Mr. Dick’s kite

Mr. Dick’s kite is a handmade object covered with manuscript leaves from his repeatedly abandoned Memorial. He imagines that its flight can carry the writing’s facts far away, making the kite both a practical invention and an expression of his hopeful, unconventional way of giving purpose to work that never reaches completion.

Construction and Manuscript

Mr. Dick proudly presents the kite as something he has made himself. David estimates that it must be about seven feet high, giving it a considerable scale, and notices that its surface is covered in closely and laboriously written manuscript. The writing is nevertheless plain enough to read at a glance. In one or two places David thinks he sees an allusion to King Charles the First's head, the recurring subject that intrudes upon Mr. Dick’s attempts to write his Memorial.

The pages are not a finished text prepared for the kite. They are old leaves from abortive versions of the Memorial: writing that has been set aside because the subject of King Charles the First repeatedly finds its way into the work and throws it out of shape. Their reuse turns discarded labor into the kite’s covering. The Memorial remains unfinished on the ground, while its fragments acquire a different purpose in the air.

Flight as a Method of Distribution

Mr. Dick explains that the kite has plenty of string and that, when it rises high, it takes the facts a long way. He calls this his manner of disseminating them, while acknowledging that he does not know where they will come down: that depends on circumstances and the wind. His account gives the kite an imagined task beyond simple recreation. The writing is no longer confined to the failed Memorial; flight offers a chance, however uncertain, for its contents to travel.

That possibility is explicitly contingent. Mr. Dick takes his chance rather than claiming control over the facts’ destination. The wind, the kite’s height, and whatever circumstances govern its return remain outside his command. In this respect, the kite’s purpose is less a reliable system of communication than an ingenious, hopeful response to the frustration of writing. David is unsure whether Mr. Dick is making a good-humoured joke when he describes it, and their shared laughter leaves room for the explanation to be both playful and sincere.

A Recurring Companion

After Mr. Dick and David become close friends, flying the great kite becomes a regular part of their time together. They often go out after Mr. Dick has finished his day’s work. The flights recur alongside a contrasting daily ritual: Mr. Dick spends a long sitting on the Memorial, which never makes progress, while the kite gives the abandoned pages a visible life outside the writing desk.

David remembers Mr. Dick as most serene while the kite is high above them. Sitting beside him on a green slope in the evening, David watches him look up at it in the quiet air. As a boy, David imagines that the kite lifts Mr. Dick’s mind out of confusion and bears it into the sky. This is David’s interpretation of what he sees, not a claim that the manuscript or Mr. Dick’s troubles have been resolved. The kite rises; the underlying difficulty remains.

The return of the kite completes the scene in a different key. As Mr. Dick winds in the string and it descends through the light, it eventually flutters to the ground like a dead thing. David recalls that Mr. Dick seemed gradually to wake from a dream, then picked up the kite and looked around in a lost way, as though they had both come down together. The image makes the flight’s comfort temporary: the object that had accompanied Mr. Dick’s attention upward lies lifeless at his feet, and David responds with heartfelt pity.

Recreation and Social Significance

Kite-flying is the only game in which Mr. Dick takes an active part, but it helps make him a familiar and beloved presence among the boys. On their Wednesday visits he is interested in the school’s many activities, following matches at marbles and pegtop, cheering hare and hounds from a knoll, enjoying cricket, and watching boys slide in winter. The kite is therefore distinctive not because it is his sole connection with others, but because it gives him one activity in which he personally participates.

The object also belongs to a wider pattern of practical ingenuity. Mr. Dick can make a boat from almost anything, turn cramp-bones into chessmen, fashion Roman chariots from old court cards, make spoked wheels from cotton reels, and construct bird-cages from old wire. The boys especially admire what he can do with string and straw. Against this background, the kite is both one of his inventions and the one most closely joined to his unfinished writing: it gives manuscript leaves a new use and gives Mr. Dick and David a shared pursuit.

The kite’s significance lies in the contrast between the fixed failure of the Memorial and the movement of its pages in flight. The writing does not become a completed argument, and the kite cannot guarantee where its facts will land. Yet, in the repeated act of making it rise, Mr. Dick finds a period of visible calm, while David finds a lasting image of their friendship and of Mr. Dick’s vulnerable return from that calm.