Going out with the tide

Going out with the tide is Daniel Peggotty’s expression for dying, grounded in a coastal belief that death follows the ebb just as birth belongs to the incoming flood. He uses it at Barkis’s bedside, where the tide’s turning gives the family a way to speak about an otherwise helpless vigil. The phrase makes the sea more than a setting: its movement becomes a measure for human departure, a pattern that resonates again when the novel places Ham’s rescue attempt against the storm-driven waves.

Meaning and Coastal Setting

Daniel Peggotty explains the belief directly to David Copperfield: "People can't die, along the coast, except when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh in—not properly born, till flood." In this account, dying and being born belong to opposite movements of the same water. The phrase does not present the tide as a force that can be mastered; it gives a coastal community’s uncertain experience of life and death a form that can be spoken and watched.

The setting lends the expression its physical weight. On David’s first journey to Yarmouth, the land appears startlingly flat, with the town and tide seeming almost mixed together. As he approaches, he sees not only the shoreline but the working landscape of boat-builders’ and shipwrights’ yards, rope-walks, caulkers’ yards, riggers’ lofts, and forges. The tide belongs to a place shaped by maritime labor and proximity to the sea, not to an abstract poetic landscape. Later, when Steerforth tells David that he has bought a clipper and that Daniel Peggotty will be its master in his absence, the community’s connection to boats and water is again part of ordinary life, though the sea also carries risks no human arrangement can control.

Barkis’s Death

The expression acquires its immediate meaning during Barkis’s final illness. Clara Peggotty bends over him and tries to draw him into recognition, reminding him that David Copperfield is present and that David’s messages had helped bring the couple together. Barkis is mute and senseless. Daniel Peggotty turns to David and says, "He's a going out with the tide," making the ebb a way to name what the bedside watchers can see but cannot prevent.

Daniel gives the vigil a precise timetable: low water is due at half past three, followed by half an hour of slack water. If Barkis survives until the tide turns, Daniel believes he will hold on past the flood and die with the next tide. The hours of watching therefore acquire a rhythm of expectation. David cannot say what influence his presence may have, but Barkis wanders feebly and mutters about driving him to school, reaching back toward an earlier connection between them. When he later stretches out his arm with a pleasant smile and says, "Barkis is willin'!", the familiar phrase associated with his courtship returns at the edge of death. At low water, he dies. The tide’s movement, Daniel’s prediction, and Barkis’s final return to remembered speech converge without making death any less final.

The Vigil and Its Limits

The phrase is both an explanation and an admission of helplessness. Daniel watches the tide and interprets its schedule, but he cannot bargain with it or guarantee that Barkis will last until the turn. David, in turn, does not claim that his presence caused Barkis to stir. The narrative preserves that uncertainty: observers can attach meaning to the timing, while the dying man’s condition remains beyond their command.

After Barkis’s death, David stays at Clara Peggotty’s request until the carrier’s remains can be taken to Blunderstone. She has bought a small plot in the old churchyard from her savings, near the grave of David’s mother. The journey from the bedside to burial extends the image of going out into a concrete farewell: the phrase first gives the family words for a death timed by the coast, then the funeral carries Barkis away from the household and back toward the graves of those already lost.

The Tide as a Motif of Risk and Departure

The novel later returns to the force of tides and waves in the storm at Yarmouth. The sea is no longer a watched schedule around a sickbed but a violent power: breakers rise over one another, wreckage is beaten apart, and those on shore struggle to see what is happening. Ham watches for a retiring wave, glances back at the men holding the rope secured around him, and dashes into the water toward the wreck. The wave briefly gives him a chance to move, but the effort exposes him to the sea’s overwhelming force; as he presses toward the ship, a vast wave sweeps over it and it disappears.

This storm scene does not repeat Daniel’s words, but it deepens the expression’s association between human life and the sea’s movements. At Barkis’s bedside, the ebb offers a pattern by which a death can be anticipated and named. In the wreck, the movement of the water creates fleeting opportunities for rescue while also destroying them. Together, the scenes make going out with the tide a compact image of departure in a maritime world: intimate and solemn in the sickroom, perilous and nearly impossible to govern on the open shore.