DAVID COPPERFIELD
by Charles Dickens
CHAPTER 1. I AM BORN
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my
own life, or whether that station will be held by
anybody else, these pages must show. To begin
my life with the beginning of my life, I record that
I was born (as I have been informed and
believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It
was remarked that the clock began to strike,
and I began to cry, simultaneously.
In consideration of the day and hour of my
birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by
some sage women in the neighbourhood who
had taken a lively interest in me several
months before there was any possibility of
our becoming personally acquainted, first,
that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and
secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts
and spirits; both these gifts inevitably
attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky
infants of either gender, born towards the
small hours on a Friday night.
I need say nothing here, on the first head,
because nothing can show better than my
history whether that prediction was verified or
falsified by the result. On the second branch of
the question, I will only remark, that unless I ran
through that part of my inheritance while I was
still a baby, I have not come into it yet. But I do
not at all complain of having been kept out of
this property; and if anybody else should be in
the present enjoyment of it, he is heartily
welcome to keep it.
I was born with a caul, which was advertised
for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price
of fifteen guineas. Whether sea-going people
were short of money about that time, or were
short of faith and preferred cork jackets, I
don't know; all I know is, that there was but
one solitary bidding, and that was from an
attorney connected with the bill-broking
business, who offered two pounds in cash,
and the balance in sherry, but declined to be
guaranteed from drowning on any higher
bargain.
Consequently the advertisement was
withdrawn at a dead loss—for as to sherry,
my poor dear mother's own sherry was in
the market then—and ten years afterwards,
the caul was put up in a raffle down in our
part of the country, to fifty members at
half-a-crown a head, the winner to spend
five shillings. I was present myself, and I
remember to have felt quite uncomfortable
and confused, at a part of myself being
disposed of in that way.
The caul was won, I recollect, by an old
lady with a hand-basket, who, very
reluctantly, produced from it the
stipulated five shillings, all in halfpence,
and twopence halfpenny short—as it
took an immense time and a great
waste of arithmetic, to endeavour
without any effect to prove to her. It is a
fact which will be long remembered as
remarkable down there, that she was
never drowned, but died triumphantly in
bed, at ninety-two.
I have understood that it was, to the last, her
proudest boast, that she never had been on the
water in her life, except upon a bridge; and that
over her tea (to which she was extremely
partial) she, to the last, expressed her
indignation at the impiety of mariners and
others, who had the presumption to go
'meandering' about the world. It was in vain to
represent to her that some conveniences, tea
perhaps included, resulted from this
objectionable practice. She always returned,
with greater emphasis and with an instinctive
knowledge of the strength of her objection, 'Let
us have no meandering.'
Not to meander myself, at present, I will go back
to my birth.
I was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or 'there
by', as they say in Scotland. I was a posthumous
child. My father's eyes had closed upon the light
of this world six months, when mine opened on
it.
There is something strange to me, even now,
in the reflection that he never saw me; and
something stranger yet in the shadowy
remembrance that I have of my first childish
associations with his white grave- stone in
the churchyard, and of the indefinable
compassion I used to feel for it lying out
alone there in the dark night, when our little
parlour was warm and bright with fire and
candle, and the doors of our house
were—almost cruelly, it seemed to me
sometimes—bolted and locked against it.
An aunt of my father's, and consequently a
great-aunt of mine, of whom I shall have more to
relate by and by, was the principal magnate of
our family.
Miss Trotwood, or Miss Betsey, as my
poor mother always called her, when she
sufficiently overcame her dread of this
formidable personage to mention her at all
(which was seldom), had been married to
a husband younger than herself, who was
very handsome, except in the sense of the
homely adage, 'handsome is, that
handsome does'—for he was strongly
suspected of having beaten Miss Betsey,
and even of having once, on a disputed
question of supplies, made some hasty but
determined arrangements to throw her out
of a two pair of stairs' window.
These evidences of an incompatibility of
temper induced Miss Betsey to pay him
off, and effect a separation by mutual
consent. He went to India with his capital,
and there, according to a wild legend in
our family, he was once seen riding on an
elephant, in company with a Baboon; but I
think it must have been a Baboo—or a
Begum. Anyhow, from India tidings of his
death reached home, within ten years.
How they affected my aunt, nobody knew; for
immediately upon the separation, she took her
maiden name again, bought a cottage in a
hamlet on the sea-coast a long way off,
established herself there as a single woman
with one servant, and was understood to live
secluded, ever afterwards, in an inflexible
retirement.
My father had once been a favourite of hers, I
believe; but she was mortally affronted by his
marriage, on the ground that my mother was 'a
wax doll'. She had never seen my mother, but
she knew her to be not yet twenty. My father
and Miss Betsey never met again. He was
double my mother's age when he married, and
of but a delicate constitution. He died a year
afterwards, and, as I have said, six months
before I came into the world.
This was the state of matters, on the afternoon
of, what I may be excused for calling, that
eventful and important Friday. I can make no
claim therefore to have known, at that time, how
matters stood; or to have any remembrance,
founded on the evidence of my own senses, of
what follows.
My mother was sitting by the fire, but poorly
in health, and very low in spirits, looking at it
through her tears, and desponding heavily
about herself and the fatherless little
stranger, who was already welcomed by
some grosses of prophetic pins, in a drawer
upstairs, to a world not at all excited on the
subject of his arrival; my mother, I say, was
sitting by the fire, that bright, windy March
afternoon, very timid and sad, and very
doubtful of ever coming alive out of the trial
that was before her, when, lifting her eyes as
she dried them, to the window opposite, she
saw a strange lady coming up the garden.
My mother had a sure foreboding at the second
glance, that it was Miss Betsey. The setting sun
was glowing on the strange lady, over the
garden-fence, and she came walking up to the
door with a fell rigidity of figure and composure
of countenance that could have belonged to
nobody else.
When she reached the house, she gave another
proof of her identity. My father had often hinted
that she seldom conducted herself like any
ordinary Christian; and now, instead of ringing
the bell, she came and looked in at that identical
window, pressing the end of her nose against
the glass to that extent, that my poor dear
mother used to say it became perfectly flat and
white in a moment.
She gave my mother such a turn, that I have
always been convinced I am indebted to Miss
Betsey for having been born on a Friday.
My mother had left her chair in her
agitation, and gone behind it in the corner.
Miss Betsey, looking round the room,
slowly and inquiringly, began on the other
side, and carried her eyes on, like a
Saracen's Head in a Dutch clock, until they
reached my mother. Then she made a
frown and a gesture to my mother, like one
who was accustomed to be obeyed, to
come and open the door. My mother went.
'Missis David Copperfield, I think,'
said Miss Betsey; the emphasis
referring, perhaps, to my mother's
mourning weeds, and her condition.
'Yes,' said my mother, faintly.
'Miss Trotwood,' said the visitor. 'You have
heard of her, I dare say?'
My mother answered she had had
that pleasure. And she had a
disagreeable consciousness of not
appearing to imply that it had been
an overpowering pleasure.
'Now you see her,' said Miss Betsey.
My mother bent her head, and
begged her to walk in.
They went into the parlour my mother had come
from, the fire in the best room on the other side
of the passage not being lighted—not having
been lighted, indeed, since my father's funeral;
and when they were both seated, and Miss
Betsey said nothing, my mother, after vainly
trying to restrain herself, began to cry. 'Oh tut,
tut, tut!' said Miss Betsey, in a hurry. 'Don't do
that! Come, come!'