Uriah Heep becomes Wickfield's partner

Uriah Heep becomes Mr. Wickfield’s partner through an arrangement that Agnes Wickfield describes not as a straightforward advancement but as a choice shaped by pressure and dependence. Her account reveals that Heep has made himself indispensable to Mr. Wickfield, gained power by understanding his weaknesses, and left Agnes to weigh her father’s peace against the danger of strengthening Heep’s position.

The Partnership Disclosed

The account emerges during a conversation between Agnes Wickfield and David Copperfield in London. After teasing David about the intensity of his attachments, Agnes asks whether he has seen Uriah Heep. She explains that Heep comes to the office below her every day and has been in London ahead of her, on business that troubles her. The subject shifts from David’s personal life to the future of her father’s business and the influence Heep has acquired within it.

Agnes then tells David that Heep is to enter into partnership with her father. David responds with indignation and urges her to intervene before Mr. Wickfield takes what he sees as a disastrous step. His immediate reaction treats the partnership as an avoidable mistake: Agnes, he believes, might still persuade her father to refuse. Her explanation changes the meaning of the decision. The arrangement is not simply the result of Mr. Wickfield’s independent judgment, and Agnes has not been unaware of its troubling implications.

She places the first disclosure two or three days after an earlier conversation with her father. Mr. Wickfield tried to present the partnership as a matter of his own choice, but Agnes could see that he could not conceal how much it was being forced upon him. She remembers feeling sorry for him. His attempt to describe the decision as voluntary, beside her perception that he had little freedom in the matter, exposes the gap between the formal appearance of agreement and the pressure behind it.

Heep’s Leverage and Mr. Wickfield’s Unease

Agnes identifies the source of that pressure in Heep’s ascendancy over her father. Heep, she says, has made himself indispensable: he has mastered Mr. Wickfield’s weaknesses, encouraged them, and used them until Mr. Wickfield is afraid of him. The partnership therefore formalizes a power that already exists in practice. Heep’s influence does not begin with the business arrangement; the arrangement gives a recognized position to a man who has already gained control over the person whose partner he is to become.

Agnes distinguishes Heep’s declared humility and gratitude from the practical force of his position. She allows that these professions may be sincere, but does not take them as evidence that the partnership will be harmless. Heep occupies a position of power, and she fears he uses it harshly. David calls him a hound, a response that conveys his anger but does not alter the circumstances Agnes describes: her father is already dependent on Heep, and the proposed partnership appears to offer no easy way out.

The immediate sequence around the proposal further clarifies Heep’s leverage. He had told Mr. Wickfield that he was going away, expressing regret about leaving while saying that he had better prospects elsewhere. Agnes recalls her father as especially depressed and burdened with care at the time. He seemed relieved by the partnership as an expedient, yet hurt and ashamed by it. Heep’s threatened departure thus operates as pressure within a relationship of dependence: the partnership can relieve Mr. Wickfield of the prospect of losing someone on whom he relies, while making that reliance more permanent.

Agnes’s Consent and the Cost of the Decision

Agnes does not claim to have prevented the arrangement. Convinced that accepting Heep as partner was necessary for her father’s peace, she urged Mr. Wickfield to make the sacrifice. She hoped the partnership would lighten the load of his life and give her more opportunities to accompany him. Her response is neither simple approval of Heep nor an assertion that the agreement is freely made. It is a decision made for her father’s immediate welfare under circumstances she regards as constrained.

That choice leaves Agnes feeling implicated. She fears that, by encouraging the partnership, she has acted as though she were her father’s enemy rather than his loving child. She connects this guilt to a longer change in Mr. Wickfield: his devotion to her has narrowed his sympathies and duties, and anxious thoughts about her have weakened his strength and energy. Agnes does not present her father’s condition as arising from one cause alone; instead, she worries that her place at the center of his attention has contributed to the pattern that has diminished him, even as her intention in supporting the partnership was to ease his burden.

The disclosure makes the partnership a turning point in the relations among the three. For David, the news first appears to call for a forceful objection; Agnes’s account instead shows why protest has not been enough to prevent it. For Agnes, accepting the arrangement is a painful effort to protect her father’s peace, coupled with fear that it will consolidate Heep’s authority. For Mr. Wickfield, the partnership offers apparent relief while deepening his dependence. Its significance lies in this contradiction: an agreement presented as a practical solution is also the public form of a private imbalance of power.