Peggoty’s hesitancy at suggesting the trip-‘opening her mouth as if she were going to speak, without doing it’-and her evasiveness when David asks what his mother will do while he’s away, both signal to the reader what the child misses. When David is whisked away to stay with Peggotty’s family in Chapter 3, the visit is book-ended by forebodings before and by shock on his return. Tactile early memory, tactile adult simile. At the beginning of the chapter David describes his very earliest memories, when his widowed mother is no more than ‘her pretty hair and youthful shape,’ and Peggotty is ‘no shape at all.’ Another sense, to go with sight, is touch, as of ‘Peggotty’s forefinger as she used to hold it out to me, and of its being roughened by needlework, like a pocket nutmeg-grater.’ That last little image, perfectly tactile as it is, draws together the child and the man. The adult David-and we can be sure that the adult Dickens is in full agreement-believes that in their observations of the world, some lucky children are fully-formed.

He is at pains to have David remind us that he is writing this as an adult, presenting the child’s-eye-view as he remembers it. Dickens makes the most of the new form he’s trying out, the first-person narrative. This second chapter is ‘I Observe’ and, for me, its opening paragraphs are a tour de force. And in the middle of the anecdote comes this reminder: ‘my later understanding comes, I am sensible, to my aid here.’ I put it away, as well as I could.’ David’s six- or seven-year-old self might not understand what’s going on with the arrival of the appalling Murdstone, but he hates the man’s invasion of their space. But, only a few sentences later, already ‘I didn’t like him or his deep voice,’ and by the end of the sentence we know why: ‘I was jealous that his hand should touch my mother’s in touching me-which it did. When David sees the new man in his mother’s life for the first time, it’s his ‘beautiful black hair and whiskers’ that the young child notices.

There are plenty of dark forebodings as early as Chapter 2, and Dickens makes sure we notice them. Not that it’s anything like so straightforward. The first monthly number, of course, is the one in which David tells us about his idyllic early childhood, shattered in the second by the reality of his mother’s second marriage. Now I’m reading it again, and I’m modifying and adding to the previous one.

I read this novel for the second (or third) time in 2011, writing a commentary as usual.

David copperfield story