David Copperfield (1935)

Directed by George Cukor

In honor of our Word of the Week, candle, I’d like to look at someone whose works to me are like a candle in the dark, Charles Dickens. I’m thinking here of that powerful light in the window, set in that wonderful ship turned into a house on the beach at Yarmouth, in the novel David Copperfield. The situation, as you may remember, is this. Mr. Peggotty, an old tar and a tower of moral strength, is going forth to seek his niece, Little Emily, through England and the continent. She has been seduced by David’s old friend from school days, Steerforth, seduced from the side of the young man who loves her more than he loves his own life, and who was on the verge of marrying her. Steerforth had insinuated himself into the family’s confidence, so what we have here is the basest of betrayals. Mr. Peggotty has one object in mind, one alone, and that is to find Emily and to bring her home. He’s always been a bluff and charitable man, one who’s seen a lot of suffering in his day, but his is a snug, clean, welcoming house, made out of that beached ship, and among the objects of his care is a crotchety old lady named Mrs. Gummidge. She’s hard to live with, because she’s always moaning and whimpering, saying, “I’m a trouble and a worrit to ye, that I am, Dan’l,” and other such unhelpful things. But Mr. Peggotty is indulgent. She’s a widow; her husband was one of Mr. Peggotty’s shipmates “drownded,” as he puts it. “She’s thinking on the old ‘un,” says he, whenever she gets into one of her blue moods, which is about every day. But now that the crisis has struck, Mrs. Gummidge rises to the occasion. She’s not going to leave that house, no sir. She will keep it ship-shape for when Dan’l returns, she says, and she means it. To that end, she will do what Daniel Peggotty has always done. She will keep a light burning in the window, for when he returns. The candle of home will shine.

Our Film of the Week, David Copperfield, is in many ways a comic romp. You’ve got the roly-poly W. C. Fields, not even bothering to imitate a British accent (and he was right not to try), as the scapegrace Mr. Micawber, irresponsible, but with a real heart — who calls the now grownup David “the friend of my youth,” which is fitting, in a way, even though Micawber was married with quite a passel of children when Davy first met him in London. You’ve got the irrepressible Edna May Oliver as Aunt Betsey Trotwood, who takes Davy in when he’s got no one else in the world, and after he’s walked, penniless, half-starved, and with but scraps of clothing to keep away the wind and the cold, all the way from London to Dover. You’ve got Roland Young — you may know him from his role as the gentle and dotty rich man who lost his butler Charles Laughton in a poker game with an American hillbilly on tour in Paris, in Ruggles of Red Gap — as the so very ’umble Uriah Heep, wringing his clammy hands and on the lookout to extort from his employer permission to marry the man’s daughter, Agnes. And that’s not to mention Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Peggotty, and Freddy Bartholomew as the boy Davy — a first-rate cast in a clean and clear film adaptation of the novel. Yes, it’s a romp — yet, as you can tell, it can be a dark world to romp in, and hence the need for that candle.

But then, Dickens was always about the light in darkness. It’s there atop the crown of the Ghost of Christmas Past, in A Christmas Carol. We see it shine on the shore of the Thames in Our Mutual Friend, when Lizzie Hexam, one of the most powerful heroines in English literature, rows on the dark river to find the mangled body of the man who loves her, Eugene, barely hanging on to life — and she herself will be the light he struggles to see, as he recovers, slowly, over many weeks. It is there in the steerage of the ship, ridden with sickness, as Martin Chuzzlewit, in the novel by his name, sails penniless back to England, and falls ill, and his friend and servant, Mark Tapley, nurses him back to health. I could go on, finding the light, the candles, the lamps, the sun beaming from eyes of pity and forgiveness and love, in every one of his novels: the very names of Esther Summerson and Lucie Manette are suggestive of the light that envelops them. The words of another writer ring in my ears: “And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

We are sorry today not to be able to give you more than a trailer for the bright film David Copperfield, directed by George Cukor (1935). It’s still our family favorite film version of the novel, if you can find it, and it is considered by many to come closest to the spirit of the story and the characters as the author conceived them.

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