Paul May on Copperfield and Happiness

Paul May, ‘A response to Annette R. Federico 'David Copperfield and the Pursuit of Happiness' [Victorian Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 69-95].

The premise for Federico’s essay stems from Dickens’ angst at his inability to feel contented, certainly whilst writing David Copperfield, and possibly for the duration of his life, as evidenced in John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens. ‘Where is happiness to be found then’, Dickens writes, ‘Is this my experience?’ Federico accordingly views the text as symptomatic of Dickens’ obsession with ‘his own frenetic pursuit of happiness’, as a result of being unable to reconcile his personal experiences of delight with both his prolific success as an author, and his eminent fame. This leads her to see the text as an indictment to follow David’s experiences in the world as Dickens’ own ‘intimate study’ of ‘the conscious desire for happiness in one’s life, and the right to pursue it’. In this manner, Federico seeks to assess one of the core principles which define David Copperfield as a Bildungsroman; as the hero, it is David’s burden to achieve happiness, ‘a task that is neither confirmed by David’s apparent success, nor denied by his repression and self-negation’, and is ineffably intertwined with Dickens’ own existential state.
To Federico, an assessment of David’s desire for ‘perfect happiness’ is worthless without a consideration of the cultural perception of happiness in the nineteenth century, and its apparent influence on David’s ideals. She therefore decides to devote much of the essay to exploring Victorian cultural and philosophical texts which ‘point to the seriousness with which [they] addressed the moral implications of the pursuit of happiness’, with reference to the notion that any prospect of ‘happiness’ is convoluted by utilitarian and utopian theory, in addition to Victorian consumerism and individualism. Her choice of theorists (most frequently Carlyle, Mill and Sidgwick) is careful in that it their contentions are often in direct response to one another, and allows her to assemble them into a dialectic argument. This attempt to synthesise does not, however, prevent Federico’s critical tone implicitly conveying her preference towards the progressive, considered views of Mill (as well as simply devoting more of the text to him), despite her accrediting Carlyle as having ‘the prophetic voice of the Victorian sage’. Concisely, she surmises that the utilitarian ‘doctrine’ for acquiring happiness was doomed to be flawed by its preoccupation with happiness itself, which vanquishes any prospect of its fruition, as demonstrated by Carlyle’s suggestion that ‘we should cease babbling about “happiness,” and leave it resting on its own basis, as it used to do!’. She proceeds to remonstrate Carlyle’s stoic declarations with Mill, who sought to ‘claim happiness for philosophy and rational analysis’ in a manifestly Socratic way, but criticises him for ‘[seeming] not to have considered what happiness might actually feel like until his own personal crisis compelled him to ask himself what would make him happy’. She surmises from this comparison, that the clear divide between utilitarian thinking, ie. ‘the greatest happiness principle’, and Carlyle’s condemning position on ‘a philosophy that guarantees an individual the right to pursue his or her own happiness implicitly endorses the abdication of duty, labor, and the pursuit of justice’ were both fundamentally inconducive to both equitable and selfish happiness. She finds Mill and Carlyle to be especially unable to reconcile this conflict, as utilitarian morality is fundamentally at odds with industrial capitalism, with it being implausible to ‘be realised in anything other than a utopia’, and concludes solely with the purpose of proving that the question ‘Am I happy?’ is certainly ‘one of the clearest imperatives of the age’.
Armed with this understanding, Federico asserts that David ‘must both ask and answer’ these essential questions of individualist happiness in David Copperfield. The novel certainly asks these questions, as she is unquestionably correct in finding this to be key in the novel’s premise, and the Autobiographical Fragment certainly confirms this. But it certainly does not seek to truly answer them to any ascertainable degree; David certainly cannot be assumed to be ‘perfectly happy’ at the end of the novel. After marrying Agnes, he discloses: ‘And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger longer, these faces fade away’, and Federico doesn’t fail to notice this tone of ‘regret and self-suppression’. After all, were Dickens’ himself endowed with the answers while writing David Copperfield, he surely wouldn’t have written to John Forster with such musings as ‘I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World’.
The essay is perhaps at its most incisive when questioning whether Dickens suggests that happiness can be attained by the Carlyean assumption that ‘there is no such this as such fulfilment on this earth’ outside of ‘steady, plain, hard-working qualities’ (David Copperfield, p. 512). Federico assesses whether any of the characters truly find fulfilment with this notion: whether Mrs. Gummidge appears to be truly satisfied when she is useful, and if Steerforth’s inability to be ‘contented’ stems from his lack of productivity. This prospective ‘answer’ to individual fulfilment is clearly left unresolved by Dickens; despite David’s growing success as a writer, Federico finds this inconclusive, as he so seldom details ‘the rewards he receives from it’. The fine line between unhappiness and happiness seems to ‘have a deeper source for Dickens than in productive labor’, she surmises. While acknowledging the possibility that Dickens is suggesting that the joy of work cannot compete with ‘the desire for lasting passion and transcendent, enduring love’, is this assumption not futile when considering David’s relationship with Dora? David claims to have been initially vested in a ‘headlong passion’, but it is not long before he suffers ‘unhappiness and remorse’ (p. 689), and is forced, as Federico rightly admits, to take a lesson in ‘prudence and good sense’.
Annette Federico’s essay provides a fantastically expansive and multifaceted analysis of the various streams of philosophical doctrines devoted to the ‘pursuit of happiness’ abundant in the nineteenth century, and closely assesses their influential value on David Copperfield, despite becoming increasingly unable to surmise that Dickens’ rendering of this struggle truly colludes with any of them. She clearly wishes to avoid a biographical study (erstwhile briefly hinting at the ‘valuable’ work done by other critics), yet what it is that she ascertains that Dickens is conveying, regarding the most equitable approach to pursuing happiness, seems to depend mostly on her own intuitive (and mostly biographical) analysis of David’s meditations on happiness in the text. Oddly, she is forced to conclude rather banally by merely praising Dickens’ selection of ‘happiness’ as a moral theme, and praising the manner in which in the novel enforces ‘the liberal reader’s involvement in the hero’s quest for happiness’ – a seemingly unsatisfying conclusion to an essay so impeccably precise in its theoretical assessment of nineteenth century philosophical criticism.