The subject is Harry Richmond, a youth of spirit; the subject is _not_
the cycle of romance through which he happens to have passed.
In the case of Copperfield, to go back to him, Dickens had exactly the
opposite intention. He found his book in the expanse of life which his
David had travelled over; Dickens's only care was to represent the
wonderful show that filled his hero's memory. The whole phantasmagoria
is the subject of the book, a hundred men and women, populating
David's past and keeping his pen at full speed in the single-minded
effort to portray them. Alone among the assembly David himself is
scarcely of the subject at all. He has substance enough, and amply, to
be a credible, authoritative reporter--Dickens sees well to that; but
he is a shadow compared with Betsy Trotwood and the Micawbers and the
Heeps, with all the hundred of them, and there is no call for him to
be more. In this respect his story, again, is contrasted with that of
Pendennis, which is, or is evidently meant to be in the first place, a
portrait of the young man--or with the story of Tom Jones perhaps,
though in this case more doubtfully, for Fielding's shrewd eye was apt
to be drawn away from the young man to the bustle of life around him.
But in Copperfield the design is very plain and is consistently
pursued; it would be a false patch in the story if at any point David
attracted more attention to himself than to the people of his
vision--he himself, as a child, being of course one of them, a little
creature that he sees in the distance, but he himself, in later years,
becoming merely the mirror of his experience, which he not unnaturally
considers worthy of being pictured for its own sake.
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