110 KNOWING DICKENS
to see the white marks of my fingers die out of the deep red of his cheek, and
leave it a deeper red.” The physical violence forges the most prolonged and
intimate bodily link between the two; it also allows Uriah to parody David’s
usual strategies by “turning the other cheek” and forgiving him. “He knew
me better than I knew myself,” David says, as if to underline the recognition
that Uriah is a figure of self-knowledge, who acts out the suspicious, hostile,
and resentful underside of his self-representation (DC 42).
The worship of power in a more idealized form suffuses the novel’s other
erotically charged relationship, between David and James Steerforth. Like
the antagonism with Uriah, this friendship begins in a fascination engen-
dered by the friction of unequal class status and later acquires the dimension
of rivalry over a love object; in this case Steerforth acts out David’s dis-
avowed attraction to the working-class Little Emily. As a schoolboy, David
allows Steerforth to exploit and feminize him in return for the feeling of
protection he offers; as a young man, David puts Emily in position to be
more literally seduced and abandoned by his erstwhile hero. Once again,
David’s mistake is a mistake in processing knowledge: he is unable to see, in
Steerforth or in himself, the blatant class condescension and contempt that
shape Steerforth’s responses to the Peggotty ménage. Being in love with
Steerforth means being in love with a reckless and pre-Victorian kind of
privileged masculinity that attracts David, even as he argues for the earnest,
disciplined, and hard-working model of manhood he means to espouse. It
seems to attract Dickens as well: the Steerforth plot remains more melo-
dramatic, less fully scrutinized, than are the currents of secret knowledge
between David and Uriah Heep. Both relationships, however, make it clear
that the venture into first-person narration had revealed new possibilities for
Dickens’s interest in fascination between men. If a staring contest in Barnaby
Rudge meant that there was an unknown but vital connection between the
fascinated parties, it now came to mean that the fascinated hero was seeing
through another man those aspects of the self that he had attempted to bury
or place beyond the range of self-knowledge.
Collaboration and Rivalry:
Dickens and Wilkie Collins
After Copperfield was complete, Dickens’s life took several important turns: he
began editing Household Words, he moved his family from Devonshire Ter-
race to Tavistock Square, he shifted constantly between residence in England
and France, and he devoted more of his time to managing and acting in