David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
David Copperfield
69 chapters
4.05from 265,938 ratingson Goodreads
David is born after his father's death, and his life goes wrong when his mother remarries. Sent away to school, then to paste labels on bottles in a London warehouse at ten, he walks to Dover to find the aunt who disowned him at birth. Dickens's own favourite among his novels, and the one that comes nearest to his own life.
About the book
Published in monthly parts in 1849 and 1850, David Copperfield is told by David himself from his birth six months after his father’s death. His mother’s marriage to Mr Murdstone ends his childhood: he is beaten, sent to a school run by a brute, and at ten put to work pasting labels in a riverside warehouse while lodging with the perpetually insolvent Mr Micawber. He runs away to Dover to find the aunt who left in disgust on the day he was born, and she keeps him. Dickens called it his favourite child, and it is the novel nearest his own life — the warehouse, the debtor’s prison, the shorthand and the reporting gallery are all his. It is also the book in which he examines what a boy learns from the adults who use him, and why a man who has been Murdstone’s stepson might marry the wrong woman first.
Characters
David Copperfield — Narrator
Orphaned, exploited and eventually a novelist, telling his own life from the six months before his birth.
Betsey Trotwood — David’s aunt
The formidable aunt who walked out at his birth and, ten years later, takes him in and makes him.
Mr Micawber — Lodging-house keeper
Grandly optimistic and permanently in debt, waiting for something to turn up and occasionally right.
Edward Murdstone — Stepfather
David’s stepfather, who calls his cruelty firmness and breaks David’s mother with it.
Uriah Heep — Antagonist
A clerk endlessly professing his humbleness while working his way into control of his employer’s affairs.
Agnes Wickfield — Friend
The steady daughter of David’s guardian, whose counsel he relies on long before he understands why.
James Steerforth — Schoolfellow
The charming older boy David worships at school, and who repays the family that loves him worst.
Dora Spenlow — David’s first wife
Enchanting, helpless and entirely unsuited to housekeeping, married in the full knowledge of it.
About the author
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was the defining English novelist of the Victorian age and, in his own lifetime, its most famous writer. When his father was imprisoned for debt the twelve-year-old Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory, and the experience runs under everything he wrote about childhood, poverty and institutions that fail the people in them. Publishing in monthly instalments, he wrote for an audience that read each part as it appeared, which is part of why his books are built of cliffhangers and crowds of minor characters nobody forgets. His novels include Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol.