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42Charles Dickensis some doubt as to the accuracy of Forster’s dating of this change. Yetthe implication is still clear: the character of the book itself was, forDickens, ‘strictly personal’, having less to do with the world as it rollsthan one individual’s ‘personal history’ in it. And Barry Westburghas noted a further, significant change in the shortened working titleDickens used for the novel’s number plans. While the first number istitled ‘The Personal History and Adventures of David Copperfield’, inthe second number and thereafter ‘Adventures’ is replaced by ‘Experiences’.Choosing deliberately to emphasize the internal rather thanthe external, Dickens moves David still further from the picaresquemode of his childhood reading. It is a change which anticipates theformulation of the 1856 letter and its ‘experiences, trials, perplexities,and confusions inseparable from the making or unmaking of all men’.Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit, it might be recalled, hadadventures. David will have experiences.[. . .]The adult David’s experience is, in essence, a dramatization ofthe difficulty of overcoming this childhood inheritance in order toachieve a full, and integrated, selfhood. And it is a dramatization inwhich Steerforth and Uriah Heep play important roles. In additionto serving as symbolic surrogates for David in his relations withEmily and Agnes—and living testaments to David’s continuedblindness—the two act as thematic counterparts, subtly refractedimages of the novel’s central figure and situation. All three play outthe same basic configuration: fatherless son, inadequate mother,and a formative childhood experience. But Steerforth and Uriahrepresent a fundamental failure of self, defining through negativeexample the meaning of David’s own, ultimately successful,struggle. It is precisely the sort of thematic reflection/refractionDickens tries for, but does not achieve, in Martin Chuzzlewit withthe juxtaposition of young Martin, Tom Pinch, Mark Tapley andJohn Westlock.The absence of a ‘steadfast and judicious father’ (275), an absencethat defines Steerforth’s life no less than David’s, ultimately provesfatal in the former’s case. He is himself aware of what this want hasmeant: “‘I wish with all my soul I had been better guided! . . . I wishwith all my soul I could guide myself better!’” (274). His presentinability to guide himself plainly stems from the earlier lack. Gifted