David Copperfield Dreams of Drowning

When Betsey Trotwood comes to London to tell her nephew that she is financially ruined, and that he must henceforth shift for himself, David Copperfield is not unnaturally shocked and distraught. His sleep is nightmarish, as it often is (more than twenty of his dreams are recounted in the novel). He imagines himself

hopelessly endeavouring to get a license to marry Dora, having nothing but one of Uriah Heep's gloves to offer in exchange, which the whole Commons rejected; and still more or less conscious of my room, I was always tossing about like a distressed ship in a sea of bedclothes.1

The rejection by the commons is a form of public humiliation, not infrequent in dreams; it is also a close echo of a preceding incident. Just prior to Aunt Betsey's arrival, David had encountered Edward Murdstone at the offices of Spenlow and Jorkins. Murdstone had at that moment procured a license to marry a beautiful girl “just of age” —a girl, we are to understand, very like David's mother. The fantasy of seeking and failing to get a marriage license is clearly a re-enactment of this event. Again David competes with Murdstone, and again he fails, just as he had failed in competing with him for the attention of Clara Copperfield. Equally revealing is the object which David offers to the Commons—“one of Uriah Heep's gloves.” The implication is that David, now deprived of the status that accompanies financial well-being, unconsciouly acknowledges his new kinship with the unpropertied social climber Heep. But is there any significance to the glove itself? Dickens, most economical of novelists, frequently defines characters in terms of objects, as for instance Jane Murdstone is denoted a sadist by her iron beads (“fetters” to David). Heep's hand, and by association his gloves, are a metonym for his character, for his body, for his sexuality. The gloves figure prominently in the scene in which