

24

Deborah Epstein Nord argues that "in much of the social and sanitary reform literature of the
mid-Victorian decades, the threat of disease from unsanitary urban conditions and the spread
of epidemic illness merges with the threat of disease and degeneration" from loose sexuality
(39). Unfortunately, public health, viewed by the middle-class as biological degeneracy in
the workers, should have been a valid concern as malnourished, poorly housed children
laboured in conditions which are now recognized as containing both chronic and acute
dangers. As Jordan states, "children, a protected group in our day, were major victims of
rapid social change and stress" (179). That middle and upper-class children were free from
the dangers of working more clearly linked the problems to the poor who had no such
refuge.
The threat of poverty to the middle-class of the time is visible in the orphan literature
of the mid-Victorian period. This threat was multi-faceted, and included the threat of
financial ruin such as that experienced by Dickens' father, the social threats of moral decay
and class rebellion, and the emotional threat of seeing paupers but being either unable or
unwilling to help. Just as the orphan Pip is a threat to and ultimately an indirect power
against the middle-class Mr. Pumblechook, so the orphans and other abandoned children
who fell outside acceptable Victorian middle-class limits threatened society in general and
thus contributed to a culture of trauma. Aggravating this menace from orphans was the
complex and multiple contradictory connotations associated with the word including street
urchins, deserving orphans, "real" orphans, bastards, and abandoned children. However,
marginalized children are the products, not the causes, of unhealthy societies. The
consequences for paupers and orphans, like most attempts at Victorian reform.

25

problematic position of these children is most poignantly articulated in Jo, arguably the most
tragic figure in Dickens ' Bleak House , who is unfavourably compared to a drover' s dog
during a parade scene; the narrator concludes, "how far above the human listener is the
brute" (258). While this may have been how middle-class passers-by would have perceived
them, the narrator also ascribes to Jo a sharp understanding of humanity and his place at its
border:
It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as in the
case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my
life! To see the horses, dogs, and cattle go by me and to know that in ignorance I
belong to them and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend!
(Bleak House 258)

In moving subtly from third to first person, the narrator also suggests the frightening .
possibilities of the middle-class reader's movement to the margins. Jo's state of abjection
seems to have paralleled those of actual workhouse children. Social historian Eric Hopkins
concludes that "the morale of workhouse children was to be expected, when it is
remembered that they were often orphaned or abandoned children without parents to tum to"
(187). Hopkins thus ascribes to the orphan condition itself rather than to the shame of
poverty the full traumatic power in influencing these children.
The degradation revealed in these representations of orphan children shows how
marginalization is imposed largely through the denial of roots. As Simone Weil states:
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of a human
soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real ,

26
active and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living
shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for
the future (43).
Roots provide the individual with a cultural heritage and invite the individual to contribute
further to that culture, but cultural mores denied mid-Victorian orphans that opportunity and
place. Similarly, homeless children in the 1840's, commonly called "Street Arabs,"
"constituted a race apart" (Andrews 29). The growth of the orphan population and the
inability to provide for this group resulted in threatening street gangs that impressed
themselves onto the consciousness of the middle-class (Hochman and Wachs 204). Attempts
to address the problem included suggestions by powerful men such as London Magistrate
Robert Chambers, who appeared before Parliament on 14 April, 1826 to propose the forced
emigration of street waifs to Canada (Bagnell 23). This proposal included not only orphaned
and homeless children, but also children whose families were in workhouses and thus could
not provide for them. Such psychological and emotional distancing, embodied in the literal
removal of the perceived problem children, removed any actual responsibility from the
middle-class. While the sanitary and public health problems which threatened the health of
the working-class are now easily recognized, linking these bio-social diseases to morality
allowed the middle-class to further reinforce their own values through negative example.
Moreover, the failure of the Victorian society to provide roots for parentless children, a
failure depicted in Dickens' writing, created a culture of further trauma for those children
who needed the most protection.
A new middle-class sense of childhood that emphasized innocence, education,

27

recognition of gender and class roles, and the minimization of children's contributions to the
family wage developed in the mid-Victorian period. Concerns about childcare in the
nineteenth century were particularly compelling because the population of England doubled
between 1800 and 1850 and nearly doubled again between 1850 and 1900 so that by midcentury approximately thirty-five percent of the population was under fourteen years of age
(Hopkins 161). This increasingly youthful population came about despite catastrophic infant
mortality rates of twenty-five percent for the population as a whole, a number which rose
significantly in urban areas and soared to fifty percent for poor illegitimate children (Perkin
8). Eric Hopkins summarizes the changing attitudes towards childhood, stating that prior to
the nineteenth century "working-class children worked from an early age ... had few, if any,
legal rights ... [were] regarded simply as miniature adults . . . [and] could be hanged for
theft at the age of seven" (1) . Hopkins continues to state, however, that within fifty years few
children under twelve years of age had paid employment, education was free and
compulsory, and legislation protected children from brutality (1), a statement which implies
a dramatic shift from child neglect to child-centeredness. Obviously, Hopkins both oversimplifies and over-romanticizes this change, an incongruity he fails to recognize in stating
that the physical cruelty and abuse of children in mid-Victorian schools and work
environments can be neither denied nor quantified (186). Because of the tenacity of class
barriers, the discrepancy between the perceived innocence of middle-class children and the
demonisation of working-class children remained largely accepted by Victorians.

In a more critical reading of the period than that provided by Hopkins, Hochman and
Wachs believe that the reality of childhood poverty, abuse, and neglect in the mid-Victorian

28
period may have been even worse than that represented in Dickens' fiction (56). Statistics
from the period, flawed though they are, support the belief that child poverty was a
continuing problem. Prior to the New Poor Law of 1834, children accounted for up to onehalf the population in parish workhouses (Hopkins 163); by 1844 there were a total of
25,413 children in union workhouses and another 119, 310 children dependent on widowed
mothers who received out-of-door relief from union workhouses, but the change in
administration and report systems makes pre-amendment act comparisons difficult (Return
of Number 1844). Returns prior to 1834 were often limited to locations such as "The Bills of

Mortality," an area roughly equal to metropolitan London but with frequently changing
boundaries ("Bills of Mortality"). The child paupers recognized as chargeable to specific
parishes within the Bills of Mortality in 1819 total 13, 430, but as a proportion of the
population and in comparison to the strict accounting kept under the New Poor Law, this
return is sketchy at best (Return 1819). Changing workhouse child populations following the
New Poor Law may have been due to a large number of factors, including the influx of
adults into the workhouses, related alternative arrangements for children such as emigration
to Canada, Australia and the United States, or the preference of children to take their
chances in the street, as well as the deterrence caused by the increased psychological trauma
of the new system.
Social factors being complex, generalized conclusions regarding Victorian orphans
and poverty are difficult. For example, while philanthropic endeavors to aid children
included the establishment of "Ragged Schools," the stigma of poverty was still associated
with these institutions, and the motivation for their establishment may well have included

29

bettering the reputation of the philanthropist or training better workers rather than actually
helping the individual students. The focus of labour legislation on women and children
allowed aristocratic Members of Parliament and narrow-sighted bureaucrats alike to
dramatize the emotional issue of "unmothered infants" and thus to deflect attention away
from the real problems faced by the poor (Poovey 63). Moreover, until 1867 legislation on
child labour applied only to textile factories, which suggests that a homogenous and
widespread attitude towards childhood did not exist even among the middle-class men who
wrote the laws. Dickens' approach the children and child welfare varied over time, and this
inconsistency is representative of "a more general, deep-rooted uncertainty about the cultural
status of childhood" (4). While Hopkins believes that "the transformation of working-class
childhood which took place in the nineteenth century was not the consequence of any
profound change in attitude to children at the beginning of the century [but] [r]ather .. .. the
product of philanthropic or compassionate motives, together with a concern for social
control, at a time of unprecedented social change," this rosy equation fails to recognize the
complex, class determined position of working-class children in the mid-Victorian period
(6). Significant changes in the child labour laws between 1840 and 1843 made parents liable
for employer abuses of their children, which indicates that concern for child welfare cannot
be distinguished from middle-class desires to police working-class adults whom they
perceived as incapable parents.
A simplistic reading of the mid-Victorian period suggests that the plethora of
philanthropic societies and social reform laws were established to benefit those less
fortunate, but obvious discrepancies between stated goals and operating procedures reveal

30

complex observing and recording practices and equally complex motivations. The London
Foundling Hospital serves as a blatant example of this sort of contradiction. Instead of
following the simple, effective traditions set by long running foundling hospitals in France,
Germany and Italy, the hospital started in London by Dr. Thomas Coram had no mechanism
for anonymously leaving a child. Instead, mothers who desired to leave infants were
interviewed regarding their potential to become better workers, that is, workers more able to
emulate and propagate the values of the middle-class. The answers to these questions
determined if the child was accepted (Weisbrod 200). These mothers subjected themselves
to scrutiny of their health and morality by a board of middle-class men, and answered
questions about the frequency and type of sexual activity they had participated in, as well as
their relationship to the father and their contentment in their place of work (Weisbrod 197).
This investigative process meant that children whose parents could not work, had limited
skills, or did not have a middle-class sponsor, and thus were in the most danger of being
abandoned or killed, were least likely to be accepted into the hospital. While the Foundling
Hospital is often cited as an example of Victorian charity, it just as easily stands as an
emblem for the many hegemonic forces utilized in the period.
Changing laws which created an intersection between the new conception of
childhood and beliefs about poverty included the New Poor Law's concern with illegitimacy,
regulations concerning children in poorhouses, workhouses and charity schools, constantly
changing child labour laws, and laws regarding hours of education. The first law restricting
the employment of child chimney sweeps was passed in 1788, and was followed in 1802
with the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act (Hopkins 4). The fact that these acts address

31

the morals of the under-aged apprentices highlights the ideological impetus behind the
changes that were occurring in the period. In fact, considerations of morality in the original
act of 1802 were more extensive than considerations of the health of the workers. The easily
circumvented health regulations included annual disinfection of the mills and factories with
quick lime, annual provision of each apprentice with a suit of clothes, limiting the hours of
work to twelve per day between six in the morning and nine in the evening, while moral
considerations included instruction "in some part of every working day" in reading, writing,
and arithmetic, separate and distinct sleeping quarters for apprentices of the opposite sex, no
more than two apprentices per bed, weekly instruction in "the Principles of the Christian
Religion," and particular emphasis on education for those apprentices whose parents were
members of the Church of England (British Parliament, Bill 1802). After surviving repeated
weakening amendments, this law was revoked entirely in 1831 and was replaced with a
much more streamlined yet detailed act which stipulated that labourers under twenty-one
years of age could not work at night and that those under eighteen years of age could not
work more than twelve hours a day. The bill further stated that children under nine years of
age could be employed only in certain jobs and that children under seven years of age could
not be employed in factories at all (British Parliament, Bill1831). Significantly, this later act
did not address the moral issues concentrated upon in the earlier one but added detail on the
administration of the acts, seemingly in order to avoid the loopholes and abuses of the earlier
law.
In contrast to these laws which prescribed certain actions of working-class children,
the middle-class mid-Victorian preoccupation with children and childhood created a

32

powerful psycho-social paradox. Middle and upper-class parents had the luxury to celebrate
childish passivity and self-centered desires in infancy while striving to train these tendencies
out of individuals before maturity (Hochman and Wachs 19). Malcolm Andrews believes
that this training resulted in a dual role for the neglected or orphaned child, as the orphan
acted as both a social reality in a Victorian culture which provided little in the way of a
social safety net and as a psychic reality for those middle-class mid-Victorian men who were
trained to systematically deny their childhood, childish selves (180). For the Victorians,
progress meant both personal and cultural maturity. The negation of childhood upon
maturation resulted in its nostalgic romanticization, thus making child and orphan
protagonists sympathetic in literature. As an element of their class training, middle-class
children were encouraged to be involved in 'respectable' leisure activities as an indication of
their families' elevated social position.
In a time of such dramatic changes and intense identities, those who made cultural

products, such as writers, were in a position either to reinforce values or to reveal those
values ' weaknesses. Dickens relished this position because of a number of interrelated
factors including his own childhood financial difficulties and embarrassment, his tenacious
personal convictions, and his cultural context. In urging academics to avoid ascribing
Dickens' power as a writer only to his personal trauma, Andrews explains that "Dickens' s
lifelong preoccupation with childhood and its unresolved relation to the adult world is due
quite as much to the complicated cultural status of childhood in nineteenth-century England
as to the private experiences of Dickens's early life" (1). Smith similarly argues that "It is
wrong to look for the origin of any of the themes of the novels simply in the author's

33

activities in real life, since life and fiction were both closely twisted round the core of the
writer's personality" (140). Smith's emphasis on personality over activity and his false
separation of these elements of Dickens' identity is unsustainable, however, particularly if
Dickens' philanthropic work on behalf of Angela Burdett-Coutts and his editorials and
speeches encouraging social reform are studied alongside his novels. Despite the fact that " .
. . the habit of drawing largely on the biographical record when considering Dickens's
treatment of childhood reduces the complexities of his attitudes to a matter of personal
idiosyncrasy"(Andrews 1), understanding Dickens' place in the complex stream of social
reform in mid-Victorian England requires an investigation of the connections between
personal and cultural trauma.
Charles Dickens not only wrote in his fiction about the need both to escape and to
retell trauma but also lived out this need in his personal life. For example, in 1860 Dickens
burned all of his personal letters, journals, and private papers in an attempt to sever his
private life from his public success (Kaplan 17 -8). Yet, during the Christmas before his
death, Dickens cryptically revealed his past to his family in playing "The Memory Game."
Henry Dickens' account of this event recounts Dickens' convoluted confession: "'My father,
after many turns, had successfully gone through the long string of words and finished up
with his own contribution, 'Warren's Blacking, 30 Strand"' (qtd. in Ackroyd 556). Because
Dickens had hidden his experience of child labour from his family, this address initially
meant nothing to the other family members playing the game. According to Henry, in
recalling his most traumatic childhood memory near the end of his life, Dickens "gave this
[address] with an odd twinkle in his eye and a strange inflection in his voice which at once

34

forcibly arrested my attention and left a vivid impression on my mind for some time
afterwards" (qtd. in Ackroyd 556). Thus, Dickens ' round-about and cryptic testimony of his
childhood trauma was dramatically impressed upon his son, for whom a new route of
understanding was possible, a route which could not be fully understood until Forster's
biography of Dickens was published several years later (Ackroyd 556). In the biography of
his friend, Forster clearly articulates Dickens' persistent memory of his early years, stating
that Dickens most remembered his family's time at Chatham when Dickens was between the
ages of four and nine, and that "the associations that were around him when he died, were
those which at the outset of his life had affected him most strongly" (Forster Book 1,
Section 1). Dickens had repressed these memories for years and denied his childhood
associations, yet he could not deny articulating their impact on his identity. Dickens'
struggle to re-create himself is repeatedly paralleled by his characters with similarly mixed
results.
Of equally mixed results were Dickens' attempts to help those he most feared
becoming like, the poor. Dickens had "no sentimental expectation of instant change"
emanating from his social work (Smith 147), nor had he any immediate insight into the
problems of his society in which the poorer classes suffered in conditions which were largely
worsening. What Dickens did have in relation to the poor and their position in mid-Victorian
society was incredibly sharp powers of observation, a keen understanding of the importance
of connections, and the persuasive literary power to relate to the public what he saw.
According to Hochman and Wachs, "Both the energy and the figuration of [Dickens']
assault upon the evils of his society spring largely from his capacity for not only empathizing

35

with the orphan condition, but also for transforming it into an image of the human
condition" (12). Despite the discouraging realities of the slow rate of cultural change and the
frustration of dealing with a stagnant bureacracy, Dickens remained constant in his interest
in sanitary and social reform.
As with most societal issues, education was a contested topic in the Victorian period.
Contrary to the commonly held mid-Victorian belief that education of the poor beyond basic
rudimentary reading and writing was dangerous because it would encourage the workingclass to question their blighted social position (Jordan 214), Dickens argued that the current
system which emphasized religious doctrine was unfair to those whose positions were so
physically poor that even the most basic learning was difficult (Letters v.3 563). True to his
perception of the problems, Dickens used the full extent of his literary powers to urge
Angela Burdett Coutts to support fully the school run by Samuel R. Starey. In a letter to
Forster, Dickens stated that he had written "a sledge-hammer account of the Ragged
schools" to Burdett Coutts and that he had "no doubt she will do whatever I ask her in the
matter" (Letters v.3 572). Dickens specified to schoolmaster Starey that this pecuniary
assistance should best be used to improve the location and physical operation of the school,
including the addition of a sink for washing and hiring someone to oversee this addition.
Dickens thought it of "immense importance that if practicable the [children] should have the
opportunity of Washing themselves" (Letters v.3 564 and 574). For Dickens, none of the
issues of poverty were separable from their root causes. Children needed to be washed and if
possible fed if they were to learn, and in Dickens' mind theoretical approaches to social
reform were of no value if practical applications were not pursued.

36

In addition to his fiction writing and his direction of Burdett Coutts' philanthropy,
Dickens' non-fiction literary efforts further spread his approach to social reform. Under
Dickens' editorial leadership, Household Words "pursued a consistent line of radical
criticism of Victorian society however tempered this may have been by its editor's desire to
ensure that it remained lively and entertaining" (Smith 153-4). In this light, a section entitled
"Social, Sanitary and Municipal Progress" was a constant feature of Household Words
throughout Dickens' tenure as editor (Smith 157). Similarly, Dickens articulated the goals of
the non-fiction elements of All the Year Round as "a collection of miscellaneous articles
interesting to the widest range of readers, consisting of Suggestive, Descriptive and Critical
Dissertations of the most prominent topics, British and foreign, that form the social history
of the past eight years" (qtd. in Smith 81). Smith believes that "Dickens's longing (not too
strong a word) to impose his will on a heterogeneous group can be seen in his burning desire
to edit and indeed own a periodical" (7). In this way, Dickens was not that different from the
average middle-class men who reveled in their new position of leadership.
One particular means of cultural and self-creation flourished in Victorian literature.
The genre of autobiography, like the novel itself, burgeoned in the nineteenth century. The
term itself first appeared in 1809, although the form can be traced back to the roots of
Western literature (Cuddon 69). Similarly, the Western novel took its modem form in the
eighteenth century and flourished in the nineteenth century, although similar types of
literature can be traced back to the twelfth century BC in Egypt (Cuddon 601-2). The codevelopment of autobiography and the novel is significant in analyzing trauma literature, as
testimony which is coloured by fiction lacks the restorative power of pure testimony

37

(Hochman and Wachs 188-9). Therefore, the conjoined development of the two genres
created a period of mutual influence between them. As a form of testimony, autobiography is
necessary for recuperative trauma writings, and David Copperfield follows the general form
of autobiography. However, it does so creatively and thus problematically. Although it is not
an actual autobiography, it is the closest Dickens came to writing one, for it incorporates
sections of his autobiographical fragment. 6
Thomas Laqueur believes that "Beginning in the eighteenth century, a new cluster of
narratives came to speak in extraordinarily detailed fashion about the pains and deaths of
ordinary people in such a way as to make apparent the causal chains that might connect the
actions of its readers with the suffering of its subjects" (176-7). Dickens' novels are a
continuation of this trend and are also indicative of the problematic and complex life of the
author and changing ideologies of the mid-Victorian culture. In particular, class-based and
volatile attitudes regarding childhood, and their practical results, meant that while orphans
maintained their acceptance in literature, they had no role in society and were thus
marginalized, making them both endangered and dangerous. This marginalization is
recognizable in the lack of suitable care facilities for foundlings, assumptions of moral
impurity in illegitimate children, the frequently employed label of "Street Arab" in calls to
deal with homeless, impoverished children, and the not-in-my-backyard suggestions of child
emigration (Bagnell 23). Hochman and Wachs' recognition of the universal identification

6

At much urging from John Forster, Dickens attempted to write an autobiography between 1845 and 1846, but
this work remained incomplete. Portions founds their way into David Copperfield, and Forster published other
sections in his Life of Dickens in 1872.

38

and life-long status of "the orphan condition" echoes the secondary definition of orphans as
having lost previously enjoyed security and protection and helps to explain their continuing
fascination (14). The cultural trauma induced by rapid societal changes and the general
unease of the Victorians found specific incarnation in fear of the unfamilied orphan.

39

Chapter 2: "An Orphan in the Wide World"7 : Truth, Testimony
and Trauma in David Copperfield
David Copperfield, as the "favourite child" of Charles Dickens ("Preface" 1867 DC
9), is the most obviously autobiographical of his novels and therefore the most indicative of
the direct influences of personal trauma on the author's fiction. As a writer who appears to
tell his story without realizing its impact, David Copperfield mirrors his creator both in
essence and in action. Although Great Expectations closely resembles the plot and character
focus of David Copperfield, the maturation of the author and societal changes are reflected
in the stronger characterization in Great Expectations and the fuller recovery from trauma
revealed in Pip. Comparatively, "Copperfield . .. is a radically ideological text, whose
conception of character reflects a cultural norm" rather than an individual existence
(Hochman and Wachs 56). The cultural norm David Copperfield reflects is the diligence and
the intrinsic rewards of striving associated with the Victorian gentleman. David Copperfield
is also an intensely personal story that embodies the problematic relationship between
trauma, testimony, and creativity. David Copperfield fails to integrate the subject of his
trauma into his own testimony because he transmutes it into a creative and public tale.
The power of David Copperfield comes from its correspondence both with Dickens'
life and with the Victorian audience's identification with the story. Just as the records of
Dickens' childhood memories became tools for his friends' and family's later understanding
of him, likewise the stories of fictional orphans were important to the mid-Victorian reading
7

David's immediate reaction on learning of his mother's death (DC 123).

40

public as a means of getting to know the 'truth' of cultural dangers, a knowledge made
possible by the readers' interaction with the story. This moment of recognition for the
Victorian middle-class rested largely in their perception of themselves as figurative orphans;
they believed themselves to be separate from both those who came before and those who
were to follow. Gilmour explains the extent of this perception of separation:
In almost every area of Victorian intellectual life, one encounters a preoccupation
with ancestry and descent, . .. and with discovering or creating links to a formative
history. And what is true of the culture's public discourse about itself was also true of
individuals, driven in an age of rapid change to find coherence and meaning in the
shape of their own lives. (25)
In failing to link themselves to a "formative history," the Victorians were figuratively

orphaned and alienated from their own culture. The Victorian search for coherence and
meaning, for a connection to their own past, allowed the self-made hero David Copperfield,
and thus David Copperfield the novel, an almost instant critical success (Ackroyd 329).
Dickens' powerful fiction and non-fiction writing and his social activism can be seen as
direct responses to his fear of poverty and its resultant loss of status, fears which would
inevitably lead to this figurative orphan state, and fears inspired by his childhood trauma.
The middle-class Victorians who flocked to buy his books shared this fear. Dickens attempts
to allay these fears by ending David Copperfield with the healthy, middle-class male
maturity of the adult David Copperfield, but the overriding trauma of the orphan condition
casts the vigour and clarity of this reassurance into doubt.
David Copperfield's appeal and relevance are not limited to the Victorian audience.

41

While the Victorian period saw the development of the figurative orphan condition, it
continues to be a reality in increasingly technological and alienated societies. For Hochman
and Wachs, "both the energy and the figuration of [Dickens'] assault upon the evils of his
society spring largely from his capacity for not only empathizing with the orphan condition
but also for transforming it into an image of the human condition" (12). This "orphan
condition," the state of loss and separation which influences every life and therefore every
human identity to some degree, is revealed in the immediacy with which David Copperfield
feels "An orphan in the wide world" (DC 123). It is also indicative of orphans' distinct status
in Victorian culture. The child David infers his mother's death from the behaviour of those
around him, and from that moment of recognition feels set apart from the other children, a
distinction which he both grieves, for it has required the death of his mother, and savors, for
it gives him the special status of a free and unique individual (DC 123). This paradox is
consistent with Victorian middle-class orphanhood, which could be both psychologically
liberating and psychologically damning. While orphans lacked the protection of family and
lineage, they were also free from the limitations which family, lineage, and ultimately class,
could impose. Furthermore, rapid societal change and the threat of early mortality in
childbirth imposed the insecurity of orphanhood on every Victorian individual. While the
working-class was more at risk for literal orphanhood, the middle-class was particularly
poised to experience figurative orphanhood, as is represented in the literature of the period,
in that it was a relatively new class which sought to be distinguished from prior generations.
Although it was potentially damaging to a coherent sense of identity, this orphan-ness freed
the Victorians to re-create themselves in a manner similar to Dickens' hero.

42

The process of self-creation is visible in David Copperfield as he tells his story, but it
is visibly false. Copperfield's eventual emptiness is particularly obvious in comparing later
chapters to the emotionally rich records of his childhood. Of his brief period at home solely
with his mother and Peggotty, David recalls a squabble between the women about which
woman he loved better. He recalls that "we all fell a-crying together. I think I was the loudest
of the party" (DC 28). Similarly, when David has been misplaced by and bites his stepfather, in a moment of great fury and fear at the ensuing beating inflicted by Mr. Murdstone,
David records that his emotions were so overwhelming that his "smart and passion began to
cool" before he was able to feel guilt, and that his "suffering soul" could not be soothed (DC
62, 65). Following the shock of his mother's death, having literally entered into the orphan
condition, the final trauma which causes David to eventually suppress his emotions is the
shame of going to work at Murdstone and Grin by's. Of his first entry into labour and
meeting his fellow workers, the narrator states that "No words can express the secret agony
of my soul as I sunk into this companionship" (DC 151). Once David leaves this period of
his life, however, the emotion laden remembrances lose their authenticity. Perhaps the
distance of time makes it easier for the adult Copperfield as narrator to reveal his childhood
emotional life, or perhaps the countenance of the successful, middle-class Victorian male
which Copperfield later assumes denies that continued expression. Either way, as Laub
states, "One has to know one's buried truth in order to be able to live one's life" (Laub
"Truth" 63). David's silence is an indication of his buried words and thus his buried self.
David cannot accomplish self-knowledge, so he must retreat by telling a safer version of his
adult story rather than fully expressing his interior self. In maturing David learns to hide the

43

essence of himself that had surfaced freely in childhood, when unhindered by a socially
influenced self-conception.
In an attempt to escape his traumatic orphan past, and to declare his former self a
separate person, David makes several declarative fresh starts throughout the retelling of his
story. Most significantly, upon arrival at Betsey Trotwood's house, and having been renamed and re-clothed, David states, "Thus I began my new life, in a new name, and with
everything new about me" (DC 206). The repeated new beginnings are supposed to separate
the past, present, and future, but David fails to realize that he must combine the periods of
his life and recognize each stage if he is to achieve a complete identity. Ironically, without
the shade of fiction Dickens was never able to feel the same removal from his childhood
tribulations as that revealed in the hollow hero David. After recording his time in the
blacking warehouse in his aborted attempt at autobiography, Dickens reports the longevity of
the memories, stating, "It was a very long time before I liked to go up Chandos Street. My
old way home by the Borough made me cry, after my eldest child could speak" (in Forster
Book 1, Section 2). In fiction, however, Dickens could manipulate a solution.
Though Copperfield seems to deny his earlier selves, Dickens cannot refuse their
representations. As Kincaid points out, the struggle for identity created by Dickens in David
Copperfield was a cultural struggle: " ... we need no one come from the dead to tell us that

the Victorians were generally uneasy with simple notions of an essentialized self.
Presentations of a multiple self or of a hidden, unknown self are common in Victorian

44

literature" (77).8 Representative of David's multiple identities and fresh starts is the repeated
renaming he undergoes at the hands of other characters. Micawber refuses responsibility for
the child David by calling him "Copperfield" and thus making him an adult of equal
independence (DC 170). Steerforth projects innocence and femininity onto David in calling
him "Daisy" (DC 272), and Dora manipulates David out of annoyance with her by cloyingly
calling him "Doady" (DC 556). Importantly, Aunt Betsey gives David a fresh start with the
name which lasts longest in deeming him "Trotwood Copperfield" at the moment she adopts
and claims him (DC 206). This name gives David a distance from his prior name, which has
been sullied by his cruel step-father. As Bottums shows, David appears malleable and
interpretable to others, becoming for each other character what he or she needs (437). In this
way, David's identity is less a personal perception than a mirror of other' s desires. Dickens'
representation of self-hood is "relational," and therefore David' s sense of self is always in
danger of being breached by others if it is not otherwise protected (Kincaid 78). David
chooses not to unite the various elements identified by the other characters into a complex
identity of his own but in the end chooses instead a monotonous self definition based on
external cultural values.
The orphan condition, despite David Copperfield's negation of its impact, is clearly
omnipresent in Victorian culture as revealed in David Copperfield, not only through David
himself but more so through the other orphans who saturate the novel. Mrs. Copperfield,
8

Kincaid cites Arnold ' s ''The Scholar Gypsy," ''The Buried Life," "Isolation: To Marguerite," and ''To
Marguerite-- Continued," Browning's "On the Campagna," Rosetti's The House of Life, Meredith ' s Modern
Love, and Tennyson' s The Princess as examples of Victorian confusion regarding the importance ofthe
individual and the dangers of separation from others (77).

45

Tommy Traddles, Dora Spenlow, Agnes Widefield, Emily and Ham Peggotty, and Martha
Endell all lack at least one parent. Further adding to the perennial presence of orphans in the
novel is the language, both literal and figurative, of the orphan state. For example,
Micawber's snorting housemaid is "A Orfling" from a workhouse; David describes his
orphan boy-cook as a "Horrible young changeling"; Ham's grateful good-bye to Mr.
Peggotty is that of the "Thanks of the orphan, as he was ever more than a father to"; and
Micawber describes himself as a "Waif and Stray upon the shore of human nature" (DC 154,
637, 678, 684). Indicative of the hypocrisy of the Victorian orphan state is Uriah Heep's
assertion that upon arrival in Canterbury young David, a friendless orphan, was regarded by
the charity-school 9 villain as "the scum of society" and as beneath himself for having lived
in the street (DC 687, 688). Although Heep is depicted as a receptacle for human duplicity
and deceit, he still feels justified in '"umbly" exalting himself over the unfamilied David.
These omnipresent reminders of the orphan condition in Dickens' representation of
Victorian society highlight the necessity of recovering from the orphan state, but David
Copperfield fails to provide that balm because the novel is ultimately both too

depersonalized and too fictionalized.
By writing a fictional story rather than autobiographical testimony, David
Copperfield protects his inner life from both public view and personal scrutiny. Failure to
recognize the affective power of the orphan state weakens the character represented in the

9

Dickens' critical attitude towards charity school education is clearly revealed through both the vile Uriah
Heep in David Copperfield and the beastly Noah Claypole in Oliver Twist.

46

adult Copperfield. Hochman and Wachs argue that David as a character is hollow because
Dickens concentrates too fully on the values of earnestness, diligence and self-discipline and
thus empties David Copperfield of the rage and desire inherent in and expected of an orphan
(56). This hollowness is revealed as David's "childhood has simply been replaced by his
adulthood, with no concrete sense of how he has moved from the one state to the other"
(Hochman and Wachs 84). On the other hand, this hollowness may also be a result of the
confused constraint Dickens projects onto David, for as Kincaid states, "David both needs
and abhors the whole idea of causality. He both is and is not the product of what he has
encountered" (57). This hollowness is evident throughout the novel, particularly as David
the narrator frequently interjects with overviews of large spans of time, as his selfexplanations show:
I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder,
and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done,
without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to
concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor
should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no
spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on
here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be
spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities
wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and
defeating him. (DC 560)
For David, affirmation and success come from "diligence, "earnestness," and "order," but

•

47
also require purging any "erratic and perverse feelings ." Indeed, is seems throughout the
novel that David strives to erase any feelings stronger than affection and admiration. Like
Dickens, David cannot help but be shaped, possibly most essentially, by the very things that
either he denies or he tries to disguise through diligence. Thus, both the revealed story and
the unacknowledged testimony maintain their ability to shape David and together indicate
his hollowness.
In contrast to the diligent hero, J. Steerforth, Uriah Heep and Wilkins Micawber are
all endowed with extremes of normal human characteristics, these being sexuality, ambition
and infantile impulse respectively, which are ignored in David. The resulting juxtaposition
creates a means of comparison and further reveals the false portrait of the hero (Hochman
and Wachs 70-76). For example, while Uriah Heep clearly states that his humility is a facade
that allows him to further his goals, David has no such false humility and proudly strives for
self-control and promotion while condemning Uriah for craving the same reward. At the
unveiling of Heep' s rapacity, David and Uriah co-accuse each other of greed: David selfrighteously says, "It may be profitable to you to reflect in the future that there never were
greed and cunning in the world yet, that did not do too much, and over-reach themselves," to
which Uriah rightly replies, "They used to teach at school . .. from nine o' clock to eleven
that labour was a curse; and from eleven o'clock to one, that it was a blessing and a
cheerfulness and a dignity ... You preach, about as consistent as they did." (DC 698).
David' s hypocrisy results from his lack of self-awareness. Because he does not recognize his
own motivation and desires, he sees the desires of his enemy as base.
Similarly, the accounts of David's romantic life, when laid aside those of his beloved

48

Steerforth, indicate the impotence of David's passion. While other characters and the readers
clearly repudiate Steerforth for his gross misconduct with Emily, he is also clearly the more
powerful love interest in the novel. Steerforth' s passion is overwhelming for his targets, who
seem to consider him irresistible. Additionally, Steerforth targets and attracts younger
women, such as Emily, or women of lower status, such as Rosa Dartle. By contrast, David's
passion is impotent and unconsummated in large part because, as an orphan, he seeks a
replacement mother. One of David's earliest romantic interests is a woman with no more
intimate representation than her formal name, "the Eldest Miss Larkins." According to her
would-be paramour, who is head-boy at Dr. Strong's academy by this point in the story and
estimated to be sixteen years old, "the eldest Miss Larkin is not a chicken; for the youngest
Miss Larkins is not that, and the eldest must be three or four years older. Perhaps the eldest
Miss Larkins may be about thirty" (DC 254). While she is polite and flattering to David, it is
obvious that he is never anything more to "the eldest Miss Larkins" than a sweet boy. This
unrequited interest is but one of many romances David imagines himself in before wooing
his first wife Dora Spenlow. David's relationship with Dora is doomed from the start, in
large part because she is also an orphan and needs a father as much as David needs a mother,
but neither can satisfy the other's need. The richly symbolic dinner scene depicts the
meaning of their marriage. In celebration of Traddles coming to dinner, Dora purchases
oysters, much to her husband's delight. However, because she has unwittingly bought
unopened oysters, and they have no oyster knives, the party "looked at the oysters and ate the

49

mutton" (DC 592). 10 Although David has earned the wife he wanted, Dora is like the
oysters- an expensive and ill-considered treat that he cannot enjoy. When David finally
marries Agnes, who has been both a mother and a sister to him before being a wife who can
satisfies his infantile emotions, he is finally able to feel fulfilled in maintaining the little boy
status which is never necessary for his more potent friend Steerforth.
Perhaps the most telling of the doubles Dickens provides alongside David is the
character of Wilkins Micawber. While Micawber may or may not be a literal orphan, he is
very much submerged in the existential emotions of orphanhood, and thus provides a foil for
David's writing. While writing should be the means of articulation for David, he keeps a
tight rein on his own expressions and belittles the lack of emotional control in others'
writings. Mr. Dick, Dr. Strong, and Julia Mills all have their writings belittled by
Copperfield. On meeting Mr. Dick, young David asks if the gentleman is insane for his
endeavor to write a Memorial with its the constant intrusions of King Charles the First. On
being assured that Mr. Dick was not mad, David remarks, "I found out afterwards that Mr.
Dick had been for upwards of ten years endeavouring to keep King Charles the First out of
the Memorial; but he had been constantly getting into it, and was there now" (DC 197).
According to David's Aunt Betsey, Mr. Dick's erratic behaviour is a result of extreme
emotional stress and family rejection, psychological intrusions that contradict David's
concentration on diligence and earnestness as the writer's main tools. In his last retrospect

10

To the Victorian audience, oysters were a multi-faceted representation of female sexuality because of their
reputed properties as an aphrodisiac, the necessity of their being opened to reveal a treasure, and their
relationship to the pearl, which was an euphemism for the clitoris.

50

David relates that Mr. Dick is still writing the Memorial and still flying giant kites,
apparently having accomplished nothing as a writer. Similarly, the good Dr. Strong, who is
presumed to be unable to control the events surrounding him and is thus a poor example of a
diligent gentleman , has been at work producing a dictionary long before David enters his
school, and according to "Adams, our head-boy, who had a turn for mathematics ... on the
Doctor's plan, and at the Doctor's rate of going ... it might be done in one thousand six
hundred and forty-nine years, counting from the Doctor's last, or sixty-second, birthday" (DC
226). At the end of thy novel, some thirty years later, the Doctor had got "somewhere about
the letter D" (DC 804). David Copperfield is able to write a complete story from birth to his
development into a successful gentleman, but Dr. Strong cannot get beyond the letter "D."
However, Wilkins Micawber is the most consistently mocked. Significantly,
Micawber' s letters are also the most richly emotional writings within the novel. In pointing
out examples of bad (that is to say emotional) writing, Copperfield tries desperately to
reinforce in the reader that his own fully structured, finally emotionless, completed work is
the superior type. For example, when Mr. Micawber, David and Tommy Traddles conspire
to unveil Uriah Heep's villainy: "Micawber rushed out of the house; leaving us in a state of
excitement, hope, and wonder, that reduced us to a condition little better than his own. But
even then his passion for writing letters was ·too strong to be resisted" (DC 655). This
statement closely follows a discussion between Copperfield and Traddles in which they
agree that Micawber's letters generally contain little if any meaning as they are nothing but
an outlet for his emotions (DC 649). In minimizing the emotional writings of his
acquaintances, and supporting his own distanced authorship, Copperfield once again

51

reinforces the separation between himself and his testimony.
Even at a time of great promise while married to Dora and beginning his writing
career, David maintains a disconcerting separation between his emotional life and his
exterior identity. In the midst of remembering his dead wife and the poignancy of this brief
time together, Copperfield interrupts the reminiscence to state "for I write a good deal now,
and was beginning to be known as a writer" (DC 595). David regularly interjects similar
statements throughout his narrative, generally as an interruption at what appears to be the
beginning of potentially painful personal reflections. The contradiction between lamenting
over his wife's ailing health and self-congratulations reinforces the impression that the
narrator is writing a story to which he is an outsider without acknowledging his inner self.
Similarly, in recounting his courtship of Dora, David, as the removed narrator, states that he
had spied a ring like the one he had given Dora on his daughter's hand, and the sight caused
"a momentary stirring in [his] heart, like pain" (DC 452). By this point Copperfield has so
far removed himself from the story that even strong emotions are recorded as muted and
pallid. Because of the interaction between fiction and testimony, David Copperfield's
eventually complete sense of self, shattered in his early childhood and youth and
reconstructed throughout his adulthood, seems more a fragile shell than an organic whole.
The lack of emotional depth in David' s character as he matures is revealed repeatedly in his
writing, as he records stories of perseverance, labour and ultimate success without believable
fervor or self-awareness.
David Copperfield records the details of his life for the reader, yet the narrator
himself appears to remain unaware. For example, on returning home for his mother's

52

funeral, the child David observes in Murdstone an apparently genuine grief he records but
cannot accept: "Mr. Murdstone took no heed of me when I went into the parlour where he
was, but sat by the fireside, weeping silently, and pondering in his elbow-chair" (DC 128).
Even in recording this incident many years later, the adult narrator cannot admit to himself
what is plainly clear to the reader, that the monster Murdstone is simply a man. As Kincaid
notes, "There is ... a great deal David notes but doesn't register, doesn ' t allow to penetrate
into an area that would call for interpretation" (56). As David is unable to recognize the
other' s trauma, he is likewise unable to see the truth of his own. Because of this, he
subsequently fails to see the truth of himself, and his memory warps the story as the story
warps his self-perception (Laub "Truth" 64). Despite early self-reports of his talent for close
observation and accurate memory, David reports on the status of his loved ones at the close
of the novel using vague and detached terms. David calls the voices of those he supposedly
loves "not indifferent," describes Aunt Betsey, who gave him every chance to restart his life,
as a "steady walker," and turns the innocently wise Dick into an impersonal "old man
making giant kites" (DC 802, 803). These descriptions of those closest to him reveal a
continued emotional distance and hesitance that overrule his story's clarity. Inconsistencies
like these in David' s character are made visible because as he matures and self-reports his
increasingly self-disciplined mind, the narration becomes much less inward than in the
childhood chapters, which give clearer indications of David's feelings (Hochman and Wachs
62). For Copperfield, discipline and the denial of emotion become synonymous and unite to
prevent analysis of the self.
Throughout David Copperfield, the concept of the self is shown as constantly

53

evolving, volatile, and in need of firm boundaries and external control (Hochman and Wachs
59). David's identity is not a result of healthy reintegration but is consciously defined by
laborious effort on his part and by limits Agnes helps maintain as the focus and limiter of his
life. While David cannot tame his own wayward heart, he finds completeness in marrying
Agnes and securing forever her guiding influence. As he states, "Clasped in my embrace, I
held the source of every worthy aspiration I had ever had; the centre of myself, the circle of
my life" (DC 794). David uses language and writing not as a natural tool for integrating
traumatic memories, or even ordinary human experience, through testimony, but as a form of
self-disciplining penance to tame his wayward tendencies, a project he cannot achieve
without Agnes' guiding spirit. In a time of great despair following Dora's death, while
seeking respite in the Swiss Alps, David initially finds no comfort or influence from those
"awful solitudes" (DC 749). Upon receiving a letter from Agnes who exhorts David to
"labour on" and show that "sorrow could not be weakness, but must be strength," he
inconceivably and instantly turns to home, work, and his suddenly realized love (DC 750).
While David begins labouring at ten years of age, the labour has no disciplining force until
he unites it with Agnes' admonitions. However, securing Agnes as a wife also helps
reconnect David, at least loosely, to his lost self. As he follows her gaze at the window near
the close of the novel, David sees "Long miles of road ... opened out before my mind; and,
toiling on, I saw a ragged way-worn boy, forsaken and neglected, who should come to call
even the heart now beating against mine, his own"(DC 793). Despite all the fresh starts,
David ultimately sees himself as the lonely little boy on an unknown road but simultaneously
recognizes that that "forsaken and neglected" child should grow up to be himself and claim

54

Agnes. Where fictionalized testimony has increasingly removed David from the realities of
his existence, refocusing his life through self-determination and the guidance of Agnes has
brought him back to a more clear though still distant sense of self. Despite David's attempts
to deny his former selves, they continue to speak.
Like his "favourite child" (Preface DC 10), Dickens' status as an existential orphan is
compounded by a deep sense of shame. Successful passage through adolescence and the
creation of a complete adult identity requires a minimum of both trauma and shame,
qualifications eluded neither by any of his orphan heroes nor by Dickens himself. In using
Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain shame, Adamson and Clark explicitly state that shaming
is a social act, an act of "desire for recognition through the other" and of the other refusing to
grant that recognition (7). This refusal is thus also a refusal of an audience which the sufferer
of trauma needs for his or her testimony and reinforces the alienation of the orphan. Because
shame is an especially threatening trauma to the identity in adolescence, Charles Dickens'
experiences in the blacking warehouse at twelve years of age became the experience against
which he constantly wrote. Similarly, for his creation David Copperfield the experience of
labour is shameful but never again referred to in the novel and thus hidden from personal
and public scrutiny. Dickens recorded the development of his own sense of shame, which
was especially powerful as he became proficient at his job pasting labels on blacking bottles,
and when he was seated where passers-by could look in at him. Dickens remembered that he
and his workmate Bob Fagin "sat in front of a window, to gain the light for their tasks, ...
and we were so brisk at it that the people used to stop and look in. Sometimes there would
be quite a little crowd there. I saw my father corning in at the door one day when we were

55

very busy, and I wondered how he could bear it" (in Ackroyd 55). Presumably Dickens'
father's acceptance of his son ' s reduced position and the lack of paternal shame was as
personally traumatic for Dickens as was his actual work. Dickens found his circumstances at
this period so personally threatening that he strove throughout his life to hide the facts of his
employment and his father's financial failure, yet his labour emerges virtually unchanged in

David Copperfield. David experiences this as one who was both traumatized through his
orphanhood and shamed through his labour.
As a result of Dickens' struggle to hide his past and yet to narrate it, James Kincaid
recognizes a constant "blurring" in Dickens' writing, particularly evident in David

Copperfield, and asserts that Dickens "presents violently contradictory, fiercely battling
notions of what constitutes the self' (50, 76). These battling selves can be attributed to
Dickens' own struggle to integrate a variety of incongruous truths into a cohesive self or may
be a result of his attempt to assimilate the imaginative with the painfully real, resulting
initially in a malleable identity which could be manipulated to satisfy external demands.
Additionally, the unsteady modes and perspectives of David Copperfield challenge
assumptions about character, narrator, and author and thus about the individual and the self
(Kincaid 54). Dickens achieves all of this, wittingly or otherwise, because his struggle to
hide his past while developing his self-identity invades his novels, resulting in stories that
read as frayed autobiographies.
While Dickens was not a literal orphan, he experienced first-hand the existential
orphanhood of his society and was, through either his own disavowal or their abandonment,
largely alienated from his parents. John Forster, in recounting the early years of Dickens'

56

life, repeatedly draws connections between those boyhood memories , good and bad, and the
boyhood Dickens created for David Copperfield. Not only does David's traumatic labour
experience directly correspond to Dickens', but details such as the libraries to which both
Dickens and David are allowed access are virtually identical (Forster Book 1, Section 1). As
a repository of Dickens' trust and confidences, and thus privy to otherwise unknown
connections between the creator and his creations, Forster confirms that Dickens "partially
uplift[ed] the veil" of his troubled childhood in writing David Copperfield (Book 1, Section
1). While David' s readers are encouraged to believe that he finds a way to cope with his loss,
though not actual restoration of his identity, through writing, this project was largely
incomplete in Dickens' own life and does not ring true in the novel. As narrator of the story,
the adult David presents his memoir as though it were a direct transcript of the occurrences
in his life, free from the traumatic influences of his childhood and from "the complex
processes of conceptualizing, verbalizing, and organizing the story of his life from within the
perplexing perspective of a vital, dynamic conflict-ridden present" (Hochman and Wachs
63). Despite all these obvious connections, David Copperfield is not literal autobiography of
either the author or the created character but is an incursion of Dickens' identity into his
creative work.
Dickens capitalized on his personal popularity and his audiences' recognition of his
novelistic self-revelations. As Kaplan points out, Dickens' commitment to public readings
reinforced the connection between himself and his creations and further blended testimony
and fiction for his audience (18). In the 1850 Preface to David Copperfield, Dickens stated
that "no one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I believed it in the

57

writing" (10). In Dickens' own words, the creation of David Copperfield "ha[d] a tight
hold" on him throughout its writing, and "took possession of his days" so much so that he
wrote to his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts on 23 October, 1850, "I have just finished
Copperfield, and don't know whether to laugh or cry" (Johnson 148, 173, 178). Seventeen
years after its initial publication, and following the completion of all his novels except The
Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens stated in the 1867 Preface to a new edition of David
Copperfield, "Of all my books, I like this the best. ... like many fond parents, I have in my

heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield" (DC 10). This
seemingly compelling emotional connection between the author and his creation
strengthened the text's appeal to the public. However, both David Copperfield and Charles
Dickens seem able to tell their stories only if they deny their trauma and if the emotions and
the inner self, and thus subjectivity, are obscured by the veil of creativity. Although
transforming a life experience into a creative story can reflect the emotions involved, it
cannot deal with them as completely as true testimony does and thus cannot help restore
identity. That Charles Dickens was not able to restore his identity is clear if one reads his
repeated representation of orphans and orphan life as continuing and largely futile attempts
to achieve such restoration.
In explaining the intricate connection between trauma and memory, Dori Laub

touches on an aspect of childhood remembrance which corresponds with both Dickens' life
and the story he writes. Dickens own theory of memory is set out clearly in David
Copperfield:

I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us

58

suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children
to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown
men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to
have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it (21).
Similarly, according to Laub's theory memories created in times of childhood trauma tend to
recur with more clarity than other memories, but with relative emotional distance. What
Laub recognizes as beyond the capacity for young children in ordinary circumstances and
outside the usual consciousness of childhood, even in his own memories ("Truth" 62),
Dickens likewise sees as possible and even explicable in particular individuals and particular
situations. Clearly, both Laub and Dickens believe that clarity of memory is incubated in
childhood trauma. Laub states that his own startlingly clear traumatic memories are "like
discrete islands of precocious thinking, and feel almost like the remembrances of another
child, removed, yet connected to me in a complex way" ("Truth" 62). David Copperfield's
reported dissociation from his childhood self is typical of survivors of childhood trauma.
David writes, as "time steals on unobserved" in his memories:
I am the head-boy, now! I look down on the line of boys below me, with a
condescending interest in such of them as bring to my mind the boy I was myself,
when I first came there. That little fellow seems to be no part of me; I remember him
as something left behind upon the road of life - as something I have passed, rather
than have actually been- and almost think of him as of someone else. (DC 254)
Surprisingly, throughout the remainder of the novel no mention is made of David's friends
met at Dr. Strong's academy. Despite the earlier report of clarity in his childhood memories,

59

David Copperfield's remembrances are obviously fragmented, a fact which he cannot admit.
This disavowal of self protects the psyche from knowledge of the trauma until it can be
safely integrated. In introducing his biography of Dickens, John Forster details the similarity
between Dickens and his favourite creation, David Copperfield, in their talents for clear
memory and close observations (Forster Book 1, Section 1). The clarity of these childhood
memories is a result of the immense impact trauma has on the developing psyche. Events
that the individual cannot understand or integrate maintain their power and presence, despite
denial, until testimony eases them into the individual's identity. However, in the end
Dickens and Copperfield both rely on fictionalizing rather than bearing true testimony to the
traumas, thus perpetuating and publicizing but not healing the memory. Dickens and
Copperfield both learn to disguise rather than contend with their orphan conditions.
Dickens' stories grip and enthrall readers because he is "on the edge" (Hochman and
Wachs 22). The power of the stories lies in the simultaneous threat of annihilation and
promise of security which are consistent throughout the plots and which are part of all
human psyches, if not all human experiences. The tradition of orphan heroes in British
fiction meant that orphans were acceptable to Dickens' public, but Dickens' works gained
both shape and energy from his personal identification with the abandoned child. As noted in
the Introduction, Cathy Caruth believes that trauma speaks to and for a variety of human
experiences by challenging the limits of our self-knowledge, and our boundaries, and by
forcing recognition of the breaks in that knowledge ("Trauma" 4). The phenomenon of
trauma has become universal because it brings us to the limits of our comprehension
("Trauma" 4). Dickens' orphan heroes bring to life the exploration of trauma and its "all-

60

inclusive" nature. They open boundaries of human experience, yet their distance from
ordinary life makes it safe to identify with their trauma without fearing its incursion into the
readers' lives. While Dickens' story is mediated by virtue of its fictionalized presentation, it
nonetheless bears witness to his life and indicates the complexities of using testimony in
overcoming trauma. David Copperfield, despite its enduring appeal to readers, deals with the
orphan experience vacantly, largely through David' s ability to write only a story but not his
testimony. While the story maintains its fascination, David' s character is unsatisfying for the
reader because it is a result of his conscious creation of self and not a truly integrated whole.
Standing outside telling the story, David removes himself from the painful emotions and as a
result also removes himself from any chance of true healing.

61

Chapter Three: "I Called Myself': Pip and the Realization of the Self
Reflecting a more mature sense of self in Dickens than his earlier orphan text, Great

Expectations investigates both inconsistencies in the individual, whether that individual be
the character or the author, and the inconsistencies in Victorian culture which lead to
individual and general trauma. As Dickens comes to question middle-class values, he
provides critical insight into the problems with the Victorian class system. In disrupting the
readers' assumptions about this system, Dickens turns again to the recovery from trauma of
his orphan characters. In Great Expectations, Pip's trauma is established initially through the
death of his parents, is both reinforced and complicated through the cruelty of his sister, and
is completed through Magwitch's threats in the graveyard, which are all merely further
instances of orphan fear and isolation. Although much of the plot circulates around Pip's
attachment to Estella and the manipulation of his dreams and identity by Miss Havisham and
Magwitch, the break in his identity is already established before any of these encounters, as
the primary trauma stems from his connection to and distinctness from the graveyard
markers which represent his parents and brothers. Pip eventually returns to his essential and
original self, his root identity, by incorporating his orphan condition and recognizing his
psychic parentage in his adoptive father Joe.

Great Expectations, which first appeared in serial publication in 1860-61, comes near
the end of Dickens' literary career and resurrects yet again the orphan theme begun in Oliver

Twist, and continued through David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, and Bleak House. Because of
this, Dickens ran the risk in Great Expectations of repeating himself, yet Great Expectations
and its hero Pip are unique. In discussing how Dickens manages to tell yet another orphan

62

boy story without repeating David Copperfield, an unsigned appraisal in the Saturday
Review of 20 July 1861 states that "The method [Dickens] has adopted to create the
distinction lies not only in the contrivance of an entirely different set of incidents, but also in
making Pip a much more thorough study of character than David Copperfield was" (qtd. in
Law and Pinnington 531). There is also a change of intensity in Great Expectations. Pip is
the most desolate and isolated of Dickens' orphans and "has not the advantage of
illegitimacy or of mysterious origins" granted to the likes of Oliver Twist and Esther
Summerson (Sadrin 97). Foundlings, having no known roots, are more free than orphans of
known families such as Pip, for orphans are seemingly permanently linked to their class. As
he matures, Pip develops a greater sense of self-knowledge than Oliver Twist and David
Copperfield, and this self-knowledge allows him to recognize his false rank as a gentleman
and to reject the hypocrisy inherent in that position.
Both Great Expectations' deeper study of character in general and Pip's isolation
from other characters in particular are necessary to accomplish what Law and Pinnington
recognize as the theoretical difference between Great Expectations and the earlier novels,
that being "a deeply ironic, pessimistic and disabused commentary on the whole Victorian
discourse of the gentleman" (12). The ideology of the Victorian gentleman seems to underlie
much of Pip's motivation, masking the true impetus of his orphan condition. Dickens
himself was criticized as ungentlemanly for publishing "commodity texts," that is, serialized
novels which sold well and profited the publisher more than the writer (Smith 25). Dickens'
real offense, of course, was that he benefitted as both author and publisher. According to
Adams, "The Victorian gentleman represents . . . a secular sainthood: the gentleman is

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celebrated as a moral ideal open to all who prove themselves worthy, yet the true gentleman,
apologists agree, is distinguished by his lack of self-consciousness" (42). This definition
contains an inherent conflict, as proving oneself and a "lack of self-consciousness" are
antithetical. Similarly, by the mid-Victorian definition, manliness is "identified above all
with honest, straightforward speech and action, shorn of any hint of subtlety or
equivocation" (Adams 14). According to this definition, the illiterate blacksmith Joe Gargery
is the most manly, or more ironically the most gentlemanly, character in Great Expectations,
and thus undermines bourgeois ideals. Furthermore, Adams argues throughout his book that
the defining characteristic of the Victorian gentleman is an infinite capacity for selfdiscipline, such as that exhibited by David Copperfield. This self-discipline, however, is
always made suspect by the equally vital characteristic of un-self-consciousness. Having
been born 'not a gentleman,' Pip can never truly become one, despite Magwitch's money
and the motivation for self-improvement that he internalizes as a result of Estella's taunting.
For the Victorian male working-class orphan, such as Pip, class and family status collude to
deny him the title 'gentleman.' The sudden self-realization brought on by Magwitch' s
revelation of himself as benefactor forces Pip to recognize his true status and to reject his
mimesis of 'the gentleman. ' This removal of the gentleman plot, so deeply intertwined with
the Estella and Miss Havisham plot, allows Pip to focus on developing an accurate and fully
integrated identity. The paradox of how one can strive without being aware of one's striving
is the paradox Pip overcomes in rejecting the place which is created for him by Magwitch
and in simultaneously rejecting the bourgeois expectations of the Victorian reader.
Dickens' portrayal of the pre-Victorian culture in which the novel is set and during

64

which the ideology of the gentleman commenced 11 makes participation in that culture finally
unappealing for both the reader and Pip. Dickens' criticism is more biting in Great
Expectations than in many of his earlier novels, and the humour is less lighthearted. The
waste and ruin personified in Miss Havisham and Satis House seem representative of the
ruin of the class-based society, and in particular the loss of status of the landed class.
Dickens also condemns the bourgeois in Great Expectations. Contemporary criticism of
Pumblechook, in an unsigned review in the Examiner of 20 July, 1861 attributed to John
Forster, points out with great clarity Dickens' broader social criticism in Great Expectations:
Mr. Pumblechook does nothing. It is his part to be nothing while claiming to be

everything; a servile flatterer of wealth for its own sake, the pompous and coarse
pretender is there to represent the baser chorus of the world that will sing hymns even
to a boy whom it has bullied in his poverty when he becomes, by no act of his own ·
merit, a lad of great expectations in the way of cash. (qtd. in Law and Pinnington
529)
In addition, several minor characters contribute to the general disgust Dickens creates in his
portrayal of middle-class Victorian culture: Miss Havisham' s scavenging, sycophantic
relatives, Bentley Drummle and his indolent London cohort of Finches, Jaggers who
flourishes in the inhumanity of London ' s courtrooms, and the neglectful Pockets with their
tumbling children, are all counterposed against the quiet, pleasant working-class home
created by Biddy and Joe. While Pip ultimately rejects, or at best tentatively resigns himself
11

The ideology ofthe gentleman flourished in the mid- to late-Victorian period, 1850-70, but had evolved with
the change in class structure which began one hundred years earlier.

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to, Victorian middle-class life, this stance is as ambiguous as the ending of the novel itself.
Because he is blinded by his desire to change his social status, and thus disavows both his
original trauma of being an orphan and his childhood companions, it takes Pip most of the
novel to realize that he will not find happiness in this society. Recovering himself by
integrating his orphan state into his awareness of self eventually allows Pip to reject the
falsely promised richness of middle-class life. It is the orphan condition, with its isolation
from a familial context, which causes Pip ' s lack of self-awareness, but the issues of social
class act as a convenient screen and further delay self-knowledge.
Pip's lack of early self-clarity compounds his initial inability to overcome and
distance himself from the trauma in his childhood. This confusion is exemplified by his
inability to understand the term "Brought up by hand." 12 Pip ironically links the saying to
the physical abuses he endures at the hand of his sister, saying:
My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had
established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had
brought me up "by hand." Having at that time to find out for myself what the
expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in
the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe
Gargery and I were both brought up by hand. (GE 7-8)
This is the first indication in the novel of the connection between Pip and Joe, a connection
that is essential to Pip's recovery from trauma and realization of his self. However, Pip
12

The practice of feeding babies adult food or animal milk when no wet nurse was available was nearly as
dangerous as the beatings Pip survives.

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cannot recognize this connection until his healing has begun. As Laub points out, immense
trauma forbids access to understanding by temporarily disengaging the "Observing and
recording mechanisms of the mind" ("Bearing Witness" 57). In Great Expectations, it is not
so much the observing and recording mechanisms that Pip loses access to, but the ability to
analyze and understand what he observes. Law and Pinnington recognize that Pip's story is
"A first person-narration in which the narrator himself is ignorant of the meaning of the
events he is recording" (12). Pip is so distanced from any sense of self early in the novel that
his first memory of his surroundings runs half a page before he recognizes himself shivering
and frightened in the shadow of his family's gravestones (4). As Law and Pinnington
indicate, "The different forms of misreading in the novel are connected both to the difficulty
of self-knowledge ... and to the instability of identity" (17). At this early stage in Pip's
testimony, however, lack of self-knowledge and the instability of a traumatized identity are
parts of the same problem, particularly since identity itself, as this thesis has discussed, was
inherently unstable in the Victorian period. The phenomenon of the mind's disengagement
from analysis is at work in Pip, who can make no sense of the beatings he receives from his
sister. As a result, Pip invents his own meanings and begins a journey of misinterpretation
based on subjective observation that continues through much of his life.
Pip's power over language remains figurative and subjective, rather than literal and
objective, for much of the novel. He uses language as both a personal and a social act
whereby each individual creates his or her own meaning out of a shared pool of meanings
(Gaughan 83). This individual sense of language does not make Pip an "unreliable narrator"
as Law and Pinnington would argue (17), for while trauma keeps Pip from understanding the

67
events of his early life, his reportage is so clearly subjective that there is little room for
subsequent misinterpretation by the reader. The reader cannot interpret Great Expectations
as anything other than Pip's perception of his experiences. Pip also creates subjective
meaning in his attempts to understand himself and the other characters in the novel. In
recognizing that his understanding of others is a subjective reality, and then imparting that
reality to the reader, Pip's testimony remains true to his sense of self and resists blurring in
the way that a lack of this understanding blurs the testimonies in David Copperfield.
As the sole source of meaning for the reader, Pip is very much the author of his own
story. Pip's role as creator begins with his calling into being the opening setting:
My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to
have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I
found out for certain that ... the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard,
intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was
the marshes ... (GE 3)
The mood of this unfolding setting is such that a fog seems to roll back and reveal the
marshes and the churchyard to the reader in accordance to Pip's words, much like the
creation of the world in Genesis. After calling into being the marshes, the churchyard, and
his buried family, Pip ends his list, his world, by creating himself with the observation that
"the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip" (GE 4).
According to Sadrin, "The master of words, [Pip] signs his name at the bottom of his list as
any artist would do at the bottom of a picture" (96). Furthermore, Pip is "self-authored in the
midst of the world that he has just conjured up .... no Mrs. Thingummy, no Dr. Chillip, no

68
Doctor Parker Peps is called to the rescue as they were to help forth Oliver, David or Paul.
His is an oral delivery" (Sadrin 96). More specifically, Pip's is an auto-oral delivery. Great
Expectations opens, "My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip,
my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I
called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip" (3). Joe later supports Pip's explanation of this
self-naming, stating the Pip is "a kind of family name what he gave himself when an infant,
and is called by" (GE 76). These statements reveal multiple truths about Pip: the name he
gives himself is both small and ambiguous, the name by which he was addressed before
mastering speech is irrelevant, and the process of naming leads to the process of becoming.
Although he has mastered language enough to be creator, at this point Pip has not mastered
language enough to be governor.
In performing his pre-mature act of false self-creation, Pip similarly creates his

parents and brothers out of the markers in the graveyard. In clearly stating his lack of
connection and utter orphan condition, Pip states, "I never saw my father or my mother, and
never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of
photographs)" (GE 3). Because of the orphan condition, and its inherent trauma, Pip
embarks on a journey of self-creation and attempts to build an identity out of what little he
knows about himself and his family. In contrast to David Copperfield's adult striving for a
self, Pip's creative attempt at self-definition is clearly juvenile. Despite his utter lack of
knowledge about his parents, Pip feels qualified to imagine, though admittedly
"unreasonably," their physical features and attitudes based on their grave markers (GE 3).
Particularly revealing is Pip's assessment of his brothers, as he concludes:

69

To five little stone lozenges ... sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine
-who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggleI am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their
backs with their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never taken them out in this
state of existence. (GE 3)
While Pip dedicates the entire first page of his story to his descriptions of his unknown
family members, they are never again mentioned in the novel until he returns from Cairo and
takes his namesake, Joe's and Biddy's Pip, to see the churchyard. None the less, the
immediacy with which Pip's orphan tale is established indicates its primacy in influencing
his identity.
Pip's forced denial of himself at Satis House hampers his early act of self-creation.
To complete his journey from self-creation to self-denial and ultimately to self-realization,
Pip travels through several shaming incidents. Because his orphan state, childhood neglect,
and the shock in the churchyard have fractured his identity, Pip is easily shamed into trying
to change himself. After first meeting Miss Havisham and Estella, Pip recounts that "I had
never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to consider them a very
indifferent pair. Her contempt was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it' (GE
60). The disease of self-contempt lingers in Pip until long after he moves to London. In the
most amiable circumstances living with Herbert Pocket, and enjoying "the lap of luxury,"
the poorer yet thoroughly middle-classed young Pocket corrects Pip in his table manners. Pip
assures the reader that "He offered these friendly suggestions in such a lively way, that we
both laughed and I scarcely blushed" (GE 179). Pip does blush, however, and never releases

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his impression that Herbert is above him, although Pip secretly sponsors Herbert's business
opportunity. While Pip strives to overcome his roots and be malleable in his upward
mobility, in the end he must realize his original identity that rests in the marshes.
Although multiple characters influence Pip, none has the ability to influence his
identity significantly or permanently. Unlike David Copperfield, Pip maintains his name
throughout most of his story. In fact, other characters make much of Pip maintaining his
name. In explaining Pip's change in prospect, Jaggers stipulates to Pip that "You always bear
the name of Pip. You will have no objection, I dare say, to your great expectations being
encumbered with that easy condition" (GE 138). Soon afterwards, Miss Havisham
prophecies, "You will always keep the name of Pip, you know" (GE 158). Despite his quick
agreement to both of these statements, Pip easily relinquishes his name to Herbert's
christening him "Handel" (GE 179). While this new name allows Pip to temporarily distance
himself from the identity he has created for himself and try out the identities created for him
by others, it is merely a semantic change. The explanation of the etymology of the name, as
requested by Herbert, indicates its failure to represent a new Pip:
"I tell you what I should like. We are so harmonious, and you have been a blacksmith
-- would you mind it?"
"I shouldn't mind anything that you propose," I answered, "but I don't understand
you."
"Would you mind Handel for a familiar name? There' s a charming piece of music by
Handel, called the Harmonious Blacksmith." (GE 178-9)
This conversation is significant not just for explaining the seemingly innocent choice of

71

names, but also for revealing that no matter where he goes, Pip cannot escape his history at
the forge. Furthermore, the fact that Pip does not understand Herbert's reference to the
"Harmonious Blacksmith" until it is explained reinforces the disparity between his orphan
working-class past and his present leisured class situation. Although tempted by the
promises of money, and Estella, that Pip equates with being a gentleman of means, it can
never be more than a pose, just as his re-naming is nothing more than a restatement of who
he already has been.
Dickens was concerned with the maintenance of identity in a time of flux by the time
he wrote Great Expectations. Because of this, and because of Pip's clear and subjective
reports, Great Expectations does not contain the same caricatures of identity and society as
Dickens' earlier novel. This change is not a lack but is an advance in style, characterization,
and subtlety. Because of the clarity of his reports , Pip achieves balance that allows him some
perspective on Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, and eventually on Miss Havisham and
Magwitch; David Copperfield never achieves this balance and perspective in regarding the
Murdstones (Hochman and Wachs 185). Because he comes to know himself, Pip can see
others as separate from himself and can create metaphors and linguistic definitions which
indicate the distinctions of the other characters. For example, Pip consistently uses the
metaphor of the letter box to refer to his friend Wemmick, not merely as a rich description of
Wemmick' s facial features, but also as an indication of his ability to keep secrets. The vivid,
evocative elements of Great Expectations result from Pip' s drive as orphan storyteller
imbuing the other characters with the traumatic results of their influence on his life. Readers
thus have no way to separate the objective reality of these characters from their subjected

72

reality in Pip's traumatized memory (Hochman and Wachs 183). Pip's subjective
perspective gives his testimony clarity and allows it to perform the healing that true
testimony can effect. Pip masters language in a highly individual manner, and thus the
opportunity is at least left open for his ultimately finding himself.
Of Dickens' many orphan protagonists, Pip is the most able to retrieve his identity
through testimony, and is the only one ultimately capable of recasting his trauma into
expression through language. Pip "has indeed mastered the direst nightmares of his life and
reached a point of insight and repose that reflects a partial liberation from the compulsive
grip of his past" (Hochman and Wachs 168). Part of this healing comes because Pip is fully
immersed in his story, whereas David Copperfield seems an outside observer in his
testimony. The young Pip does not understand enough to be ashamed, as David Copperfield
frequently is, until he meets Miss Havisham, and never learns to hide his emotions but learns
instead to express them. Hochman and Wachs find that " . .. The sort of inarticulateness that
makes Daniel Peggotty bleed from the mouth at the loss of Emily is superseded in Pip by the
gift of transforming pain first into images and actions and then into words" (189). This gift is
apparent in what appears at the time to be a final parting from Estella, as Pip declares:
You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever
read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded
even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since . ... You have
been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become
acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are
not more real, more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence

73

and influence have been to me .... Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot
choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil.
(GE 364)

Pip provides strong emotional reactions and clear connections to and distinctions between
himself and those who act upon his life and his identity. He also recognizes the complexity
of his identity.
While David Copperfield is renamed and recreated by others, Pip provides personal
insight that consistently refuses to conform to the expectations and roles others wish for him.
Magwitch has striven for years to create "a brought-up London gentleman," but Pip rejects
this notion when he realizes that Magwitch instigated it and not Miss Havisham as he had
convinced himself. Recognizing the folly of his assumptions and how those assumptions
have shaped his self-perception is a pivotal point of growth and healing for Pip. Afterwards,
despite his continued passion for Estella, Pip is self-aware enough to recognize that
"wretched though it made me, and bitter the sense of dependence and even of degradation
that it awakened-- I saw in this, that Estella was set to wreak Miss Havisham's revenge on
men" (GE 302). While Pip cannot protect his heart from Estella, the insight does allow him
to forgive her later, just as understanding Miss Havisham's story allows him to judge her
separately from her conduct towards him and thus to move forward from that trauma.
Without his clear expression of emotions, Pip could not have matured from strictly
subjective to objective reporting. The ability to recognize and forgive others as separate from
their acts towards him reveals a significant maturation in Pip.
Unlike his Dickensian predecessors, Pip tells the story of integrating his orphan

74
condition, not his entrapment in and resignation to it. His gradual acceptance and final
honouring of Magwitch are part of the maturation which allows Pip to separate himself from
the original identity of the bundle of nerves shivering in the churchyard and to find hope in
seeing "the shadow of no parting" from Estella (GE 4, 484 ). In reporting true emotional
trauma in his testimony, Pip opens the door to the gradual process of healing and clarity he
achieves. As Sadrin sees, "[Pip] gives up his false pretenses and takes himself for what he is,
an ordinary young man, . . . now placed in the school of experience and adversity and
making good progress towards self-knowledge, self-denial and self-reliance" (119). For Pip,
the story is not of manipulation and disappointed expectations but of maturation and selfdiscovery through tribulations. While Smith is correct in observing that "Pip' s physical
journey to London and riches in Great Expectations becomes a spiritual pilgrimage through
guilt and suffering to forgiveness" (48), it is also an existential journey from a shivering,
crying, unaware bundle of nerves to a self-aware and independent man.
Pip's story proposes that overcoming the orphan condition and forging a strong
identity are more important than financial wealth and social standing. By canceling middleclass readers' expectations of domestic bliss and financial abundance, Dickens reveals how
constructed was the belief in these conditions for happiness. Dickens accomplishes this
disruption without causing dissonance for the reader by allowing access into Pip ' s thoughts
and feelings at various essential moments. For example, Pip's revulsion at discovering
Magwitch as his benefactor is striking: "I could not have spoken one word, though it had
been to save my life .... The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the
repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if he had been

75

some terrible beast" (GE 319-20). The depth and breadth of Pip's physical and mental
reaction to Magwitch makes his report much more believable than the purified story told by
David Copperfield, which sinks to sentimentality when emotion is permitted. Dickens'
contemporary critics applauded this strength of expression. Mrs. Oliphant, who otherwise
found Great Expectations like "A painter's rapid memorandum of some picture," and
thought "The entire connection between Miss Havisham, Pip and Estella, ... a failure," was
apparently moved to belief at Pip's horror on re-acquaintance with Magwitch (qtd. in Law
and Pinnington 544, 545). As she interprets the scene:
The terrible benefactor appears without the slightest warning in the young man's
chambers, startling his harmless youthful life in to the rudest, yet most intense
tragedy; for this convict patron is a "Lifer," and the penalty of his return, if found
out, is death. [A] sudden change ... thus clouds over a hitherto harmless and aimless
existence; ... when hunted and in danger, the unfortunate young hero grows first
tolerant, then anxious, and at last affectionate, to his strange and uncongenial friend.
(Mrs. Oliphant in Law and Pinnington 546)
The cloud that Mrs. Oliphant recognizes results from the temporary disturbance in Pip's
identity as he deals with Magwitch's revelation and anticipates the impending repercussions
of his return. Pip works through this problematic relationship because he is able to recognize
and express his emotions.
In large part, the power of Magwitch, particularly the powerful revulsion he excites
in Pip, results from the similarity of their childhood orphan conditions. Much like Pip's own
early self-creating memories, Magwitch' s testimony begins, "I first became aware of myself

76

down in Essex ... Summun had run away from me ... and he'd took the fire with him, and
left me very cold" (GE 346). Magwitch ' s pathetic beginning exemplifies the orphan
condition in which Pip lives, and thus the hint exists that Pip could have become as
neglected and degenerate as Magwitch, in the eyes of his countrymen. For the most part,
Joe's kindness prevented Pip ' s degeneracy. The power and influence of Pip's small, fearmotivated kindness to Magwitch is exponentially comparable to the power and influence of
Joe's constant, love-motivated kindness to Pip. When Pip realizes that Magwitch is his
benefactor, he also slowly begins to realize that the false narratives spun for him by others
have no reflection on who he truly is. The fact that his traumas simultaneously create and
modify Pip's character corresponds to Elaine Scarry' s definition of pain as both inventing
and destroying what no one else can understand (4). It takes years and distance working with
Herbert in Cairo before Pip can both literally and existentially come home to himself, no
longer an orphan but the beloved son of Joe and Biddy. Pip thus reverses the experience of
David Copperfield by finding a mother in a woman he had hoped to make his wife.
John Forster rightly recognizes, in his review in the Examiner of 20 July 1861 , that
Pip's story, though less so Great Expectations itself, revolves around Joe's love and
constancy towards the hero (qtd. in Law and Pinnington 528). Pip and Joe have a complex
relationship that includes interchanging roles, a shared heart, and the promise of overcoming
shared traumas. Indeed, as Kincaid points out, Pip has much to learn from Joe, most
particularly that "it is innocence and goodness of heart, not guilt, that can never be doubted.
Pip does not seem to get it, does not seem to understand Joe's dissociation of action from
being" (85). It is this understanding that grows in Pip throughout the story as he moves from

77

subjective to objective readings of others, readings modeled by Joe. Yet, indicative of Pip's
orphan state, Pip denies his connection to Joe for much of the novel, slighting Joe when he
visits London and neglecting to visit the forge when he returns to his hometown. Before
learning to value Joe, Pip shows misplaced embarrassment in a conversation with Estella
and fails to be ashamed of his uncaring attitude towards Joe:
'Since your change of fortune and prospects, you have changed your companions,'
said Estella.
'Naturally,' said I.
'And necessarily,' she added, in a haughty tone; 'what was fit company for you once,
would be quite unfit company for you now.'
In my conscience, I doubt very much whether I had any lingering intention left, of
going to see Joe; but if I had, this observation put it to flight. (GE 237)
Eventually, Pip must return to Joe. Interestingly, it is through his struggle to save, and his
eventual identification with, Magwitch that Pip comes to understand, act out, and internalize
the goodness revealed by Joe. By corning to terms with Magwitch, the false father who must
die, Pip is able to recognize and emulate his true psychic father Joe and eventually become
his true self. According to Sadrin, "It is precisely because he is no prevaricator that Joe can
be a mediator between the real and the false Pips" (111 ). The multiple fathers and multiple
selves of Pip reveal the complexity of identity formation, particularly for orphans who know
little of their roots.
Despite the familiar subjects and relative brevity of Great Expectations, it is arguably
one of Dickens more complex novels. An unsigned review attributed to H. F. Chorley and

78

published in the Atheneum of 13 July 1861 praises every aspect of the book and concludes
that "most particularly are we grateful for the uncertainty in which the tale closes" (qtd. in
Law and Pinnington 526). The ambiguous conclusion to Great Expectations reveals an
increased awareness in Dickens' writing of the complexities of reality. The restrained hint of
happiness at the end corresponds with Dickens' restrained acknowledgment of middle-class
life as the best option for Pip following his harsh entry into life and his dissipated lifestyle in
London. Pip's presumed happiness, though, is a much more muted conclusion than the
clearly stated happiness of Joe and Biddy, who are consistently portrayed as working-class.
Furthermore, as Houston points out, Dickens typically shows male labour as alienating and
requiring the comfort of the good wife, but this pattern is broken in the relationship between
Pip and Estella and in Pip's maturation through middle-class work (13). Without the selfcongratulatory taming of David Copperfield's wayward heart, Pip settles into a satisfactory
life and develops an identity that includes acceptance of the past and the ability to hope for
the future. Because he can, by the end of the novel, clearly articulate both his present and his
past (Hochman and Wachs 166), Pip does not sever the link between himself as a child and
himself as a man.

Great Expectations similarly helps create the man-child link for its author. For the
victim of trauma, sharing the story of that trauma with another human being is a vital step in
recovering a healthy identity (Laub "Event" 79). As a child who felt "a very small and notoverly-particularly-taken-care-of-boy" (Dickens in Forster Book 1, Section 1), Dickens
naturally repeated the trauma of that neglect and abandonment in his writings, with varying
success. It is never clear if Pip is striving to escape his traumatic home life or his class and

79

social status, but in many ways the argument is irrelevant as class and family trauma are
inextricably linked in the orphan condition. While David Copperfield's tale remains mired in
story because David can neither clearly accept nor clearly assign blame, Pip's story remains
clear testimony. Combining the autobiographical structure of David Copperfield and the
emotional vigor of Bleak House, Great Expectations shows through the hero Pip that seeing
the self as a complete subject and honouring the resultant subjective reading in bearing
testimony may not result in a neatly tied up happy ending but does allow the development of
a complete, complex identity.

80

Conclusion
Although, thankfully, not everyone must be a literal orphan, it seems everyone
experiences the orphan condition to some extent. Throughout mythology and subsequent
written literature, a wide variety of orphans have represented the various psychic states of
mankind. From Moses floating down the Nile in a basket to Harry Potter witnessing his
parents' murders, orphans have existed in literature to express needs in human beings that
would otherwise remain underrepresented. This long tradition means that orphans were
familiar to Dickens' public, and he extends their portrayal to such an extent that his works
gain both shape and energy from his identification with the abandoned child. The trauma
incurred in childhood abandonment has been discussed throughout this thesis; the
comparison of David Copperfield and Great Expectations further reveals distinct modes of
communicating trauma and the relative usefulness of those modes in integrating traumatic
memories in to self-conception. Dickens' childhood included the shame and uncertainty
common to his period and to the orphan experience. While he translated these experiences
into semi-autobiographical novels, they cannot be read as either true autobiographies or true
testimonies. David Copperfield most closely reflects Dickens' childhood, but David loses his
ability to clearly relate his emotions as he matures and takes on the guise of the Victorian
gentleman. On the other hand, Great Expectations is less of a literal reflection of Dickens'
life, but more fully reveals the rage, fear, and uncertainty of the orphan condition.
This thesis has shown that the application of trauma theory to orphan literature
reveals much about both the texts themselves and the cultures that create those texts.
Although orphan literature and the existential orphan experience are universal in Western

81

literature, the proliferation of orphans in mid-Victorian literature warrants special
investigation. The rise and spread of the middle-class in the Victorian period, widespread
changes in faith, and increased urbanization made the Victorians, in particular middle-class
Victorians, feel disconnected from prior generations. The result was a period of generalized
anxiety. Increased poverty in urban centers also led to increased numbers of street children
who created further unease amongst the middle-class. The literature of the period reflects
this discomfort as exemplified in David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Furthermore,
translating this fear into literature mirrors the process of bearing witness which trauma
theorists agree is a necessity in overcoming the identity disruption which results from
childhood trauma. Trauma and shame are both social experiences, and individuals can
recover from them through the similarly social experience of sharing testimony. Because the
examples used from Dickens' works are fictional, however, they are also problematic.
David Copperfield and Great Expectations are very similar texts in terms of both plot
and the primary trauma of the protagonists. While both David and Pip survive a number of
experiences which are threatening or shaming and thus disrupt identity, the manner in which
they later re-integrate these experiences into their identities creates the primary difference
between the two novels as attempts at testimony. For David Copperfield, being a
"posthumous child" and never seeing or bein.g seen by his father is only a nominal factor in
his identity development until further circumstances, most significantly his mother's death,
combine to disrupt his sense of security. On becoming a total orphan, David loses his sense
of himself. The primary disruption of identity is similar in Pip, who knows neither one of his
parents and is raised by his cruel older sister. This is a significant factor as Pip creates his

82

childhood identity, which has little stability as a result. While being orphaned causes Pip and
David to have unstable identities, these identities can be nominally maintained until deeply
shaming experiences in adolescence force their rupture. For David, as for Dickens, being
made to labour and care for himself causes a psychic trauma which is never overcome. In
Pip's case, the humiliation he receives from Miss Havisham's and Estella cause him to reject
his earlier identity and temporarily adopt the identity made possible through Magwitch's
sponsorship. The key difference in the recovery from trauma as shown by David Copperfield
and Pip lies in the how they relate events of their lives as unemotional story or subjective
testimony, and in their ability to use language in integrating their adult and childhood selves.
Because David Copperfield adopts external values as a form of identity, his sense of self is
never believable. He does not allow diligence and order to co-exist with the rage and fear
inherent in his orphaned condition, and refuses the expression of strong emotion throughout
the retelling of his life. This behaviour is represented in David's choice in Agnes of a
surrogate mother as a wife. This choice allows him to continue to deny his orphan state. On
the other hand, Pip clearly experiences and expresses uncertainty, fear, and a lost sense of
self once he realizes that he has based his young adult identity on mistaken assumptions. He
ultimately finds an existential father in Joe because he has allowed himself to return to his
early home and admit his need for a parent. Testimony such as Pip's that admits need and
loss allows for integration of trauma and the subsequent combination of a variety of
identities results in a fuller depiction of self and a fuller recovery from that trauma.
Despite all of his writings about orphans and childhood trauma which approximate
testimony, there is no evidence that Dickens was ever publicly able to achieve the kind of

83

integration he represented in Pip. David Copperfield contains verbatim exerpts from
Dickens' autobiographical fragment, but Dickens did not reveal even to his family that the
story was partially true. Moreover, because Copperfield does not achieve a restoration of
identity and denies the continuing influence of trauma on his life, it appears that Dickens had
similarly failed to understand the importance of emotionally true testimony at this point in
his life. Great Expectations, which was written ten years later, reveals a much fuller
understanding on the part of the author regarding identity development and trauma, but again
its fictionalized presentation and removal from Dickens' own life keep it from acting as
testimony. Further changes in the author are revealed in comparing the novels' acceptance or
refutation of the mid-Victorian middle-class values.
Charles Dickens is regarded as a seminal creator of culture in the Victorian period,
yet his novels reveal a relationship to society which is fraught with inner conflict. In David
Copperfield, Dickens whole-heartedly affirms the importance of being earnest, diligent,
reliable and ordered, all factors which were essential to the public persona of the middleclass gentleman. On the other hand, Great Expectations contains biting satire of the middle
and upper-classes, and much of Pip's unhappiness is a result of attempting to be the
gentleman typified by David Copperfield. Moreover, David Copperfield and Agnes achieve
middle-class stability, which is clearly intended to be a happy ending to the novel. By
comparison, the ending of Great Expectations is unclear, and any happiness Pip has found is
a result of his wholly integrated identity, not his social standing. In fact, class issues as social
and psychological factors play a relatively minor role in David Copperfield and are mainly
limited to Emily's folly at trying to reach above her station. In Great Expectations, most of

84

Pip's relationship with Estella is problematic because he is of a lower class, and the break in
Pip's identity is predicated on the resultant shame of being working-class. Because class is an
important aspect of his story, Pip's eventual rejection of middle-class expectations is less
satisfying but more believable than David Copperfield's empty self-aggrandizement.
Literary orphans remain a common trope in literature because they represent a range
of human experience. While this thesis has concentrated mainly on identity formation, many
other related factors are influenced by orphanhood. For example, Richard Maddock in his
book Motivation, Emotions and Leadership relates that eighty percent of English leaders
throughout history had lost one or both parents by the age of twelve. Maddock further
postulates that the success of these orphans may be due to their early need to support
themselves or their families and an internalized desire for social movement (6). Upward
social mobility, a consistent theme in David Copperfield and Great Expectations as in many
orphan texts, may be a benefit of early independence. Furthermore, novels featuring orphans,
in particular those written by Dickens, tend to focus on the orphan struggle for self-creation
and the impact on the relationship from connections with other people. While these
connections may be beneficial, as in the case of David Copperfield and his Aunt Betsey or
Agnes, they may also be negative, as with David Copperfield and the Murdstones. Dickens
may have chosen to focus on these negative· connections because the overriding fear of both
real and existential orphans is abandonment, such as what he had experienced. This threat
lies at the root of the psychic trauma caused by becoming an orphan, and causes the primary
injury to the identity. Because of the threat of abandonment, the orphan must use language in
the form of testimony to recover from the orphan state.

85

In Bleak House, John Jamdyce states that, "The universe ... makes a rather
indifferent parent" (93). This statement is a summary of Dickens' observation of his
disconnected society and of the Victorian attempt to re-establish connections which were
severed by the move from religious to scientific faith. By writing stories of abandonment and
reclaimed selves, Dickens wrote stories that touched on the human condition. David
Copperfield and Great Expectations continue to attract and speak to audiences because the

orphan condition in which they were produced and which they reflect is still an active
component of the human experience.

86

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