Endnotes

1  Gardner 23-24, n. 5.

2  As I have argued elsewhere, Dickens’s allusions to Watts’s poem in Bleak House (1853) follow the same pattern as those in David Copperfield, and similarly substitute a crocodile (Megalosaurus) for the bee (McCune 1-14).

3  “Against Idleness and Mischief,” lines 11-12.

4  David Copperfield 220; ch. 16. Hereafter I will abbreviate David Copperfield in the form DC.

5  DC 507; ch. 36.

6  DC 507.

7  Albert Pionke was kind enough to point out this trope to me.

8  “The Origin of Royalty” 449-450.

9  Buist 205. Another positive instance of Queen Victoria as queen appears in an 1851 article in the Illustrated London News which proposes an “ORDER OF THE BEE, as an order of Civil Merit… with our good Queen Bee—Queen Victoria, the Regina Regnant of the Hive” (“The Order of the Bee” 717).

10  DC 808; ch. 59.

11  DC 808.

12  DC 807.

13  DC 808.

14  DC 855; ch. 64.

15  DC 854; ch. 64.

16  DC 394; ch. 27.

17  DC 394.

18  Dobrinsky 57.

19  Dobrinsky 63.

20  DC 808; ch. 59.

21  DC 808; ch. 59.

22  Dobrinsky 58.

23  DC 220-1; ch. 16.

24  DC 233.

25  DC 235; ch. 16.

26  DC 643; ch. 45.

27  Carmichael 660.

28  DC 632; ch. 45.

29  DC 632.

30  DC 632.

31  DC 633.

32  DC 644.

33  DC 644; ch. 45.

34  DC 660.

35  DC 646.

36  DC 646.

37  The interview in which Aunt Betsey’s summary of Murdstone’s crimes makes him “wince” (209; ch. 14) opens with the Murdstones entering her garden on donkeys, and Aunt Betsey shouting at them, “Donkies!” (202, ch. 14; cf. 190, ch. 13). When David tells his aunt that it is Mr. Murdstone, she replies, “I don’t care who it is” (202). I am indebted to Karen Chase for the observation that Aunt Betsey reduces Mr. Murdstone to a donkey.

38  “If you’re a man, controul your limbs, sir! …I am not going to be serpentined and corkscrewed out of my senses!” (503, ch. 35; emphasis mine). Mr. Micawber later calls Heep a “serpent” as well (692; ch. 49).

39  Leighton and Surridge 249-250, 250 n. 3.

40  DC 646.

41  DC 233; ch. 16.

42  DC 854; ch. 64.

43  Leighton and Surridge 250. Crocodiles really do engage in cannibalism (Huchzermeyer 53-54), but the belief that a crocodile will eat its own offspring seems to have mistakenly arisen because crocodiles carry their children in their mouths (De Silva and De Silva 144). Nevertheless, the image of the cannibal crocodile parent persisted in encyclopedic sources at least until 1895: “The male takes no part in rearing the young, but is said on the contrary to attack and devour them when not prevented by his mate” (“Crocodile” 1842).

44  Jeremy Tambling has noted that Thomas Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton is Dickens’s source for the “Crocodile Book” (Tambling 945, n. 5). As I have argued elsewhere, David Copperfield transforms Day’s account by selecting some details and omitting others (McCune 19-20), but the details he gives, and the order in which he gives them, are Day’s (McCune 19, n. 13).

45  Day 101; ch. 3.

46  Songs vi, vii.

47  Songs vi.

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