3 - The middle novels

Summary

There is a conspicuous restlessness about the novels which Charles Dickens conceived in the 1840s: Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), Dombey and Son (1846-48), and David Copperfield (1849-50). In part, their mobility is geographical: travelers voyage and return from England to the Continent, the United States, Australia, and India. England is a commercial hub: at the center of trading networks and a growing colonial power. Internally, conceptions of spatiality shift as a result of new modes of travel. The coaches of Martin Chuzzlewit are replaced by the railways which slice through urban and rural environments in Dombey and Son, effecting shifting points of view. And travel, these novels make clear, has everything to do with offering different perspectives. The shifts of location are one of the means by which the reader’s attention is continually redirected, especially in the first two novels. In these, different groupings of characters are interwoven, juxtaposed, brought into implicit conversation with one another in a way which amplifies the novels' central conceptual concerns with selfishness, with forms of value, with families, with desire, and with self-realization. If the third of the novels, David Copperfield, differs from the other two in being unified by one central narrative voice, its own sense of motion is given not just by the successive stages through which David passes on “the road of life” (64), but by the continual oscillation of time between the present of the narration, and the recollections – sometimes sharp, sometimes dream-like and hazy – which haunt the writer, causing him to lose “the clear arrangement of time and distance” (57).