Performing Suffering: From Dickens to David

Abstract

“That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my power to tell” (Forster 1: 25 and Dickens 218). Charles Dickens's description of the anguish of his childhood is wreathed in paradoxes the author savors but does not acknowledge. Like his scandalous successor Oscar Wilde, Dickens luxuriates in the spectacle of his own martyrdom. His commendation “exquisitely” turns a lament into a boast, undermining the sincerity that assures us his suffering has no language. Yet despite their half-concealed pleasure at his own pain, these sentences pleased Dickens so much that, after writing them to John Forster in his secret confession of his childhood humiliation, he gave them to his abused, beloved David Copperfield and thereby to the world. David, however, subdues the pride in emotional virtuosity his creator could not suppress.