Mental Capital, Industrial Time, and the Professional in "David Copperfield"

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Though she apparently never wears it, David Copperfield's first wife Dora possesses a watch. Or did possess one. We learn about watch only when we are told that couple's servant has absconded with it. The boy stole Dora's watch, David tells us, which, like everything else belonging to us, had particular place of its own; and, converting it into money, spent (he was always a boy) in incessantly riding up and down between London and Uxbridge outside coach (657-8). Dora loses track of time watch has no particular place), thereby unleashing a series of events demonstrating equivalence of time and money: converting Dora's lost time into money, boy then loses time himself. A weak-minded boy-bereft of David's resources of intellect (328), to borrow a phrase from elsewhere in novel-he lacks both discipline, spending produce immediately, and power of invention, imagining more profitable pastime than circling aimlessly between London and Uxbridge. As for Marx, are elements of for Dickens, and misappropriated moments represent potential loss of profit (Capital 233). The Copperfields forfeit their property, while boy, like watch's hand traveling equidistant spaces between numerals, covers same plot of land over and over. Attempting to get ahead by stealing rather than putting in time, he goes nowhere, stuck in empty moments obviously unoccupied by production but not clearly filled by consumption either (eschewing luxury, frugal boy sits outside coach). The problem is not that watch-the emblem of industrial capitalism and new time-discipline of factory, as E.P. Thompson has argued-structures time unnaturally. Rather, boy's attempt to reach ends (produce) without means (work) is itself an insult to measurable time. If one expects to get anywhere, Dickens remonstrates, one must submit to time, obey its rules. One must follow example David sets only a few sentences earlier. Immediately before his discussion of this unfortunate page, David mentions his own, much more promising career: I laboured hard at book, without allowing it to interfere with punctual of newspaper duties (656). The latter clause appears almost as an afterthought-the emphasis ostensibly on book not newspaper duties-but it is in fact central to our understanding of writer David has become. Unlike Dora, David never loses track of time, never falls behind on his newspaper deadlines. Unlike boy, David respects time; use of article the rather than more likely possessive pronoun (the punctual discharge as opposed to my punctual discharge) bespeaks time's objective status and importance to David. Far from espousing personal, spontaneous writing privileged by Romantics, David's writing proceeds, we might say, like clockwork. The syntax of clause implies, in further contrast to