David Copperfield & Charles Dickens

. . monster was often prejudiced, unprofessional and unfair, more ready to follow public opinion than to reach it (Hibbert 300). Yet even a cursory reading of David Copperfield--one nonices outright that the initials of the author are the reverse of the initials of David Copperfield--makes it inconceivable that Dickens did not draw on a reservoir of personal visualize and sensibility to craft the humbug.

Evidence of Dickens's preference for David Copperfield as an artefact of his work is readily available. In an 1866 letter to Robert Browning, he describes David Copperfield as "my own particular favourite" (in Storey 171).[1] The autobiographical features of the smart appeared to grow out of deuce elements that were unique to the early serialisation and planning of David Copperfield. One was point of view; David Copperfield was Dickens's frontmost deployment of first person. The second was a "fragment of autobiography" that Dickens had begun in 1846 but that his wife encouraged him to abandon, in part beca utilize "what it told was too painful to confess" ( handle 108). The fragment was set aside for two years, and in 1848 the serious planning of David Copperfield began. Fielding sums up the cover in terms of the pattern of the evolving narrative:

But right off that he was writing in the first person, for the first time, he saw a great opportunity to make use of it. Into the second number went the key of his childhood reading; into the

The relevance of these speculations to David Copperfield is embedded in the story of David's marriage to Dora. In the novel, David fondly pursues the child-wife Dora when the reader head understands Agnes is outlying(prenominal) more suited to the role of his wife. The growth of David's perplexity with Dora's incompetency never descends into meanness.

The best evidence of the fiction-reality analogue, however, can be lay down in the language of the novel and that of Dickens's letters. A series of notes from Dickens to Catherine in 1835 is quite suggestive. The content of the notes is less relevant that the salutations or the complimentary closes:

My dear love . . . God bless you my feel. count me Dearest Kate Ever--Ever Yours

As a serial presentation, published in nineteen so-called "numbers," the narrative of David's life perforce unfolds gradually. Fielding cites its natural development "in several stages," as well as the mutability--whether from childishness to maturity or exposure of crime masquerading as humility--of such characters as David, Uriah Heep, Dora, and Traddles. Various fictional analogues to Dickens's life can be discerned in the plotting and character development of David Copperfield. The account of David's experience as an abused child, first at the men of Murdstone and later at school, may follow Dickens's account of his youth.

House, Madeline, and whole wheat flour Storey, eds. The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1820-1839. London: Oxford UP, 1965.

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