Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield

Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield

David Copperfield was Charles Dickens’s eighth novel, and has been said to be Charles Dickens favorite novel. In the Charles Dickens edition of the novel Dickens states, “It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is David Copperfield”(Valsmis 1). Many of the events of the novel, David Copperfield, have been compared to Charles Dickens own life; therefore many believe the novel to be somewhat autobiographical. John Forster one of Charles Dickens close friends and the author of Dickens biography wrote, “too much had been assumed…of the full identity of Dickens with his hero; but certainly a good deal of Dickens’s character and experience went into the book”(Unknown 2). Forster’s remark deals mainly with some of the public’s belief that the entire story of David Copperfield was autobiographical.

Charles Dickens began work on David Copperfield after John Forster questioned him about his childhood. E. D. H. Johnson's, Charles Dickens: An Introduction to His Novels, discussed a conversation that John Forster overheard between Charles Dickens’s father and a man, in which; the man claimed that he remembered a young Dickens working in his factory (Johnson 1). Johnson stated, “Forster's curiosity over this chance discovery moved Dickens to write the fragment of an autobiography which he subsequently entrusted to his friend when he decided to incorporate the substance of his recollections almost verbatim in the Murdstone and Grinby episode of David Copperfield”(Johnson 1). D...

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http://www.eiu.edu/~multilit/engl253-01s02/dickens/publicationrecep.htm

Other Sites interesting Sources

Hornback, Bert. David Copperfield in Noah's Architecture: A Study of Dickens'

Mythology. Athens, OH: Ohio State P, 1972: 63-82.

Needham. Gwendolyn B. The Undisciplined Heart of David Copperfield in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1954): 81-107. [Reprinted in David Copperfield,Norton Critical Edition, Ed. Jerome H. Buckley, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990: 794-806.]

Nussbaum, Martha C. "Steerforth's Arm: Love and the Moral Point of View" from Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 335-363).<o:p></o:p>

Stewart, Garrett. "Dickens and Language," in Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, Ed. John O. Jordan, New York: Cambridge UP, 2001: 136-151.