The next morning is passed in an agony of crapulousness and remorse. When Copperfield calls on Agnes to apologise, she dismisses his drunkenness as already forgotten. However, she warns him against Steerforth as a "dangerous friend". In this she is of course right-Steerforth will prove to be a dangerous friend to Copperfield, although not altogether a false one. It is with Steerforth rather as it is with the wine at Copperfield's dinner: the problem lies not so much with the thing itself, as with how it is used. Steerforth's great betrayal is the seduction and abandonment of Little Em'ly; but it is a betrayal made possible by Copperfield's unguarded introduction of Steerforth into the simple Yarmouth world of Ham and Peggotty.

It is easy to think of Dickens's great serialised novels as triumphs of improvisation. In part they were. But as he became more experienced in the form, so Dickens realised that improvisation required a settled narrative framework. In the case of David Copperfield (as Dickens wrote to James White) the story had been "carefully planned out . . . to the end" and constructed "with immense pains". The fruits of Dickens's painful care are visible in Copperfield's party, which gathers up and focuses the various references to wine both earlier and later in the novel. From first to last, Steerforth has been associated with wine: to begin with, at school the two bottles of cowslip wine which Copperfield is sent by Peggotty which Steerforth guards "to wet your whistle when you are story-telling"; and at the end, the ship which breaks up off Yarmouth, in which Steerforth drowns, and which is "laden with fruit and wine" from Spain or Portugal.

Wine, which both entices and endangers, is a metaphor for the dangerous attraction which Steerforth embodies. Nor was Dickens himself proof against its charm. With the novel almost complete, he wrote to John Forster and announced that "I am within three pages of the shore; and am strangely divided." No better token of that strange division than the metaphor Dickens chose to evoke the near-completion of his novel, "within three pages of the shore", recalling as it does the circumstances of Steerforth's near-rescue from the tempestuous wreck, and therefore confessing, as it must, the muffled affinity between the novelist and his protagonist's "dangerous friend"-both Steerforth and wine.