Mr. Littimer

Mr. Littimer is James Steerforth’s servant and a figure whose scrupulous performance of respectability masks both his complicity in Emily Peggotty’s abandonment and his own criminal past. He carries himself with formal deference, but the account of Emily’s flight reveals how that manner serves him: he reports a cruel abandonment as an errand performed for his employer, then presents himself in prison as a model penitent. His trajectory from trusted servant to prisoner Twenty Eight exposes the gap between respectable appearance and ethical conduct.

Identity and Service

Mr. Littimer enters the account as an attendant in James Steerforth’s household. When Rosa Dartle summons him to tell David Copperfield about Emily’s flight, he appears with his accustomed composure, bows, and takes his place behind her. His manner remains formal even in a conversation about a young woman’s distress. That controlled deference is not merely a personal affectation: it shapes the story he tells, in which responsibility repeatedly belongs to James, to Emily, or to the circumstances, while he casts himself as a dutiful intermediary.

His service had given him prolonged access to James and to Emily after she left Yarmouth. Littimer says that he and James travelled with her through France, Switzerland, Italy, and other parts of Europe. He describes Emily as able to speak languages and as much admired, details that show her life abroad was not simply a brief journey. Yet his account also says that she was often low in spirits, that James became restless as her unhappiness grew, and that Littimer found himself in difficulty between them. The polished report turns a deeply unequal situation into a sequence of domestic inconveniences.

Emily’s Abandonment and Escape

Littimer recounts that James left a villa near Naples one morning, pretending that he would return in a day or so. Instead, he had gone, leaving Littimer to explain the departure to Emily. James, Littimer says, had proposed that she marry a respectable man prepared to overlook her past. The offer is presented as an honourable solution, though it would have transferred Emily from James’s control to the very servant charged with announcing that she had been discarded. David recognizes that Littimer is speaking of himself; Rosa Dartle’s expression confirms the implication.

When Littimer told Emily that James had left, she reacted with desperate violence. According to his account, she had to be restrained and kept from reaching a knife or the sea. For a time, he says, everything that might be used to injure herself or another person was removed, and she was shut up closely. She nevertheless escaped at night: she forced open a lattice window that Littimer had nailed shut, climbed down a vine growing beneath it, and disappeared. Littimer says that he never saw or heard of her again. Rosa treats the possibility of Emily’s death with cruelty; Littimer offers drowning as one possibility but also allows that boatmen may have helped her. He recalls that Emily had spoken with people on the beach and had told local children she was a boatman’s daughter, connecting her isolation abroad with her earlier life by the sea.

His account does not present him as an innocent witness. The measures taken against Emily, including the barred window and confinement, place him directly within the coercive circumstances from which she had to escape. When David presses him about whether James encouraged letters that might have reached his mother, Littimer gives only a guarded answer: he distinguishes betraying James’s confidence to his mother from betraying it to David, and declines to say more. David then makes clear that he understands Littimer’s part in the story and intends to make it known to the man who had been Emily’s father from childhood.

Respectability and Self-Presentation

Littimer’s defining strategy is to make obedience sound like virtue. In the conversation with David and Rosa, he describes himself as having undertaken James’s commission to relieve his employer of difficulty and restore harmony with an affectionate parent. Even his account of Emily’s confinement is delivered without abandoning his formal, deferential posture. His apparent composure sharpens the contrast between the respectable surface he maintains and the violence and abandonment his narrative describes.

That contrast returns in prison. David is astonished when prisoner Twenty Eight walks out reading a good book. Asked about his circumstances, Littimer complains mildly about the cocoa’s milk, then attributes his past follies to a thoughtless life in the service of young men and warns David to repent of the wickedness in which he has been involved. He also asks David to tell the young woman he once tried to save that he forgives her and calls her to repentance. The speech reverses the moral positions established by his earlier conduct: Emily, whom he helped confine and who was abandoned, is cast as the offender needing forgiveness, while Littimer presents himself as the chastened rescuer. The prison visitors receive his performance as edifying, but the reader has already heard the history it leaves out.

Crime and Prison Ending

A prison informant supplies the material fact behind Littimer’s performance. Prisoner Twenty Eight was transported for robbing a young master of about two hundred and fifty pounds in money and valuables on the night before they were to go abroad. The informant remembers the case because Littimer was caught by a dwarf, correcting the description to a little woman while admitting that he has forgotten her name. The report establishes that Littimer’s criminality is not merely an accusation inferred from his dealings with Emily: he has been convicted of theft and sentenced to transportation.

The two accounts of Littimer’s life abroad consequently stand beside one another. In the first, he travels with James and Emily and helps manage the aftermath of James’s abandonment; in the second, he is himself the servant who robbed a young master as they prepared to leave the country. In prison, he turns that history into a cautionary tale about being led astray by young men, but the account of Emily makes his claimed helplessness difficult to accept without qualification. His ending does not disclose what becomes of him after the sentence. Instead, it fixes him as a prisoner whose public penitence repeats the same habit of self-exculpation visible in his polished service: he speaks the language of duty and reform while shifting the burden of wrongdoing onto others.