David Copperfield (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Charles Dickens, Radhika Jones (Introduction), Radhika Jones

Overview

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

Dickens’s favorite of all his novels, David Copperfield is the story of a boy who loses both parents at an early age, and who escapes the torture of working for his pitiless stepfather to make something of himself and, with any luck, find true happiness.

David Copperfield features an unforgettable gallery of characters, including David’s cruel stepfather Mr. Murdstone, the unctuous Uriah Heep, the amiable Mr. Micawber, whom Dickens based on his father, and Dora Spenglow, whom David marries and calls his “child-wife.” Written in the first person, David Copperfield is perhaps the most autobiographical of Dickens’s fictions. This new edition includes commentaries, discussion questions, and Phiz’s original illustrations.

Features the original illustrations by Phiz.

Radhika Jones is the managing editor of Grand Street magazine, a freelance writer, and a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Jones also wrote the introduction and notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593080631
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble
Publication date:	12/01/2003
Series:	Barnes & Noble Classics Series
Pages:	768
Sales rank:	14,589
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.54(d)

About the Author

Born on February 7, 1812, Charles Dickens was the second of eight children in a family burdened with financial troubles. Despite difficult early years, he became the most successful British writer of the Victorian age.

In 1824, young Charles was withdrawn from school and forced to work at a boot-blacking factory when his improvident father, accompanied by his mother and siblings, was sentenced to three months in a debtor's prison. Once they were released, Charles attended a private school for three years. The young man then became a solicitor's clerk, mastered shorthand, and before long was employed as a Parliamentary reporter. When he was in his early twenties, Dickens began to publish stories and sketches of London life in a variety of periodicals.

It was the publication of Pickwick Papers (1836-1837) that catapulted the twenty-five-year-old author to national renown. Dickens wrote with unequaled speed and often worked on several novels at a time, publishing them first in monthly installments and then as books. His early novels Oliver Twist (1837-1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), and A Christmas Carol (1843) solidified his enormous, ongoing popularity. As Dickens matured, his social criticism became increasingly biting, his humor dark, and his view of poverty darker still. David Copperfield (1849-1850), Bleak House (1852-1853), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) are the great works of his masterful and prolific period.

In 1858 Dickens's twenty-three-year marriage to Catherine Hogarth dissolved when he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, a young actress. The last years of his life were filled with intense activity: writing, managing amateur theatricals, and undertaking several reading tours that reinforced the public's favorable view of his work but took an enormous toll on his health. Working feverishly to the last, Dickens collapsed and died on June 8, 1870, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood uncompleted.

Author biography from the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of David Copperfield.

Date of Birth:

February 7, 1812

Date of Death:

June 18, 1870

Place of Birth:

Portsmouth, England

Place of Death:

Gad's Hill, Kent, England

Education:

Home-schooling; attended Dame School at Chatham briefly and Wellington

Read an Excerpt

From Radhika Jones's Introduction to David Copperfield

It is one of the provocative complexities of the Victorian novel that while it was instrumental in creating a mass audience for literature, making reading a genuinely collective activity, it could still maintain the illusion of personal intimacy—if only through such devices as the singular direct address "Dear Reader." Dickens did not only publish his work serially, as did most novelists at the time; he actually wrote serially—that is, he composed his novels section by section according to the specifications of the periodical publishing them. This process allowed for changes midstream, sometimes in reply to requests or complaints from readers. In David Copperfield, Dickens is known to have reworked the role of the dwarf manicurist Miss Mowcher, who is introduced as an aider and abettor of young men engaged in seduction, after a letter he received from a woman with whom he had been briefly acquainted, Mrs. Jane Seymour Hill. Mrs. Hill, a dwarf herself, recognized her appearance in the character and argued that her physical deformities were being manipulated into ethical shortcomings. Dickens wrote back to assure her that his characters were always composites and that no harm was meant, but his haste to make amends confirms that at least part of her accusation struck a chord. When Miss Mowcher reappears in the plot, not only is her reputation cleared, but she voices the very maxim that Mrs. Hill had communicated to Dickens—that one must not confuse disfigurement of the body with disfigurement of the soul.

Serial composition also had the potential to bring on the occasional panic attack, for while the public was occupied in wondering what would happen to Little Em'ly, the Micawbers, and Tommy Traddles, their creator could conceivably be wondering the same thing. Charles Kent, in his 1872 commemoration of Dickens's public performances, recalls the admission of one such moment as related by Dickens with "a vivid sense still upon him of mingled enjoyment and dismay":

Somewhere about the middle of the serial publication of David Copperfield, happening to be out of writing-paper, he sallied forth one morning to get a fresh supply at the stationer's. He was living then in his favourite haunt, at Fort House, in Broadstairs. As he was about to enter the stationer's shop, with the intention of buying the needful writing-paper, for the purpose of returning home with it, and at once setting to work upon his next number, not one word of which was yet written, he stood aside for a moment at the threshold to allow a lady to pass in before him. . . . The next instant he had overheard this strange lady asking the person behind the counter for the new green number. When it was handed to her, "Oh, this," said she, "I have read. I want the next one." The next one she was thereupon told would be out by the end of the month. "Listening to this, unrecognised," he added, in conclusion, "knowing the purpose for which I was there, and remembering that not one word of the number she was asking for was yet written, for the first and only time in my life, I felt—frightened!" (Kent, Charles Dickens as a Reader, pp. 45-46). Many of his novels, particularly the later ones, required meticulously plotting in advance, but David Copperfield unfolds relatively simply—perhaps because it relied in part on events of Dickens's own experience, with which he was naturally familiar, but also because its first-person voice dictates a more restricted plot than an omniscient third-person narrator, capable of exposing connections and coincidences among an extensive web of characters, could provide. In his next novel, Bleak House, Dickens would combine these approaches in two distinct narrative strands; the result is a structurally complex work whose denouement links an aristocrat with the lowliest of street-sweepers and touches on every social class in between. But the world of David Copperfield, with the exception of the scene of David's birth (the facts of which he relays on good authority of eyewitnesses), is limited to David's own recollections of events in which he plays a part, and the fabric of society is likewise limited to David's personal acquaintance.

In form David Copperfield is a bildungsroman, a novel that traces the moral and intellectual development of its hero in his or her progress toward adulthood. (Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and other Romantic-era German novels are credited as giving rise to this tradition, hence the German root bildung, or "formation.") But the question of how such development is defined—what constitutes growth, so to speak, and how it is measured—differs widely from author to author and from work to work. In Copperfield, the formation of David's character has far less to do with his acquiring a profession or a fortune than it does with his learning to love responsibly and prudently. The fame and wealth he gains by his pen is a pleasant sidebar, but the real struggle in David's plot is reserved for finding a suitable mate. Toward this goal, David spends much of his youth making an informal study of female prototypes, a parade of women who pass through his life, each with her own lesson to impart. There are the women who fall, giving in to temptation, lust, and love over duty. Then there are the women who, often against our expectations, rise to the occasion—Mrs. Gummidge, who becomes a prop for Mr. Peggotty when tragedy strikes his family, and on a much larger scale, David's great aunt, the formidable Betsey Trotwood, who sets David on a promising path toward adulthood.