Tales from Dickens

Of the rest who died on the scaffold, Rudge, the murderer, was hanged, cursing all men to the last; Maypole Hugh died glorying in his evil life and with a jest on his lips, and Dennis, the hangman, was dragged to the gallows cringing and shrieking for mercy.

A few weeks later Emma Haredale was married to Edward Chester and sailed with him back to the West Indies, where he had established a flourishing business.

Before this, however, his father, Sir John Chester, was well punished for his hard heart and bad deeds by the discovery that Maypole Hugh, the hostler, was really his own unacknowledged son, whose mother he had deserted many years before. But even this blow, and the marriage of his son Edward to the niece of his lifelong enemy, did not soften him. He still hated Haredale with his old venom and loved to go to the ruins of The Warren and gloat over its destruction.

On one of these visits he met and taunted Haredale beyond all endurance. The two men drew their swords and fought a duel, which ended by Haredale's running Sir John through the heart. Haredale left England at once, entered a convent in a foreign country and spent his few remaining years in penance and remorse.

Lord George Gordon, the poor deluded noble who had been the cause of all this disorder, finally died, harmless and quite crazy, in Newgate Prison. Simon Tappertit, in spite of his active part in the riots, was luckier, for he got off with two wooden legs and lived for many years, a corner boot-black.

Joe, of course, married Dolly Varden, and the locksmith gave her such a generous marriage portion that he was able to set up in business, succeeding his father as landlord of the old Maypole Inn, and there they lived long and happily.

Barnaby Rudge, after the death of his father, gradually became more rational and was everywhere a great favorite with old and young. He and his mother lived always on the Maypole farm, and there were never two more contented souls than they.

As for Grip, the raven, he soon forgot his jail experience and grew sleek and glossy again. For a whole year he never uttered a word till one sunny morning he suddenly broke out with, "I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a devil!" in extraordinary rapture. From that time on he talked more and more, and as he was only one hundred and fifty years old when Barnaby was gray headed (a mere infant for a raven) he is very probably talking yet.

THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD

Published 1849–1850

CHARACTERS

DAVID COPPERFIELD

I

DAVID'S EARLY UPS AND DOWNS

There was once a little boy by the name of David Copperfield, whose father had died before he was born. The night he was born his great-aunt, Miss Betsy Trotwood – a grim lady with a black cap tied under her chin and a great gold watch chain – came to the house to ask his mother to name the baby, which she took for granted was a girl, after her; but as soon as she found it was a boy she flounced out in anger and never came back again.

The first thing David remembered was living in a big country house in England with his pretty, golden-haired mother and with Peggotty, his nurse, a red-faced, kindly woman, with a habit of wearing her dresses so tight that whenever she hugged him some buttons would fly off the back. He loved his mother dearly – so dearly that when a tall, handsome man named Murdstone began to come to see her in the evenings David was jealous and sad. Mr. Murdstone acted as if he liked him, and even took him riding on his horse; but there was something in his face that David could not like.

One summer day David was sent off with Peggotty for a two weeks' visit to her brother's house in Yarmouth. Yarmouth was a queer fishing town on the sea-coast, and the house they went to was the queerest thing in it. It was made of an old barge, drawn up high and dry on the beach. It had a chimney on one side and little windows, and there were sea-shells around the door. David's room was in the stern, and the window was the hole which the rudder had once passed through. Everything smelled of salt water and lobsters, and David thought it was the most wonderful house in the world.

He soon made friends with the family – Mr. Peggotty, a big fisherman with a laugh like a gale of wind; Ham, his nephew, a big, overgrown boy who carried David from the coach on his back, and Mrs. Gummidge, who was the widow of Mr. Peggotty's drowned partner.

And, last of all, there was a beautiful little girl with curly hair and a string of blue beads around her neck whom they called Little Em'ly. She was an orphan niece of Peggotty's. None of these people belonged to Mr. Peggotty, but, though he was only a poor fisherman himself, he was so kind that he gave them all a home. David played with little Em'ly, and went out in the boat with Mr. Peggotty, and enjoyed his visit greatly, though he grew anxious to see his mother again.

He had no idea what had happened to her till he got back home with Peggotty. Then he found why he had been sent off on his visit. While he was away his mother had married Mr. Murdstone.

David found things sadly altered after this. Mr. Murdstone was a hard, cruel master. He cared nothing for the little boy and was harsh to him in everything. He even took away David's own cozy bedroom and made him sleep in a gloomy chamber. When he was sad Mr. Murdstone called him obstinate and locked him up and forbade his mother to pet or comfort him.

David's mother loved him, but she loved her new husband, too, and it was a most unhappy state of things. To make it worse, Mr. Murdstone's sister came to live with them. She was an unlovely old maid with big black eyebrows, and liked David no better than her brother did.

After this there were no more pleasant hours of sitting with his mother or walking with her to church, for Mr. Murdstone and his sister kept them apart. The only happy moments David spent were in a little upper room where there was a collection of books left by his dead father. He got some comfort from reading these.

Mr. Murdstone made David's mother give him hard tasks and lessons to do, and when David recited them he and his sister both sat and listened. To feel their presence and disapproval confused the little fellow so much that even when he knew his lesson he failed.

One day when he came to recite he saw Mr. Murdstone finishing the handle of a whip he had been making. This frightened him so that he could scarcely remember a word. Mr. Murdstone grasped him then and led him to his room to whip him.

Poor little David was so terrified that he hardly knew what he was doing, and in his agony and terror, while the merciless blows were falling, he seized the hand that held him and bit it as hard as he could. Mr. Murdstone then beat him almost to death and locked him in the room.

He was kept there for five days with only bread and milk to eat. Every day he was taken down for family prayers and then taken back again, and during prayers he was made to sit in a corner where he could not even see his mother's face. He had to sit all day long with nothing to do but think of Mr. Peggotty's house-boat and of little Em'ly and wish he was there. The last night Peggotty, his nurse, crept up and whispered through the keyhole that Mr. Murdstone was going to send him away the next day to a school near London.

The next morning he started in a carrier's cart. His mother was so much in awe of Mr. Murdstone that she hardly dared kiss David good-by, and he saw nothing of Peggotty. But as he was crying, Peggotty came running from behind a hedge and jumped into the cart and hugged him so hard that all the buttons flew off the back of her dress.

The man who drove the cart was named Barkis. He seemed to be very much taken with Peggotty, and after she had gone back David told him all about her. Before they parted he made David promise to write her a message for him. It was a very short message – "Barkis is willin'." David didn't know in the least what the driver meant, but he promised, and he sent the message in his very first letter.

Probably Peggotty knew what he meant, though, for before David came back again Mr. Barkis and she were courting. However, that has not much to do with this part of the story.

The school to which Mr. Murdstone had sent him was a bare building with gratings on all the windows like a prison, and a high brick wall around it. It was owned by a man named Creakle, who had begun by raising hops, and had gone into the school business because he had lost all of his own and his wife's money and had no other way to live. He was fat and spoke always in a whisper, and he was so cruel and bad-tempered that not only the boys, but his wife, too, was terribly afraid of him.

He nearly twisted David's ear off the first day, and he made one of the teachers tie a placard to David's back (this, he said, was by Mr. Murdstone's order) which read:

TAKE CARE OF HIMHE BITES

To have to wear this before everybody made David sorrowful and ashamed, but luckily a good-natured boy named Tommy Traddles, who liked David's looks, said it was a shame to make him wear it, and as Tommy Traddles was very popular, all the other boys said it was a shame, too. So, beyond calling him "Towser" for a few days, and saying "Lie down, sir!" as if he were a dog, they did not make much fun of him while he wore it.

Besides Tommy Traddles, David liked best the head boy, James Steerforth – the oldest boy in the school, and the only one Creakle did not dare beat or mistreat. Steerforth took David under his wing and helped him with his lessons, while in return David used to tell him stories from the books he had read.

What with the beatings and tasks, David was glad enough when vacation time came. But his home-coming was anything but pleasant. He found his mother with a little baby, and she looked careworn and ill.

Mr. Murdstone, he saw at once, hated him as much as ever, and Miss Murdstone would not let him even so much as touch his baby brother. He was forbidden to sit in the kitchen with Peggotty, and when he crept away to the upper room with the books Mr. Murdstone called him sullen and obstinate. David was so miserable every day that he was almost glad to bid his mother good-by, and as he rode away, to look back at her as she stood there at the gate holding up her baby for David to see.

That was the last picture David carried in his heart of his pretty mother. One day not long after, he was called from the school-room to the parlor, and there Mr. Creakle told him that his mother was dead and that the baby had died, too.

David reached home the next day. Peggotty took him into her arms at the door and called his mother her "dear, poor pretty," and comforted him, but he was very sad. It seemed to him that life could never be bright again.

After the funeral Miss Murdstone discharged Peggotty and, probably not knowing what else to do with him, let David go with the faithful old servant down to the old house-boat at Yarmouth, where he had been visiting when his mother was married to Mr. Murdstone.

The wonderful house on the beach was just the same. Mr. Peggotty and Ham and Mrs. Gummidge were still there, with everything smelling just as usual of salt water and lobsters; and little Em'ly was there, too, grown to be quite a big girl. It seemed, somehow, like coming back to a dear old quiet home, where nothing changed and where all was restful and good.

But this happiness was not to last. David had to go home again, and there it was worse than ever. He was utterly neglected. He was sent to no school, taught nothing, allowed to make no friends. And at last Mr. Murdstone, as if he could think of nothing worse, apprenticed him as a chore boy in a warehouse in London.

The building where David now was compelled to work was on a wharf on the river bank, and was dirty and dark and overrun with rats. Here he had to labor hard for bare living wages, among rough boys and rougher men, with no counselor, hearing their coarse oaths about him, and fearing that one day he would grow up to be no better than they. He was given a bedroom in the house of a Mr. Micawber, and this man was, in his way, a friend.

There was never a better-hearted man than Mr. Micawber, but he seemed to be always unlucky. He had a head as bald as an egg, wore a tall, pointed collar, and carried for ornament an eye-glass which he never used. He never had any money, was owing everybody who would lend him any, and was always, as he said, "waiting for something to turn up." With this exception David had not a friend in London, and finally Mr. Micawber himself was put in prison for debt, and his relatives, who paid his debts to release him, did so on condition that he leave London. So at length David had not even this one friend.

David bore this friendless and wretched life as long as he could, but at length he felt that he could stay at the warehouse no longer and made up his mind to run away.

The only one in the world he could think of who might help him was – whom do you think? His great-aunt, Miss Betsy Trotwood, who had left his mother's house the night he was born because he did not happen to be a girl. She was the only real relative he had in the world.

She lived, Peggotty had told him, in Dover, and that was seventy miles away; but the distance did not daunt him. So one day he put all his things into a box and hired a boy with a cart to take it to the coach office. But the boy robbed him of all the money he had (a gold piece Peggotty had sent him) and drove off with his box besides, and poor David, crying, set out afoot, without a penny, in the direction he thought Dover lay.

That evening he sold his waistcoat to a clothes-dealer for a few pennies, and when night came he slept on the ground, under the walls of Mr. Creakle's old school where he had known Steerforth and Tommy Traddles. The next day he offered his jacket for sale to a half-crazy old store-keeper, who took the coat but would not pay him at first, and David had to sit all day on the door-step before the other would give him the money.

The next four nights he slept under haystacks, greatly in fear of tramps, and at length, on the sixth day, ragged, sunburned, dusty and almost dead from weariness, he got to Dover.

He had to ask many people before he could find out where Miss Betsy Trotwood lived. It was outside the town, in a cottage with a little garden. Here she lived all alone, except for a simple-minded old man, whom she called Mr. Dick, who was a relative of hers, and who did nothing all day but fly big kites and write petitions to the king, which he began every morning and never finished. All the neighbors thought Miss Betsy Trotwood a most queer old woman, but those who knew her best knew that she had a very kind heart under her grim appearance.

When David reached the house Miss Betsy was digging at some flowers in the garden. All she saw was a ragged, dirty little boy, and she called out, without even turning her head: "Go away; no boys here!"

But David was so wretched that he went right in at the gate and went up behind her and said: "If you please, aunt, I'm your nephew."

His aunt was so startled at his looks and at what he said, that she sat down plump on the ground; and David, his misery getting all at once the better of him, sobbed out all the pitiful tale of his wrongs and sorrows since his mother had died.

Miss Betsy Trotwood's heart was touched. She seized David by the collar, led him into the house, made him drink something and then made him lie down on the sofa while she fed him hot broth. Then she had a warm bath prepared, and at last, very tired and comfortable, and wrapped up in a big shawl, David fell asleep on the sofa.

That night he was put to bed in a clean room, and before he slept he prayed that he might never be homeless and friendless again.

II

LITTLE EM'LY

Good fortune was with David now. His aunt wrote to Mr. Murdstone, and he and his sister came, fully expecting to take the boy back with them, but, instead, Miss Betsy told Mr. Murdstone plainly that he was a stony-hearted hypocrite, who had broken his wife's heart and tortured her son, and she ordered him and his sister from the house. David was so delighted at this that he threw his arms around her neck and kissed her, and from that moment Miss Betsy Trotwood began to love him as if he had been her own son.

David loved her in return. He drove out with her and helped Mr. Dick fly his kites and was very grateful. And at length his aunt placed him in a school in Dover and found him pleasant lodgings there in the house of her lawyer, Mr. Wickfield.

It was a different sort of school from what his first had been. His teacher was a Doctor Strong, and the school-boys were not the frightened, ill-treated lot he had known at Mr. Creakle's house. He was happy there, but his happiest hours of all were those spent, after school was out, at Mr. Wickfield's. The lawyer had an only daughter, Agnes, just David's age, a sweet, gentle girl, who seemed to live for her father, and whom David came to consider before long almost as a sister.

One person connected with the lawyer's household whom he did not like so well was Uriah Heep. Heep was a high-shouldered, red-headed, bony young man, with no eyebrows or eyelashes, and with long skeleton fingers. He dressed all in black, and his hands were clammy and cold, like a fish, so that it chilled one to touch them. He never smiled – the nearest he could come to it was to make two creases down his cheeks. He was always cringing and pretending to be humble, but really he was a sneak and a scoundrel at heart. David detested him without knowing why, the more so when he came to see that Heep was gaining an influence over Agnes's father. All the while, too, Heep pretended to like David, though David knew very well he did not.

So time went on. David studied hard and was a favorite with both pupils and teachers. At length he was head boy himself, and at seventeen his school life was finished.

He parted regretfully from Doctor Strong and from Agnes, and after paying his aunt, Miss Betsy Trotwood, a visit, he started off to Yarmouth to see his old nurse, now the wife of Barkis, the driver, and just as fond of David as ever. On his way through London, as it happened, David met the old school-fellow whom he had so liked, James Steerforth, and, loath to part with him so quickly, he proposed that the latter accompany him to Yarmouth.

Steerforth agreed and they went together. They took dinner at Peggotty's and spent the first evening in the old house-boat, where Mr. Peggotty still lived with Ham and Mrs. Gummidge and little Em'ly, the latter now grown to be a lovely girl and engaged to marry Ham. They spent some weeks there, each amusing himself in his own way, and soon Steerforth was as popular as David had always been, for he sang beautifully and talked entertainingly, and all, from Mr. Peggotty to little Em'ly, thought they had never seen so brilliant and handsome a lad.

If David could have read the thoughts that were in Steerforth's mind he would have grieved that he had ever brought him to that peaceful, innocent spot. For Steerforth had changed since the old school-days when David had been so fond of him. He had learned wickedness, and now, while he was exerting himself in every way to make the Peggottys like and admire him, in his heart he was trying to fascinate little Em'ly and to steal her love that she had given to Ham, till she would leave her home and run away with him to a foreign country. This, however, David could not guess, nor could any of the others, who regretted when the two friends' visit was over.

Now that his school-days were finished David's aunt had planned for him to study law in an office in London, and accordingly David began his new life there, very near the street where he had once toiled, a wretched, friendless helper, in the dirty warehouse on the dock. He found Tommy Traddles, who had stood his friend at Mr. Creakle's school, studying now to be a lawyer also, and boarding, curiously enough, at the house of Mr. Micawber, who had drifted back to London, still as poor and as hopeful as ever and still "waiting for something to turn up."

In spite of these and all his new acquaintances, David was very lonely at first and missed Agnes, who all through his life at Doctor Strong's school had been his friend and adviser.

He saw her once when she was visiting in London, and then she had bad news to tell him; her father had been steadily failing in health and business, and little by little Uriah Heep, his red-headed clerk with the clammy hands, had got him and his affairs into his power and made himself a partner in the firm. David guessed that Heep had planned to entrap her father so as to compel Agnes herself to marry him, and this suspicion made David despise the clerk more and more. But he knew of no way to help.

All this time he often saw Steerforth, but never guessed how often the latter had been secretly to see little Em'ly or of the wicked part he was playing. But one day David heard that Barkis, Peggotty's husband (whose early courtship he himself had aided when he took her the message "Barkis is willin'") had died, and David went at once to Yarmouth to try to comfort his old nurse in her loss.

While he was there the blow came which caused such sorrow to all who lived in the old house-boat. Little Em'ly, the pride and joy of Mr. Peggotty's tender heart, ran away with Steerforth.

She left a letter, begging them to forgive her, especially her uncle, Mr. Peggotty – and bidding them all good-by. It broke Mr. Peggotty's heart, and Ham's, too. And David was scarcely less sorrowful. Because, for what he had done, Steerforth, whose friendship had been so much to him, could never be his friend again.

But nothing could change Mr. Peggotty's love for little Em'ly. He determined to start out and search throughout the world for her; and, meantime, Ham and Mrs. Gummidge were to stay there in the old home, to keep it looking just the same, with a lighted candle in the window every night, so that if little Em'ly by any chance came back it would be bright and warm to welcome her. Mr. Peggotty's parting words to David were:

"I'm a-going to seek her far and wide. If any hurt should come to me, remember that the last word I left for her was, 'My unchanged love is with my darling child, and I forgive her.'"

III

DAVID AND HIS CHILD-WIFE

Though Agnes always held a large place in his heart, David was very impressionable. In the next few years he thought himself in love a good many times, but when finally he met Dora Spenlow, the daughter of one of the members of the law firm with which he was studying, he knew that all his other love-affairs had been only fancies. Dora was blue-eyed, with cheeks like a pink sea-shell, and looked like a fairy. David fell head over ears in love with her the first time he ever saw her. He lost his appetite, and took to wearing tight gloves and shoes too small for him, and he used to put on his best clothes and walk around her house in the moonlight and do other extravagant things.

They found a good deal of trouble in their love-making, for Dora was under the care of none other than the terrible sister of Mr. Murdstone, who had made David so miserable in his childhood, but he and Dora used to meet sometimes, and they sent each other letters through one of Dora's girl friends. David, perhaps, would not have done this if he had thought he would have a fair chance to win Dora; but with his old enemy, Miss Murdstone, against him, he was afraid to tell her father of his love. But one day he told it to Dora, and she promised to marry him.

Good luck, however, never comes without a bit of bad luck. Soon after this David came home to his rooms one night to find his aunt, Miss Betsy Trotwood, there, with her trunk and Mr. Dick, kites and all. She told David she had no other place to go; that she had lost all of her money and was quite ruined.

This was misfortune indeed, for it seemed to put his hope of marrying Dora a great deal further away; but David faced the situation bravely and began at once to look for something to do outside of the law office to earn money enough to support them all.