Dickensian Hair-acterization in David Copperfield: Sympathetic Fallacies in the Follicles of Murdstone, Peggotty and Traddles
The Banquet, Revolutions ed. 4
Dear All and Sundry,
We love the characters we know in our lives, don’t we? The crazy aunt, the adventurous uncle, the zany teacher, or the daredevil friend - we appreciate those specimens of humanity that demonstrate to us how varied the spectrum of personality can be when peculiar natures are shaped by adverse or unique conditions.
But how do authors create character? Today we will be taking a peek through a very narrow lens at one of the best character creators ever and examine one (admittedly peculiar) facet of his technique.
Counterfeits in fiction
Shakespeare and Dickens
Hair makes the Man
A few Hirsute Examples
Other Odds and Split Ends: Seamus Heaney and Pope Leo
Stranger than fiction
In life, when we meet oddballs, we are quick to appreciate what sets them apart, and what makes them so memorable and so ripe for imitation: their honesty. It is through the power of their often-unselfconscious integrity that they exert an influence on all those who encounter them. They are marvelously themselves, regardless of circumstance.
But it is difficult in art to capture both sides of the coin that nature herself mints so prodigally, a character that reads as both recognizably true AND undeniably unique; Life is not only more original than fiction; as the saying so rightly puts it, life is often stranger than fiction as well. Consequently, fiction does not always meet the high standards of verisimilitude — it abounds in counterfeit failures of both types. On the one hand, there are static roles that are realistic but mundane clones of characters we have seen or met many times in life and literature, and on the other, there are those that are obvious zanies but that ring false, mere exaggerated cartoons, that we need never fear to encounter in the aisles of our supermarket, senate or basilica.
Shakespeare and Dickens
However, we delight when we encounter those grand successes: characters in fiction that are memorable, unique, strange and honest. They are a key factor in a work achieving the influence of enduring appeal. Who is unchanged after having once met Odysseus, The Wife of Bath, Don Quixote, or Falstaff? Shakespeare of course filled his works with characters that seemed to have just tumbled onto the stage from the balcony above or rose from the groundling pit below. He gives us kings and clowns, mistresses and monsters, porters and pedants, each with their own voice, humor, wishes and demands.
After Shakespeare, the most prolific creator of memorable characters (at least in English) is undoubtedly Charles Dickens. The are few imaginations so fecund: Pecksniff, Miss Havisham, Madame Defarge, Gradgrind, The Artful Dodger, to name but a few, are each memorable in their own stories, and haunting prototypes that future novelists and storytellers will imitate. The misanthropic, embittered old man, shriveled and calloused by his love of things instead of others, will find no greater exemplar than Scrooge, and we recognize him in every miser we encounter. And so they follow—the hypocritical blowhard, the forsaken corpse-bride, the sullen grudge-keeper, the ignorant, theory-wielding teacher, the precocious streetwise child, all descend at least in part from a Victorian forebear that walked, lived, thrived or withered in a Dickensian London.
Well-defined characters not only make consistent and particular choices, they have appearances that are also unique and set them apart. When we first meet a character, the character’s appearance is often what affords the reader the first insights into their personality. Whereas costume, carriage and countenance provided by the actor in Shakespeare’s dramas, these must be supplied by the author in a novel, and Dickens does not disappoint.
The Key ironically is the Lock!
Do clothes make the man? Certainly, physical description is often used by authors to give the reader a clue to the interior disposition of the character. Dickens will employ many tools to tip his hat to reader, from waistcoats to watch chains, but strangely, his most consistent trick is rendering in particular detail what’s under the hat. We could examine any of Dickens works to see this at play. For the sake of concision, Dear Sundry, allow me to focus on one: David Copperfield. Character in David Copperfield is communicated by hair. “Hair?” I hear you ask, Dear Sundry.
Yes, hair.
Of course, it is not only communicated by hair, but it is remarkable how consistently hair acts as true compass. Hair, even more than the weather, manifests the sympathetic fallacy. The eyes may be the windows to the soul, but even windows have valances and drapes.
David Copperfield, our stand in for Charles Dickens himself, has a moment that communicates this inevitability to the reader when, unable to admit that he has imbibed a bit too much, he gets a view of himself in the mirror and notices “my hair, only my hair, nothing else, looked drunk.” The truth will out, and it will paradoxically be unlocked by a character’s locks.
Hair plays an important plot function as well. Steerforth, a destructively Byronic antihero is known for his pleasant looks and cherubic long hair. When, at a climactic moment during a ranging coastline storm, a ship is seen to wreck upon the lea shore of Yarmouth, the reader is alerted to who one of the sailors clinging to the rigging might be by his flowing hair. It is a poignant ironic revelation, as Ham, the man who was most injured by Steerforth’s womanizing, ventures into the surf to rescue him, at the price of his own life.
But to stick specifically to characterization, let’s examine the following cast and their coiffures: Mr. Murdstone, Mr. Peggotty, and (admittedly, my favorite) Tommy Traddles.
Can Hair be Hostile?
As a child, young David’s life is turned upside down when his mother is beleaguered by the advances of Mr. Murdstone, a cold and conniving man who dissembles behind a veneer of strength and gravity. We see him through David’s eyes as he pursues his mother, and the irony of what young Davy misses is not lost on the adult David narrating the story, nor is it lost on the reader. Paralleling David’s growing awareness of Mr. Murdstone’s character is his changing appraisal of Mr. Murdstone’s black hair.
We get one of our first glimpses of him outside: “There was my mother, looking unusually pretty, I thought, and with her a gentleman with beautiful black hair and whiskers”. While his mother is generically “pretty” Mr. Murdstone’s appeal is closely connected with the blackness of his hair.
It is the first thing that David identifies Mr. Murdstone by; even before he knows his name he knows him as the “gentleman with the black whiskers”
When Davy gets a closer look at him, he finds, “his hair and whiskers were blacker and thicker, looked at so near.” He notes too the “dotted indication of the strong black beard he shaved close every day”
Once established, Murdstone’s black hair will be referenced again and again, as it becomes a shorthand for his black temper and ominous presence in David’s life. Other hostile presences will be associated with it: “a big hostile dog that’s as black as Mr. Murdstone’s hair and whiskers.”
“Honest brow and iron-grey hair.”
But hair need not always be threatening. Dickens uses hair to characterize his heroes as well as his villains. Take for instance, his description of Dan Peggotty, the fatherly presence who dedicates his life to bringing his prodigal and wayward daughter home:
"As he stood, looking at his cap for a little while before beginning to speak, I could not help observing what power and force of character his sinewy hand expressed, and what a good and trusty companion it was to his honest brow and iron-grey hair." (DC Ch. 51)
The “iron-grey hair” has already been used to denote Dan Peggotty, and the adjective is not incidental.
The connection between the hand and the hair is “power and force of character”
As dependable as iron, and strong as iron, as useful as iron, as hard-working as iron, Dan Peggotty is the steady strong anchor from whom his daughter drifts but to whom she is nonetheless fastly tied through chains of love, a love that is expressed synecdochally in his hands and hair.
Tommy Traddles
When we first meet Traddles as a boy at school with Copperfield, he is described as being caned almost every day. But “after laying his head on the desk for a little while, he would cheer up somehow, begin to laugh again, and draw skeletons all over his slate, before his eyes were dry.”
Traddles is as buoyant as a cork, which is well for him as he is often submerged by the exigencies of life. However, it is not long before he has righted and come back to the surface, as unsinkable and as irrepressible as before This stubborn irrepressibility of spirit is paralleled by the irrepressibility of Traddles’ hair which will not be cowed or corralled by comb or hand.
Copperfield asks Traddles at one point if he can smooth down his hair, as they are about to be presented to Dora. Traddles wishes he could comply with his best friends request but…
“No,” said Traddles. “Nothing will induce it. I assure you it’s quite an old story, my unfortunate hair. It stood very much in my way, too.”
Other characters?
We’ve already mentioned Steerforth and Copperfield himself. What of the others? Dear Sundry, they too, if they have hair mentioned by Dickens at all, seem to have a Dorian-Gray like relationship between their hair and their soul. We can consider Dora’s childlike curls, Mr. Sharp’s fashionable but falsifying wig, Mr. Creakle’s bad comb-over, and Uriah Heep’s red hair cut low, artificially humbled if you will, Dear Sundry, by frequent application of the razor.
Nor is this follicle phenomena found in David Copperfield alone. Volumes would be needed to press all the locks kept within Dickens bindings. Examples abound. For instance, Jerry Cruncher’s “spikes” are notable, as is the blond hair of Lucie Manette that forms the basis of The Golden Thread (as well as a retelling of the Goldilocks legend) both found in A Tale of Two Cities. Once you start seeing them, it’s hard not to.
Odds and Split Ends:
Character, as mentioned above, is marked by integrity. The ability to remain one’s self, regardless of the absurdity of their circumstances, (or the absurdity of ones self in those circumstances) is often what makes characters so memorable. Seamus Heaney’s small poem A Norman Simile gets at the essential force or current that undergirds that integrity.
A Norman Simile
To be marvelously yourself like the river water
Gerald of Wales says runs in Arklow Harbour,
Even at high tide when you would expect salt water. Halting Attila
A few days ago, we celebrated the feast day of Pope Leo the Great. It was Pope Leo who notably met Attila the Hun to halt his further incursion into Italy. While pious legend has it that saints Peter and Paul in a very martial aspect, appeared with sword in hand to persuade Attila of his folly, the fact remains that Attila did in fact withdraw.
In order to celebrate the more fully with my family, I composed the following, sung to a well-known Australian ballad, that perhaps, Dear Sundry, you also would enjoy singing, whenever honoring Pope Leo’s ambassadorial success is called for. (I regret that I do not have a good idea of Pope Leo's or Attila’s hair, or I’m sure their coiffures would have made an appearance)
In Honor of Pope Leo (Sung to a well-known Australian tune) Once a holy pontiff knelt beside the Mincio, Hoping that someone would answer his plea, And he prayed as he knelt, and waited for the Hun to come, “Who’ll come a halting Attila with me?” Halting Attila, Halting Attila, Who’ll come a halting Attila with me? And he prayed as he knelt, and waited for the Hun to come, “Who’ll come a halting Attila with me?”
I salute you all, Dear Sundry, and hope to remain characteristically yours, crazy hair and all.