Take care of him. He bites.

“Take care of him. He bites.” is the warning placed on David Copperfield’s back when he arrives at Salem House. Intended as a joke or practical instruction, it turns a frightened child into a spectacle: others are invited to treat him as dangerous before they have met him. The episode makes the placard both a device of schoolroom humiliation and a compact image of the power of imposed labels.

The placard at Salem House

The warning first appears on a pasteboard sign lying on a desk in the schoolroom. The room is already hostile to David: its dirty floor is strewn with old exercises, two white mice search a pasteboard castle for food, and a caged bird barely moves on its perch. Amid this neglected setting, the carefully written placard catches his attention. Not understanding that the warning refers to a boy, he climbs onto the desk to look for the dog he thinks must be hidden nearby.

Mr. Mell corrects the misunderstanding. The sign is meant for David, and Mr. Mell says he has been instructed to put it on him. Though apologetic about this beginning, he ties the placard to David’s shoulders like a knapsack. Its physical placement matters: the warning is not merely something David reads but something he must carry, visible wherever he goes.

Public shame and imagined judgment

The wooden-legged man in authority makes the humiliation harder to escape. If David leans against a tree, wall, or house, the man orders him to display the badge conspicuously or face a report. David believes the servants, butcher, baker, and everyone coming and going can read it. The sign converts the routine walk through the playground into a public performance of an accusation: the school’s visitors are told to take care of David because he bites.

The warning soon affects David’s idea of himself. He begins to dread that he may actually be a wild boy who bites. Even when nobody appears to be looking, he imagines an observer behind him, reading the placard. The humiliation thus works beyond the moments when someone addresses him: the sign has taught him to anticipate judgment and to see himself through the label attached to him.

An old playground door, covered with boys’ carved names, gives his fears a future audience. There were forty-five boys at the school, and David imagines how particular names might answer the warning: J. Steerforth might read it in a strong voice and pull his hair; Thomas Traddles might pretend to be afraid; George Demple might sing it. These are David’s anticipations, not accounts of what those boys actually do. Before they return, the names seem to join in a general rejection of him. In his dreams, the same shame follows him into scenes of home and sociability: he appears in nothing but his nightshirt and the placard, making people scream and stare.

Creakle makes the label a spectacle

When Mr. Creakle returns, David is summoned before him. The contrast between the comfortable room and garden in the headmaster’s part of the house and the dusty playground sharpens the imbalance of the encounter. Mr. Creakle calls David the young gentleman whose teeth are to be filed and orders him turned around so that the placard can be examined. The wooden-legged man displays it, and Mr. Creakle asks for the report on the boy.

The scene shows the warning operating with institutional authority, not only as a taunt among pupils. David is displayed and discussed as an object of discipline before the school’s report about him is given. The joke about filing his teeth treats the supposed danger as settled, while the sign itself supplies the audience with an identity to read. Its cruelty lies in the gap between that official-looking label and the child’s actual fear and vulnerability.

A label set against loyalty and compassion

The episode belongs to a wider concern in David Copperfield with the difference between a person and the judgment attached to that person. When David later defends Peggotty to Betsey Trotwood, he insists on her loyalty and care, recalling that she loved both him and Clara Copperfield and held Clara during her final moments. His appeal rests on lived acts of devotion, not on an outsider’s label or assumption. The scene offers a moral counterpoint to Salem House: a person is better understood through what she has done for others than through a judgment imposed from outside.

That contrast becomes especially painful in Daniel Peggotty’s search for Emily Peggotty. He sets out to find her despite the disgrace attached to her flight, and tells Steerforth’s mother that he would accept her return without bringing shame upon her. Later, Martha speaks of the river as the natural company of someone as disgraced and miserable as herself, and regrets having been separated from Emily, who had always treated her kindly. These scenes do not repeat the school placard, but they extend the novel’s attention to the harm done when social judgment fixes a person’s identity. Against that judgment, acts of recognition, forgiveness, and faithful care make room for a fuller account of who someone is.