MEMORY 81object of Dickens’s first infatuation showed up again in his life, he responded
as if he were identical with the young David Copperfield.
Miss Maria Beadnell had flirted mercilessly with the susceptible Dickens
in his youth; in 1855 Mrs. Maria Winter ventured to revive the excitement
by getting back in touch with the famous novelist who had so touchingly
portrayed David and Dora’s young love. Dickens was already in a David
Copperfield mood, writing to Forster early in February, “Why is it, that
as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall
into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and
companion I have never made?” (7.523). The three long letters he wrote to
Maria in that month, after he had received her note but before he had seen
her in person, are shocking to behold among the letters that Dickens wrote
in the midst of his busiest decade. Without a thought he enters the time-
traveling mode; when he sees the handwriting on her note, “Three or four
and twenty years vanished like a dream, and I opened it with the touch of my
young friend David Copperfield when he was in love.” Memories spill out
of him, proofs that she has never been absent from his thoughts. Like David
Copperfield, he seems to feel that his virtue is dependent on having forgot-
ten nothing: “What should I be worth, or what would labour and success be
worth, if it were otherwise!” (7.532–33).
The second letter, written from Paris on 15 February 1855, accepts a com-
mission to buy some jewelry for her and responds to her assurance that his
letters will be read by her alone. Now Dickens is fully immersed in a David
Copperfield vision of himself, minus the comic irony of the novel. “What-
ever of fancy, romance, energy, passion, aspiration and determination belong
to me, I never have separated and never shall separate from the hard hearted
little woman—you—whom it is nothing to say I would have died for, with
the greatest alacrity!” The sound of her name “has always filled me with a
kind of pity and respect for the deep truth that I had, in my silly hobbledehoy-
hood, to bestow upon one creature who represented the whole world to me.
I have never been so good a man since, as I was when you made me wretch-
edly happy. I shall never be half so good a fellow any more.” It is remarkable,
if not downright terrifying, to observe Dickens so wrought up by an interior
fantasy world that Maria herself has no existence except as the “Sun” who
inspired what he mistakenly believes were the best, “the most innocent, the
most ardent, and the most disinterested days of my life” (7.538–39). Why was
it so essential to link memory with a loss of “deep truth” and virtue, when the
memory referred to a period of blindness and torment?
Such a question could be answered in a number of different registers.
Dickens was feeling the guilty death-throes of his love for Catherine, and the