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[Commentary continued] In contrast to the isolated, melancholic, inward-gazing child who is situated in class as well as space by the surrounding seashore and boathouse that dominates the scene in the frontispiece, the Em'ly of the 1858 volume one title-page vignette is daring, playful, energetic; the illustrator has thrust David, the egocentric subject of the "autobiography" well into the background for once, and has foregrounded the lithe child who will become one of the novel's fallen women. The picture reminds readers that all such social outcasts were once innocent children, and therefore enforces sympathy for the anguished woman that this carefree child will become. Already, the winds of change that will transport Em'ly as young woman away from home, family, and native land are blowing in from the sea (to the left) and inland across the Denes (right), but she remains perfectly focussed on balancing on the beam. Her windswept hair and clothing imply her complete integration with the forces of nature which are the source of the Peggottys' livelihood. Whereas so much of the chapter that provides the textual referent for the vignette, "I Have a Change," is occupied with David's initial impressions and descriptions of the interior of the boathouse and the complex relationships of its occupants, the title-page vignette of 1858 realises a scene the next morning, when the recently introduced children, the cosseted upper-middle class David and the orphan of the lower middle class go to the beach to pick up shells and pebbles. As opposed to David's simplistic view that the sea is dangerous — after all, it has carried off a number of members of the Peggotty clan — Em'ly's view of the sea is more complicated, and certainly not entirely one of utter enjoyment and blithe disregard for danger that Phiz's illustration might imply:

"You're quite a sailor, I suppose?" I said to Em'ly. I don't know that I supposed anything of the kind, but I felt it an act of gallantry to say something; and a shining sail close to us made such a pretty little image of itself, at the moment, in her bright eye, that it came into my head to say this.

"No," replied Em'ly, shaking her head, "I'm afraid of the sea."

"Afraid!" I said, with a becoming air of boldness, and looking very big at the mighty ocean. "I an't!"

"Ah! but it's cruel," said Em'ly. "I have seen it very cruel to some of our men. I have seen it tear a boat as big as our house, all to pieces."

"I hope it wasn't the boat that —"

"That father was drownded in?" said Em'ly. "No. Not that one, I never see that boat."

"Nor him?" I asked her.

Little Em'ly shook her head. "Not to remember!"

Here was a coincidence! I immediately went into an explanation how I had never seen my own father; and how my mother and I had always lived by ourselves in the happiest state imaginable, and lived so then, and always meant to live so; and how my father's grave was in the churchyard near our house, and shaded by a tree, beneath the boughs of which I had walked and heard the birds sing many a pleasant morning. But there were some differences between Em'ly's orphanhood and mine, it appeared. She had lost her mother before her father; and where her father's grave was no one knew, except that it was somewhere in the depths of the sea.

"Besides," said Em'ly, as she looked about for shells and pebbles, "your father was a gentleman and your mother is a lady; and my father was a fisherman and my mother was a fisherman's daughter, and my uncle Dan is a fisherman." [Nonesuch, 34]

The actual moment realised in the title-page vignette occurs later that same day, when Em'ly gives herself over to her natural environment:

"Don't you think you are afraid of the sea, now?"

It was quiet enough to reassure me, but I have no doubt if I had seen a moderately large wave come tumbling in, I should have taken to my heels, with an awful recollection of her drowned relations. However, I said "No," and I added, "You don't seem to be either, though you say you are," — for she was walking much too near the brink of a sort of old jetty or wooden causeway we had strolled upon, and I was afraid of her falling over.

"I'm not afraid in this way," said little Em'ly. "But I wake when it blows, and tremble to think of Uncle Dan and Ham and believe I hear 'em crying out for help. That's why I should like so much to be a lady. But I'm not afraid in this way. Not a bit. Look here!"

She started from my side, and ran along a jagged timber which protruded from the place we stood upon, and overhung the deep water at some height, without the least defence. The incident is so impressed on my remembrance, that if I were a draughtsman I could draw its form here, I dare say, accurately as it was that day, and little Em'ly springing forward to her destruction (as it appeared to me), with a look that I have never forgotten, directed far out to sea.

The light, bold, fluttering little figure turned and came back safe to me, and I soon laughed at my fears, and at the cry I had uttered; fruitlessly in any case, for there was no one near. But there have been times since, in my manhood, many times there have been, when I have thought, Is it possible, among the possibilities of hidden things, that in the sudden rashness of the child and her wild look so far off, there was any merciful attraction of her into danger, any tempting her towards him permitted on the part of her dead father, that her life might have a chance of ending that day? [Nonesuch, 35-36]

References

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield, il. Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). The Illustrated Library Edition. 2 vols. London: Chapman & Hall, 1858.

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield, il. Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). The Nonesuch Edition. London: Bloomsbury, 1937.

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Last modified 9 March 2011