“Auld Lang Syne”

“Auld Lang Syne” serves as a song of shared remembrance in David Copperfield: it turns a Canterbury farewell into a moment of fellowship, then reappears in Mr. Micawber’s later recollection of his bond with David. The song’s emotional force exceeds the singers’ grasp of its words. They can be moved by joining hands and voices even as they admit that they do not understand a lyric, making the song a compact expression of affectionate memory, comic uncertainty, and the ties sustained across changing circumstances.

The Canterbury Farewell

At the end of an evening together, as the punch disappears and Mr. Micawber grows still more convivial, he and Mrs. Micawber sing “Auld Lang Syne” with David. The scene follows toasts and a review of their acquaintance, in which the company sells the family’s property all over again. Mr. Micawber has praised his wife as his guide, philosopher, and friend; David, in turn, has toasted her. The song gathers this sociable exchange into a shared performance, rather than leaving the evening’s affection in the form of speeches alone.

The singers make their fellowship physical: when they reach “Here's a hand, my trusty frere”, they join hands around the table. They then declare that they will “take a right gude Willie Waught”, while admitting they have not the least idea what the words mean. Their lack of understanding does not prevent them from being genuinely affected. The scene’s warmth therefore depends less on interpreting the lyric than on acting together—holding hands, singing, and sharing the same occasion. The comic admission of ignorance sits alongside real emotion, not in opposition to it.

A Friendship Recast in Song

In a later toast, Mr. Micawber brings the song back while raising his glass to the days when he and David were younger and, as he puts it, fought their way through the world side by side. He introduces the recollection through the lines “We twa hae run about the braes” and “And pu'd the gowans' fine”, then qualifies their companionship as figurative. The qualification matters: the song offers him a language for friendship, but he does not present their shared history as a literal childhood spent together.

Mr. Micawber also admits that he does not know what gowans are. He imagines that he and David would have taken a pull at them if it had been feasible, then takes a pull at his punch instead. The joke turns the lyric’s unfamiliar detail into an occasion for convivial improvisation. Yet the image still lets him express attachment: even without knowing the word, he can use the song to picture an imagined shared experience. The toast is at once affectionate and theatrical, in keeping with Mr. Micawber’s expansive manner.

The performance also has an observer. Thomas Traddles is evidently lost in wonder at the distant time when Mr. Micawber and David could have been comrades in the battle of the world. His response makes visible the distance between Mr. Micawber’s ceremonious account and the actual history it describes. The song supports a figurative claim of solidarity, while Traddles’s puzzlement quietly exposes its grandness. The moment remains affectionate without requiring the listener to mistake the metaphor for a literal account.

Recollection and Reprise

The song’s recurrence links separate occasions through memory. At Canterbury, singing belongs to a shared farewell among Mr. Micawber, Mrs. Micawber, and David; in the later toast, Mr. Micawber makes its words a reference point for his own and David’s past. The movement is from collective performance to personal recollection: what once joined the voices around a table can later be summoned in speech as evidence of enduring regard.

A further echo appears in Mr. Micawber’s letter to David, where he identifies an appointment by referring to the Canterbury house of public entertainment at which he and Mrs. Micawber once united their voices with David’s in the “well-known strain of the Immortal exciseman nurtured beyond the Tweed”. The phrase is a humorous, circumlocutory way of invoking the familiar song and its earlier performance. In the same letter, Mr. Micawber presents his duty as done and an act of reparation as performed; the musical allusion locates that serious business within the history of shared social feeling. The song thus becomes a private point of recognition in a written message, not merely an accompaniment to a convivial evening.

Meaning Without Full Understanding

Across these appearances, the song’s significance comes from what the characters do with it. Joined hands give the farewell a visible form of companionship; a later toast turns its lines into a playful account of shared hardship; the letter’s allusion carries the memory into another context. At each point, the expression binds recollection to present action, whether the action is singing, raising a glass, or referring back to a former meeting.

The singers’ confessed uncertainty about the words prevents the song from functioning simply as a statement whose meaning everyone has mastered. Instead, the scene lets emotion coexist with partial understanding: the company does not know what “a right gude Willie Waught” means, yet the joined voices and hands move them. Mr. Micawber’s later uncertainty about gowans repeats that pattern in comic form. “Auld Lang Syne” matters in the novel as a shared expression of remembrance whose feeling remains legible even when its lyric is not.