David Copperfield
Charles Dickens (1850)
“A boy who narrates his own life discovers that the people who shaped him were never who he thought they were — and neither was he.”
At a Glance
David Copperfield is born posthumously into genteel poverty, suffers under a cruel stepfather, is sent to labor in a London warehouse at ten, escapes to his eccentric aunt Betsey Trotwood, and slowly builds a life as a writer. Along the way, he is deceived by the sycophantic Uriah Heep, devastated by the fall of his charming friend Steerforth, and learns — through two marriages and a gallery of unforgettable characters — that an 'undisciplined heart' is more dangerous than poverty, cruelty, or bad luck combined.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
David Copperfield was serialized in monthly parts from May 1849 to November 1850 and was immediately recognized as Dickens's most personal work. Dickens himself said 'of all my books, I like this the best' — calling it his 'favourite child.' It established the Victorian bildungsroman as a major literary form, influenced every subsequent first-person coming-of-age narrative in English, and remains one of the most widely read novels of the nineteenth century. Tolstoy called it his favourite English novel. James Joyce cited its opening as a direct influence on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Diction Profile
Variable — ranges from high Victorian retrospection (David the narrator) to broad comic caricature (Micawber, Heep) to dialect realism (Peggotty, Ham) to Gothic intensity (the storm)
High