• Mr Murdstone appears to show signs of repentance when confronted by Copperfield’s aunt about his treatment of Clara and David, but when David works at Doctors’ Commons years later, he meets Murdstone taking out a marriage licence for his next young and trusting wife.

• 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 methods of parenting, calling it “firmness”.

• [18] 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.

• Later, she rejoins her brother and his second wife in a marriage much like the one with David’s mother.

• He is condescending to other social classes, a snob who unhesitatingly takes advantage of his younger friends and uses his mother’s influence, going so far as to get Mr Mell dismissed from the school because Mell’s mother lives in an almshouse.

• [16] The first generations of readers did not know this part of David Copperfield’s story began like an incident in the author’s life.

• When he is seven years old, his mother marries Edward Murdstone without having told him they plan to marry.

• He is saved by Mr Micawber, and his friends consider him to have become a better man through the experience.

• 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”.

• David has similar feelings for Murdstone’s sister Jane, who moves into the house soon afterwards.

• In their first year of marriage, David learns their differences as to keeping a house in order.

• 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”.

• Mr Peggotty takes Emily to a new life in Australia, accompanied by Mrs Gummidge and the Micawbers, where all eventually find security and happiness.

• She is married to David Copperfield Sr until his death, and gives birth six months later to the central character of the novel.

• • Julia Mills – She is a friend of Dora who supports Dora’s romance with David Copperfield; she moves to India when her father gets a new position.

• 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.

• Dr Strong’s main concern is to work on his dictionary, where, at the end of the novel, he has reached the letter D. The Doctor is 62 when David meets him, and married about a year to Annie, considerably younger than her husband.

• 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”.

• Agnes nurtures an unrequited love for David for many years but never tells him, helping and advising him through his infatuation with, and marriage to Dora.

• After David returns to England, he realises his feelings for her, and she becomes David’s second wife and mother of their children.

• [3]
  The autobiographical material
  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.

• 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 goes home for the holidays to learn that his mother has given birth to a baby boy.

• Upon returning to Britain, after a failed attempt to conceal his feelings, David finds that Agnes loves him too.

• • Agnes Wickfield – Mr Wickfield’s mature and lovely daughter and close friend of David since he began school at Dr Strong’s in Canterbury.

• With a surprising amount of delicacy, Creakle’s wife breaks the news to David that his mother has died.

• 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.

• 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.

• Much like her brother she is domineering, mean-spirited, and petty.

• He works mornings and evenings for his former teacher Dr Strong as a secretary, and also starts to learn shorthand, with the help of his old school-friend Traddles, upon completion reporting parliamentary debate for a newspaper.

• She is the “Confidential Friend” of David’s first wife, Dora Spenlow, and is the one who found David’s letters to Dora, and creates the scene between David Copperfield and Dora’s father, Mr Spenlow.

• Her uncle Mr Peggotty manages to find her with the help of Martha, who had grown up in their part of England and then settled in London.

• [19]
  Despite never living there, Dickens knew the City of Canterbury well and includes numerous references to it.

• 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.

• Unlike Thackeray, who adored it, Dickens claims years later never to have read it.

• He takes David to Salem House and is the only adult there who is kind to him.

• 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”.

• He is fond of making gigantic kites and tries to write a “Memorial” (that is, a Petition – though on what subject is never revealed) but is unable to focus and finish it.

• • 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.

• David’s aunt sends him to a better school than the last he attended.

• 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.

• After his mother dies, he sends David to work at his factory in London.

• He nurtures a deep hatred of David Copperfield and of many others, though in some ways he is a mirror to David, wanting to get ahead and to marry the boss’s daughter.

• Between them, they tyrannise David and his poor mother, making their lives miserable.

• He and David meet again later and become lifelong friends.

• David spends his early years residing in a small house called the Rookery.

• When Emily is older and runs away with David’s friend Steerforth, he travels around the world in search of her.

• 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.

• He proves to be not only a kind and loyal friend but also demonstrates a keen emotional intelligence, particularly when he helps Dr and Mrs Strong through a marriage crisis.

• She suffers a miscarriage, which begins a long illness from which she dies with David’s childhood friend and later second wife Agnes Wickfield at her side.

• • Dora Spenlow – The adorable daughter of Mr Spenlow who becomes David’s first wife after a long courtship.

• With considerable moral support from Agnes and his own great diligence and hard work, David ultimately finds fame and fortune as an author, writing fiction.

• [14] 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.

• He succeeds in making a name and a career for himself, becoming a Judge and marrying his true love, Sophy.

• 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.

• • Edward Murdstone – The main antagonist of the first half of the novel, he is Young David’s cruel stepfather who beats him for falling behind in his studies and emotionally torments Clara.

• • James Steerforth – A student at Creakle’s school who befriends young David, even as he takes over David’s money.

• They live a life that seems empty to the adult David Copperfield.

• 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.

• After Dora’s death, Agnes encourages David to return to normal life and his profession of writing.

• 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.

• David realises that will leave him alone in London, where no one cares about him.

• • Uriah Heep – The main antagonist of the novel’s second half, Heep serves first as clerk from age 11 or 12; at age 15 he meets Copperfield and a few years later becomes partner to Mr Wickfield.

• He runs his prison by the system and is portrayed with great sarcasm, as he thinks that his model inmates, Heep and Littimer, have changed their criminal ways because of his intervention.

• Shortly after David returns to Salem House, his mother and her baby die, and David returns home immediately.

• [17] Some of the most painful episodes of his life are barely disguised; others appear indirectly, termed “oblique revelations” by Paul Davis.

• [26] True or false, he had encountered Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, a novel that called for understanding and sympathy in a class-eaten society.

• They quickly marry, and in this marriage he finds true happiness.

• David reacts by biting Mr Murdstone, and is sent to Salem House – a private school owned by Mr Murdstone’s friend Mr Creakle – in retribution.

• To get him out of the way, David is sent to visit Peggotty’s family in Yarmouth.

• 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.

• News of his death, a day before Emily and Mr Peggotty’s emigration, is withheld from his family to enable them to leave without hesitation or remorse.

• • Sophy Crewler – One of a family of ten daughters, Sophy runs the household and takes care of all her sisters.

• David meets this doctor each time he returns to the neighbourhood of his birth.

• Mr Wickfield feels guilty that, through his love, he has hurt his daughter by keeping her too close to himself.

• It begins, like other novels by Dickens, with a bleak picture of childhood in Victorian England, followed by young Copperfield’s slow social ascent, as he painfully provides for his aunt, while continuing his studies.

• This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go further back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy.

• [41]
  A serious incident occurred in December: Mrs Jane Seymour Hill, chiropractor to Mrs Dickens,[42] raised the threat of prosecution, because she recognised herself in the portrait of Miss Mowcher; Dickens did not do badly,[43] 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.

• [17]
  However, question implies an affirmation: it is Copperfield, and no one else, who will determine his life, the future is delusory, since the games are already played, the life has been lived, with the novel being only the story.

• “(chapter 32)[59] 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.

• [74]
  David thus succeeds, as George Orwell puts it, in standing “both inside and outside a child’s mind”,[17] a particularly important double vision effect in the first chapters.

• Mrs Micawber has, since childhood, two songs in her repertoire, the Scottish “The dashing white sergeant”[81] and the American lament “The little Tafflin with the Silken Sash”,[82] whose attraction has decided her husband to “win that woman or perish in the attempt”[83] In addition to the melodies that soothe and embellish, the words of the second, with her dream “Should e’er the fortune be my lot to be made a wealthy bride!”

• [10]
  Dickens marked the end of his manuscript on 21 October 1850[10] 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!

• 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.

• It covers the narrator’s life until the day he decides to put an end to his literary endeavor.

• [75] So much so that the story of his childhood is realised so concretely that the narrator, like the reader, sometimes forgets that it is a lived past and not a present that is given to see.

• 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.

• [55] 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.

• 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”.

• The dictionary of Strong will never be completed and, as a story of a life, will end with the death of its author.

• Phiz brings together in a single image a whole bunch of unwritten information, which Dickens approved and probably even suggested.

• [71]
  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.”

• The paradox is that even as he gauges his infamy, David remains from start to finish dazzled by Steerforth’s aristocratic ascendancy, even as he contemplates him drowning on Yarmouth Beach, “lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him at school”.

• 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.

• 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.

• [31][32] 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”.

• [56]
  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.

• 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.

• [65]
  Thus, to use George 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”.

• So, again in chapter 2, the second and third paragraphs comment on the first memory of the two beings surrounding David, his mother, and Peggotty:
  I believe I can remember these two at a little distance apart, dwarfed to my sight by stooping or kneeling on the floor, and I going unsteadily from the one to the other.

• His first years are spent with women, two Claras,[N 8] his mother and Peggotty, which, according to Paul Davis, “undermines his sense of masculinity”.

• 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.

• Hence, concludes Paul Davis, the need to read his life differently; it is more by refraction through other characters that the reader has a true idea of the “hero” of the story.

• This means that he does not know where his approach will lead him, that writing itself will be the test.

• [64] 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.

• 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.

• However, his failure as a model is announced well before the episode at Yarmouth where he seizes, like a thief, Little Emily before causing her loss in Italy.

• 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”,[58] which creates a question and an embarrassment: is Copperfield protecting himself from his confusion, or does he shed some crocodile tears for form?

• [70]
  A series of lives
  David’s life can be seen as a series of lives, each one in radical disjunction from what follows, writes Paul Davis.

• According to Paul Davis, only Copperfield succeeds in constructing a whole of his life, including suffering and failure, as well as successes, and that is “one measure of his heroism as a writer”.

• [71]
  The weight of the past
  The past “speaks” especially to David, “a child of close observation” (chapter 2); the title of this chapter is: “I observe”,[74] and as an adult he is endowed with a remarkable memory.

• 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.

• [17] In the second chapter for example, when David spends a day with Mr Murdstone, during the first episode of “Brooks of Sheffield”[N 7][76][77] in which, first blow to his confidence, he realises little by little that Mr Murdstone and his comrade Quinion are mocking him badly:
  ‘That’s Davy,’ returned Mr Murdstone.

• Four character names were found at the last moment: Traddles, Barkis, Creakle and Steerforth;[37] 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).

• [N 3][10]
  Last incidents in the writing
  Although plunged into the writing of his novel, Dickens set out to create a new journal, Household Words,[40] the first issue of which appeared on 31 March 1850.

• Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.

• “[34]
  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.

• [50] 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!

• 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 latter was a way for individuals to escape some of the rigidity of British society and start anew.

• [71] 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.

• 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.

• Overflowing with imagination and love, in every way faithful and devoted, inveterate optimist, he eventually becomes, in a way, the child of David who helps him to alleviate his financial difficulties.

• “Even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine”, (chapter 42)[57] the book exists, and the reader becomes ipso facto a “father-confessor”,[52] knowing how to judge and even, at times, to doubt the sincerity of the emotion expressed.

• Will he succeed in unifying the whole, in overcoming the trauma of the past, his obsession with the decapitated royal head, so as to make sense of the present and find a direction for the future?

• Copperfield is not always the hero of his life, and not always the hero of his story, as some characters have a stronger role than him,[73] Besides Steerforth, Heep, Micawber, for example, he often appears passive and lightweight.

• Neither rich nor poor, he must also make a place for himself in the world, at which he succeeds by putting love and patience at the center of his priorities, the love that tempers the ambition and the patience that moderates the passion.

• “[45][10]
  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;[N 4] but in reality, David Copperfield is a carefully structured and unified novel.

• [68][69] The changes involve David leaving past selves behind on the way to maturity.

• 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.

• [54]
  Commentary via the illustrations
  Without being Dickens, this narrator, Copperfield, is very like him and often becomes his spokesperson.

• 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”.

• The different tracks do not move away from the main avenue, and when they do, a narrative “forceps” brings them together again.

• To forge an identity as a man and learn how to survive in a world governed by masculine values, instinctively, he looks for a father figure who can replace that of the father he did not have.

• 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:[46] 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.

• Bildungsroman
  Different names
  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”.

• 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.

• [85]
  Traddles
  Now consider Traddles, the anti-Steerforth, the same age as the hero, not very brilliant at school, but wise enough to avoid the manipulations to which David succumbs.

• 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.

• 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.

• Emily, meanwhile, still has her head turned to Ham but the body is withdrawn and the look has become both challenging and provocative.

• [34]
  As always with Dickens, when a writing project began, he was agitated, melancholic, “even deeper than the customary birth pangs of other novels”;[34] as always, he hesitated about the title, and his working notes contain seventeen variants, “Charles Copperfield” included.

• Some of these subjects are directly satirized, while others are worked into the novel in more complex ways by Dickens.

• The perspective of the child is combined with that of the adult narrator who knows that innocence will be violated and the feeling of security broken.

• Mr Murdstone thus represents the anti-father, double negative of the one of which David was deprived, model a contrario of what it is not necessary to be.

• However, the Micawbers are not lacking in charm, the round Wilkins, of course, but also his dry wife, whose music helps her to live.

• The roles are reversed and, by the absurdity, David is forced to act as a man and to exercise adult responsibilities towards him.

• [38] 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.

• It is by writing his own story, and giving him his name in the title, that Copperfield can finally assert who he is.

• [78]
  The final blow, brutal and irremediable this time, is the vision, in chapter 9, of his own reflection in his little dead brother lying on the breast of his mother: “The mother who lay in the grave was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms was myself, as I had once been, hushed forever on her bosom”.

• [66]
  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,[67] and in which character change is extremely important.

• 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.

• [89] or, as Robert Ferrieux said,[90]
  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.

• [108] Values, like the imperative need for women to marry and to be that ideal described as The Angel in the House (manages the home without aid and is always calm) are “interrogated, tested and even subverted”,[109] for example by having one mother-figure be the character Betsey Trotwood, who is not a mother.

• [7]
  The happiness of maturity with Agnes
  [edit]
  It is because David has taken stock of his values and accepted the painful memories of Dora’s death, that he is finally ready to go beyond his emotional blindness and recognize his love for Agnes Wickfield, the one he already has called the “true heroine” of the novel to which he gives his name.

• Moreover, the idea that redemption could be achieved by such a new start in a person’s life was a preoccupation of the author, and he saw here subject matter to charm his readers.

• 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”.

• Beyond the admiration aroused for the amazing self-confidence of the little child, in resolving this issue and taking control of his life with the assurance of someone much older, the passage “testifies to the work of memory, transfiguring the moment into a true myth”.

• So he is predisposed to succumb, by what he calls in chapter 7 an “inborn power of attraction”, to the charm instinctively lent to beautiful people, about which David said “a kind of enchantment … to which it was a natural weakness to yield.”

• [128]
  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”,[129] 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’.

• The hard path to the right balance
  It is true that David’s personal story makes it more difficult for him to access the kind of equilibrium that Traddles presents, because it seems destined, according to Paul Davis, to reproduce the errors committed by his parents.

• Their emigration to Australia, in the wake of that of Micawber, Daniel Peggotty, and Mr Mell, emphasizes Dickens’s belief that social and moral redemption can be achieved in a distant place, where someone may create a new and healthy life.

• David is the first to receive such treatment, especially in the section devoted to his early childhood, when he is lost in the depths of loneliness in London, following his punishment by Mr Murdstone.

• [92] 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.

• However, finding himself in a community of thought, even distantly, with his hateful and cruel stepfather whom he holds responsible for the death of his mother and a good deal of his own misfortunes, it was a troubling discovery.

• So Betsy 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.”

• [104] Like him the Victorian reading public shared Copperfield’s complacent views, expressed with the assurance of success that is his, at the end, as a recognized writer who is happy in marriage and safe from need.

• [101]
  The mid-Victorian era saw a change in gender roles for men and women, in part forced by the factories and separation of work and home, which made stereotypes of the woman at home and the man working away from home.

• [71]
  As often in Dickens where a satellite of the main character reproduces the course in parallel, the story of the Strong couple develops in counterpoint that of David and Dora.

• [71] So, without knowing it, he looks a lot like his late father, also named David, who, according to Aunt Betsey, had eyes only for the flower-women, and, as such, he finds himself as irresistibly attracted to Dora whose delicate and charming femininity, the sweet frivolity too, recall those of his diaphanous mother.

• This is a characteristic of all of Dickens’s writing, but it is reinforced in David Copperfield by the fact that these people are the narrator’s close family members and friends, who are devoted to David and sacrificing themselves for his happiness.

• Heep is seen reading a hymn book and Littimer also “walked forth, reading a good book”: both have managed to convince the naïve Creakle, and his fellow magistrates, that they have seen the error of their ways.

• In reality, says Jordan, it is impossible for David to understand or even imagine any sexual tension, especially that which governs the relationship between Rosa and Steerforth, which, in a way, reassures his own innocence and protects what he calls his “candour” – frankness or angelism?

• In truth, Aunt Betsey, despite her stiffness and bravado, does not dominate her destiny; she may say she can do it, yet she cannot get David to be a girl, or escape the machinations of Uriah Heep any more than the money demands of her mysterious husband.

• [101] That everything is put in order in Australia, that Martha marries a man from the bush, that Emily, in the strong arms of Dan Peggotty, becomes a lady of good works, that Micawber, who had been congenitally insolvent, suddenly acquires the management skills and becomes prosperous in dispensing justice.

• [86] The second was like a flash of revelation: “There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose”.

• [7] Adrienne E Gavin, nuancing the point, writes that she is neither more nor less caricature than other young women in the hero’s life: if Emily is a stereotype of the “lost woman” and Dora of “woman-child”, Agnes is that of “ideal Victorian woman”, which necessarily limits, for her as for the others, the possibilities of evolution, the only change available from a loving and devoted daughter to a loving and devoted wife.

• Dickens’s understanding of the burden on women in marriage in this novel contrasts with his treatment of his own wife Catherine, whom he expected to be an Angel in the House.

• Whether at the home of Wickfield, Strong, or under the Peggotty boat, women are vulnerable to predators or intruders like Uriah Heep, Jack Maldon, James Steerforth; Murdstone’s firmness prevails up to the death of two wives; with David and Dora complete incompetence reigns; and at the Micawber household, love and chaos go hand in hand; while Aunt Betsey is subjected to blackmail by her mysterious husband.

• 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.

• That “‘umble” Heep goes from a lowly clerk to an associate at Wickfield’s, to claiming to win the hand of Agnes, daughter of his boss, is intolerable to David, though it is very similar to his own efforts to go from shorthand clerk to literary fame, with Dora Spenlow, the daughter of his employer.

• Thus, David Copperfield is the story of a journey through life and through oneself, but also, by the grace of the writer, the recreation of the tenuous thread uniting the child and the adult, the past and the present, in what Georges Gusdorf calls “fidelity to the person”.

• [127] Micawber has been described as “With the one exception of Falstaff, … the greatest comic figure in English literature”.

• [86] At the end of chapter 45, almost entirely devoted to the epilogue of this affair, David meditates on these words which he repeats several times and whose relevance, applied to his own case, is imposed on him.

• Chesterton accused Dickens of presenting emigration in an excessively optimistic light, arguing that Dickens believed that by sending a boatload of people overseas their ‘souls’ can be changed, while ignoring the fact that poor people like Peggotty have seen their home stained or, like Emily, their honour tarnished.

• Avenger to the end, she wants the death of Little Emily, both the new conquest and victim of the same predator, and has only contempt for the efforts of David to minimize the scope of his words.

• From an initially culpable intransigence, which led her to abandon the newborn by denouncing the incompetence of the parents not even capable of producing a girl, she finds herself gradually tempered by circumstances and powerfully helped by the “madness” of her protege, Mr Dick.

• The chapters describing their loves are among the best in the novel[71] because Dickens manages to capture the painful ambivalence of David, both passionately infatuated with the irresistible young woman, to whom we can only pass and forgive everything, and frustrated by his weak character and his absolute ignorance of any discipline.

• [99]
  From the point of view of the novel’s inner logic, in order for Copperfield to complete his psychological maturation and exist independently, Dickens must expel his surrogate fathers, including Peggotty and Micawber, and emigration is an easy way to remove them.

• She also fails, in spite of her lucidity, her clear understanding, of the love blindness of her nephew, to prevent him from marrying Dora and in a parallel way, to reconcile the Strongs.

• [110] When seeming to describe a stereotypical image in particularly the female characters, the story “does so in a way that reflects the fault-lines of the image.

• She goes with Emily to start a new life in Australia.

• Michael Hollington analyses a scene in chapter 11 that seems emblematic of the situation and how humour and sentimentality are employed by Dickens.

• 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.

• [131] 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.

• Two statements made by Annie Strong impressed him: in the first, she told him why she rejected Jack Maldon and thanked her husband for saving her “from the first impulse of an undisciplined heart”.

• Nothing is more certain than that, it never can take place, and never will.

• Types of character
  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.

• [111]
  The fallen woman
  Martha Endell and Emily Peggotty, the two friends in Yarmouth who work at the undertaker’s house, reflect Dickens’s commitment to “save” so-called fallen women.

• [61] There are therefore two possible readings, the one that remains on the surface and another that questions below this surface, the implicit questions.

• Theatricality
  Dickens went to the theatre regularly from an early age and even considered becoming an actor in 1832.

• The Peggotty family, in Chapter 3, treat him with respect, “as a visitor of distinction”; even at Murdstone and Grinby, his behaviour and clothes earned him the title of “the little gentleman”.

• 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.

• Paul Davis writes that Agnes is surrounded by an aura of sanctity worthy of a stained glass window, that she is more a consciousness or an ideal than a person, that, certainly, she brings the loving discipline and responsibility of which the hero needs, but lacks the charm and human qualities that made Dora so attractive.

• All these conversions are somewhat ‘ironic’,[102] and tend to undermine the hypothesis of ‘a Dickens believing in the miracle of the antipodes’, which Jane Rogers considers in her analysis of the ‘fallen woman’ as a plot device to gain the sympathy of Dickens’s readers for Emily.

• [11]
  Prison discipline
  Dickens satirises contemporary ideas about how prisoners should be treated in Chapter 61, ‘I am Shown Two Interesting Penitents’.

• While good characters are also satirised, a considered sentimentality replaces satirical ferocity.

• Where he cruelly failed was that he matched it with selfish brutality instead of making it effective by the love of others.

• [88] At the end of his story, he realises that the conjurer’s cap is on his head, that he can draw his attention to the people he loves and trusts.

• 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.

• [94] Mr Creakle is very proud of this new system, but his enthusiasm is immediately undermined by the reminder of his former ferocity as a school principal.

• 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.

• [61] From the beginning, Copperfield ranks as and is considered by his friends among the good people.

• 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.

• 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”.

• [126] 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.

• [106]
  Marriage
  Another concern of Dickens is the institution of marriage and in particular, the unenviable place occupied by women.

• [157]
  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”,[158] and the author himself calls it “his favourite child”.

• [158]
  The first reviews were mixed,[166] but the great contemporaries of Dickens showed their approval: Thackeray found the novel “freshly and simply simple”;[167] 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”;[28] 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”.

• “[162][N 11] 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”.

• The ultimate version of 1867, also called the Charles Dickens edition, included another preface by the author with the statement that David Copperfield is the favourite work of the author.

• [163] Criticism has not always been even-handed, though over time the high importance of this novel has been recognised.

• “[192]
  Illustrations
  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.

• [187] 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.

• 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”.

• 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.

• Fielding[155] reveals that the dialect of this town was taken from a book written by a local author, Major Edward Moor published in 1823.

• 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),[204] the characters became more popular for use outside the novels, in jigsaw puzzles and postcards.

• 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?

• [202]
  Although the reputation of Dickens with literary critics went through a decline and a much later rise after he died,[203] his popularity with readers followed a different pattern after his death.

• [7] 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.

• 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”.

• [204] 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.

• [161] 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.

• 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.

• [150] 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” ‘.

• 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”.

• [204]
  Major print editions of David Copperfield
  Publishing contract
  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.

• “[180] 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.

• [207] 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.

• [206] A brief preface was written in 1850 by the author, already entrusted to Forster after he finished his manuscript, with the promise that a new work will follow.

• [196] 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.

• [178] The characters and their varied places in society in the novel evoked reviewer comments, for example, the novel is “populated by some of the most vivid characters ever created,” “David himself, Steerforth, Peggotty, Mr Dick – and it climbs up and down and off the class ladder.

• 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'”.

• “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.

• [164] 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,[165] and, according to Forster, his reputation was at the top.

• In 1871, Scottish novelist and poet Margaret Oliphant described it as “the culmination of Dickens’s early comic fiction”;[170] However, in the late nineteenth-century Dickens’s critical reputation suffered a decline, though he continued to have many readers.

• [7] 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.

• “[189] It also seems that the novel was Sigmund Freud’s favourite;[190][191] 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.

• [176] 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.

• The latter intends to stay behind, just like the author who, thus, hides behind the illustrator.

• “[147][148] 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”.

• 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.

• [154] In the early dark period of David’s life his dreams “are invariably ugly”, but in later chapters they are more mixed, with some reflecting “fanciful hopes” that are never realised, while others are nightmares which foreshadow “actual problems”.

• 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.

• Phiz drew the images around the central baby-over-the-globe with no information on the characters who would appear in the novel.

• 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.

• It is therefore not surprising that the book is often placed in the category of autobiographical works.

• [128]
  In 2015, the BBC Culture section polled book critics outside the UK about novels by British authors; they ranked David Copperfield eighth on the list of the 100 Greatest British Novels.

• Other editions
  Three volumes were published by Tauchnitz in 1849–50, in English, for distribution outside Great Britain in Europe.

• [205]
  Dedication and preface
  The 1850 book, published by Bradbury and Evans, was dedicated to the honourable Mr and Mrs Richard Watson, from Rockingham, Northamptonshire, aristocratic friends met on a trip to Switzerland five years ago.

• [19] 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”.

• 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”.

• In that contract, the publishing house Bradbury and Evans received a quarter of the receipts from what Dickens wrote for the next eight years.

• [195] Dickens accepted and even encouraged these additional, sometimes subtle indications, which, commenting on the event, say more than the narrator says in print.

• [146]
  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.

• [168]
  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,[169] and the praise of critics.

• [181] Henry James remembered being moved to tears, while listening to the novel, hidden under a table, read aloud in the family circle.

• • 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.

• [171] 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”.

• 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”.

 

Works Cited

[‘1. Dickens invented over 14 variations of the title for this work; see Adams, Hazard (Autumn 1987). “Titles, Titling, and Entitlement to”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 46 (1): 7–21. doi:10.2307/431304. JSTOR 431304.
2. ^ Actually Wordsworth began writing this work in 1798–99.
3. ^ Charles I was born into the House of Stuart 19 November 1600, and was King of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1625 to 1649. Charles I was deposed during the English Civil War, and was beheaded, with the monarchy replaced by the Commonwealth of England. Charles was canonized by the Church of England in 1660.
4. ^ For example, those of Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones written by Henry Fielding, Dickens’s favorite past author.
5. ^ A Rookery is a colony of birds, usually rooks. The term “rookery” was also used as a name for dense slum housing in nineteenth-century cities, especially in London.
6. ^ The expression is from St Augustine who uses it at the end of the first part of his Confessions.
7. ^ Word play containing the verb “brook”, meaning “endure,” and the town of “Sheffield,” famous for the manufacture of cutlery. Hence Mr Murdstone’s joke, “take care, if you please. Somebody’s sharp”.
8. ^ The connotations of the first name “Clara” are clarity, transparency, brightness.
9. ^ Dickens ridiculed the way it worked, lamenting that detainees were better treated than the poor or even non-commissioned soldiers.
10. ^ Conclusion of the preface of 1867: “Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.”
11. ^ It is likely here that Dickens refers to the failure of his marriage with his wife.
12. ^ Kafka’s novel is a kind of inverted bildungsroman, since the young man whose destiny we follow is more of a disaster than an accomplishment.
13. McCrum, Robert (30 December 2013). “The 100 best novels: No 15 – David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)”. The Guardian. London. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
14. ^ Davis 1999, pp. 85, 90
15. ^ Jump up to:a b Charles Dickens, Letters, VII, page 515
16. ^ Jump up to:a b c Schlicke 1999, p. 158
17. ^ Dickens, Charles (1917). “Preface”. The personal history and experience of David Copperfield the younger. Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. P F Collier & Son – via Bartleby.
18. ^ Jump up to:a b Monod, Sylvère (1968). Dickens the Novelist. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0806107684.
19. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g Davis 1999, p. 92
20. ^ Davis 1999, pp. 85, 92
21. ^ Jump up to:a b Davis 1999, p. 85
22. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g Schlicke 1999, p. 151
23. ^ Jump up to:a b c Griffin, Emma. “Child labour”. The British Library. Archived from the original on 12 May 2018. Retrieved 26 May 2018. Material was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Archived 16 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine.
24. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, letter to Mrs Winter, 22 February 1855
25. ^ Flood, Alison (13 February 2015). “Young Dickens in love: sugary, and waxing lyrical about gloves”. The Guardian. London. Retrieved 11 February 2019.
26. ^ Forster 1966, p. I, 3
27. ^ Jump up to:a b c Schlicke 1999, p. 150
28. ^ Bradbury 2008, p. 19
29. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k Davis 1999, p. 90
30. ^ Davis 1999, p. 202
31. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Schlicke 1999, p. 152
32. ^ Jump up to:a b Sanders 1997
33. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to Dudley Costello, 25 April 1849.
34. ^ “Dickens, Charles – Canterbury Historical and Archaeological Society”. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
35. ^ “Home”. Canterbury Cathedral. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
36. ^ “Guildhall – Canterbury Historical and Archaeological Society”. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
37. ^ “St Alphege’s Church – Canterbury Historical and Archaeological Society”. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
38. ^ Meckler 1975
39. ^ Charles Dickens, Letter, Letter to Rogers, 18 February 1849.
40. ^ Jump up to:a b c Schlicke 1999, p. 153
41. ^ Carlyle 1998, p. 317
42. ^ Perdue, David A. “Charles Dickens: family and friends”. The Charles Dickens Page. Archived from the original on 21 July 2011. Retrieved 25 March 2019.
43. ^ Schlicke 1999, pp. 150, 331, 334
44. ^ Page, Norman (1999). Charles Dickens: Family History. Psychology Press. p. 382. ISBN 978-0-415-22233-4.
45. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to John Forster, 12 January 1849
46. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Forster 1966, p. VI, 6
47. ^ Patten 1978, pp. 205–206
48. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to John Forster, 19 April 1849
49. ^ Burgis 1981, p. XXIX
50. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to John Forster, 6 June 1849
51. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to John Forster, 10 July 1849
52. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to John Forster, 22 September 1849
53. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to William Macready, 11 June 1850
54. ^ Jump up to:a b Perdue, David A (2012). “Miss Mowcher, Oops”. The Charles Dickens Page. Archived from the original on 29 August 2012. Retrieved 28 June 2012.
55. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to Mrs Seymour, 18 December 1849
56. ^ Stone 1968, p. 232
57. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to John Forster, 21 October 1850
58. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 11
59. ^ Guillemette, Lucie; Lévesque, Cynthia (2016). “Narratology, The narrative theory of Gérard Genette”. Quebec: Signo. Retrieved 5 April 2019.
60. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 697
61. ^ Cordery 2008, p. 372
62. ^ Wilson 1972, p. 214
63. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 101
64. ^ Jump up to:a b c Cordery 2008, p. 373
65. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 478
66. ^ Greene, Graham (1951). The Lost Childhood and Other Essays. London: Eyre and Spottiswode. p. 53.
67. ^ Cordery 2008, p. 377
68. ^ Cordery 2008, pp. 377–378
69. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 488
70. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 619
71. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 367
72. ^ Jordan, John O (1985). “The Social Sub-Text of David Copperfield”. Dickens Studies Annual. 14 (14). Penn State University Press: 61–92. JSTOR 44371526.
73. ^ Jump up to:a b c Cordery 2008, p. 374
74. ^ Inspiration for this analysis arises partly from Shore, W Teignmouth (1917). David Copperfield, Criticisms and Interpretations V. Archived from the original on 10 April 2019. Retrieved 9 April 2019 – via Bartleby. We should note when studying this novel that it is narrated in the first person, the story is an autobiography, the most difficult form of fiction in which to attain a close approach to realism. Dickens has succeeded wonderfully;
75. ^ This analysis is inspired by an article originally in Englishmen of Letters, Ward, Adolphus William (1917). David Copperfield, Criticisms and Interpretations III. Archived from the original on 10 April 2019. Retrieved 9 April 2019 – via Bartleby. As to the construction of “David Copperfield”, however, I frankly confess that I perceive no serious fault in it. It is a story with a plot, and not merely a string of adventures and experiences, like little Davy’s old favourites upstairs at Blunderstone.
76. ^ Gusdorf 1956, p. 117
77. ^ Ferrieux 2001, pp. 117–122
78. ^ Gusdorf 1956, pp. 105–123
79. ^ Lynch 1999
80. ^ Bakhtin 1996, p. 21
81. ^ Jeffers 2005, p. 2
82. ^ Jump up to:a b Dickens 1999, p. XV
83. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i Davis 1999, p. 91
84. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 176
85. ^ Davis 1999, pp. 90–91
86. ^ Jump up to:a b Dickens 1999, p. 14
87. ^ Davis 1999, p. 99
88. ^ Christie, Sally (22 February 2016). “Why Charles Dickens’s best character is non-existent”. The Guardian. London. Retrieved 8 April 2019.
89. ^ Alberge, Dalya (25 April 2012). “The gift that led Dickens to give up his treasured copy of David Copperfield”. The Independent. Retrieved 8 April 2019.
90. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 22
91. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 110
92. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 6
93. ^ “Dances”. Scottish Dance. Archived from the original on 6 August 2012. Retrieved 19 July 2012.
94. ^ “American Sea-Songs”. Traditional Music (.co.uk). Retrieved 19 July 2012.
95. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 342
96. ^ “The themes at Dickens”. dickens-theme.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk. Archived from the original on 10 May 2010. Retrieved 19 July 2012.
97. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 640
98. ^ Jump up to:a b Dickens 1999, p. 535
99. ^ Dickens 1999, p. XIV
100. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 411
101. ^ Gusdorf, George (1951). Mémoire et personne [Memory and person] (in French). Vol. 2. Paris: University Press France. p. 542.
102. ^ Ferrieux 2001, p. 129
103. ^ Dickens 1985, pp. 33–37
104. ^ Takei 2005, pp. 116–131, 100
105. ^ Jump up to:a b Collins 2016, pp. 140–163
106. ^ Dickens 1985, p. 33
107. ^ Dickens 1985, p. 34
108. ^ Charles Dickens, ‘Pet Prisoners, “Letters”, Household Words, 27 April 1850.
109. ^ Cordery 2008, p. 379
110. ^ Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (1933) [1931]. Criticisms and Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens. London: Dent. p. 131.
111. ^ Dickens 1985, pp. 35–36
112. ^ Wilson 1972, p. 212
113. ^ Jump up to:a b Cordery 2008, p. 376
114. ^ Moore, Grace (2004). Dickens and Empires: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens. The Nineteenth Century Series. Aberdeen: Ashgate. p. 12. ISBN 978-0754634126.
115. ^ Rogers, Jane (27 May 2003). “How did Dickens deal with prostitution in his novels? Little Em’ly in the novel”. Victorian Web. Retrieved 16 March 2019. The fact that Em’ly can only continue her thwarted life in the colonies suggests that Dickens is sensitive to his audiences’ abhorrence of Em’ly’s crime, whilst (by saving her from annihilation) encouraging them to greater sympathy for her.
116. ^ Forster 1966, pp. VI, 7
117. ^ Cordery 2008, pp. 374–375
118. ^ Jump up to:a b Cordery 2008, p. 375
119. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 612
120. ^ McKnight 2008, pp. 186–193
121. ^ Cordery 2008, p. 374
122. ^ McKnight 2008, p. 196
123. ^ Jump up to:a b McKnight 2008, p. 195
124. ^ Healey, Edna. “Coutts, Angela Georgina Burdett”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/10.1093. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
125. ^ Charles Dickens, “A Bundle of Emigrants”, Letters, Household Words, 30 March 1850
126. ^ Jordan 2001, pp. 130–131
127. ^ Jordan 2001, p. 130
128. ^ Jordan 2001, p. 131
129. ^ Levin 1970, p. 676
130. ^ Levin 1970, p. 674
131. ^ Purton 2012, p. xvii
132. ^ Luebering, J E. “Picaresque novel”. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 5 March 2019.
133. ^ Allen, Walter E. “Last Years: Tom Jones”. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 5 March 2019.
134. ^ Watt 1963, p. 300
135. ^ Ackroyd 1990, p. 44
136. ^ Dickens 1934, p. xviii
137. ^ Forster, John (2008) [1875]. “Chapter 20”. The Life of Charles Dickens. Vol. III. p. 462. Retrieved 5 March 2019 – via Project Gutenberg.
138. ^ Dickens 1985, p. 13
139. ^ Dickens 1985, p. 14
140. ^ Jump up to:a b Priestley 1966, Chap XIII p 242
141. ^ Johnson 1977
142. ^ Woolf 1986, p. 286
143. ^ “Eirôneia”. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 26 February 2019.
144. ^ Mee 2010, p. 20
145. ^ Stone 1987, pp. xx–xxi
146. ^ Jump up to:a b Hollington 1997, p. 37
147. ^ Dickens 1999, pp. 132–133
148. ^ Hollington 1997, p. 38
149. ^ Tomalin 2011, p. 7.
150. ^ Worth 1978, p. 1
151. ^ Dickens 1985, p. 378
152. ^ Charles Dickens, speaking at dinner for the Royal General Theatrical Fund, 19 March 1858.
153. ^ Johnson 1969, p. 147
154. ^ Dickens 1985, Chapter 13
155. ^ Lançon, Philippe (17 March 2012). “Charles Dickens, homme de Londres” [Charles Dickens, man of London]. Review: Arts. To celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of the writer, the British capital presents an exhibition in which London holds the leading role. Libération (in French). Paris. Archived from the original on 4 February 2019. Retrieved 27 February 2019.
156. ^ Kincaid 1969, pp. 196–206
157. ^ Suhamy 1971, p. 25
158. ^ Suhamy 1971, p. 26
159. ^ Jump up to:a b Kearney 1978, p. 28
160. ^ Kincaid 1969, p. 197
161. ^ Kearney 1978, p. 30
162. ^ Plung 2000, p. 216
163. ^ Plung 2000, p. 217
164. ^ Plung 2000, p. 218
165. ^ Plung 2000, p. 219
166. ^ Jump up to:a b Kincaid 1969, p. 203
167. ^ Fielding, K. J. (30 April 1949). “David Copperfield and Dialects”. Times Literary Supplement.
168. ^ Moor, Major Edward (1823). Suffolk Words and Phrases or, An attempt to collect the lingual localisms of that county. Yarmouth: J Loder for R Hunter.
169. ^ Dickens 1985, pp. 32–33
170. ^ Jump up to:a b Forster 1976, p. 6
171. ^ Dickens, Charles. “Preface”. David Copperfield (1867 ed.). London: Wordsworth Classics. p. 4.
172. ^ Dickens 1999, p. 3
173. ^ Davis 1999
174. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, letter to John Forster, 3 and 4 (?) February 1855.
175. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to John Forster, early October 1860.
176. ^ Bensimon, Fabrice (2001). “La culture populaire au Royaume-Uni, 1800–1914” [Popular Culture in the United Kingdom, 1800–1914]. Revue d’Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine (in French). 5 (48): 75–91. doi:10.3917/rhmc.485.0075.
177. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to Mrs Watson, 3 July 1850.
178. ^ Schlicke, Paul (2000). “David Copperfield: Reception”. In Schlicke, Paul (ed.). Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198662532.
179. ^ William Makepeace Thackeray, London, Punch, number 16, 1849.
180. ^ Henry James, A Small Boy and Others, 1913, cited by Barbara Arnett and Giorgio Melchiori, The Taste of Henry James, 2001, p. 3.
181. ^ Collins 1996, p. 619
182. ^ Margaret Oliphant, Blackwood’s Magazine, number 109, 1871.
183. ^ Jump up to:a b Pykett 2008, p. 471
184. ^ Pykett 2008, p. 473
185. ^ Pykett 2008, pp. 474–475
186. ^ Leavis 1948, p. 244
187. ^ Leavis 1948, p. 132
188. ^ Jump up to:a b Schlicke 1999, p. 154
189. ^ Pykett 2008
190. ^ Ciabattari, Jane (7 December 2015). “The 100 greatest British novels”. BBC Culture. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
191. ^ Ciabattari, Jane (7 December 2015). “8. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens, 1850)”. BBC Culture: The 25 Greatest British Novels. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
192. ^ Charlotte Brontë, Letter to W S Williams, 13 September 1849, cited by Wheat, Patricia H (1952). The Adytum of the Heart: The Literary Criticism of Charlotte Brontë. Cranbury, New Jersey, London and Mississauga, Ontario: Associated University Presses. pp. 33, 121. ISBN 978-0-8386-3443-1.
193. ^ Cain, Tom (September 1973). “Tolstoy’s Use of David Copperfield”. Critical Quarterly. 15 (3): 237–246. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8705.1973.tb01474.x.
194. ^ Lodge, David (May 2002). “Dickens Our Contemporary, review of ‘Charles Dickens’ by Jane Smiley”. The Atlantic. Retrieved 25 July 2012.
195. ^ Gredina, Irina; Allingham, Philip V. “Dickens’s Influence upon Dostoyevsky, 1860–1870; or, One Nineteenth-Century Master’s Assimilation of Another’s Manner and Vision”. The Victorian Web. Retrieved 26 July 2012.
196. ^ Tedlock, Jr, E W (Winter 1955). “Kafka’s Imitation of David Copperfield”. Comparative Literature. 7 (1). Duke University Press: 52–62. doi:10.2307/1769062. JSTOR 1769062.
197. ^ Spilka, Mark (December 1959). “David Copperfield as Psychological Fiction”. Critical Quarterly. 1 (4): 292–301. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8705.1959.tb01590.x.
198. ^ Spilka, Mark (Winter 1959). “Kafka and Dickens: The Country Sweetheart”. American Imago. 16 (4): 367–378. JSTOR 26301688.
199. ^ Wheale, J (1980). “More Metempsychosis? The Influence of Charles Dickens on James Joyce”. James Joyce Quarterly. 17 (4): 439–444. JSTOR 25476324. Retrieved 3 May 2021.
200. ^ Woolf, Virginia (22 August 1925). “David Copperfield”. The Nation and Athenaeum: 620–21. Retrieved 20 February 2019.
201. ^ Virginia Woolf, Letter to Hugh Walpole, 8 February 1936.
202. ^ Jaeger, Peter (1 September 2015). “A Psychoanalytic Dictionary of David Copperfield”. English: Journal of the English Association. 64 (246). Oxford University Press: 204–206. doi:10.1093/english/efv018.
203. ^ Philbert, Bradley (2012). “Sigmund Freud and David Copperfield”. Bradley Philbert. Archived from the original on 25 August 2013. Retrieved 24 July 2012.
204. ^ Maugham, William Somerset (1948). Great novelists and their novels: essays on the ten greatest novels of the world and the men and women who wrote them. J C Winston Co. p. 181.
205. ^ Jump up to:a b c Allingham, Philip V (19 January 2009). “Taking Off the Wrapper: David Copperfield Anticipated, May 1849”. Victorian Web. Retrieved 27 June 2012.
206. ^ Brattin, Joel J (27 June 2012). “Dickens and Serial Publication”. PBS.[dead link]
207. ^ Steig, Michael (1978). Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. p. 113. ISBN 978-0253317056.
208. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to Hablot Knight Browne, 9 May 1849
209. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to Hablot Knight Browne, 21 September 1849
210. ^ Allingham, Philip. “Illustrations by Phiz and Barnard of Peggoty’s Boat-House in David Copperfield”. The Victorian Web. Victorian Web. Retrieved 7 November 2019.
211. ^ Allingham, Philip V. (1 February 2008). “A New Edition of Dickens for a New Generation of Readers: Fred Barnard and the Household Edition of Charles Dickens’s Works”. Victorian Web. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
212. ^ Simkin, John (August 2014). “Harold Copping”. Spartacus Educational. Retrieved 9 March 2019.
213. ^ “David Copperfield: illustrations”. how-serendipitous.webs.com. Archived from the original on 1 August 2009. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
214. ^ Simkin, John (August 2014). “Frank Reynolds”. Spartacus Educational. Retrieved 9 March 2019.
215. ^ Pykett 2008, p. 470–471
216. ^ Jump up to:a b c Cordery, Gareth (28 September 2017). “”Your Country Needs You”: Charles Dickens Called Up for National Service”. Victorian Web. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
217. ^ Charles Dickens, Letters, Letter to Bradbury and Evans, 10 July 1849
218. ^ Schlicke 1999, p. 596
219. ^ Bolton, H Philip (1987). Dickens Dramatized. Boston: G K Hall. pp. xviii, 501. ISBN 978-0-8161-8924-3.
220. ^ Davis 1999, pp. 92–93
221. ^ Collins 1996, pp. 216–217
222. ^ “It’s a brave writer who takes on a retelling of Dickens, and of David Copperfield, the most personal of his novels, at that. And yet the American author Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead – which transposes this very English, quasi-autobiographical Bildungsroman to her own home territory of Appalachia – feels in many ways like the book she was born to write.” “Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver review – Dickens updated”. The Guardian. London. 10 November 2022. Retrieved 25 January 2023.
223. ^ “David Copperfield, Drama in 10 episodes”. Radio Echoes. 14 September 1991. Retrieved 12 March 2019.
224. ^ Brunsdon, Charlotte (19 January 2018). Television Cities: Paris, London, Baltimore. Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822372516 – via Google Books.
225. ^ “December delights”. M2 Presswire. 26 October 1995.’]