David Copperfield (novel)

David Copperfield or 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) by Charles Dickens, first published in 1850. Like most of his other works, it originally appeared in serial form (published in monthly installments). Many elements within the novel follow events in Dickens's own life, and it is probably the most autobiographical of all of his novels. It is also Dickens's "favourite child".

Overview

Dickens worked on David Copperfield for two years between 1848 and 1850, carefully planning out the plot and structure. Seven novels proceed it, and seven novels would come after it, Copperfield being his mid-point novel.

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Tolstoy regarded Dickens as the best of all English novelists, and considered Copperfield to be his finest work, ranking the "Tempest" chapter (chapter 55,LV - the story of Ham and the storm and the shipwreck) the standard by which the worlds great fiction should be judged. Henry James remembered hiding under a small table as a boy to hear installments read by his mother. Dostoevsky read it enthralled in a Siberian prison camp. Franz Kafka called his last book Amerika a "sheer imitation". James Joyce paid it relevance through parody in Ulysses. Virginia Woolf, who normally had little regard for Dickens, confessed the durability of this one novel, belonging to "the memories and myths of life".

Related Topics:
Tolstoy - Henry James - Dostoevsky - Franz Kafka - Amerika - James Joyce - Ulysses - Virginia Woolf

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The story is told almost entirely from the position of the first person narrative, through the voice of David Copperfield himself, and was the first Dickens novel to do so. Critically, it is considered a Bildungsroman and would be influential in the genre such as Dickens own Great Expectations (1861), Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Related Topics:
First person narrative - Bildungsroman - Great Expectations - Thomas Hardy - Samuel Butler - H. G. Wells - D. H. Lawrence - James Joyce

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As a bildungsroman, it has one major theme throughout, the disciplining of the hero's emotional and moral life. We learn to go against "the first mistaken impulse of ] undisciplined heart", a theme which is repeated throughout all the relationships and characters in the book.

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