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Dreams of David Copperfield had exerted considerable influence on Uriah Heep since the day they had first met. Uriah had crawled into bed late and thought of the younger boy until he fell asleep. In the course of his life, Uriah had revisited his early conversations with Master Copperfield so many times that he could no longer separate the thoughts of his fifteen year old self from his later refinements of those thoughts. He knew his resentments and longings had not quite taken their full shape, but he did not know in what respect they had been lacking.
He was quite sure, however, that his thoughts had circled like water in a drain around the perfect inevitability of young Copperfield’s life. How he would grow up with Agnes Wickfield - two pretty, amiable, well bred children. They would become closer and closer companions until the day they married. Bright young Copperfield would be brought into the firm as Wickfield’s partner, after he finished school. Certainly he would. He had heard Wickfield questioning Betsey, pressing her on whether she did not have a motive for sending David to live there. Of course she did.
And Wickfield, not being wholly a fool, understood it. Consented to it. Not without some resentment, possessive of his little daughter as he was, and also, perhaps, smarting at the knowledge that his fate was not fully under his power. But to men such as Wickfield even powerlessness was largely a comfortable state, perhaps. If he did nothing, he would never be very happy in his life, but he would always have respectable, soothing, work before him. He would always be swaddled warmly in decency, whatever turn his biography took. In some corner of his mind, Wickfield surely understood that to be powerless in the way he was before the inevitable happy union of Agnes and David Copperfield was to have power of a kind: the kind that passed from father to son, or son-in-law, a thousand times a day the world over: the kind that came with having a house and a firm and a daughter that a certain sort of young man would always come seeking.
When sleep had at last taken Uriah from these thoughts, or his younger self’s versions of them, he had dreamed of Master Copperfield for the rest of the night. He had dreamed that he had forgotten to put his handkerchief back in his pocket, and that Master Copperfield had brought it to him. Uriah had felt shame prickle him head to toe, knowing that Master Copperfield had touched the cloth, soaked through with his perspiration. Copperfield had offered it to him with such perfect politeness that Uriah had thought his anger would kill him. He did not hand the handkerchief back.
The dream went on, and now Copperfield turned the pages of Tidd’s Practice. Uriah knew that he had left the pages damp, and that Copperfield was not reading the words, but was only pretending to take note of Tidd’s advice while he stared at what Uriah’s fingers had done to the pages. Oh, just get out! Stop and get out! Had he said it, or only thought as much? He didn’t know. And Copperfield had looked at him perplexed, and asked what he had done wrong, as though he had not done anything wrong. But he had, oh, he had. Then Master Copperfield had insisted he didn’t mind, and taken Uriah’s hand in his own, and run a soft thumb over the palm, and made Uriah ache all over in a way that would become incredibly familiar, though only in his dreams and the moments just after he woke from them.
Even by fifteen it had become unlike him, to feel so wild and weak. For he had learned how to make the hurt he felt an always and never thing. To turn and twist matters so that if there was a sting, it was an expected confirmation that came with its own bitter pleasure. So that there was always some opportunity in it for him. So that every slight and set down only made his humility more to the purpose, and the more to the purpose it seemed, the more power he had in making a meal of it. In the deep night, when he woke from dreams of Copperfield, all of that was gone. He would lie there with his heart beating fast, his normally hard eyes wide, staring at everything and nothing.
Waking red hot with hunger and shame from his first dream of Master Copperfield, he did not know that his mind would later torment itself with a hundred dreams, perhaps more, where Copperfield pressed burning kisses to his mouth, and at least a dozen where he let Uriah inside him. Yet it did not really come as a surprise that as they grew older the want only grew deeper and less chaste. In his waking life, Uriah found he could think of his want for Copperfield without experiencing the weakness that came upon him at night. He thought of what he might do with Copperfield, of course, but there was so much else besides desire between them in the daylight, where Uriah punished and cheated Copperfield and tried to take all that was his that he could.
For a long time (though the details of Uriah’s dreams of Copperfield varied, and though he never became accustomed to the hot desire he would wake with) the dreams still fit the mould of the very first he had. After Copperfield struck him a blow to the cheek, it was his rotten tooth that Copperfield found and brought to his dreaming self, instead of his handkerchief, but the quality of the dream was otherwise much the same. He had kept the tooth he had had out, and sometimes while he was at his work he would reach a hand up into the little pocket of his coat and touch it and imagine Copperfield’s fingers on it, probing his rottenness, curious and repulsed.
Only after Uriah’s imprisonment in Pentonville did a new sort of dream begin. In this dream, Copperfield—his hated, beloved, beautiful Copperfield, was dead.
Lying wretched in the dark, damp with cold sweat and resorting to reciting Tidd’s Practice front to back to calm himself, Uriah looked in vain for the cause of this change. He could not understand it. It was not because he had been set back in his schemes. The fury in his soul at the world was as great as ever; it was no greater. He had felt fear upon receiving his sentence, but he had quickly discovered himself to be perfectly in his element as a convict. He had always known how to coax out a certain type of person’s need for his obedience: to make them understand it, perhaps only half-consciously, as the proof of everything they wanted to be true of the world. To suspect he was not sincere would be to admit not only that they could not have what they wanted from people like him, but that to want it at all was a terrible thing. They could not do that, so they treated him as the most perfect example of humility. There was hardly a child in England, rich or poor alike, who had been to school yet had never been beaten. Yet Uriah numbered among them. The blow Copperfield had struck him had been the first he had ever felt.
Creakle assured Uriah that he would receive a full pardon upon reaching Australia. How pleased the school master-turned-warden was to credit himself with Uriah’s reform. How great were his efforts to give Uriah all he could by way of favors! There was a bitter delight in it all for Uriah. A hard, fierce confirmation to be found in having his humility swallowed hook, line and sinker. Of course, he preferred to practice his humility on Copperfield. Copperfield, who knew it to be false from the first instant. Who understood the strange pleasure to be had in that pretend fawning, who was drawn to it and fascinated by it and him, who felt it with him as he did it. Poor sweet Copperfield, who longed for him to stop carrying on in his humble way but never knew how to ask. To be humble before someone like Copperfield was such a different thing than to be humble before Creakle that they hardly bore comparing.
Creakle was as good as his word. Uriah’s arrival in Australia saw him immediately pardoned, and with money sent on ahead by his mother, Uriah was able to set up quite comfortably. Uriah’s neat, flagstone house in Hobart saw an abundance of visitors. There was the criminal who had escaped justice and fled to Australia, only to have a warrant sent after him. He came to Uriah for arguments against the warrant’s legitimacy and got them. There was the woman who claimed she couldn’t be held to the IOUs she’d issued. Uriah helped her case. There was the ship captain who wanted to know if his brother’s claim to their father’s property was really as sound as it seemed. He returned to England with a page of arguments written in Uriah’s careful, dark inked hand.
Once, when they were young, he had happened upon a project on Copperfield’s desk. Whether for Doctor Strong or for Copperfield’s own amusement, he didn’t know, but the boy was translating Milton into Latin. A line had leaped from the page: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.” If such was not the case for Uriah, it was certainly true that there was a consistency to his outlook that seemed to transcend the rises and falls of his fortunes. Prosperous and respected, and now nearing age forty, he still spent his days in humility and his nights in throes of terror and ecstasy over David Copperfield.
Years after the worst dreams began, at last understanding came, unexpected — a mirror catching sunlight. Uriah opened the newspaper to find that the great author David Copperfield intended to make a reading tour of Australia. Copperfield was coming! He might see him again. Uriah clutched his chest, almost unable to bear the surge of feeling that struck him. He understood at last.
He had of course observed that without regular congress with Copperfield, he was not quite the man he had been. He felt all that happened to him was less potent, without his best and favorite audience to observe it. But he had not really understood that, locked away in prison, he had felt the first intimation of what it would be like to live in a world entirely without Copperfield. The most shadowy corners of his mind had felt the chill of it like a prophecy, and had cried out in abject horror. And with that understanding came another: after all this time, after all he had done to make it utterly impossible, he still believed, in some crevice of his hardened heart, that there was a chance: that he might still have Copperfield. Copperfield’s death would mean a world without, what was to Uriah, the best thing in it. And it would mean there was no chance — no deal with any devil could ever bring it about. It was, he realized, as his heart raced with anticipation, his foolish, stupid hope that had given him all of those nights of agony. And he still, still held it.