Dickens Deconstructed

Philadelphia, Pa.—One of the unfortunate effects of the interdisciplinary approach to education is that it encourages English professors to regard themselves as astute on subjects on which they are clearly not, such as economics.

In a way, some of the casualties of this trend are illusory, namely, arguably the most finely drawn fictional characters ever created. In A Christmas Carol, Ebeneezer Scrooge is part of “an aging, grasping capitalist class,” Teresa Mangum of the University of Iowa said at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting here.

“Perhaps it is the ghost of Christmas present that is most appropriate for the United States today with its excess,” Dr. Mangum muses. Similarly, in Dombey and Sons, we see “the symbolic role that women held in a capitalist system,” according to Sara L. Maurer of Notre Dame who spoke on the same panel.

“In David Copperfield, money equals happiness, as expressed in Micawber’s formulation,” Berkeley’s Audrey Jaffe said at the MLA forum on the works of Charles Dickens. Let’s go back to the book on that one, literally.

“Mr. Micawber was waiting for me within the gate, and we went up to his room (top story but one), and cried very much,” Master Copperfield remembered of his trip to see his landlord in King’s Bench Prison. “He solemnly conjured me, I remember, to take warning by his fate; and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that if he spent twenty pounds one he would be miserable.”

“After which he borrowed a shilling off me for porter, gave me a written order on Mrs. Micawber for the amount, and put away his pocket-handkerchief, and cheered up.” Offhand, Micawber’s warning sounds more like an admonition to live within one’s means, followed by a demonstration of his own reluctance to do so.

Incidentally, three pages later, Copperfield describes Micawber as “a thoroughly good-natured man, and as active a creature about everything but his own affairs as ever existed, and never so happy as when he was busy about something that could never be of any profit to him.”

Hard work in the Australian bush eventually helps Micawber achieve the prominence he so desperately craves. “I never wish to meet a better gen’l’man for turning to with a will,” the old sailor Pegotty tells the grown Copperfield of Micawber in Australia. “I’ve seen that bald head of his a-perspiring in the sun, Mas’r Davy, till I a’most thowt it would have melted away.”

“And now he’s a magistrate.” “David Copperfield uses the term ‘happiness’ frequently,” Dr. Jaffe said here, but a read of the book shows the main characters, including the one she quotes, do not always define it in monetary terms.

For Pegotty happiness comes when he finds his long-lost niece and for the hero himself when he marries his childhood sweetheart. Thus, the search for economic determinism among the sympathetic characters in the Dickens classic is one undertaken rather in vain.

“The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the tracts which favor that theory,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Charles Thomson in 1787. Remarkably, the co-author of the Declaration of Independence was never at a Modern Language Association convention.

He went to a more productive meeting in Philadelphia.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.