David Copperfield abandons his attempt to reform Dora

David Copperfield’s attempt to reform Dora Spenlow ends when he recognizes that his project has turned affection into instruction and made his wife apprehensive. His retreat restores warmth between them, but it also leaves intact a quiet dissatisfaction: he loves Dora and is happy with her, yet the marriage is not the happiness he had once anticipated.

The Reforming Project

David’s decision follows a conversation about the couple’s household arrangements and their responsibility toward the people they employ. He argues that employers’ conduct helps shape employees’ conduct, and that lax arrangements can give others opportunities to do wrong. Although he presents this as a moral concern, Dora hears the unease in his words as a question about their marriage itself. She weeps behind her handkerchief and asks why he married her if he could not bear her, suggesting that he might instead send her to her aunts at Putney or to Julia Mills in India. Her distress makes David feel that repeating his criticism in the same mild way will not work. He settles on a different course: to form her mind.

That phrase gives the undertaking an air of purposeful improvement, but the purpose is David’s. He imagines that Dora can be shaped toward the thoughtful, prudent companionship he wants. The gap between his good intentions and her experience becomes the episode’s central difficulty: he understands his plan as care, while Dora recognizes its pressure and becomes fearful of what he will ask of her next.

Lessons and Their Effects

David begins at once. When he would rather indulge Dora’s childishness, he makes himself serious instead. He discusses the subjects occupying his own thoughts and reads Shakespeare to her, exhausting her. He also introduces small pieces of useful information and sound opinion as though casually; Dora starts at them as if startled by sudden explosions. David sees that she instinctively understands what he is doing and is seized by apprehension, particularly when he reads Shakespeare, whom she appears to regard as a terrifying presence.

He extends the lessons through Thomas Traddles, using his visits to deliver practical wisdom indirectly for Dora’s benefit. Thomas Traddles does not know that he has been enlisted in the scheme. David considers the advice excellent, but its effect on Dora is to depress her spirits and make her nervous that she will be the next target. David recognizes the role he has taken on as something like a schoolmaster setting a trap: he lies in wait for an opening and then pounces with another lesson. The image exposes the coercive shape of a project he had treated as benevolent. His effort to produce sympathy instead makes ordinary conversation feel like a test Dora may fail.

Recognition and Withdrawal

For months David persists, imagining that the lessons will lead to perfect sympathy and that Dora’s mind will eventually be formed to his satisfaction. At last, the lack of progress changes his view of the task. He considers the possibility that her mind is already formed, and that the scheme, promising in its language, has failed in practice. This recognition does not mean that he has found a way to make Dora into the companion he first pictured; it means he gives up treating her existing character as an unfinished project.

David decides to accept Dora as she is and to stop trying to change her. He is tired of being sagacious and prudent alone, and cannot bear to keep Dora under restraint. He brings home a pair of earrings for her and a new collar for Jip, then sets out to make himself agreeable. The gifts mark a change in his approach: rather than offering another lesson, he offers small tokens of pleasure. Dora welcomes them joyfully, though David senses that a shadow remains between them. He resolves that, if the shadow must fall somewhere, he will keep it in his own heart.

Reconciliation and Residual Unease

David sits beside Dora, puts the earrings in her ears, and admits that they have not lately been as good company as before, taking the fault upon himself. When he asks whether it would have been better not to try to form her mind, Dora calls him a shocking boy; he answers that he will not try again because he loves her as she is. He promises not to conduct further experiments on her character and proposes that they return to their old way together. Dora welcomes the prospect of happiness while asking whether he will mind when things go slightly wrong. David agrees that they must do the best they can. Her laughter and delight as she goes to put Jip’s collar on complete the immediate reconciliation in affectionate action rather than in a new program of instruction.

Yet David’s decision is not a simple resolution of the marriage’s difficulties. He says that he will quietly improve their arrangements himself, but foresees that he can do little without becoming the watchful instructor again. The old unhappy feeling continues to pervade his life: it deepens or changes without becoming clearly defined, like sorrowful music faintly heard at night. He loves Dora and is happy, but the happiness he once vaguely expected is not the one he experiences, and something remains missing.

Significance of the Episode

The episode turns on David’s belated recognition that affection does not give him the right to treat Dora as a pupil. His lessons are gentle in intention and unsettling in effect; even the apparently casual remarks become occasions for her to anticipate correction. His abandonment of the scheme is therefore both a practical retreat from a failed method and an adjustment to the limits of his authority within the marriage. He changes the conduct he can control rather than continuing to make Dora the object of his improvement.

The ending preserves a tension between reconciliation and incompatibility. David’s apology, the gifts, and Dora’s renewed affection restore companionship, but they do not make his earlier ideal of perfect sympathy come true. His promise to accept her and his admission that something is still wanting stand together. The episode thus records not a transformation of Dora, but David’s decision to stop demanding one, while leaving his private disappointment unresolved.