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David Copperfield [N 1] is a novel in the bildungsroman genre by Charles Dickens, narrated by the eponymous David Copperfield, detailing his adventures in his journey from infancy to maturity. It was published as a serial in 1849 and 1850 and then as a book in 1850.

David Copperfield is also an autobiographical novel:[2] "a very complicated weaving of truth and invention",[3] with events following Dickens's own life.[4] Of the books he wrote, it was his favourite.[5] Called "the triumph of the art of Dickens",[6][7] it marks a turning point in his work, separating the novels of youth and those of maturity.[8]

David Copperfield Novel Pdf Download

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At first glance, the work is modelled on 18th-century "personal histories" that were very popular, like Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, but David Copperfield is a more carefully structured work. 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.[9]

Dickens wrote without an outline, unlike his previous novel, Dombey and Son. Some aspects of the story were fixed in his mind from the start, but others were undecided until the serial publications were underway.[10] The novel has a primary theme of growth and change, but Dickens also satirises many aspects of Victorian life. These include the plight of prostitutes, the status of women in marriage, class structure, the criminal justice system, the quality of schools, and the employment of children in factories.[11]

If David Copperfield has come to be Dickens's "darling", it is because it is the most autobiographical of all his novels.[17] Some of the most painful episodes of his life are barely disguised; others appear indirectly, termed "oblique revelations" by Paul Davis.[17] However, Dickens himself wrote to Forster that the book is not a pure autobiography, but "a very complicated weaving of truth and invention".[3]

The most important autobiographical material concerns the months that Dickens, still a child, spent at the Warren factory, his diligence with his first love, Maria Beadnell (see Catherine Dickens and Ellen Ternan), and finally his career as a journalist and writer. As pointed out by his biographer and friend John Forster, these episodes are essentially factual: the description of forced labor 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.[17]

However, this material, like the other autobiographical aspects of the novel, is not systematically reproduced as such. The cruel Mr Murdstone is very different from the real James Lamert, cousin to Dickens, being the stepson of Mrs Dickens's mother's sister, who lived with the family in Chatham and Camden Town, and who had found for the young Charles the place of tagger in the shoe factory he managed for his brother-in-law George.[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. 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.[17] Finally, David's literary career seems less agitated than that of Dickens, and his results are much less spectacular. David's natural modesty alone does not explain all these changes; Paul Davis expresses the opinion that Dickens recounts his life as he would have liked it, and along with "conscious artistry", Dickens knows how to borrow data, integrate them to his original purpose and transform them according to the novelistic necessities, so that "In the end, Copperfield is David's autobiography, not Dickens's".[17]

David Copperfield is the contemporary of two major memory-based works, William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1850), an autobiographical poem about the formative experiences of his youth and Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) which eulogises the memory of his friend, Arthur Hallam.[19][N 2] There is Wordsworth's romantic questioning on the personal development of the individual and there is Tennyson's Victorian confrontation with change and doubt. According to Andrew Sanders, David Copperfield reflects both types of response, which give this novel the privileged position of representing the hinge of the century.[20]

The memories of Dickens are, according to Paul Schlicke, remarkably transmuted into fiction.[19] The experience Dickens lived, as the son of a brazen impenitent, is celebrated through the comic figure of Wilkins Micawber. Dickens's youthful passion for Maria Beadnell resurfaces with tenderness, in the form of David's impractical marriage with Dora Spenlow. Dickens's decision to make David a novelist emphasises how he used this book to re-invent himself as a man and artist, "The world would not take another Pickwick from me, but we can be cheerful and merry, and with a little more purpose in us".[21] If the preoccupation with the adventures of a hero, associated with a parade of comic or grotesque characters, looks back to Dickens's earlier novels, the interest in personal development, the pessimistic atmosphere and the complex structure of Copperfield foreshadow other novels.[19]

In 1847, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bront's first-person narrative, was acclaimed as soon as it was published. Unlike Thackeray, who adored it, Dickens claims years later never to have read it.[22] True or false, he had encountered Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, a novel that called for understanding and sympathy in a class-eaten society.[23] Thackeray's Pendennis was serialised at the same time as David Copperfield and it depicts its hero's personal and social journey from the countryside to the city. A rivalry existed between the two writers, though it preoccupied Thackeray more than Dickens. The most direct literary influence is "obviously Carlyle" who, in a lecture given in 1840, the year of his meeting with Dickens, on "On Heroes, Hero-Worship" and "the Heroic in History", claims that the most important modern character is "the hero as a man of letters".[24][25][20] This is David's destiny, through experience, perseverance and seriousness.[24]

A week after his arrival in Yarmouth, his sixth son, Henry Fielding Dickens, was named after Henry Fielding, his favourite past author. Per Forster, Dickens refers to Fielding "as a kind of homage to the novel he was about to write".[30]

As always with Dickens, when a writing project began, he was agitated, melancholic, "even deeper than the customary birth pangs of other novels";[30] as always, he hesitated about the title, and his working notes contain seventeen variants, "Charles Copperfield" included.[15] After several attempts, he stopped on "The Copperfield Survey of the World as it Rolled", a title that he retained until 19 April.[31] When Forster pointed out that his hero, now called David, has his own initials transposed, Dickens was intrigued and declared that this was a manifestation of his fate.[30] He was not yet sure of his pen: "Though I know what I want to do, I am lumbering like a train wagon",[32] he told Forster.

Changes in detail occur during the composition: on 22 August 1849, while staying on the Isle of Wight for a family vacation, he changed on the advice of Forster, the theme of the obsession of Mr Dick, a secondary character in the novel. This theme was originally "a bull in a china shop" and became "King Charles's head" in a nod to the bicentenary of the execution of Charles I of England.[N 3][10]

Although plunged into the writing of his novel, Dickens set out to create a new journal, Household Words,[36] the first issue of which appeared on 31 March 1850. This daunting task, however, did not seem to slow down the writing of David Copperfield: I am "busy as a bee", he writes happily to the actor William Macready.[37]

A serious incident occurred in December: Mrs Jane Seymour Hill, chiropractor to Mrs Dickens,[38] raised the threat of prosecution, because she recognised herself in the portrait of Miss Mowcher; Dickens did not do badly,[39] 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.[38] This was, writes Harry Stone, "the only major departure from his original plans".[40]

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! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World."[41][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. 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".[9] 006ab0faaa