Well, surprise surprise, I mentioned somewhat earlier in this catalogue that I strove mightily to use only one representative novel for each author, so as to include more authors and more of a variety of authors, but that in two instances I just couldn’t limit their contributions to lovable English language novels and had to choose two. In the case of Jane Austen, it was both Emma and Pride and Prejudice. In the case of Charles Dickens I’m closing out the first quarter of my “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language” with Bleak House at #24 and this one, David Copperfield, at #25. Alphabetically that is.
I think that Dickens’ dominance of the mid- to late-nineteenth century English fiction scene, even despite the competition from writers like Trollope, Thackery, and George Eliot, plus his continued popularity to this day (five of his novels appeared on Penguin Books’ recent list of “100 Must-Read Classics” voted on by their readers), give me ample excuse to drop the “one book limit” rule in Dickens’ case. While David Copperfield did not happen to appear on the Penguin list, it does appear on The Guardian’s 2015 list of the “100 Best Novels Written in English,” as well as The Observer’s list of “The 100 Best Novels of All Time” and as #8 on the BBC list of the “100 Greatest British Novels” (Bleak House was #6 on that list—with Great Expectations ahead of both as #4).
In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that part of my attachment to David Copperfield is emotional. I first read the book in the summer vacation after my sophomore year of high school and I remember the tears that sprang unlooked for to my eyes as I sat on my front porch and read those final words of the 870-page Signet Classic edition I’d bought for 75 cents (50% more than the usual price, because of its size) and spent much of my life experiencing what David had been going through:
“Oh Agnes, Oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!”
It was the first time that I realized how deeply a novel could affect me. It was the first time I ever cried at the end of a book. But not the last.
Dickens published David Copperfield serially between 1849 and 1850, and then brought it out as a book in 1850. The book is a bildungsroman, that is, a coming of age novel in which the protagonist learns and changes as he or she matures. It had become a popular genre in the nineteenth century inspired largely by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, often considered the first bilgungsroman, which was translated into English by Thomas Carlyle, whose own Sartor Resartus claims to be the first bindungsroman in English. Dickens was acquainted with Carlyle, who may well have been on his mind when he was writing David Copperfield, since it has been pointed out that Carlyle’s 1840 lecture “On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History” extolled the modern hero as a man of letters, which is what Copperfield ultimately becomes. Carlyle’s opinions on prison reform, as published in the 1850 pamphlet “Model Prisons,” may well have influenced Dickens as well, as he satirizes the leniency of the modern prison in the later part of the novel.
A more recent example of the English bildungsroman, as narrated in the first person, was Jane Eyre in 1847. Dickens claimed never to have read it, but he cannot have been unaware of its influence. But another British writer who certainly influenced David Copperfield is Fielding, whose “personal history” novels, in particular Tom Jones, were favorites of Dickens. In fact. at the very time Dickens was beginning to plan David Copperfield, his wife gave birth to their sixth son, whom Dickens named Henry Fielding Dickens.
Coleridge called the plot of Tom Jones one of the three greatest plots in all of literature. David Copperfield’s plot is more loose, tracing as it does the life of its protagonist from birth to maturity, and moving through several periods of the protagonist’s life, during each of which he is essentially a new person. Born posthumously (and therefore presented with a string of father-figures throughout the book), and raised initially by an indulgent and childlike mother and her housekeeper, Clara Peggotty, young Davy is shocked when his mother marries the stern Edward Murdstone. He goes on a visit to the Peggotty family in Harmouth, meeting Clara’s brother and his adopted nephew and niece, Ham and Little Emily, who becomes seven-year old David’s first love. Returning home, David finds his stepfather harsh and cruel, both to himself and his mother, and Murdstone sends him to a boarding school called Salem House. It is a cruel place with a harsh headmaster, Mr. Creakle, of whose methods Murdstone would approve. Here David meets the charming and unscrupulous James Steerforth, who becomes his idol.
David’s mother gives birth to a baby brother while he is away, but dies, along with the child. David is taken out of school and sent to London to work for a wine merchant, a business partner of Murdstone’s, and to live with an eccentric landlord named Wilkins Micawber, who is wildly impractical but sympathetic to David (a character modeled on Dickens’ own father). Micawber is put in prison for debt, but advises David to go to Dover and look up his great aunt Betsey Trotwood, the boy’s only living relative. David eventually does so, and the kind-hearted aunt decides to raise him, and she sends him to a better school, run by the kind Dr Strong. Here, David lodges with Aunt Betsey’s lawyer, Mr. Wickfield and his daughter Agnes, who soon becomes David’s closest confidante.
Also lodging in the house is Wickfield’s assistant Uriah Heep. Heep turns out to be the villain of the second half of the book: he conspires to gain influence over Wickfield and to marry Agnes. Upon finishing school, David works as an apprentice lawyer, as Dr Strong’s secretary, and as a fledgling writer. But a number of disasters befall in the meantime: Steerforth has reappeared in David’s life and seduces, and deserts, Peggotty’s niece Emily, who disappears into the London streets. Aunt Betsey’s fortune has dwindled due to Heep’s machinations, and Heep threatens to force Agnes to marry him to save her own father’s face. And David, falling completely in love with a childish, impractical young woman named Dora Spenlow, suffers through an unhappy marriage to woman much like his own mother. How all this works out I’ll not divulge, in case you haven’t read the novel. But once again, you really ought to. The end may well make you weep.
But you’re not reading David Copperfield just to see how it comes out. Along the way, Dickens comments on the education system (David’s two schools), child labor (David with the wine merchant), the position of women in marriage (like David’s mother) of prostitutes (what Little Emily becomes), of the treatment of the insane (like the obsessed and childish Mr. Dick at Aunt Betsey’s house) and other aspects of Victorian society.
But chiefly one reads Dickens for the characters. It’s no coincidence that “Dickensian” has become an adjective often applied to memorable characters, especially those who are larger than life, full of warmth or jollity, or weirdly grotesque. Uriah Heep, the “‘umblest” creature on earth, is certainly one of these, as is Copperfield’s Aunt Betsey, who stormed out of the house when David was born because he was not a girl, and her kite-flying houseguest Mr. Dick, who is obsessed with the execution of King Charles I two hundred years earlier. But the most Dickensian of all David Copperfield characters is the impractical but ever big-hearted spendthrift, the jovial and optimistic Mr. Micawber. The novelist J.B. Priestley wrote that “With the one exception of Falstaff,” Micawber was “the greatest comic figure in English literature.” Of the fourteen different film or television versions of the novel, George Cukor had the genius to cast W.C. Fields as Micawber in 1935, and I’ve never been able to see him as anybody else.
David Copperfield was reputedly Dickens’ own favorite of all his novels, as he called it his “favourite child.” Part of this may have been that it was the most autobiographical of his books, with several incidents, and characters, paralleling some in his own life. But it’s been the favorite of several others as well: Leo Tolstoy, not a bad novelist himself, called David Copperfield “the best work of the best English novelist,” while Dostoevsky used the novel to help get him through a prison camp in Siberia. Kafka wrote that the first chapter of his novel Amerika was inspired by David Copperfield. And Henry James said that he was “moved to tears” as a boy while listening to the novel being read aloud. Your experience might be the same. Read this novel if you haven’t. Read it again if you have.