Deck: The Charles Dickens Tarot
Card: 7 of Air Uriah Heep
Answer: As with the last few questions I have asked the tarot, this one comes from Dodalisque. Given his recent comments (cf. "Is idealism a crime? II" in which he portrays me as being unexplainably nasty to him whereas, from where I stand, my opinions of him are simply realistic), I'm not surprised I pulled the Uriah Heep card. Since the question is more an assertion with the directive to discuss, I will...
On the face of it, the weasely Machiavelli Uriah Heep might suggest that one of the advantages of old age is it allows you to drop the pretenses of being "ever so 'umble" and simply be the conniving cad you really are. Since growing old affects people in different ways, this may be the case for some; certainly, in my experience, advanced years - especially in men - makes a person less patient if not actually less able to maintain the mask between the outside world and their inner feelings.
More telling is the fact that Uriah is surrounded by elderly people - a point made explicit on this card. On the other side of the chessboard, nodding off, is Mr. Wickfield, while behind Uriah is his addled mother. Plying Mr. Wickfield with drink, Uriah falsifies documents and blackmails the old man. David Copperfield's surrogate father-figure, the inveterate reprobate Wilkins McCawber, is also being manipulated by Heep. This all suggests it's less that the aged no longer need to avoid admitting what complete fools they are as it is the aged are more vulnerable to being fooled.
Uriah Heep is a character in David Copperfield, a pseudo-(or, more accurately: a supra-)autobiography which opens with the famous line "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." Show they do, as David is indeed the hero, and not - try as he may - Uriah. What I'm getting at here is this: while the card pulled is Uriah Heep, the character Heep taught David Copperfield - the novel's hero and the unspoken subject of the card - a valuable lesson. In a framed picture above the mantlepiece, we see Mr. Wickfield's daughter, the angelic Agnes. The impish Uriah attempts to blackmail Agnes into being his lover. So proud of his machinations is Uriah that he brags of his plot to David. David is sickened and outraged by the mere suggestion yet, through a misguided notion of decorum, chooses not to say let alone do anything about it. The subtext here is that David is in love with Agnes - a feeling which is entirely reciprocated, yet Agnes' own notions of decorum prevent her from revealing her feelings. David, meantime, is too busy keeping up appearances to realize not only how Agnes feels but how he himself feels. Here, then, is the true foolishness of youth which advancing age dismantles and the most salient answer to our question: Heep, as a two-faced fink, is a personification of the impediments and self-imposed blinders which prevent us from seeing who others and we ourselves are. As David/Dickens drops his boyish idealism, he comes to see his own foolishness and, in turn, out-grow it.
Post-Script: The beautiful because dutiful Agnes Wickfield is Dickens' loving portrait of his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth (cf. the CDT's Strength card). Very quickly, and for the rest of his life, Dickens regretted marrying Georgina's sister Catharine and not marrying Georgina. Early on, Georgina moved in with the Dickens family and essentially ran their household. When Charles and Catharine separated, Georgina stayed with Dickens, maintaining his domestic (and non-domestic) affairs and serving as his confidante. Although many found this scenario scandalous, both Dickens and Georgina disdained the foolish assumptions and social prejudices of their critics. In this way, David & Agnes & Dickens & "Georgy" no longer needed to avoid admitting to themselves what complete fools they had been and what a heep of fools the world still was.
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