Crocodiles

Crocodiles are a memorable feature of David Copperfield’s early reading: creatures encountered through a book, then brought to life in an improvised adventure shared with Clara Peggotty. The episode gives the animals a double significance—as material for childhood imagination and as a marker of the warmth and freedom that harsher forms of education will displace.

The crocodile book by the fire

One evening, while David waits up for his mother to return from a neighbour’s house, he reads to Clara Peggotty about crocodiles. He is exhausted, yet determined to stay awake; as he struggles to keep his eyes open, the familiar objects around her work become vivid points of attention, from her thread and brass thimble to the painted view on her work-box. The book belongs to this intimate domestic scene: reading is not an imposed task but something David shares with a trusted adult.

Clara Peggotty’s understanding of the animals is comic and affectionate rather than exact. After listening, she retains the impression that crocodiles are a kind of vegetable, and she mangles their name when asking to hear more. The mismatch does not interrupt their companionship. David is puzzled by her odd expression and eagerness to return to the subject, but the two resume the reading together.

An adventure made from reading

The book’s account becomes a miniature performance. David recounts leaving crocodile eggs in the sand for the sun to hatch, fleeing the animals by repeatedly changing direction, and then going into the water to attack them with sharp pieces of timber. The creatures’ unwieldy bodies provide the explanation for how the children supposedly outwit them. The episode is presented as the child’s elaboration of what he has read, not as a real encounter or an independent account of crocodile behaviour.

The imagined chase extends their reading well past the point when David might have gone to bed. When they exhaust the crocodiles, they move on to alligators, continuing until the garden bell announces his mother’s return. The book thus supplies shared play as well as information: its animals become figures in an adventure that the child can narrate and the caregiver can accompany, even when she is only partly following its details.

A remembered kind of learning

In later recollection, the crocodile book helps define an earlier, gentler education. David remembers learning with his mother before the Murdstones took control of his lessons. Those early studies, including the alphabet learned at her knee, remain associated with her kind voice and manner; he describes his progress as a path of flowers that reached as far as the crocodile book. Reading is remembered as a source of pleasure and encouragement, not simply as schoolwork.

That memory sharpens the contrast with the lessons imposed under Edward Murdstone and Jane Murdstone. They are long, difficult, and often unintelligible to David and his mother, who nominally presides over them while the Murdstones supervise and discipline her. When she tries to prompt him, Jane Murdstone warns her, and Edward Murdstone throws the book at David or boxes his ears before sending him from the room. The earlier book-associated ease gives way to fear and drudgery.

The book against lost childhood

The crocodile episode acquires further weight against David’s later experiences of educational deprivation. At ten, he is sent to work in Murdstone and Grinby’s warehouse, where his days are spent washing and handling bottles. He mourns the loss of the learning and ambition he had hoped to carry into adulthood. When he later enters Doctor Strong’s school, he feels estranged from ordinary schoolboy life and finds that much of what he had learned has slipped away during the years of hardship.

The crocodiles themselves do not need to reappear for the remembered book to matter. In David’s retrospective account, it preserves a small scene of companionship and imaginative freedom, and makes the later loss of education concrete: before lessons became punishment and learning receded under forced labour, a book could keep a tired child awake, draw him into a shared adventure, and remain in memory as part of a happier childhood.