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Toru Sasaki, The ‘Conspiracy of Words’ in David Copperfield, The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 49, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 19–32, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bfz035
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Extract
Vladimir Nabokov remarks of Pushkin’sEugene Onegin: ‘there is a conspiracy of words signaling to one another, throughout the novel, from one part to another’.1 The Russian novelist’s observation turns out to be perfectly apt for Dickens, whose words on the page constantly echo and resonate with each other, thereby generating significances that may be hidden unless carefully scrutinised, or that may be unintended by the novelist himself.2 The idea of the ‘conspiracy of words’ will be made clearer by juxtaposing Nabokov’s comment with one from Edgar Allan Poe. In his review (Saturday Evening Post, 1 May 1841) of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, a novel that begins with a mysterious murder, Poe claimed, having only read the first seventh of the whole novel, that he had seen through its tricks and could already tell who the culprit was. He also predicted some of the plot developments. Picking, for example, the following passage of the novel, he said he had discerned Dickens’s ‘evident design’.3 Here the mentally afflicted protagonist, Barnaby Rudge, is talking to Mr Chester about the clothes ‘hanging on [the] lines to dry, and fluttering in the wind’:
