David encounters Agnes whilst carousing drunkenly with Steerforth in the chapter entitled "My first Dissipation": she spurns him whilst David acclaims him as "theguidingstarofmyexistence". Steerforth’s elopement, however, spells the sad end of the novel’s most psychologically revealing relationship. David is left free to participate in the more conventional plot developments and Steerforth assumes a more unambiguous role as villain.
At this point much of the novel becomes more predictable and less interestingly diverse (although the storm scene in chapter LV is widely regarded as one of the highlights of Dickens’s writing career). The autobiographical candour steadily recedes (although David does become a writer) as he marries his "child-wife" Dora (an oddly unpleasant phrase) and sinks into the domesticity that is the usual fate of a Dickens hero. Instead of developing the theme of unsuited spouses, and analysing the effects of so dysfunctional a childhood on an adult, Dickens presents us with a series of bittersweet vignettes of married life that do not add up to anything like the punch of, say, the Lydgates’ marriage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In fact, to most intents and purposes, David persists in his bachelor life after the wedding. Instead of developing Dora as a selfish, foot-stamping imp Dickens chooses to present her as a terminally ill doll, symptomatic of the book’s rather too neat conclusion. Micawber is transformed into an agent of moral justice, violently denouncing Heep for his peculation and thereby completely losing touch with his own fecklessness, the very characteristic that made him so likeable earlier. The neatness with which the various plot strands are resolved is disappointing after the focus of the earlier parts of the novel. A sense is left of the integrity and credibility of David’s recollections having been compromised for the sake of Dickens’s insistence on cosy moral order at his book's end.
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