78 KNOWING DICKENS
younger character-David hovers in a blurrily continuous time zone, quite dif-
ferent from the retrospective judgments enforced by Pip the narrator on Pip
the younger in Great Expectations. Because of this difference, David Copperfield
is often read as a narrative that refuses to confront the innocent hero’s implica-
tion in the class injustices that surround him. Mary Poovey offers the most
powerful formulation: she sees the duplicity of the class system reduplicated in
the retrospective narrative’s “splitting of the protagonist into an innocent hero,
who does not know such deceitfulness because he is too young and too good,
and a worldly narrator, who knows but will not tell” (Poovey 121). If, however,
we read the whole narrative as a writing that creates David’s consciousness and
unconsciousness, it does nothing but tell. What it does not do is to tell us that
it’s telling; and it is exactly because of that, I suggest, that David Copperfield
achieves its great uncanny power to render the human condition of knowing
without knowing that we know.
That power is markedly on display in two scenes during which David
plays the role of silenced witness: the firing of Mr. Mell (DC 7) and Rosa
Dartle’s attack on the seduced and abandoned Emily (DC 50). Both scenes
play out, as in dreams, the contending voices of David’s always shaky sense of
his class identity. In the schoolmaster Mr. Mell, David encounters a grown-
up version of the child in the autobiographical fragment: a shamed, anxious,
and yet loving child of an indigent, institutionalized parent, who pretends to
be no one’s child in order to maintain his status in the eyes of his employer.
David learns that the old almswomen is Mr. Mell’s mother in one of those
sleep-waking trances that figure unacknowledged knowledge in Dickens.
Offstage and hidden from the reader, he tells Steerforth; Steerforth uses the
knowledge to stage a dramatic and humiliating scene in which Mr. Mell is
publicly fired for his association with a “beggar.” Mell stands in for David/
Dickens, receiving exactly the treatment that David fears from his mates
when he arrives at school with a shaming placard on his back.
In the firing scene, Mell, David, and Steerforth all play out parts of the
conflict between knowing and telling: the son who hushes up his parent’s
shameful dependence, the telling child who betrays the secrets, the arrogant
public exposer who displays the secret, and the declassed adult whose hand
on the child’s head protects and forgives him for his betrayal. It is given to
Mell to stutter out in uncanny repetitions the autobiographical work this epi-
sode performs: “I have not forgotten myself, I—I have remembered myself,
sir.” Remembering himself, David displays the split between his dependence
on Steerforth’s class power and his guilty identification with its victim.
“I soon forgot him,” he announces of Mr. Mell, marking once again a site
of distressed memory.