them, shuts the book, and lays it by as an arrear to be worked out
when my other tasks are done.
There is a pile of these arrears very soon, and it swells like a
rolling snowball. The bigger it gets, the more stupid I get. The case
is so hopeless, and I feel that I am wallowing in such a bog of
nonsense, that I give up all idea of getting out, and abandon myself
to my fate. The despairing way in which my mother and I look at
each other, as I blunder on, is truly melancholy. But the greatest
effect in these miserable lessons is when my mother (thinking
nobody is observing her) tries to give me the cue by the motion of
her lips. At that instant, Miss Murdstone, who has been lying in
wait for nothing else all along, says in a deep warning voice:
‘Clara!’
My mother starts, colours, and smiles faintly. Mr. Murdstone
comes out of his chair, takes the book, throws it at me or boxes my
ears with it, and turns me out of the room by the shoulders.
Even when the lessons are done, the worst is yet to happen, in
the shape of an appalling sum. This is invented for me, and
delivered to me orally by Mr. Murdstone, and begins, ‘If I go into a
cheesemonger’s shop, and buy five thousand double-Gloucester
cheeses at fourpence-halfpenny each, present payment’—at which
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David Copperfield
I see Miss Murdstone secretly overjoyed. I pore over these cheeses
without any result or enlightenment until dinner-time, when,
having made a Mulatto of myself by getting the dirt of the slate
into the pores of my skin, I have a slice of bread to help me out
with the cheeses, and am considered in disgrace for the rest of the
evening.
It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if my unfortunate
studies generally took this course. I could have done very well if I
had been without the Murdstones; but the influence of the
Murdstones upon me was like the fascination of two snakes on a
wretched young bird. Even when I did get through the morning
with tolerable credit, there was not much gained but dinner; for
Miss Murdstone never could endure to see me untasked, and if I
rashly made any show of being unemployed, called her brother’s
attention to me by saying, ‘Clara, my dear, there’s nothing like
work—give your boy an exercise’; which caused me to be clapped
down to some new labour, there and then. As to any recreation
with other children of my age, I had very little of that; for the
gloomy theology of the Murdstones made all children out to be a
swarm of little vipers (though there was a child once set in the
midst of the Disciples), and held that they contaminated one
another.
The natural result of this treatment, continued, I suppose, for
some six months or more, was to make me sullen, dull, and
dogged. I was not made the less so by my sense of being daily
more and more shut out and alienated from my mother. I believe I
should have been almost stupefied but for one circumstance.
It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a
little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own)
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David Copperfield
and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that
blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle,
Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don
Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host,
to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of
something beyond that place and time,—they, and the Arabian
Nights, and the Tales of the Genii,—and did me no harm; for
whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew
nothing of it. It is astonishing to me now, how I found time, in the
midst of my porings and blunderings over heavier themes, to read
those books as I did. It is curious to me how I could ever have
consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great
troubles to me),"};
