David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

David Copperfield, published in 1850, was Dickens' middle novel and written at the height of his career. It is a first person Bildungsroman, heavily autobiographical and shedding many insights into the early life of its author. Much like Oliver Twist, the story opens with David's birth and follows his progress through infancy into boyhood. A considerable portion of the book deals with childhood and trauma, before progressing onto the attendant trials of adulthood. Orphaned at a vulnerable age, David is sent to work in a London blacking warehouse by his abusive stepfather, Mr Murdstone. The shame and depression induced by this fall from middle class respectability and removal from school directly reflects Dickens' own grievances at being thus employed during his father's incarceration at the Marshalsea debtor's prison. It is a thinly transmuted confession of immense emotional turmoil, a period which would haunt Dickens for the rest of his life. The fictitious Copperfield eventually runs away from the squalid conditions and seeks refuge with his prickly Aunt Trotwood in Dover. Here David is reinstated into a bourgeois lifestyle, beginning life afresh under the protection of his new guardian.

It would be futile to introduce here even a handful of the many characters in the book, each coloured with a distinct personality and unique relationship to the central protagonist. The pages positively swarm with a rich cast of eccentrics and misfits who appear, disappear, and reappear phantom-like at the required points of the drama. I could not help noticing that, despite the inevitable presence of villains such as the insidious Uriah Heep, David Copperfield contained more honest and decent characters than is usual in Dickens' works, perhaps as a way of solidifying a strong support network of allies to compensate for his hero's shaky beginnings in life. With David's career, love life, ambitions and triumphs, sorrows and misfortunes recorded chronologically, the reader is invited to participate in the tumultuous maturation of identity. This search for identity seems to be a pervasive theme of the text, particularly as David is rarely referred to by his real name, but instead by a plethora of nicknames such as Trot, Daisy, Doady, and Mas'r Davy. The tone of the book is alternately comic, whimsical, melancholy, and tragic. Although overly sentimental in places which is quite out of keeping with modern dramas, the book remains a riveting, highly enjoyable journey through one man's history.  

Rating: 3/5