Happy Birthday, Mr. Dickens

Dickens (by Euan)

There has been lots of ink given over to Charles Dickens in the days and weeks leading up to this 200th anniversary of his birth, but I was made happiest by a piece in Time discussing the novel David Copperfield and quoting the passage where David Copperfield gets drunk for the first time.

Somebody was leaning out of my bedroom window, refreshing his forehead against the cool stone of the parapet, and feeling the air upon his face. It was myself. I was addressing myself as ‘Copperfield’ and saying, ‘Why did you try to smoke? You might have known you couldn’t do it.’ Now somebody was unsteadily contemplating his features in the looking-glass. That was I too. I was very pale in the looking-glass; my eyes had a vacant appearance; and my hair — only my hair, nothing else — looked drunk. […] Owing to some confusion in the dark, the door was gone. I was feeling for it in the window-curtains when Steerforth, laughing, took me by the arm and led me out. We went downstairs, one behind another. Near the bottom, somebody fell, and rolled down. Somebody else said it was Copperfield. I was angry at that false report, until, finding myself on my back in the passage, I began to think there might be some foundation for it.