At
the end of my previous post about Charles Dickens’s “Brooks of Sheffield”
name-substitution motif in David Copperfield, which I presented as an
illustration of the kind of coded conversation with which Jane Austen’s novels all teem….
….I wrote as follows:
“What I would like to ask all the Dickensians reading this post, is the following
question—can you think of any other passages in Dickens’s oeuvre, in which he,
either explicitly as with”Brooks of Sheffield”, or implicitly (the way JA
did it), portrayed other coded conversations? My bet would be that he did,
and the place I’d guess he ‘d have been most likely to do it, would have been
in David Copperfield itself!
Why? Because that would also be an
Austenian touch. JA, in Emma, gave us an
overt “Gotcha!” with the revelation of Jane & Frank’s
engagement, but also gave us a hidden “Gotcha!”with the shadow story of
Emma , in which, as I have claimed since early 2005, Jane Fairfax came to Highbury not because she was secretly
engaged to Frank, but because she was secretly pregnant!
So, if JA did that, perhaps Dickens
gave his readers the overt coded motif
with “Brooks of Sheffield” in David
Copperfield, in part as a giant hint
to the reader to search for other coded
conversations in that same novel, where Dickens did this implicitly. It
is well known that Dickens, like JA, loved puzzles, riddles, and the like. This
would be in exactly that same vein. “
ENQ QUOTE
Among the comments I received in
response thereto was the following very interesting one from Anielka Briggs in
Austen-L, which I reproduce in relevant almost-full:
“…no-one seems to have written the answer to the joke
anywhere on the Internet. To “brook” or to endure is only HALF the joke
and like Austen you have to suffuse yourself in the text and the spirit to
really "get it". You might
also have to be English to get it. “Name of Somewhere in England” is what
was stamped or transferred onto table-ware. Industrial Victorian Sheffield was
particularly well-known for small silver and steel items, cutlery and flasks
and JUG lids. Dickens gives us a first hint when David asks his mother
“if she was at all acquainted with Mr. Brooks of Sheffield, but she answered
No, only she supposed he must be a manufacturer in the KNIFE AND FORK way”. Any
“Name of Sheffield” ought to be a steel or silver manufacturer.
You
also have to know the English saying “Little pitchers/JUGs have big ears” (do
you have this saying in the US) which means that a small JUG has a
comparatively large handle with which to hold and fill it
and it is a metaphor for small children overhearing adult conversation and a
coded warning that parents use in England to tell one another not to divulge
confidential information as they suspect a child
is listening closely. Quinon and Murdstone use an allusion to an imagined JUG
manufacturer from Davy’s home town to say “a little JUG from Sheffield has big
ears”
Finally
the joke is revealed later in the book by the author who juxtapositions Mrs.
Copperfield’s “KNIFE AND FORK” suggestion (which one would have expected of a
Sheffield steel manufacturer) with the answer to the joke (that Davy was being
called a little JUG with big ears)
“I
took back Captain Hopkins's KNIFE AND FORK early in the afternoon, and went
home to comfort Mrs. Micawber with an account of my visit. She fainted when she
saw me return, and made a LITTLE JUG of egg-hot” (a brandy-based alcoholic
drink with egg and sugar)…This inspired Murdstone (or rather the clever author Dickens)
to call David a “little JUG with big ears” and to use the contents
of a little JUG to get him drunk and confused, hence the toast they propose is
“'Confusion to Brooks of Sheffield!” – that the CONTENTS of the LITTLE JUG were
causing CONFUSION to the LITTLE
JUG with BIG EARS, Davy or “Brooks” of Sheffield.” END QUOTE
As a
great example of how the Internet can facilitate discoveries that were not
possible in the past, within a couple of days, my initial post written in the
U.S. led to Anielka’s post written in Oz, which in turn led me, back in the
U.S.A., to realize something still more extraordinary.
I
believe that I’ve gotten much closer still to the solution of the mystery that
Dickens created when he concocted this strange little motif of multifaceted
punning word/name play, involving the name “Brooks of Sheffield”, the phrase “knife
and fork” (which, as Anielka implied, appears an astonishing different thirteen
times scattered throughout the entire novel!), and, for good measure, even had
a second usage of the word “jug” near “knife and fork”. Why would Dickens go to
such trouble, if this was meaningless?
What
I realized while reading Anielka’s post about Sheffield manufactured goods is
summarized here:
“Sheffield silver plate came into
being in 1742 when a silversmith found that clean, smooth, blocks of copper and
silver would bond when he pressed them together. He sandwiched copper between
two silver slabs -- then ran them through rollers, over and over. The result
was silver outside a strong copper core.
In 1762, 24-year-old Matthew Boulton
set up a factory in Birmingham, England. He began making silver-plated objects
with the Sheffield process. Boulton became the first really large producer of
Sheffield plate. And, when silversmiths raised legal objections to stamping
hallmarks on the stuff, Boulton led a movement to require separate standards
for Sheffield silver.
But Sheffield plate couldn't last.
In 1800, a chemist found that an electric current would transfer silver to
metal in a bath. By 1840, electroplating had been patented, and it could be
used it to lay down any desired thickness of silver. It took none of the
craftsmanship needed in the Sheffield process.
After that, Sheffield plate became a
collectors' cult item in the late 19th century. Forgers would try to make
electroplated copper ware look like Sheffield silver. Experts would try to tell
the difference. They couldn't always do so.
The Sheffield copper/silver sandwich
had edges that had to be hidden, usually with strips of soldered decoration.
The imitators used decoration to hide copper that wasn't really exposed.
Sheffield also had a slightly different hue. Still, after 1850, all new
silverware was either solid or electroplated.”
And I
also found this added tidbit on Wikipedia:
“The
material was accidentally invented ...in 1743. While
trying to repair the handle of a customer's decorative knife, [Boulsover] heated it too
much and the silver started to melt. t. When he examined the damaged handle, he noticed that the
silver and copper had fused together very strongly. Experiments showed that the
two metals behaved as one when he tried to reshape them, even though he could
clearly see two different layers.”
And
by now I hope someone reading along, with a sensitivity to puns, has realized
the biggest joke of all, hidden in plain sight literally at the top of every
other page throughout the entire novel?
Of
course I mean that the joke about David hidden in this “Brooks of Sheffield”
word matrix is that even though David appears to be “Copper”(field), he is
actually a combination of “Copper” and “Silver”! Sheffield Silver/Copperfield.
If
you don’t think this is a giant clue as to the mysteries in David Copperfield
swirling around the murky circumstances of his birth, and the way he is
referred to by a half dozen different names during the course of the novel,
then….I suggest to you that you are in confusion about Dickens’s sly intent,
which is nothing less than, I speculate, a full-fledged shadow story, the
details of which are not debriefed overtly at the end of the novel, but must be
sleuthed out, painstakingly, as I have sleuthed out what I call the shadow
stories of Jane Austen’s novels.
And I
believe that Dickens was well aware of Jane Austen’s penchant for birth
mysteries in the shadow stories of her novels as well!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment