A Study Guide for Charles Dickens's David Copperfield

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Charles Dickens's "David Copperfield," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535821544

Book preview

1

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens

1850

Introduction

Charles Dickens's autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, published in 1850, was the author's favorite and has remained a favorite for generations of readers. In fact, Dickens is arguably England's most beloved, read, and critically acclaimed novelist. Noted scholar Harold Bloom, in his study of Dickens, praises the author's astonishing universality, in which he nearly rivals Shakespeare and the Bible. This universality is one of the novel's celebrated qualities.

The novel is a bildungsroman, a story of growing up, that takes the protagonist from early childhood to early middle age. It is a story of the development of a writer, but it is also a portrait of Victorian England at mid-century with a host of characters designed to show various social features, for example, class structure, the penal system, the education available for poorer children, and the sundry forms of child labor and abuse. A novel of social protest, David Copperfield examines social problems while in certain particulars it relates the story of Dickens's own development into adulthood and into his life's work as a writer.

Author Biography

Many scholars have noted that Charles Dickens incorporated autobiographical details in David Copperfield (1850). George H. Ford, in his article on Dickens in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, notes the similarities in manner between the author's father, John, and Mr. Micawber. His mother, Elizabeth Barrow, would become, according to Ford, the model for a character in another of her son's novels, Nicholas Nickleby.

Charles, one of eight children, was born in Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812. His early years were spent quite contentedly in small coastal towns in southern England. His life changed radically, however, when the family moved to London, where his father was soon sent to debtors' prison. As a result, twelve-year-old Charles was forced to go to work at a boot-blacking warehouse and to live on his own in the city slums. He fictionalized this harrowing and grim existence in his descriptions of David's similar experiences in London after his mother dies. Eventually Dickens's father regained some financial stability, but Dickens never completely lost the feeling that he had been abandoned and neglected by his parents. His experiences prompted him to develop a life-long concern for the welfare of children and of the poor.

Dickens excelled at school and graduated at the top of his class, but his parents never considered sending him to university. He read voraciously and gained work as an apprentice in a law office. In 1834, he was employed as a reporter for the Morning Chronicle. These two jobs taught him a great deal about the legal profession, a subject that figures in many of his novels.

While he worked as a reported, Dickens began to write sketches of London scenes and of its picturesque citizens. His first, A Dinner at Poplar Walk, was published by the Monthly Magazine in 1833 when he was twenty-one. He had several more published by the magazine and later collected them into two volumes, Sketches by Boz (1836), which publicized his pen name. The volumes sold well and earned favorable reviews. That same year he married Catherine Hogarth, with whom he had ten children. But his marriage was not a happy one. He fell in love with the eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan. Dickens caused a public scandal when he set up his wife at a separate London residence and lived and traveled with Ellen Ternan.

His first book, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), later known as The Pickwick Papers, became an immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic. More celebrated novels followed, including Oliver Twist (1838) and Nicholas Nickleby (1839). For the next two decades, Dickens produced an astonishing number of novels, including David Copperfield (1850) and Bleak House (1853). The serialization