David Copperfield

I picked up David Copperfield because I had heard for years that it was the one Dickens loved most. That claim always made me curious. Not his most famous or his darkest, but the one he called his favorite child. I wanted to see why. The Penguin Classics edition I read runs to 1024 pages, first published in 1850, and it took me a good part of a month, a few chapters at night with tea going cold beside me.

What surprised me early was how personal it feels. It is told by Davy himself, looking back, and the voice is warmer than I expected from Victorian fiction of this size. Funny in places. Sad in places without forcing it. By the end I understood the favorite child remark. It has faults, and I will get to those, but it holds together because Davy grows in front of you from a fatherless boy in Suffolk to a working novelist in London.

Blunderstone, Peggotty and the Murdstones

Davy is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk, six months after his father dies. His mother Clara is young, pretty, soft hearted and entirely unready for the world. Their servant Clara Peggotty, a round faced kindly woman with buttons popping off her dress, becomes his true protection. Her family lives in Yarmouth in a converted boat house on the shore. Her brother Daniel Peggotty, a fisherman, keeps house there with his orphaned nephew Ham, his orphaned niece Little Emly, and the widowed Mrs Gummidge who complains about being left alone in the world.

Davy visits that boat house as a small child and remembers it all his life. Fried fish. Ham rowing. Emly running on the sand with blue eyes and a bold laugh. Daniel Peggotty saying Emly will be a lady one day. It reads like the only fully safe place in the early book.

That safety breaks when Clara marries Mr Murdstone. He is handsome in a hard way, with black hair and side whiskers and a voice that expects obedience. His sister Miss Murdstone arrives soon after with a steel purse and a habit of using hard metal bags and harder maxims. The house turns cold. Davy is beaten for struggling with lessons. He bites Murdstone on the hand during one beating and is sent away to school at Salem House. While he is gone, his mother has another baby. When Davy returns, both his mother and the baby are dead. Peggotty tells him plainly. Murdstone has worn Clara down with control and gloom.

The early chapters hurt because Dickens shows neglect through small acts, a missed greeting or a locked door, rather than speeches.

Salem House, Steerforth and Traddles

Salem House in London is run by Mr Creakle, a bald man with a fiery face who favors his cane and favors boys with money. Davy arrives with a placard on his back that reads he bites. The boys stare. Two friendships shape him there.

James Steerforth is older, handsome, confident, generous with money and stories. Everyone adores him, including Davy. Tommy Traddles is the opposite, good humored, unlucky, always drawing skeletons during lessons and always getting caned for it. Mr Mell, a poor usher with a mother in an almshouse, treats Davy with decency. Steerforth gets Mell dismissed by repeating gossip about his mother, and Davy never quite forgets that flash of cruelty even while he worships his friend.

School ends abruptly after his mother dies. Murdstone and his sister do not want the expense. Davy, about ten, is sent to work in London at Murdstone and Grinby, a wine warehouse near the river, washing bottles and sticking labels for a few shillings a week. He lodges with the Micawber family, who will matter far more later, and he eats scraps and walks the streets alone. It is the most autobiographical part of the novel. Dickens himself had worked in a blacking factory as a boy, and you can feel that shame and anger under the humor.

Running to Dover and a new start

When the warehouse work grows hopeless and the Micawbers leave London under pressure from debts, Davy decides to run away. He has heard of an aunt, his fathers sister Betsey Trotwood, who lives in Dover. She had arrived on the night of his birth, hoped for a girl, and stalked off when told the baby was a boy. Davy walks much of the way to Dover, robbed by a young tramp, half starved, dusty and sunburned.

Betsey is blunt, upright, anti donkey when boys ride them across her green, and far kinder than rumor suggests. With her lives Mr Dick, a gentle cracked man who believes the troubles of King Charles the First are tangled in his own head and who flies a great kite covered with writing. Betsey pays off the Murdstones when they arrive to claim Davy, tells them what she thinks of them in plain terms, and renames the boy Trotwood Copperfield. She sends him to school in Canterbury under the kind Dr Strong.

Canterbury gives Davy two anchors. One is Dr Strong and his young wife Annie, shadowed by a coarse cousin named Jack Maldon who wants her attention. The other is the Wickfield house. Mr Wickfield is a lawyer, widowed, drinking too much, devoted to his daughter Agnes. Agnes is calm, clear eyed, steady. She keeps the household accounts and keeps her father from sliding. She becomes Davys fixed point. When he is confused or weak, he thinks of Agnes and steadies. Dickens draws her as near perfect, which is both the point and, for many readers, part of the problem. I will come back to that.

Davy does well at school. Betsey loses much of her money through bad management, which forces Davy to think about earning a living rather than drifting into a gentlemanly life. He is articled to Mr Spenlow in London to learn proctor law in Doctors Commons. The offices are sleepy and old fashioned, full of copying and fees, and Dickens has fun with their pomposity.

Uriah Heep, the Wickfields and London lodgings

The threat in Canterbury has a name and a wringing pair of hands. Uriah Heep is Mr Wickfields clerk, red haired, cadaverous, always writhing with humility. He says he is ever so humble. He wriggles. He copies keys. Slowly he lends Wickfield money, encourages his drinking, learns his secrets, and pushes himself into partnership. Then he pushes toward marriage with Agnes. Davy hates him on sight, and so does every reader.

In London, Davy lodges first with Mrs Crupp and then with Mrs Steerforths circle, where he meets Steerforth again, grown and charming and idle. He also renews with Traddles, now poor and studying law, engaged to Sophy Crewler, living in a tiny Camden room with flower pots and simple meals. Traddles is one of the best people in the book. He works. He waits. He forgives debts owed to him. His contrast with Steerforth is deliberate and a little heavy handed, but it works because Traddles feels real.

Mr Micawber reappears in London with his large family and his large language. Wilkins Micawber talks in round phrases about waiting for something to turn up. He borrows. He writes begging letters. He is arrested for debt. His wife Emma stands by him with twins and speeches about never deserting him. Dickens based him on his own father, and the comedy is affectionate, though Micawber skates close to wearing out his welcome. He is given a clerk job with Wickfield and Heep through influence, which sets up the later exposure.

This middle stretch is long. Law copying. Dinner parties. Theater visits. Davy learning shorthand to become a parliamentary reporter. It can drag if you want plot every ten pages. I found the everyday texture kept me going, the fog, the chop houses, the landladies, the exact cost of rooms.

Dora, Emily and the wreck at Yarmouth

Davy falls hard for Dora Spenlow, Mr Spenlows daughter. She is pretty, playful, terrified of housekeeping, devoted to her tiny dog Jip. Her father disapproves of Davy as a suitor and dies suddenly after a carriage accident and illness, leaving Dora with two aunts. Davy marries her young. For a while their failures are comic. Dora cannot keep accounts. She burns dinner. She cries. Davy tries to train her like a pupil and fails. Then Jip dies, Dora sickens after a miscarriage, and she fades in a way that is hard to read now. She knows she is not the wife Davy needs. She asks Agnes to come. She dies holding Davys hand.

My reaction to Dora shifted while reading. At first she charms. Then she irritates. Then her death lands harder than expected because Dickens shows Davys guilt at wanting her to be different. Still, she is thin next to Agnes or even Miss Mowcher or Rosa Dartle. She exists to be loved and to die young, and that feels dated.

Parallel to this runs the Yarmouth tragedy. Little Emly, now grown and engaged to Ham, the best and most patient of men, is seduced by Steerforth with help from his servant Littimer. Steerforth installs her in a villa, grows bored, proposes she marry Littimer, and abandons her. She runs. She ends in London, hunted, helped briefly by Martha, another fallen girl Steerforth used, and by Daniel Peggotty who has been walking England searching for her. Ham remains loyal and forgiving. He dies trying to save a sailor in a great storm off Yarmouth. The sailor is Steerforth, washed ashore with a mark on his forehead from an old injury Rosa Dartle once gave him. Daniel Peggotty finds his body on the sand. The storm chapter is the most famous set piece for good reason, loud and bleak and staged with total confidence.

Emly is recovered with help from Wilkins Micawber in London, who spots Littimer and forces a confrontation. Daniel Peggotty takes Emly and Mrs Gummidge to emigrate to Australia to begin again. It is sentimental, yes, but Dickens earns some of it by letting Ham die without a last speech and by letting Daniel Peggotty grieve quietly.

Micawber exposes Heep and Agnes at last

The Canterbury plot tightens when Traddles and Micawber compare notes. Micawber, hired by Heep, has been made to sign false papers and to cover thefts from Wickfield and from Betsey Trotwood. He pretends drunken loyalty while gathering proof. In a famous scene at the Wickfield house, with Betsey, Traddles, Davy, Agnes and others present, Micawber denounces Heep at length, produces letters and account books, and calls him a villain in rolling periods. Heep turns white and snarls. Wickfield is cleared though broken. Betsey recovers part of her money. Micawber, redeemed by honesty at last, emigrates with his family to Australia where he becomes a magistrate and writes long cheerful letters home.

Davy, widowed, goes abroad to Switzerland to grieve and work. He writes. He becomes a known author. On return he understands at last what readers saw chapters earlier. He loves Agnes Wickfield. She has loved him for years without pressing. They marry. They have children. Betsey lives with them in the cottage at Highgate. Peggotty serves as housekeeper. Traddles, married to Sophy, becomes a successful judge. Daniel Peggotty prospers in Australia. Emly lives quietly. Heep ends in prison for fraud, still greasy with false humility alongside another prisoner named Littimer.

Dickens closes with Davy looking around his table and lifting his eyes to Agnes by his side. It is a calm ending after storm and death, and it fits the retrospective shape. Davy the narrator has learned to value steadiness over charm. Steerforth charmed everyone and ruined lives. Traddles and Agnes worked and waited and held people together.

I should be plain about the faults because they are real even in a book I ended up admiring. It is too long by modern standards. Whole dinners and law office jokes could be cut. The moral design splits too neatly between angels and villains. Agnes never errs. Traddles never sours. Heep and Creakle and Littimer never show a decent impulse. Steerforth gets a little more shading through his mother and through Rosa Dartle, but not enough to explain why everyone forgives him so much for so long. Dora is the weakest major figure, written as a child wife rather than a woman, and her long dying scene asks for tears her character has not earned. Some readers will also tire of Micawber's speeches and Mrs Gummidges refrain about being a lone lorn creature, though I grew fond of both.

Even so, the best parts justify the bulk. The boat house. The Dover walk. The kite on the hill with Mr Dick. The storm. The Heep exposure. The quiet scenes where Agnes simply sits and listens and Davy leaves stronger. If you want one Victorian novel that shows how a boy becomes a man through work, marriage, grief and friendship, this is the one to try. Start with no hurry. Let the early Yarmouth pages set their hook. When Heep starts writhing, you will turn pages faster than you expect for a book from 1850.