Podcast Appearances
He's been guarding Agnes like some sort of awful troll because he didn't want David to swoop in and take her away.
And all David can really do is tell Uriah that even though he, David, isn't going to marry Agnes, he feels that she's far too good for Uriah to marry him.
He says, Okay, but it's this, David's confession that he has no desire to marry Agnes, and that therefore there's actually no romantic relationship going on between Agnes and David, it is this that causes Uriah to show his hand to Mr. Wickfield.
and reveal his intention to propose to her.
And it really seems to take him off guard that Mr. Wickfield would have such a huge and negative reaction to this idea, which tells us, and I love this detail, but it tells us that Uriah doesn't know how awful he is.
He doesn't know how icky and slimy and disgusting he seems to everyone else.
David says Uriah, pale and glowering in a corner, evidently very much out in his calculations and taken by surprise, right?
He thought that Mr. Wickfield would be okay with this idea, since he's been allowing everything else that Uriah's been doing.
But Mr. Wickfield loves Agnes more than anything else on earth.
Remember, he used to say that she was his one purpose in life, and he couldn't bear it if she had to marry this awful man.
But Uriah doesn't see himself as an awful man, and that's what makes him a great villain.
He sees himself as a great man who was born too low.
He sees himself as a man deserving of everything he can grasp onto for himself, even Agnes.
So he is a villain, really and truly.
And I don't know about you, but I love to hate him.
He's a great villain, I think.
But now, whether or not we think that David should marry Agnes, Agnes, in her goodness, has given David some really good advice about how he can get back with Dora, which is that he should chill out, stop doing everything clandestinely, and he should write to the aunts that Dora now lives with and explain that he would like to court their niece.
So we, as the reader, are in the position of having to watch as the
makes it potentially easier for David to continue his relationship with the woman that we don't want David to marry, which, at least narratively, if not emotionally, is a very delicious little quandary.