"David Copperfield" Dickens's eighth novel, his first with a first-person narrator, published by Bradbury and Evans in twenty monthly parts (as nineteen) 1849–50. Considered by many, starting with Forster, to be his masterpiece, it was Dickens's own ‘favourite child’ among his novels (1867 Preface) and draws more directly than any other on events in his life.
Inception and Composition
Some time between 1845 and 1848—the exact date is uncertain—Dickens began to write his autobiography (see diaries and autobiographical fragment). He showed parts of it to Forster and to Catherine, but upon reaching the period of his love for Maria Beadnell he found the memories too painful and burned the manuscript (to Mrs Winter, 22 February 1855).
The preoccupation during these years with his past found outlet in the Christmas books, and a child's view of experience was integral to his presentation of Paul Dombey. Forster, who says that his relationship with Dickens was then at its most intimate, proposed that, ‘by way of change’, Dickens might attempt to write a novel in the first person, a suggestion ‘which he took at once very gravely’ (6.6).
On 7 January 1849 Dickens travelled to Norwich and Yarmouth with John Leech and Mark Lemon. He reported to Forster that Yarmouth was ‘the strangest place in the world … I shall certainly try my hand at it’ (12 January 1849), and on a walk saw a signpost for Blundeston, which he adapted to ‘Blunderstone’ for David's birthplace (to Mrs Watson, 27 August 1853).
‘As a kind of homage to the novel he was about to write’, he named his sixth son, born on 15 January, Henry Fielding, instead of his original intention, Oliver Goldsmith (Forster 6.6). By early February he was ‘revolving a new work’, which put him in ‘deepest despondency’—even deeper than the customary birth-pangs of other novels (Forster 6.6).
He had great difficulty settling on a title; seventeen variants are recorded in his notes, including the name ‘Charles Copperfield’ for his hero. On 23 February he proposed ‘Mag's Diversions’, to Forster; dissatisfied, on the 26th he sent six more options, from which he chose ‘The Copperfield Survey of the World as It Rolled’.
This remained the working title for another month (but not as late as 19 April, as Forster claims; see Patten1978, pp. 205–6), and he was ‘much startled’ when Forster pointed out that his hero's initials were his own reversed, declaring ‘that it was in keeping with the fates and chances which were always befalling him’ (Forster 6.6). At this stage he could still complain that ‘My hand is out in the matter of Copperfield. Today and yesterday I have done nothing. Though I know what I want to do, I am lumbering like a stage waggon’ (19 April 1949).
No. 1 did not fill 32 pages, and he added the account of Mrs Gummidge as a ‘lone lorn creetur’ and a passage foreshadowing Emily's seduction. Unlike Dombey, for Copperfield Dickens drew up no master plan in advance, often writing a chapter summary after the chapter itself. He made four late name changes (Traddles, Barkis, Creakle, and Steerforth —see Clarendon Introduction, p. xxix), debated about David's profession as late as November, when he had reached No. 8, and by 7 May 1850 had still not decided Dora's fate. Some things, however, were clear from an early stage: David's reunion with Aunt Betsey, Emily's fall, and Agnes's role as the ‘real’ heroine.
Once under way he was ‘quite confident’ and planning ahead (to Forster, 6 June 1849). He went for a long walk while meditating how to introduce ‘what I know so well’—based on his experience in Warren's Blacking warehouse—and once he had completed ‘a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction’ he was delighted. ‘I think I have done it ingeniously’, he told Forster (10 July 1849). ‘Once fairly in it, the story bore him irresistibly along’, Forster observed (6.6); ‘certainly with less trouble to himself in the composition, beyond that ardent sympathy with the creatures of the fancy which always made so absolutely real to him their sufferings or sorrows; and he was probably never less harassed by interruptions or breaks in his invention’.
He spent the summer in the Isle of Wight, where he fell ill briefly in August. He took Forster's advice and changed Mr Dick's obsession from a bull in a china shop to King Charles's head, topical in the bicentenary of Charles's execution (22 August 1849). Although sales were substantially lower than for Dombey, he was philosophical, and set about planning Household Words, the first number of which was published 31 March 1850 (to Forster, 22 September 1849).
Although the journal took up increasing amounts of his time, it did not interfere with the writing of his novel, as the Christmas books had with Dombey. ‘Between Copperfield and Household Words, I am busy as a bee’, he cheerfully reported to Macready (11 June 1850). In December he had an unexpected setback when Mrs Seymour Hill threatened him with legal action because Miss Mowcher bore too close a resemblance to her.
Embarrassed, Dickens placated her by changing his plans for the character, but not without loss to consistency of characterization (18 December 1849; see characters—originals). Stone (1987), praising Dickens's ‘consummate fulfillment’ of his design for Copperfield, calls the transformation of Miss Mowcher ‘the only major departure from his original plans’.
On 16 August 1850 his third and last daughter, Dora Annie, named for David's child-wife, was born. Catherine was unwell for months afterwards and Dora, always frail, died on 14 April 1851. As Dickens finished writing the book on 21 October 1850, he felt ‘strangely divided, as usual in such cases, between sorrow and joy. Oh, my dear Forster’, he confided, ‘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’. (See also composition, Dickens's methods.)
Contracts, Text, and Publication History
As with Dombey, there was no separate contract for Copperfield, only the general agreement of 1 June 1844 with Bradbury and Evans, which assigned them one-quarter share in whatever he might write for eight years. In response to a letter from the Secretary of the Newsvendors' Benevolent Association, Dickens complained about his publishers' discount policy (to Evans, 5 May 1849).
He warned Evans not to ask for copy (1 May 1849), and on several occasions asked for an incomplete number to be set up in type, so that he would know ‘exactly where I am’ and so that Browne would have material on which to base his illustrations (10 July 1849).
The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to be Published on Any Account) appeared monthly from 1 May 1849 to 1 November 1850, with the cover title shortened to The Personal History of David Copperfield on the title-page. It was dedicated to the Honourable Mr and Mrs Richard Watson.
Holograph copies of trial titles, number plans, complete manuscript, corrected proofs, a list of chapter headings, and an errata list are all held in the Forster Collection. A brief Preface, dated October 1850, stated publicly what Dickens had said to Forster, that he would leave unspoken the ‘personal confidences, and private emotions’ which the book aroused in him, and promised that another serial novel would follow. He used the same Preface for the Cheap Edition (1859) and altered it slightly for the Charles Dickens Edition (1867), adding that ‘Of all my books, I like this the best’. He made little revision for these later editions.
Tauchnitz published the novel in three volumes in 1849–50 from corrected proofs (see copyright), and the first American edition was published in monthly parts and two volumes by John Wiley and G. P. Putnam. It was reprinted widely after Dickens's death. The definitive Clarendon Edition (1981), based on the 1850 text, is edited by Nina Burgis.
Illustrations
Dickens' principal illustrator, Hablot Browne, once again had sole responsibility. He prepared the wrapper design (with a baby in the centre, surveying a globe of the world—a remnant of the original working title), two engravings per number, a frontispiece, and vignette title-page. His illustrations contain details not in the text, which throw light on characters and events, thus forming ‘part of the evidence of what the novel is’ (Steig1978).
Dickens kept a sharp eye on minutiae, asking Browne, for example, to change David's coat in the illustration of the friendly waiter to a ‘little jacket’ (9 May 1849). Browne offered several preliminary sketches for David's meeting with Aunt Betsey, first reproduced in the Clarendon Edition, letting Dickens choose his favourite. Browne was one of the guests at a dinner party at Devonshire Terrace on 12 May, and visited Dickens at Bonchurch in August (Forster 6.3, 6). Dickens found Browne's work for Copperfield ‘capital’ and the illustration of Micawber for chapter 17 ‘uncommonly characteristic’ (21 September 1849).
Sources and Context
David Copperfield appeared the same year as the two other supreme English works of memory, Wordsworth's The Prelude and Tennyson's In Memoriam. The Romantic concern with the moral and imaginative growth of the individual and the Victorian confrontation with change and doubt coalesced to make Dickens's novel ‘a key text of mid-Victorian civilization, a text in which the self-fashioned hero is redefined for a post-Romantic generation’ (Andrew Sanders, Introduction to World's Classics Edition, 1997).
Dickens's memories are intensely personal but marvellously transformed into fiction. His experience as the son of a debtor is comically celebrated in the resilience of Wilkins Micawber; his unrequited passion for Maria Beadnell is tenderly evoked in the doomed marriage of David and Dora.
The decision to make David a novelist emphasizes the extent to which Copperfield is Dickens's stocktaking as an artist. ‘The world would not take another Pickwick from me, now’, he observed when the novel was barely under way, ‘but we can be cheerful and merry I hope, notwithstanding, and with a little more purpose in us’ (to Dudley Costello, 25 April 1949).
The focus on an individual hero's adventures, on childhood, and on a parade of comic and grotesque characters all look back to earlier work, even as the concern with individual development, the strain of pessimism, and the complex structural patterning foreshadow key characteristics of the later novels.
Charlotte Brontë's intense first-person narrative, Jane Eyre, had appeared to acclaim in 1847 (although Dickens claimed years later never to have read it; see Jerome Meckier, ‘Some Household Words’, Dickensian, 71, 1975). Dickens did, however, read Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, with its concern to promote sympathy and understanding in a class-ridden society (to Rogers, 18 February 1849).
Pendennis was appearing serially at the same time as Copperfield, but the rivalry mattered less to Dickens than to Thackeray. The contemporary whose influence figures ‘far more prominently’ is Carlyle, who laughingly quoted Mrs Gummidge that ‘everything went contrairy with him’ at Dickens's dinner-party on 12 May 1849 (Forster 6.6). In his lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, delivered in 1840, the year he and Dickens met, Carlyle had defined history as the biographies of Great Men. David, having made his own way by dint of hard personal experience, earnestness, and application, is precisely that ‘most important modern person’, the Hero as Man of Letters (see Sanders, World's Classics Introduction).
Copperfield also deals with specific social concerns. Martha and Emily reflect Dickens's efforts at Urania Cottage to reclaim fallen women (see also prostitutes). Their emigration, along with the Micawbers and Mr Mell, dramatizes Dickens's belief in the possibility of starting a new life abroad (see ‘A Bundle of Emigrants' Letters’, HW30 March 1850). The depiction of Littimer and Heep in prison is generally seen as a journalistic excrescence, based on his article ‘Pet Prisoners’ (HW27 April 1850) and on Carlyle's ‘Model Prisons’ (Latter Day Pamphlets, 1 March 1850). His views on education and treatment of the insane feed into the depiction of Salem House and of Mr Dick, respectively (see madness).
Plot, Character, and Theme
David's childhood idyll with his young widowed mother and her kindly servant Peggotty is rudely interrupted when, on return from a holiday visit to Peggotty's family in Yarmouth, he discovers that his mother has remarried. His cruel stepfather, Mr Murdstone, abetted by his sister Miss Jane Murdstone, bullies Clara Copperfield into submission and terrorizes David by trying to ‘form’ his character.
When Murdstone beats him for not knowing his lesson, David bites his hand and is sent to Salem House, a school conducted by the ignorant and brutal Mr Creakle. Among his fellow-pupils are the cheerful Tommy Traddles, who draws skeletons whenever he is caned, and Steerforth, a Byronic figure who patronizes David and is worshipped in return.
David's mother dies, whereupon Peggotty marries Barkis, the carrier, and David, taken from school, is sent to work in Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse. He boards with Mr Micawber, grandiloquent and improvident, who is arrested for debt. David runs away to Betsey Trotwood, his angular but kindly aunt, who, taking advice from her simple-minded ward Mr Dick, defies the Murdstones and offers protection to David, whom she renames Trotwood. David goes to Dr Strong's school in Canterbury, where he boards with Mr Wickfield, his daughter Agnes, and his 'umble clerk Uriah Heep.
David visits Yarmouth, accompanied by Steerforth, who carries off Mr Peggotty's niece, David's childhood sweetheart, Emily. Miss Mowcher, a dwarf, whom Dickens had introduced to assist in the elopement, is changed to an honest friend. David is articled to Mr Spenlow and falls in love with his daughter, Dora. Uriah, taking advantage of Mr Wickfield's drinking, gradually insinuates himself into power, sets his eye on Agnes, and assures Dr Strong his young wife is unfaithful. David knocks him down.
After Aunt Betsey is mysteriously bankrupted, David becomes a parliamentary reporter and then a novelist. He marries Dora, whose charming childishness results in chaotic housekeeping. The fallen woman Martha helps David and Mr Peggotty find Emily, who is berated by Rosa Dartle, companion to Steerforth's mother and herself passionately in love with Steerforth. Mr Dick reconciles Dr Strong and his wife.
Mr Micawber exposes the villainy of Heep. Traddles recovers Aunt Betsey's property. Dora dies. In a great storm at Yarmouth, Ham Peggotty drowns trying unsuccessfully to rescue a sailor, whose corpse is found to be Steerforth's. The Micawbers, Mr Peggotty, Emily, and Martha emigrate to Australia. Some years later David marries Agnes.
Characters and themes in Copperfield are organized with intricate structural parallelism. The Bildungsroman teaches David to eschew the sternness of Murdstone on the one hand and the carelessness of Micawber on the other. David learns the pitfalls of an ‘undisciplined heart’, but the lesson of prudence is set against the lost joys of childhood, resulting in a prevailing tone of sadness.
Reception
Reviews of Copperfield were mixed, and monthly sales hovered around 20,000, in comparison with 32,000 for Dombey and 34,000 for Bleak House. Nevertheless, as Forster proclaimed, ‘Dickens never stood so high in reputation as at the completion of Copperfield’ (6.7). ‘Everyone is cheering David on’, Dickens told Mrs Watson (3 July 1850). ‘There seems a bright unanimity about “Copperfield” ’ (13 July 1850).
Thackeray found it ‘charmingly fresh and simple’, with ‘admirable touches of tender humour’ (Punch, 16, 1849). Ruskin thought the storm scene surpassed Turner's evocations of the sea (Modern Painters, 1843–60). Matthew Arnold described it as a work ‘rich in merits’ (Collins1971, pp. 267–9), and Henry James recalled it as ‘a treasure so hoarded in the dusty chamber of youth’ (A Small Boy and Others, 1913). Thus, even though as late as 1861 ‘only Numbers I–V had been issued in more than 25,000 copies’, its back numbers sold better than any other Dickens work; the Household Edition (1872) sold 83,000 copies, and in 1935 it led the Everyman and Collins lists (Collins1971, p. 619; Patten1978, pp. 209, 331).
It retained a special place in Dickens's affections. When he grew increasingly restless and dissatisfied in the 1850s, he asked, ‘Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing 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?’ (to Forster, 3 and ?4 February 1855). And as he began Great Expectations, he reread Copperfield ‘to be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions … and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe’ (to Forster, early October 1860).
The number of dramatizations of Dickens's work, diminishing throughout the 1840s, increased markedly with Copperfield. Philip Bolton counts six productions before serialization was complete, and twenty in ‘the first burst’ of interest (Bolton1987, p. 321). Dickens's public reading version, prepared in 1861, was, like the novel itself, Dickens's own favourite, and the storm scene, the finale of the reading, was ‘for most people who heard it … the most sublime moment in all the readings’ (Collins 1975, pp. 216–17).
One of the most distinguished film adaptations of Dickens is the 1935 MGM version, with Freddie Bartholomew as David, Edna May Oliver as Aunt Betsey, W. C. Fields as Micawber, Basil Rathbone as Murdstone, Lionel Barrymore as Dan Peggotty, and Maureen O'Sullivan as Dora.
For many critics Copperfield has been the foremost work in Dickens's career. Margaret Oliphant saw it as the culmination of Dickens's early comic fiction (Blackwood's Magazine, 109, 1871). K. J. Fielding (1965), and Geoffrey Thurley (1976), stressed its centrality, and Sylvère Monod (1968), celebrated it as the triumph of Dickens's art. Q. D. Leavis (1970) carefully explored its images of marriage, of women, and of moral simplicity.
Richard Dunn (1981) lists issues which have figured most prominently in criticism of Copperfield: fictional autobiography, the characterization of the narrating hero, the question of heroism, the treatment of minor characters, the theme of memory, and the relation of Copperfield to Dickens's other works.
PVWS
Bibliography
Gilmour, Robin, ‘Memory in David Copperfield’, Dickensian, 71 (1975).
Needham, Gwendolyn, ‘The Undisciplined Heart of David Copperfield ’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 9 (1954).
Patten, Robert L., ‘Autobiography into Autobiography: The Evolution of David Copperfield’, in George P. Landow (ed.), Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (1979).
Priestley, J. B., The English Comic Characters (1925).
How to cite this entry:
PVWS "David Copperfield" Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 4 October 2011
The focus on an individual hero's adventures, on childhood, and on a parade of comic and grotesque characters all look back to earlier work, even as the concern with individual development, the strain of pessimism, and the complex structural patterning foreshadow key characteristics of the later novels.
Charlotte Brontë's intense first-person narrative, Jane Eyre, had appeared to acclaim in 1847 (although Dickens claimed years later never to have read it; see Jerome Meckier, ‘Some Household Words’, Dickensian, 71, 1975). Dickens did, however, read Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, with its concern to promote sympathy and understanding in a class-ridden society (to Rogers, 18 February 1849).
Pendennis was appearing serially at the same time as Copperfield, but the rivalry mattered less to Dickens than to Thackeray. The contemporary whose influence figures ‘far more prominently’ is Carlyle, who laughingly quoted Mrs Gummidge that ‘everything went contrairy with him’ at Dickens's dinner-party on 12 May 1849 (Forster 6.6). In his lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, delivered in 1840, the year he and Dickens met, Carlyle had defined history as the biographies of Great Men. David, having made his own way by dint of hard personal experience, earnestness, and application, is precisely that ‘most important modern person’, the Hero as Man of Letters (see Sanders, World's Classics Introduction).
Copperfield also deals with specific social concerns. Martha and Emily reflect Dickens's efforts at Urania Cottage to reclaim fallen women (see also prostitutes). Their emigration, along with the Micawbers and Mr Mell, dramatizes Dickens's belief in the possibility of starting a new life abroad (see ‘A Bundle of Emigrants' Letters’, HW30 March 1850). The depiction of Littimer and Heep in prison is generally seen as a journalistic excrescence, based on his article ‘Pet Prisoners’ (HW27 April 1850) and on Carlyle's ‘Model Prisons’ (Latter Day Pamphlets, 1 March 1850). His views on education and treatment of the insane feed into the depiction of Salem House and of Mr Dick, respectively (see madness).
Plot, Character, and Theme
David's childhood idyll with his young widowed mother and her kindly servant Peggotty is rudely interrupted when, on return from a holiday visit to Peggotty's family in Yarmouth, he discovers that his mother has remarried. His cruel stepfather, Mr Murdstone, abetted by his sister Miss Jane Murdstone, bullies Clara Copperfield into submission and terrorizes David by trying to ‘form’ his character.
When Murdstone beats him for not knowing his lesson, David bites his hand and is sent to Salem House, a school conducted by the ignorant and brutal Mr Creakle. Among his fellow-pupils are the cheerful Tommy Traddles, who draws skeletons whenever he is caned, and Steerforth, a Byronic figure who patronizes David and is worshipped in return.
David's mother dies, whereupon Peggotty marries Barkis, the carrier, and David, taken from school, is sent to work in Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse. He boards with Mr Micawber, grandiloquent and improvident, who is arrested for debt. David runs away to Betsey Trotwood, his angular but kindly aunt, who, taking advice from her simple-minded ward Mr Dick, defies the Murdstones and offers protection to David, whom she renames Trotwood. David goes to Dr Strong's school in Canterbury, where he boards with Mr Wickfield, his daughter Agnes, and his 'umble clerk Uriah Heep.
David visits Yarmouth, accompanied by Steerforth, who carries off Mr Peggotty's niece, David's childhood sweetheart, Emily. Miss Mowcher, a dwarf, whom Dickens had introduced to assist in the elopement, is changed to an honest friend. David is articled to Mr Spenlow and falls in love with his daughter, Dora. Uriah, taking advantage of Mr Wickfield's drinking, gradually insinuates himself into power, sets his eye on Agnes, and assures Dr Strong his young wife is unfaithful. David knocks him down.
After Aunt Betsey is mysteriously bankrupted, David becomes a parliamentary reporter and then a novelist. He marries Dora, whose charming childishness results in chaotic housekeeping. The fallen woman Martha helps David and Mr Peggotty find Emily, who is berated by Rosa Dartle, companion to Steerforth's mother and herself passionately in love with Steerforth. Mr Dick reconciles Dr Strong and his wife.
Mr Micawber exposes the villainy of Heep. Traddles recovers Aunt Betsey's property. Dora dies. In a great storm at Yarmouth, Ham Peggotty drowns trying unsuccessfully to rescue a sailor, whose corpse is found to be Steerforth's. The Micawbers, Mr Peggotty, Emily, and Martha emigrate to Australia. Some years later David marries Agnes.
Characters and themes in Copperfield are organized with intricate structural parallelism. The Bildungsroman teaches David to eschew the sternness of Murdstone on the one hand and the carelessness of Micawber on the other. David learns the pitfalls of an ‘undisciplined heart’, but the lesson of prudence is set against the lost joys of childhood, resulting in a prevailing tone of sadness.
Reception
Reviews of Copperfield were mixed, and monthly sales hovered around 20,000, in comparison with 32,000 for Dombey and 34,000 for Bleak House. Nevertheless, as Forster proclaimed, ‘Dickens never stood so high in reputation as at the completion of Copperfield’ (6.7). ‘Everyone is cheering David on’, Dickens told Mrs Watson (3 July 1850). ‘There seems a bright unanimity about “Copperfield” ’ (13 July 1850).
Thackeray found it ‘charmingly fresh and simple’, with ‘admirable touches of tender humour’ (Punch, 16, 1849). Ruskin thought the storm scene surpassed Turner's evocations of the sea (Modern Painters, 1843–60). Matthew Arnold described it as a work ‘rich in merits’ (Collins1971, pp. 267–9), and Henry James recalled it as ‘a treasure so hoarded in the dusty chamber of youth’ (A Small Boy and Others, 1913). Thus, even though as late as 1861 ‘only Numbers I–V had been issued in more than 25,000 copies’, its back numbers sold better than any other Dickens work; the Household Edition (1872) sold 83,000 copies, and in 1935 it led the Everyman and Collins lists (Collins1971, p. 619; Patten1978, pp. 209, 331).
It retained a special place in Dickens's affections. When he grew increasingly restless and dissatisfied in the 1850s, he asked, ‘Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing 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?’ (to Forster, 3 and ?4 February 1855). And as he began Great Expectations, he reread Copperfield ‘to be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions … and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe’ (to Forster, early October 1860).
The number of dramatizations of Dickens's work, diminishing throughout the 1840s, increased markedly with Copperfield. Philip Bolton counts six productions before serialization was complete, and twenty in ‘the first burst’ of interest (Bolton1987, p. 321). Dickens's public reading version, prepared in 1861, was, like the novel itself, Dickens's own favourite, and the storm scene, the finale of the reading, was ‘for most people who heard it … the most sublime moment in all the readings’ (Collins 1975, pp. 216–17).
One of the most distinguished film adaptations of Dickens is the 1935 MGM version, with Freddie Bartholomew as David, Edna May Oliver as Aunt Betsey, W. C. Fields as Micawber, Basil Rathbone as Murdstone, Lionel Barrymore as Dan Peggotty, and Maureen O'Sullivan as Dora.
For many critics Copperfield has been the foremost work in Dickens's career. Margaret Oliphant saw it as the culmination of Dickens's early comic fiction (Blackwood's Magazine, 109, 1871). K. J. Fielding (1965), and Geoffrey Thurley (1976), stressed its centrality, and Sylvère Monod (1968), celebrated it as the triumph of Dickens's art. Q. D. Leavis (1970) carefully explored its images of marriage, of women, and of moral simplicity.
Richard Dunn (1981) lists issues which have figured most prominently in criticism of Copperfield: fictional autobiography, the characterization of the narrating hero, the question of heroism, the treatment of minor characters, the theme of memory, and the relation of Copperfield to Dickens's other works.
PVWS
Bibliography
Gilmour, Robin, ‘Memory in David Copperfield’, Dickensian, 71 (1975).
Needham, Gwendolyn, ‘The Undisciplined Heart of David Copperfield ’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 9 (1954).
Patten, Robert L., ‘Autobiography into Autobiography: The Evolution of David Copperfield’, in George P. Landow (ed.), Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (1979).
Priestley, J. B., The English Comic Characters (1925).
How to cite this entry:
PVWS "David Copperfield" Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 4 October 2011
