David Copperfield

Plot summary

The story follows the life of David Copperfield from childhood to maturity. David was born in Blunderstone, Suffolk, England, six months after the death of his father. David spends his early years residing in a small house called the Rookery. His loving and childish mother, Clara Copperfield, and their kindly housekeeper, Clara Peggotty, bring him up here; they call him Davy. When he is seven years old, his mother surprises David by marrying Edward Murdstone while the boy is visiting Peggotty's family in Yarmouth. Her brother, a fisherman named Daniel Peggotty, lives in a beached barge, with his adopted niece and nephew Emily and Ham, and an elderly widow, Mrs Gummidge. "Little Em'ly" is somewhat spoiled by her fond foster father, and David is in love with her. Here he is known as “Master Copperfield.”

On his return, David discovers his mother has married and is immediately given good reason to dislike his stepfather, Murdstone, who believes exclusively in stern, harsh parenting, calling it "firmness". David has similar feelings for Murdstone's sister Jane, who moves into the house soon afterwards. Between them, they tyrannise David and his poor mother, making their lives miserable. When David falls behind in his studies, Murdstone thrashes him, and David bites his hand. In consequence, he is sent away to Salem House, a boarding school, under a ruthless headmaster named Mr Creakle. There he is befriended by two quite different older boys, James Steerforth and Tommy Traddles. He develops an impassioned admiration for Steerforth, perceiving him as someone noble, who could do great things if he would, and one who pays attention to him.

David goes home for the holidays to learn that his mother has given birth to a baby boy. Shortly after David returns to Salem House, his mother and her baby die, and David returns home immediately. Peggotty marries the local carrier, Mr Barkis. Murdstone sends David to work for a wine merchant in London – a business of which Murdstone is a joint owner. After some months, David's friendly but spendthrift landlord, Wilkins Micawber, is arrested for debt and sent to the King's Bench Prison, and the rest of Mr. Micawber's family soon moves to the Prison too. David visits the Micawbers regularly at the Prison and boards nearby. When Micawber's release is imminent, the Micawbers decide they will soon move to Plymouth. David realises that will leave him alone in London, where no one cares about him. He makes up his mind to run away to Dover to find his only known remaining relative, his eccentric and kind-hearted great-aunt Betsey Trotwood. She had come to Blunderstone at his birth, only to depart in ire upon learning that he was not a girl. However, she takes it upon herself to raise David, despite Murdstone's attempt to regain custody of him. She encourages him to 'be as like his sister, 'Betsey Trotwood' as he can be – that is, to meet the expectations she had for the girl who was never born. David's great-aunt renames him "Trotwood Copperfield" and addresses him as "Trot", one of several names others call David in the novel.

Characters

David Copperfield – The narrator and protagonist of the novel. David's father, David Sr, dies six months before he is born, and he is raised by his mother and nursemaid Peggotty until his mother remarries. David's stepfather, Mr Murdstone, sends David away to a boarding school. While attending school, David learns his mother has died, on his ninth birthday. He is sent to work at a factory until he runs away to find his aunt. David Copperfield is characterised in the book as trusting, goal-oriented, but as yet immature. He marries Dora Spenlow and later Agnes Wickfield.

Clara Copperfield – David's affectionate and beautiful mother, described as being innocently childish. She is married to David Copperfield Sr until his death, and gives birth six months later to the central character of the novel. She loves and coddles young David with the help of Peggotty. Years later she remarries, to Mr Murdstone. She dies a couple of months after the birth of her second son, who dies a day or so later, while David is away at Salem House boarding school.

Clara Peggotty – The faithful servant of the Copperfield family and a lifelong companion to David – she is called by her surname Peggotty within David's family, as her given name is Clara, the same as David's mother; she is also referred to at times as Barkis after her marriage to Mr Barkis. After her husband's death, Peggotty helps to put in order David's rooms in London and then returns to Yarmouth to keep house for her nephew, Ham Peggotty. Following Ham's death, she keeps house for David's great-aunt, Betsey Trotwood.

Betsey Trotwood – David's eccentric and temperamental yet kind-hearted great-aunt; she becomes his guardian after he runs away from the Murdstone and Grinby warehouse in Blackfriars, London. She is present on the night of David's birth but leaves after hearing that Clara Copperfield's child is a boy instead of a girl, and is not seen again until David flees to her house in Dover from London. She is portrayed as affectionate towards David, and defends him and his late mother when Mr Murdstone arrives to take custody of David: she confronts the man and rebukes him for his abuse of David and his mother, then threatens him and drives him off the premises. Universally believed to be a widow, she conceals the existence of her ne'er-do-well husband who occasionally bleeds her for money.

Dr Edward Chillip – A shy doctor who assists at David's birth and faces the wrath and anger of Betsey Trotwood after he informs her that Clara's baby is a boy instead of the girl Betsey wanted. David meets this doctor each time he returns to the neighbourhood of his birth. Mr Chillip, met in London when David Copperfield returns from Switzerland, tells David of the fate of Murdstone's second wife, which is much the same as the fate of David's mother.

Autobiographical novel

Fragments of autobiography

Between 1845 and 1848, Dickens wrote fragments of autobiography, excerpts of which he showed to his wife and John Forster. Then in 1855 he made an attempt at revising it. This was a failure because, as he tells his first love Maria Beadnell (now Mrs Winter), when he began dealing with his youthful love for her, "I lost courage and burned the rest". Paul Schlicke points out that in fact not all the pages have gone through the flames and that, as Dickens began writing David Copperfield some pages were unearthed. Proof of this is found in the eleventh chapter of the novel: "I begin Life on my own Account and don't like it", where the story of Dickens's experience at the Warren Shoe Factory is told almost verbatim, with the only change, "Mr Micawber" instead of "my father". John Forster also published substantial extracts relating to this period in Dickens's biography, including a paragraph devoted to Wellington House College, which corresponds with the second stage of childhood recounted in the novel. Thus Dickens looks back on his painful past, already evoked by the martyrdom of Little Paul in Dombey and Son, though voiced by an omniscient narrator in that earlier novel. Until Forster published his biography of Dickens in 1872–1874, no one knew that Dickens had worked in a factory as a child, not even his wife, until Dickens wrote it down and gave the papers to Forster in 1847. The first generations of readers did not know this part of David Copperfield's story began like an incident in the author's life.

The autobiographical dimension

If David Copperfield has come to be Dickens's "darling", it is because it is the most autobiographical of all his novels. Some of the most painful episodes of his life are barely disguised; others appear indirectly, termed "oblique revelations" by Paul Davis. However, Dickens himself wrote to Forster that the book is not a pure autobiography, but "a very complicated weaving of truth and invention".

The most important autobiographical material concerns the months that Dickens, still a child, spent at the Warren factory, his diligence with his first love, Maria Beadnell (see Catherine Dickens and Ellen Ternan), and finally his career as a journalist and writer. As pointed out by his biographer and friend John Forster, these episodes are essentially factual: the description of forced labour to which David is subjected at Murdstone and Grinby reproduces verbatim the autobiographical fragments entrusted to his friend; David's fascination with Dora Spenlow is similar to that inspired by the capricious Maria; the major stages of his career, from his apprenticeship at Doctors' Commons to writing his first novel, via the shorthand reporting of parliamentary procedures, also follow those of its creator.

However, this material, like the other autobiographical aspects of the novel, is not systematically reproduced as such. The cruel Mr Murdstone is very different from the real James Lamert, cousin to Dickens, being the stepson of Mrs Dickens's mother's sister, who lived with the family in Chatham and Camden Town, and who had found for the young Charles the place of tagger in the shoe factory he managed for his brother-in-law George. The end of this episode looks nothing like what happens in the novel; in reality, contrary to the desire of his mother that he continue to work, it is his father who took him out of the warehouse to send him to school. Contrary to Charles's frustrated love for Maria Beadnell, who pushed him back in front of his parents' opposition, David, in the novel, marries Dora Spenlow and, with satisfaction ex post facto, writes Paul Davis, virtually "kills" the recalcitrant stepfather. Finally, David's literary career seems less agitated than that of Dickens, and his results are much less spectacular. David's natural modesty alone does not explain all these changes; Paul Davis expresses the opinion that Dickens recounts his life as he would have liked it, and along with "conscious artistry", Dickens knows how to borrow data, integrate them to his original purpose and transform them according to the novelistic necessities, so that "In the end, Copperfield is David's autobiography, not Dickens's".

Sources and context

Dickens's past

David Copperfield is the contemporary of two major memory-based works, William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1850), an autobiographical poem about the formative experiences of his youth and Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) which eulogises the memory of his friend, Arthur Hallam. There is Wordsworth's romantic questioning on the personal development of the individual and there is Tennyson's Victorian confrontation with change and doubt. According to Andrew Sanders, David Copperfield reflects both types of response, which give this novel the privileged position of representing the hinge of the century.

The memories of Dickens are, according to Paul Schlicke, remarkably transmuted into fiction. The experience Dickens lived, as the son of a brazen impenitent, is celebrated through the comic figure of Wilkins Micawber. Dickens's youthful passion for Maria Beadnell resurfaces with tenderness, in the form of David's impractical marriage with Dora Spenlow. Dickens's decision to make David a novelist emphasises how he used this book to re-invent himself as a man and artist, "The world would not take another Pickwick from me, but we can be cheerful and merry, and with a little more purpose in us". If the preoccupation with the adventures of a hero, associated with a parade of comic or grotesque characters, looks back to Dickens's earlier novels, the interest in personal development, the pessimistic atmosphere and the complex structure of Copperfield foreshadow other novels.

Despite never living there, Dickens knew the City of Canterbury well and includes numerous references to it. David Copperfield regularly visits the cathedral services at Canterbury Cathedral, and Mr Micawber wants his son to become a chorister. The Guildhall is mentioned when David Copperfield is asked by the barrister to visit. Dr Strong and Annie Markleham get married at St Alphege church, which is also situated prominently in Canterbury.

Contemporaneous novels

In 1847, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë's first-person narrative, was acclaimed as soon as it was published. Unlike Thackeray, who adored it, Dickens claims years later never to have read it. True or false, he had encountered Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, a novel that called for understanding and sympathy in a class-eaten society. Thackeray's Pendennis was serialised at the same time as David Copperfield and it depicts its hero's personal and social journey from the countryside to the city. A rivalry existed between the two writers, though it preoccupied Thackeray more than Dickens. The most direct literary influence is "obviously Carlyle" who, in a lecture given in 1840, the year of his meeting with Dickens, on "On Heroes, Hero-Worship" and "the Heroic in History", claims that the most important modern character is "the hero as a man of letters". This is David's destiny, through experience, perseverance and seriousness.

Development of the novel

First inspirations

On 7 January 1849, Dickens visited Norwich and Yarmouth in Norfolk, with two close friends, John Leech (1817–1864) and Mark Lemon (1809–1870). Leech was an illustrator at Punch, a satirical magazine, and the first illustrator for A Christmas Carol by Dickens in 1843. Lemon was a founding editor of Punch, and soon a contributor to Household Words, the weekly magazine Dickens was starting up; he co-authored Mr Nightingale's Diary, a farce, with Dickens in 1851. The two towns, especially the second, became important in the novel, and Dickens informed Forster that Yarmouth seemed to him to be "the strangest place in the world" and that he would "certainly try my hand at it". During a walk in the vicinity of Yarmouth, Dickens noticed a sign indicating the small locality of Blundeston, which became in his novel the village of "Blunderstone" where David is born and spends his childhood.

A week after his arrival in Yarmouth, his sixth son, Henry Fielding Dickens, was born. The boy was named after Henry Fielding, his favourite past author. Per Forster, Dickens refers to Fielding "as a kind of homage to the novel he was about to write".

As always with Dickens, when a writing project began, he was agitated, melancholic, "even deeper than the customary birth pangs of other novels"; as always, he hesitated about the title, and his working notes contain seventeen variants, "Charles Copperfield" included. After several attempts, he stopped on "The Copperfield Survey of the World as it Rolled", a title that he retained until 19 April. When Forster pointed out that his hero, now called David, has his own initials transposed, Dickens was intrigued and declared that this was a manifestation of his fate. He was not yet sure of his pen: "Though I know what I want to do, I am lumbering like a train wagon", he told Forster.

No general plan, but an inspired novel

Contrary to the method previously used for Dombey and Son, Dickens did not elaborate an overall plan and often wrote the summary of a chapter after completing it. Four character names were found at the last moment: Traddles, Barkis, Creakle and Steerforth; the profession of David remains uncertain until the eighth issue (printed in December 1849, containing Chapters 22–24, in which David chooses to be trained as a proctor); and Paul Schlicke notes that the future of Dora was still not determined on 17 May 1850 (when 37 chapters had been published in the first 12 monthly instalments). Other major aspects of the novel, however, were immediately fixed, such as David's meeting with Aunt Betsey, Emily's fall or Agnes's role as the "real" heroine of the story.

Once launched, Dickens becomes "quite confident". The most difficult thing was to insert "what I know so well", his experience at the Warren factory; once the threads were woven, however, the truth mixed with fiction, he exulted and congratulated himself in a letter to Forster. From now on, he wrote in this letter, the story "bore him irresistibly along". Never, it seems, was he in the grip of failures of inspiration, so "ardent [is his] sympathy with the creatures of the fancy which always made real to him their sufferings or sorrows."

Changes in detail occur during the composition: on 22 August 1849, while staying on the Isle of Wight for a family vacation, he changed on the advice of Forster, the theme of the obsession of Mr Dick, a secondary character in the novel. This theme was originally "a bull in a china shop" and became "King Charles's head" in a nod to the bicentenary of the execution of Charles I of England.

Last incidents in the writing

Although plunged into the writing of his novel, Dickens set out to create a new journal, Household Words, the first issue of which appeared on 31 March 1850. This daunting task, however, did not seem to slow down the writing of David Copperfield: I am "busy as a bee", he writes happily to the actor William Macready.

A serious incident occurred in December: Mrs Jane Seymour Hill, chiropractor to Mrs Dickens, raised the threat of prosecution, because she recognised herself in the portrait of Miss Mowcher; Dickens did not do badly, gradually modifying the psychology of the character by making her less of a caricature and, at the very end of the novel, by making her a friend of the protagonist, whereas at the beginning she served rather contrary purposes. This was, writes Harry Stone, "the only major departure from his original plans".

His third daughter was born on 16 August 1850, called Dora Annie Dickens, the same name as his character's first wife. The baby died nine months later after the last serial was issued and the book was published.

Dickens marked the end of his manuscript on 21 October 1850 and felt both torn and happy like every time he finished a novel: "Oh, my dear Forster, if I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel to-night, how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World."

At first glance, the work is modelled in the loose and somewhat disjointed way of "personal histories" that was very popular in the United Kingdom of the 18th century; but in reality, David Copperfield is a carefully structured and unified novel. It begins, like other novels by Dickens, with a rather bleak painting of the conditions of childhood in Victorian England, notoriously when the troublesome children are parked in infamous boarding schools, then he strives to trace the slow social and intimate ascent of a young man who, painfully providing for the needs of his good aunt while continuing his studies, ends up becoming a writer: the story, writes Paul Davis, of "a Victorian everyman seeking self-understanding".

Publication in monthly instalments

"The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery" was published from 1 May 1849 to 1 November 1850 in 19 monthly one-shilling instalments, containing 32 pages of text and two illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"), with a title cover simplified to The Personal History of David Copperfield. The last instalment was a double-number.

On the other side of the Atlantic, John Wiley & Sons and G. P. Putnam published a monthly edition, then a two-volume book version.

I – May 1849 (chapters 1–3);

II – June 1849 (chapters 4–6);

III – July 1849 (chapters 7–9);

IV – August 1849 (chapters 10–12);

V – September 1849 (chapters 13–15);

VI – October 1849 (chapters 16–18);

VII – November 1849 (chapters 19–21);

VIII – December 1849 (chapters 22–24);

IX – January 1850 (chapters 25–27);

X – February 1850 (chapters 28–31);

XI – March 1850 (chapters 32–34);

XII – April 1850 (chapters 35–37);

XIII – May 1850 (chapters 38–40);

XIV – June 1850 (chapters 41–43);

XV – July 1850 (chapters 44–46);

Point of view

Whatever the borrowings from Dickens's own life, the reader knows as an essential precondition, that David Copperfield is a novel and not an autobiography; a work with fictional events and characters – including the hero-narrator – who are creations of Dickens's imagination.

First person narrator

The use of the first person determines the point of view: the narrator Copperfield, is a recognised writer, married to Agnes for more than ten years, who has decided to speak in public about his past life. This recreation, in itself an important act, can only be partial and also biased, since, a priori, Copperfield is the only viewpoint and the only voice; not enjoying the prerogatives of the third person, omnipotence, ubiquity, clairvoyance, he relates only what he witnessed or participated in: all the characters appear in his presence or, failing that, he learns through hearsay, before being subjected to his pen through the prism of his conscience, deformed by the natural deficit of his perception and accentuated by the selective filter of memory. Story teller and teacher, Copperfield does not let the facts speak for themselves, but constantly asserts himself as master of the narrative game, and he intervenes, explains, interprets and comments. His point of view is that of the adult he has become, as he expresses himself just as he is writing. At the end of his book, he feels a writer's pride to evoke "the thread[s] in the web I have spun".

Gareth Cordery writes that "if David Copperfield is the paradigmatic Bildungsroman, it is also the quintessential novel of memory" and as such, according to Angus Wilson, the equal of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu). The memory of the hero engages so intensely with his memories that the past seems present:

How well I recollect the kind of day it was! I smell the fog that hung about the place; I see the hoar-frost, ghostly, through it; I feel my rimy hair fall clammy on my cheek; I look along the dim perspective of the schoolroom, with a sputtering candle here and there to light up the foggy morning, and the breath of the boys wreathing and smoking in the raw cold as they blow upon their fingers, and rap their feet upon the floor.

In such passages, which punctuate the retrospective chapters, the relived moment replaces the lived, the historical present seals the collapse of the original experience and the recreation of a here and now that seizes the entire field of consciousness. Sometimes this resurrected experience is more vivid than reality; so, in Chapter 41, about Traddles's face, he says: "His honest face, he looked at me with a serio-comic shake of his head impresses me more in the remembrance than it did in the reality." These are "sacred moments", writes Gareth Cordery, which Copperfield has carefully guarded in "the treasure chambers" of his memory, where sings "the music of time": "secret prose, that sense of a mind speaking to itself with no one there to listen".

Commentary via the illustrations

Without being Dickens, this narrator, Copperfield, is very like him and often becomes his spokesperson. It adds to his point of view, directly or indirectly, that of the author, without there necessarily being total match between the two. As such, Copperfield serves as "medium", mirror and also screen, Dickens sometimes subverting his speech to get to the forefront or, on the contrary, hide behind this elegant delegate to the nimble pen. Dickens's voice, however, is in general well concealed and, according to Gareth Cordery, the most difficult to detect because mostly present by implication. To help hear his voice, he adds, it is advisable to turn to Phiz, whose illustrations bring a point of view which is not always in agreement with that of Copperfield. For example, in chapter 21, the two friends arrive by surprise at the Peggotty home, and Copperfield presents Steerforth to Emily at the very moment when her betrothal with Ham has just been announced. This sudden intrusion stops the girl as she has just jumped from Ham's arms to nestle in those of Mr Peggotty, a sign, says Cordery in passing, that the promise of marriage is as much for the uncle as for the nephew. The text remains brief but Phiz interprets, anticipates the events, denounces even the future guilt of Copperfield: all eyes are on the girl, her bonnet, emblem of her social aspirations and her next wanderings with Steerforth, is ready to be seized. Copperfield, dressed as a gentleman, stands in the doorway, one finger pointing at Steerforth who is taller by one head, the other measuring the gap between Ham and Dan Peggotty, as if offering Emily to his friend. Emily, meanwhile, still has her head turned to Ham but the body is withdrawn and the look has become both challenging and provocative. Phiz brings together in a single image a whole bunch of unwritten information, which Dickens approved and probably even suggested.

Reader's insight

A third perspective is the point of view of the discerning reader who, although generally carried away by sympathy for the narrator's self-interested pleading, does not remain blissfully ignorant and ends up recognizing the faults of the man and of the writer, just as the reader also learns to identify and gauge the covert interventions of the author.

The discerning reader listens to the adult Copperfield and hears what this adult wants or does not want them to hear. "Even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine", (chapter 42) the book exists, and the reader becomes ipso facto a "father-confessor", knowing how to judge and even, at times, to doubt the sincerity of the emotion expressed. So, when Dora dies, the reader sees that the topic of grief is dropped in a hurry, as if Copperfield had more important things to do than to indulge in sorrow: "this is not the time at which I am to enter a state of mind beneath its load of sorrow", which creates a question and an embarrassment: is Copperfield protecting himself from his confusion, or does he shed some crocodile tears for form?

Copperfield also examines some of his most culpable weaknesses, such as unconscious connivance (his "own unconscious part") in the defilement of the Peggotty home by Steerforth, which he remains forever incapable of opposing: "I believe that if I had been brought face to face with him, I could not have uttered one reproach."(chapter 32) The same treatment is given to his childhood love, his so much idealised Emily, who, once "fallen", is expelled from his consciousness to the point where his last comment, when he stealthily sees her aboard the ship leaving for Australia, is "a masterpiece of narrative duplicity": far from seeing in her what she has become, a real woman, he takes refuge behind the image of a pathetic religious icon elegantly allowing him to remove his own guilt for betraying her.

These underground currents are thus revealed in David's psychological struggle, Gareth Cordery concludes, currents that his narrative unconsciously attempts to disguise.

Recapitulation of plot structure

The plot line

The story is a road from which different paths leave. The road is that of David's life, the main plot; the branches are born of meetings with him and lead to several secondary intrigues taken more or less far along. Each is represented by an important figure: Mr Micawber, Steerforth, little Emily, Uriah Heep; there are side stories, that of Martha Endell, Rosa Dartle, and, along the main road, stretch some parallel paths on which the reader is from time to time invited: the Traddles, Betsey Trotwood, the Peggotty family, Dan and Ham in particular, Peggotty herself remaining from start to finish intimately related to David. The different tracks do not move away from the main avenue, and when they do, a narrative "forceps" brings them together again. Hence the retrospective chapters and the ultimate recapitulation were written.

The necessary summaries

The narrative is linear in appearance, as is usual in traditional first-person form. It covers the narrator's life until the day he decides to put an end to his literary endeavor. However, whole sections of his life are summarised in a few paragraphs, or sometimes just a sentence or two, indicating that three or ten years have passed, or that Dora is dead, necessary to keep the story moving along. Thus, the long stay of reflection in Switzerland which leads to the recognition of love for Agnes, or the lapse of time before the final chapter, are all blanks in the story. Besides the hero, this story concerns important secondary characters such as Mr Micawber or Uriah Heep, or Betsey Trotwood and Traddles, the few facts necessary for a believable story are parsimoniously distilled in the final chapters: an impromptu visit to a prison, the unexpected return of Dan Peggotty from the Antipodes; so many false surprises for the narrator who needs them to complete each person's personal story. As such, the epilogue that represents the last chapter (Ch 64) is a model of the genre, a systematic review, presumably inspired by his memory, without true connection. There is the desire to finish with each one, with forced exclamations and ecstatic observations, scrolling through the lives of those who are frozen in time: Dick with his "Memorial" and his kite, Dr Strong and his dictionary, and as a bonus, the news of David's "least child", which implies that there have been other children between him and eldest child Agnes of whom the reader has never heard by name. So also goes the story of Dan Peggotty relating the sad tale of his niece. The four chapters called "Retrospect" (Chapter 18: "A Retrospect", Chapter 43: "Another Retrospect", Chapter 53: "Another Retrospect" and Chapter 64: "A Last Retrospect") are placed at strategic moments of the general discourse, which play a catch-up role more than one of meditation by the narrator, without venturing into event details. Here, the narration has disappeared, it has given way to a list, an enumeration of events.

Restructuring a posteriori

Dickens's approach, as shown in David Copperfield, does not escape what Georges Gusdorf calls "the original sin of autobiography", that is to say a restructuring a posteriori and in this, paradoxically, it demonstrates its authenticity. It consists of splitting one's life into parts, choosing decisive phases, identifying an evolution and endowing them with a direction and then a meaning, whereas, from day to day, existence has been lived as a cluster of shapeless perceptions requiring an immediate adaptation, that captures at best in the novel the use of the historical present generally adopted by Dickens. It is a succession of autonomous moments which do not end up amalgamating in a coherent whole and that connect the tenuous thread of the "I" recognizing each other. In this reconstruction, one part of truth and the other of poetry, the famous Dichtung und Wahrheit (From my Life: Poetry and Truth; 1811–1833), autobiography of Goethe, there is the obligatory absence of objectivity, the promotion of oblivion as an integral part of memory, the ruling power of the subjectivity of time found.

Thus, to use Georges Gusdorf's words again, David Copperfield appears as a "second reading of a man's experience", in this case, Charles Dickens, when he reached the fullness of his career, tried to give "a meaning to his legend".

Themes

This novel's main theme arises from the fact that it is a bildungsroman, a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood, which is common in Dickens's novels, and in which character change is extremely important. The changes involve David leaving past selves behind on the way to maturity. Other important themes relate especially to Dickens's social concerns, and his desire for reform. This includes the plight of so-called "fallen women", and prostitutes, as well as the attitude of middle-class society to these women; the status of women in marriage; the rigid class structure; the prison system; educational standards, and emigration to the colonies of what was becoming the British Empire. The latter was a way for individuals to escape some of the rigidity of British society and start anew. Some of these subjects are directly satirized, while others are worked into the novel in more complex ways by Dickens.

Bildungsroman

Copperfield's path to maturity is marked by the different names assigned to him: his mother calls him "Davy"; Murdstone calls him as "Brooks of Sheffield"; for Peggotty's family, he is "Mas'r Davy"; en route to boarding school from Yarmouth, he appears as "Master Murdstone"; at Murdstone and Grinby, he is known as "Master Copperfield"; Mr Micawber is content with "Copperfield"; for Steerforth he is "Daisy"; he becomes "Mister Copperfield" with Uriah Heep; and "Trotwood", soon shortened to "Trot" for Aunt Betsey; Mrs Crupp deforms his name into "Mr Copperfull"; and for Dora he is "Doady". While striving to earn his real name once and for all, this plethora of names reflects the fluidity of Copperfield's personal and social relationships, and obscure his real identity. It is by writing his own story, and giving him his name in the title, that Copperfield can finally assert who he is.

David's life can be seen as a series of lives, each one in radical disjunction from what follows, writes Paul Davis. The young boy in the warehouse differs from Blunderstone Rookery's child, or Salem House student, and overall David strives to keep these parts of himself disconnected from each other. For example, in Chapter 17, while attending Canterbury School, he met Mr Micawber at Uriah Heep's, and a sudden terror gripped him that Heep could connect him, such as he is today, and the abandoned child who lodged with the Micawber family in London.

So many mutations indicate the name changes, which are sometimes received with relief: "Trotwood Copperfield", when he finds refuge in Dover at his Aunt Betsey's house, so the narrator writes, "Thus I began my new life, in a new name, and with everything new about me." Then, he realised "that a remoteness had come upon the old Blunderstone life" and "that a curtain had for ever fallen on my life at Murdstone and Grinby's".

There is a process of forgetfulness, a survival strategy developed by memory, which poses a major challenge to the narrator; his art, in fact, depends on the ultimate reconciliation of differences in order to free and preserve the unified identity of his being a man.

David opens his story with a question: Will I be the hero of my own life? This means that he does not know where his approach will lead him, that writing itself will be the test. As Paul Davis puts it, "In this Victorian quest narrative, the pen might be lighter than the sword, and the reader will be left to judge those qualities of the man and the writer that constitute heroism.

Social questions

Admittedly, it is not the primary interest of David Copperfield that remains above all the story of a life told by the very one who lived it, but the novel is imbued with a dominant ideology, that of the middle class, advocating moral constancy, hard work, separate spheres for men and women, and, in general, the art of knowing one's place, indeed staying in that place. Further, some social problems and repeated abuses being topical, Dickens took the opportunity to expose them in his own way in his fiction, and Trevor Blount, in his introduction to the 1966 edition Penguin Classics, reissued in 1985, devotes several pages to this topic.

However, Gareth Cordery shows that behind the display of Victorian values, often hides a watermarked discourse that tends to question, test, and even subvert them. There are therefore two possible readings, the one that remains on the surface and another that questions below this surface, the implicit questions.

Among the social issues that David Copperfield is concerned with, are prostitution, the prison system, education, as well as society's treatment of the insane.

Dickens's views on education are reflected in the contrast he makes between the harsh treatment that David receives at the hands of Creakle at Salem House and Dr Strong's school where the methods used inculcate honour and self–reliance in its pupils.

Through the character of "the amiable, innocent, and wise fool" Mr Dick, Dickens's "advocacy in the humane treatment of the insane" can be seen. Mr Dick's brother

didn't like to have him visible about his house, and sent him away to some private asylum-place: though he had been left to his particular care by their deceased father, who thought him almost a natural. And a wise man he must have been to think so! Mad himself, no doubt.

So Betsey Trotwood, continuing Mr Dick's story in Chapter 14, stepped in to suggest that Mr Dick should be given "his little income, and come and live with" her: "I am ready to take care of him, and shall not ill-treat him as some people (besides the asylum-folks) have done."

Dickens's way of writing

Dickens's approach to the novel is influenced by various literary genres, including the picaresque novel tradition, melodrama, and the novel of sensibility. Satire and irony are central to the picaresque novel. Comedy is also an aspect of the British picaresque novel tradition of Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett. Fielding's Tom Jones was a major influence on the nineteenth century novel including Dickens, who read it in his youth, and named a son Henry Fielding Dickens in his honour. Melodrama is typically sensational and designed to appeal strongly to the emotions.

Trevor Blount comments on the fascination that Dickens has always exercised on the public. He mentions the lavishness, energy, vividness, brilliance, and tenderness of Dickens's writing, along with the range of his imagination. Blount also refers to Dickens's humour, and his use of the macabre and of pathos. Finally, Blount celebrates the artistic mastery of an overflowing spontaneity, which is conveyed with both delicacy and subtlety. What Blount admires, in the first place, is the vigour with which the characters "rise" from the page and create a "phantasmagorical" universe, which is seen by the reader with the intensity of an hallucination. This is best illustrated in many of Dickens's works, by the powerful figure of a weak individual. In David Copperfield Mr Wilkins Micawber is such a figure, someone who is formidably incompetent, grandiose in his irreducible optimism, sumptuous in his verbal virtuosity, and whose grandiloquent tenderness is irresistibly comical. Micawber has been described as "With the one exception of Falstaff, ... the greatest comic figure in English literature".

In this novel, one characteristic noted by Edgar Johnson is that Dickens, in the first part, "makes the reader see with the eyes of a child", an innovative technique for the time, first tried in Dombey and Son with an omniscient narrator, and carried here to perfection through the use of the 'I'.

Modernist novelist Virginia Woolf writes, that when we read Dickens "we remodel our psychological geography ... [as he produces] characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks".

Satire and pathos

The very principle of satire is to question, and to tear off the masks, so as to reveal the raw reality under the varnish. Dickens uses the whole arsenal of literary tools that are available to the satirist, or rather supplied by his narrator, David, who even directs satire upon himself. These tools include irony, humour, and caricature. How it is employed relates to the characters' differing personalities. Satire is thus gentler towards some characters than others; toward David the hero-narrator, it is at once indulgent and transparent.

There are several different types of character: On the one hand, there are the good ones, Peggotty, Dr Strong, Traddles, Agnes etc., on the other hand, there are the bad ones, Murdstone, Steerforth, Uriah Heep, etc. A third category are characters who change over time, including Betsey Trotwood, who at first is more obstinate than nasty, it is true, and Martha Endell, and Creakle, etc. There is also a contrast drawn between ever-frozen personalities such as Micawber, Dora, Rosa Dartle, and those who evolve. The latter includes David, Mr Mell, Miss Mowcher. There is also a contrast drawn between the idiosyncrasies of Mr Dick, Barkis, Mrs Gummidge, and the subtle metamorphosis from innocence to maturity of characters like David, Traddles, Agnes.

Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers, and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical impetus" to a novel's meanings. The name Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions to "murder" and stony coldness; Strong is definitely not "strong"; Creakle "squeaks and grinds". There can also be a visual dimension to Dickens's humour. This includes Micawber's rotundity, his wife's dried-up body, which forever offers a sterile breast, Betsey's steadfast stiffness, Mr Sharp's bowed head, Daniel Peggotty's stubborn rudeness, Clara Copperfield's delicate silhouette, and Dora's mischievous air. Then there are exaggerated attitudes that are constantly repeated. Dickens creates humour out of character traits, such as Mr Dick's kite flying, James Steerforth's insistent charm, Uriah Heep's obsequiousness, Betsey pounding David's room. There are in addition the employment of repetitive verbal phrases: "umble" of the same Heep, the "willin" of Barkis, the "lone lorn creetur" of Mrs Gummidge. Dickens also uses objects for a humorous purpose, like Traddles's skeletons, the secret box of Barkis, the image of Heep as a snake, and the metallic rigidity of Murdstone.

Theatricality

Dickens went to the theatre regularly from an early age and even considered becoming an actor in 1832. "Many of the plays that he saw on the London stage in the 1820s and 1830s were melodramas". There is a visual, theatrical—even cinematic—element in some scenes in David Copperfield. The cry of Martha at the edge of the river belongs to the purest Victorian melodrama, as does the confrontation between Mr Peggotty and Mrs Steerforth, in chapter 32:

I justify nothing, I make no counter-accusations. But I am sorry to repeat, it is impossible. Such a marriage would irretrievably blight my son's career, and ruin his prospects. Nothing is more certain than that, it never can take place, and never will. If there is any other compensation.

Such language, according to Trevor Blount, is meant to be said aloud. Many other scenes employ the same method: Micawber crossing the threshold, Heep harassing David in Chapter 17, the chilling apparition of Littimer in the middle of David's party in Chapter 27. The climax of this splendid series of scenes is the storm off Yarmouth, which is an epilogue to the menacing references to the sea previously, which shows Dickens's most intense virtuosity (chapter 55).

Dickens made the following comment in 1858: "Every good actor plays direct to every good author, and every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage".

Setting

Setting is a major aspect of Dickens's "narrative artistry and of his methods of characterization", so that "the most memorable quality of his novels may well be their atmospheric density [... of the] descriptive writing".

In David Copperfield setting is less urban, more rustic than in other novels, and especially maritime. Besides Peggotty, who is a seaman whose home is an overturned hull, Mr Micawber goes to the naval port of Plymouth on the south coast after prison and appears finally on board a steamer. David himself is connected to Yarmouth, and Aunt Betsey settled in the Channel port of Dover. Young David notices the sea on his first day at her home; "the air from the sea came blowing in again, mixed with the perfume of the flowers". The city, London, is especially the place of misfortune, where the dark warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby are found. The philosopher Alain (pseudonym of Émile-Auguste Chartier) comments as follows about Dickens's portrayal of London (but it might also be applied to other locations), as cited by Lançon:

The Dickensian atmosphere, unlike any other, comes from the way the distinctive nature of a dwelling is linked to the personality of its inhabitant [...] [There is there] a look that creates a sense of reality, with the remarkable connection between buildings and characters.

Symbolism

Important symbols include, imprisonment, the sea, flowers, animals, dreams, and Mr Dick's kite. According to Henri Suhamy, "Dickens's symbolism consists in giving significance to physical details ... The constant repetition of these details ... contributes to deepen their emblematic significance". This may include the characters, aspects of the story, and, more prominently amongst the motifs, places or objects.

Separating realism and symbolism can be tricky, especially, for example, when it relates, to the subject of imprisonment, which is both a very real place of confinement for the Micawber family, and, more generally throughout David Copperfield, symbolic of the damage inflicted on a sick society, trapped in its inability to adapt or compromise, with many individuals walled within themselves.

The imponderable power of the sea is almost always associated with death: it took Emily's father; will take Ham and Steerforth, and in general is tied to David's "unrest" associated with his Yarmouth experiences. In the end nothing remains but Steerforth's body cast-up as "flotsam and jetsam", that symbolises the moral emptiness of David's adoration. The violent storm in Yarmouth coincides with the moment when the conflicts reached a critical threshold, when it is as if angry Nature called for a final resolution; as Kearney noted, "The rest of the novel is something of an anti-climax after the storm chapter." Referring to the climactic storm scene in David Copperfield, the last in any Dickens novel, Kearney remarked that "The symbolism of sea, sky and storm is successfully integrated to achieve what amounts to a mystical dimension in the novel, and this mystical dimension is, on the whole, more acceptable than the ones found elsewhere in Dickens".

According to Daniel L Plung, four types of animal are a particularly important aspect of the way symbolism is used: song birds symbolise innocence; "lions and raptors [are] associated with the fallen but not evil"; dogs, other than Jip, are associated "with the malicious and self-interested"; while snakes and eel represent evil. A typical example of the way that animal symbolism is used is found in the following sentence: " 'the influence of the Murdstones upon me [David] was like the fascination of two snakes on a wretched young bird" '. When David describes Steerforth as "brave as a lion" this is a clue to Steerforth's moral weakness and foreshadows subsequent events.

Dialect

Dickens, in preparation for this novel, went to Norwich, Lowestoft, and Yarmouth where the Peggotty family resides, but he stayed there for only five hours, on 9 January 1849. He assured his friends, that his descriptions were based on his own memories, brief as were his local experiences. However, looking to the work of K. J. Fielding reveals that the dialect of this town was taken from a book written by a local author, Major Edward Moor published in 1823. There, Dickens found a beein (a house), fisherate (officiate), dodman (snail), clickesen (gossip), and winnicking (tears) from winnick (to cry) and so on.

Literary significance and reception

Many view this novel as Dickens's masterpiece, beginning with his friend and first biographer John Forster, who writes: "Dickens never stood so high in reputation as at the completion of Copperfield", and the author himself calls it "his favourite child". It is true, he says, that "underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life", that is, an experience of self-writing. It is therefore not surprising that the book is often placed in the category of autobiographical works. From a strictly literary point of view, however, it goes beyond this framework in the richness of its themes and the originality of its writing.

Situated in the middle of Dickens's career, it represents, according to Paul Davis, a turning point in his work, the point of separation between the novels of youth and those of maturity. In 1850, Dickens was 38 years old and had twenty more to live, which he filled with other masterpieces, often denser, sometimes darker, that addressed most of the political, social and personal issues he faced.

"The privileged child" of Dickens

Dickens welcomed the publication of his work with intense emotion, and he continued to experience this until the end of his life. When he went through a period of personal difficulty and frustration in the 1850s, he returned to David Copperfield as to a dear friend who resembled him: "Why," he wrote to Forster, "Why is it, as with poor David, a sense comes always crashing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?" When Dickens begins writing Great Expectations, which was also written in the first person, he reread David Copperfield and confided his feelings to Forster: "was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe". Criticism has not always been even-handed, though over time the high importance of this novel has been recognised.

Initial reception

Although Dickens became a Victorian celebrity his readership was mainly the middle classes, including the so-called skilled workers, according to the French critic Fabrice Bensimon, because ordinary people could not afford it. Issues I to V of the serial version reached 25,000 copies in two years, modest sales compared to 32,000 Dombey and Son and 35,000 Bleak House, but Dickens was nevertheless happy: "Everyone is cheering David on", he writes to Mrs Watson, and, according to Forster, his reputation was at the top.

The first reviews were mixed, but the great contemporaries of Dickens showed their approval: Thackeray found the novel "freshly and simply simple"; John Ruskin, in his Modern Painters, was of the opinion that the scene of the storm surpasses Turner's evocations of the sea; more soberly, Matthew Arnold declared it "rich in merits"; and, in his autobiographical book A Small Boy and Others, Henry James evokes the memory of "treasure so hoarded in the dusty chamber of youth".

Subsequent reputation

After Dickens's death, David Copperfield rose to the forefront of the writer's works, both through sales, for example, in Household Words in 1872 where sales reached 83,000, and the praise of critics. In 1871, Scottish novelist and poet Margaret Oliphant described it as "the culmination of Dickens's early comic fiction"; However, in the late nineteenth-century Dickens's critical reputation suffered a decline, though he continued to have many readers. This began when Henry James in 1865 "relegated Dickens to the second division of literature on the grounds that he could not 'see beneath the surface of things'". Then in 1872, two years after Dickens's death, George Henry Lewes wondered how to "reconcile [Dickens's] immense popularity with the 'critical contempt' which he attracted". However, Dickens was defended by the novelist George Gissing in 1898 in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. G. K. Chesterton published an important defence of Dickens in his book Charles Dickens in 1906, where he describes him as this "most English of our great writers". Dickens's literary reputation grew in the 1940s and 1950s because of essays by George Orwell and Edmund Wilson (both published in 1940), and Humphrey House's The Dickens World (1941). However, in 1948, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition, contentiously, excluded Dickens from his canon, characterising him as a "popular entertainer" without "mature standards and interests".

Dickens's reputation, however, continued to grow and K. J. Fielding (1965) and Geoffrey Thurley (1976) identify what they call David Copperfield's "centrality", and Q. D. Leavis in 1970, looked at the images he draws of marriage, of women, and of moral simplicity. In their 1970 publication Dickens the Novelist, F. R. and Q. D. Leavis called Dickens "one of the greatest of creative writers", and F. R. Leavis had changed his mind about Dickens since his 1948 work, no longer finding the popularity of the novels with readers as a barrier to their seriousness or profundity. In 1968 Sylvère Monod, after having finely analyzed the structure and style of the novel, describe it as "the triumph of the art of Dickens", which analysis was shared by Paul B. Davis. The central themes are explored by Richard Dunne in 1981, including the autobiographical dimension, the narrator-hero characterization process, memory and forgetting, and finally the privileged status of the novel in the interconnection between similar works of Dickens. Q. D. Leavis compares Copperfield to Tolstoy's War and Peace and looks at adult-child relationships in both novels. According to writer Paul B. Davis, Q. D. Leavis excels at dissecting David's relationship with Dora. Gwendolyn Needham in an essay, published in 1954, analyzes the novel as a bildungsroman, as did Jerome H. Buckley twenty years later. In 1987 Alexander Welsh devoted several chapters to show that Copperfield is the culmination of Dickens's autobiographical attempts to explore himself as a novelist in the middle of his career. Finally, J. B. Priestley was particularly interested in Mr Micawber and concludes that "With the one exception of Falstaff, he is the greatest comic figure in English literature".

Opinions of other writers

David Copperfield has pleased many writers. Charlotte Brontë, for example, commented in 1849 in a letter to the reader of her publisher: "I have read David Copperfield; it seems to me very good—admirable in some parts. You said it had affinity to Jane Eyre: it has—now and then—only what an advantage has Dickens in his varied knowledge of men and things!" Tolstoy, for his part, considered it "the best work of the best English novelist" and, according to F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, was inspired by David and Dora's love story to have Prince Andrew marry Princess Lise in War and Peace. Henry James remembered being moved to tears, while listening to the novel, hidden under a table, read aloud in the family circle. Dostoevsky enthusiastically cultivated the novel in a prison camp in Siberia. Franz Kafka wrote in his diary in 1917, that the first chapter of his novel Amerika was inspired by David Copperfield. James Joyce parodied it in Ulysses. Virginia Woolf, who was not very fond of Dickens, states that David Copperfield, along with Robinson Crusoe, Grimm's fairy tales, Scott's Waverley and Pickwick's Posthumous Papers, "are not books, but stories communicated by word of mouth in those tender years when fact and fiction merge, and thus belong to the memories and myths of life, and not to its aesthetic experience." Woolf also noted in a letter to Hugh Walpole in 1936, that she is re-reading it for the sixth time: "I'd forgotten how magnificent it is." It also seems that the novel was Sigmund Freud's favourite; and Somerset Maugham sees it as a "great" work, although his hero seems to him rather weak, unworthy even of its author, while Mr Micawber never disappoints: "The most remarkable of them is, of course, Mr Micawber. He never fails you."

Illustrations

As is the custom for a regular serialised publication for a wide audience, David Copperfield, like Dickens's earlier novels, was from the beginning a "story in pictures" whose many engravings are part of the novel and how the story is related.

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz)

Phiz drew the original, the first two illustrations associated with David Copperfield: on the wrapper for the serial publication, for which he engraved the silhouette of a baby staring at a globe, probably referring to the working title (The Copperfield Survey of the World as it Rolled), and the frontispiece (later used in the published books), and the title page. The green wrapper is shown at the top of this article. Phiz drew the images around the central baby-over-the-globe with no information on the characters who would appear in the novel. He knew only that it would be a bildungsroman. The images begin at the bottom, on the left side of the tree that has leaves on the left, and is dead on the right. A woman holds a baby on her lap. The images continue clockwise, marking events of a life, but with no reference to any specific event or specific character of the novel.

When each issue was written, Phiz then worked with Dickens on the illustrations. "In the monthly plates, Phiz would have to translate the memories of the protagonist-narrator into a third-person objective or dramatic point of view." Some of his illustrations contain details that are not in the text, but illuminate a character or situation, "forming part of [...] of what the novel is". Dickens accepted and even encouraged these additional, sometimes subtle indications, which, commenting on the event, say more than the narrator says in print. The latter intends to stay behind, just like the author who, thus, hides behind the illustrator.

Dickens was particularly scrupulous about illustrations; he scrutinised the smallest details and sometimes demanded modifications, for example to replace for a very particular episode the coat that David wears by "a little jacket". The illustration of the meeting between David and Aunt Betsey was particularly delicate, and Phiz had to do it several times, the ultimate choice being that of Dickens. Once the desired result was obtained, Dickens does not hide his satisfaction: the illustrations are "capital", he writes to Phiz, and especially that which depicts Mr Micawber in chapter 16, "uncommonly characteristic".

One puzzling mismatch between the text and accompanying illustrations is that of the Peggotty family's boat-house "cottage" on the Yarmouth sands (pictured). It is clear from the text that the author envisaged the house as an upright boat, whereas the illustrator depicted it as an upturned hull resting on the beach with holes cut for the doors and windows. Interior illustrations of the cottage also show it as a room with curved ceiling beams implying an upturned hull. Although Dickens seemed to have had the opportunity to correct this discrepancy he never did, suggesting that he was happy with the illustrator's depiction.

Other illustrators

David Copperfield was later illustrated by many artists, after the serialization, including:

Fred Barnard (1846–1896), who illustrated David Copperfield in the Household Edition by Chapman & Hall in the 1870s;

Kyd (Joseph Clayton Clarke) (1855–1937);

Harold Copping (1863–1932), who illustrated Dickens stories for children;

Frank Reynolds (1876–1953);

Jessica Willcox Smith (1863–1935) who has illustrated many abbreviated editions for children.

Charles Keeping (1924–1988) who illustrated the complete works of Dickens for the Folio Society.

Some of these works are fullsize paintings rather than illustrations included in editions of the novels. Kyd painted watercolours. Frank Reynolds provided the illustrations for a 1911 edition of David Copperfield.

Although the reputation of Dickens with literary critics went through a decline and a much later rise after he died, his popularity with readers followed a different pattern after his death. Around 1900, his novels, including David Copperfield, began an increase in popularity, and the 40-year copyrights expired for all but his latest novels, opening the door to other publishers in the UK; by 1910 all of them had expired. This created the opportunity for new illustrators in new editions of the novels, as both Fred Barnard (Household Edition) and Frank Reynolds (1911 edition of David Copperfield) provided, for example; their styles were different from that of Phiz who provided the illustrations for the first publications of the novel in 1850 and during the author's life. As the books were read by so many (one publisher, Chapman & Hall, sold 2 million copies of Dickens's works in the period 1900–1906), the characters became more popular for use outside the novels, in jigsaw puzzles and postcards. Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber were popular figures for illustrations. As World War I approached, the illustrations on postcards and the novels, abridged or full length, continued in popularity in the UK and among the soldiers and sailors abroad.

Editions of David Copperfield

First edition

1850, UK, Bradbury & Evans, publication date 14 November 1850, bound (first edition), 624 pages, 38 plates.

Like Dombey and Son, David Copperfield was not the subject of a specific contract; it followed the agreement of 1 June 1844, which was still valid. In that contract, the publishing house Bradbury and Evans received a quarter of the receipts from what Dickens wrote for the next eight years. This did not prevent the novelist from criticizing his publisher, or providing an incomplete number, just "to see exactly where I am" and for his illustrator Phiz to have "some material to work on".

The first edition was dedicated to the honourable Mr and Mrs Richard Watson, from Rockingham, Northamptonshire, aristocratic friends met on a trip to Switzerland five years earlier. Dickens wrote a brief preface in 1850 and entrusted it Forster after he finished the manuscript. It includes the promise that a new work would follow. This preface was also used for the Cheap Edition of 1859. The ultimate version of 1867, also called the Charles Dickens Edition, included another preface by Dickens saying that David Copperfield was his favourite work.

Selected later editions

Three volumes were published by Tauchnitz in 1849–50, in English, for distribution outside Great Britain in Europe. During Dickens's lifetime, many other editions were released, and many since he died. According to Paul Schlicke, the most reliable edition is the 1981 edition from Clarendon Press with an introduction and notes by Nina Burgis; it serves as a reference for later editions, including those of Collins, Penguin Books and Wordsworth Classics.

1858, UK, Chapman & Hall and Bradbury & Evans, publication date 1858, hardback, 'Library Edition', 515 pages.

1867, UK, Wordsworth Classics, Preface by the author (the "Charles Dickens edition", with his statement "But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD.")

1962 (reprinted 2006 with an afterword by Gish Jen) US, Signet Classics ISBN 0-451-53004-7. Includes passages deleted for the original monthly serial, and unrestored in subsequent editions.

1981 (reprinted 2003) UK, Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-812492-9, hardback, edited by Nina Burgis, The Clarendon Dickens, 781 pages.

1990, USA, W W Norton & Co Ltd ISBN 0-393-95828-0, publication date 31 January 1990, hardback (Jerome H. Buckley (Editor), Norton Critical Edition – contains annotations, introduction, critical essays, bibliography and other material).

Adaptations

Earliest adaptations

While it was being published, David Copperfield was the object, according to Philip Bolton's survey, of six initial dramatisations, followed by a further twenty when the public's interest was at its peak in the 1850s. The first adaptation, Born with a Caul by George Almar, was staged while the serial issues were not yet completed, with some changes from Dickens's plot, having Steerforth live and marry Emily, and inventing a character to kill Mr Murdstone. The most spectacular dramatisation, however, were those of Dickens himself. Although he waited more than ten years to prepare a version for his public readings, it soon became one of his favourite performances, especially the storm scene, which he kept for the finale, "the most sublime moment in all the readings".

Fiction

Barbara Kingsolver's 2022 novel, Demon Copperhead, closely parallels the events, characters, and moral trajectory of Dickens' novel but is set in late-twentieth-century/early-twenty-first-century Appalachia.

Radio

Favourite Story, hosted by Ronald Colman – 25 October 1947

Theater Guild on the Air – 24 December 1950 with Richard Burton, Boris Karloff, Flora Robson and Cyril Ritchard

The Personal History of David Copperfield – BBC Radio 4, 1991 – a ten-part series adapted by Betty Davies with Gary Cady as David Copperfield, Miriam Margolyes, John Moffatt, Timothy Spall and Sheila Hancock

Performed unabridged on Audible by Richard Armitage 2018

Film and TV

David Copperfield has been filmed on several occasions:

1911: David Copperfield, silent film directed by Theodore Marston

1913: David Copperfield, silent film directed by Thomas Bentley

1922: David Copperfield, silent film directed by A. W. Sandberg

1935: David Copperfield, a film directed by George Cukor, featuring W. C. Fields

1956: David Copperfield, a 13-part TV serial shown on BBC. No recordings are known to exist.

1966: David Copperfield, a 13-part TV serial. Only four of the thirteen episodes are known to exist.

1969: David Copperfield, a TV film directed by Delbert Mann

1974: David Copperfield, a 6-part TV serial directed by Joan Craft

1983: David Copperfield, an animated film by Burbank Films Australia

1986: David Copperfield, a 10-part TV serial directed by Barry Letts, shown on BBC

1993: David Copperfield, animated TV film, shown on NBC

1999: David Copperfield, a 2-part TV serial shown on BBC

2000: David Copperfield, a TV film directed by Peter Medak

2019: The Personal History of David Copperfield, a film directed by Armando Iannucci