David Copperfield, Month Eight

I learned a new word this month: dissipation. That's because the title of Chapter 24 is "My First Dissipation,"  and to me the word sounded vaguely like a legal term.

Now, this came right after a chapter in which Copperfield decided to choose a profession. By the way, it turns out this profession-choosing wasn't all the difficult back then. Copperfield's aunt suggested he should become a proctor, and after minimal thought Copperfield decided that he liked the idea "exceedingly." No worries about what color his parachute is, Copperfield is quite content to be a proctor, even if he didn't quite know what it was before then.

I wasn't entirely sure what a proctor was either, though when I looked it up, I discovered that it was a type of solicitor in Victorian times. And so when the next chapter title included the word "dissipation," I assumed this was just some sort of legal phrase and didn't bother looking it up. This was a mistake.

I soon learned that it actually means roughly "a bender." To adopt a decidedly non-Dickensian phrase, this is the chapter in which David Copperfield gets wasted. Wicked wasted. Perhaps even exceedingly wasted.

While a drunken Copperfield disturbs a play with his loud talk, Dickens has this wonderful description of drunkenness: "The whole building looked as if it were learning to swim, it conducted itself in such an unaccountable manner when I tried to steady it."

Eventually, Copperfield wakes up with a monstrous hangover, or as Dickens writes, "But the agony of my mind, the remorse and shame I felt when I became conscious the next day!" In this one chapter, Copperfield seems to experience everything about drinking excess, except the throwing up, which disappointed me a bit. I was really curious to see what Dickensian turn of phrase would be used to describe that.