David Copperfield - Analysis

Analysis

The story is told entirely from the point of view of the first person narrator, David Copperfield, and was the first Dickens novel to be written as such a fashion. After finishing the novel, Dickens remarked that he liked it the best of all his books. His fondness for this child of his fancy, as he called it, was partly due to the fact that the novel was reminiscent of his own early life. Not autobiography exactly, the novel rather runs on correspondences between the careers of Charles Dickens and David Copperfield. The title characters' initials are the author's initials reversed.

Critically, David Copperfield is considered a Bildungsroman, a novel of self-cultivation, and is included in the same genre as Dickens's Great Expectations (1861), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, 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, and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Tolstoy regarded Dickens as the best of all English novelists and considered Copperfield his finest work, ranking the "Mischief" chapter (chapter 42) the standard by which the world's great fiction should be judged. Henry James remembered hiding under a small table as a boy to hear its instalments read aloud by his mother. Dostoyevsky read it enthralled in a Siberian prison camp. Franz Kafka called his own first novel Amerika "sheer imitation" of David Copperfield. James Joyce parodied it in Ulysses. G. K. Chesterton considered Copperfield "the best of all Dickens' books". Virginia Woolf, who otherwise betrayed little regard for Dickens, confessed the durability of this one novel, which belongs, she said, to "the memories and myths of life". In a letter written to Hugh Walpole on 8 February 1936, she noted that "I'm reading David Copperfield for the 6th time with almost complete satisfaction. I'd forgotten how magnificent it is.... So enthusiastic am I that I've got a new life of him : which makes me dislike him as a human being". The novel was also Sigmund Freud's favourite novel. Somerset Maugham considered it a great novel, although he found David the weakest character in it, unworthy of the real Dickens. He praised Mr Micawber, who "never fails", and thought that Little Emily got what she was asking for. Charlotte Bronte referred to the novel in a letter to William Smith Williams on 13 September 1849, noting that "I have read David Copperfield; it seems to me very good—admirable in some parts. You said it had affinity to Jane Eyre: it has—now and then—only what an advantage has Dickens in his varied knowledge of men and things!". In John Irving's The Cider House Rules, the main character, Homer Wells, reads David Copperfield to the other orphans every night before bed.