“David Copperfield” (post 6) by Charles Dickens: David gets drunk, revealing symptoms of multiple personality

“Somebody was leaning out of my bed-room window, refreshing his forehead against the cool stone of the parapet, and feeling the air upon his face. It was myself. I was addressing myself as ‘Copperfield,’ and saying, ‘Why did you try to smoke? You might have known you couldn’t do it.’ Now, somebody was unsteadily contemplating his features in the looking-glass. That was I too. I was very pale in the looking-glass; my eyes had a vacant appearance; and my hair — only my hair, nothing else — looked drunk” (1, p. 369).

Comment: When Dickens wrote The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), he may have expected his readers to understand that when the murderer, John Jasper, refers to himself in the third person, it indicates that Jasper has multiple personality (in which one personality is referring to another personality). 

Did Dickens have the same expectation for readers of David Copperfield, which was published twenty years earlier? I don’t know. And since he acknowledged autobiographical aspects of David Copperfield, but may not have been ready to associate multiple personality with himself, he blames David’s dissociation on intoxication.

Intoxication may camouflage or uncover, but does not cause, multiple personality.

1. Charles Dickens. David Copperfield [1850]. Revised Edition. New York, Penguin Books, 2004.

Added June 15: The rest of this novel has nothing quite as definitive of multiple personality as the passage I quote above. But if you have not read my extensive, introductory post, please search “Dickens” in this blog. A famous novelist called it “Engaging.”