David Copperfield Summary: What Happens in Dickens's Favourite Novel
What it is about
David Copperfield is Charles Dickens's novel of one life told from the inside. It was published as a serial across 1849 and 1850, then as a book in 1850. The narrator is David himself, recounting his journey from infancy to maturity, which places the novel squarely in the bildungsroman tradition. Of all the books Dickens wrote, this was his favourite, and it has been called the triumph of his art. Critics treat it as a turning point, the hinge between the novels of his youth and the novels of his maturity.
It is also partly autobiographical, described as a very complicated weaving of truth and invention, with events that follow the shape of Dickens's own life. He wrote it without an outline, unlike the book before it, Dombey and Son. Some elements were settled in his mind from the start. Others were still undecided while the serial parts were going to press.
The story begins in Blunderstone, Suffolk. David is born six months after his father's death and spends his first years at a small house called the Rookery with his young, childish mother Clara and the housekeeper Clara Peggotty. When he is seven, his mother marries Edward Murdstone while David is away visiting Peggotty's family in Yarmouth, where her brother Daniel lives in a beached barge with his adopted niece and nephew, Emily and Ham. David comes home to a transformed household. Murdstone believes in stern, harsh parenting and calls it firmness. His sister Jane joins them. Between them they make life miserable for David and his mother.
From there the book becomes a sequence of displacements. A brutal boarding school, Salem House, run by Mr Creakle. Bereavement. Child labour in a London wine merchant's warehouse. A debtors' prison. A long walk to Dover in search of a great-aunt he has never properly met. The second half follows David's slow social ascent as he studies, works and eventually finds fame and fortune as an author writing fiction.
The main characters
David is both hero and narrator, and one running joke of the novel is how rarely anyone calls him by his own name. He is Davy at home, Master Copperfield at Yarmouth, Trotwood or Trot to his aunt. Identity in this book is something other people keep renaming.
Betsey Trotwood is the great-aunt who appeared at David's birth and left in a temper on learning he was not a girl. Eccentric and kind-hearted, she takes on his upbringing and sees off Murdstone's attempt to regain custody. She urges David to be as much like the sister who was never born as he can manage.
Wilkins Micawber is David's spendthrift London landlord, friendly, endlessly optimistic and arrested for debt. James Steerforth is the glamorous older schoolfriend David admires with something close to worship, convinced he could do great things if he chose. Tommy Traddles is the steadier friend, the one who later helps David learn shorthand. Agnes Wickfield, daughter of the lawyer David lodges with, becomes his confidante and moral support. And Uriah Heep, Wickfield's clerk, is the servile, scheming figure who gradually gains complete control over his ageing, alcoholic employer.
The themes
Growth and change are the primary subject. David is shaped by every household he passes through, and the novel is interested in which influences stick. Family is drawn broadly here, since the people who actually raise David are a housekeeper, a fisherman's household in a boat and an aunt who wanted a different child. Friendship is treated as a moral test: David's admiration for Steerforth and his steady regard for Traddles pull in opposite directions.
Underneath the personal story, Dickens satirises Victorian England. The novel takes aim at the plight of prostitutes, the status of women in marriage, the class structure, the criminal justice system, legal record keeping, the quality of schools and the employment of children in factories. Much of this arrives through character rather than lecture. Creakle's school and the wine warehouse make the argument without stating it.
How it ends (spoilers)
Heep's fraud reaches into Betsey Trotwood's fortune, which is why David has to work mornings and evenings while training as a proctor. Micawber, employed by Heep as a secretary, is instrumental in exposing him. Heep is last seen in prison, convicted of attempting to defraud the Bank of England. Steerforth seduces Emily, offers to marry her off to his manservant Littimer and deserts her in Europe. Her uncle Dan Peggotty traces her with help from Martha. Ham, once engaged to Emily, drowns in a storm off the coast while trying to rescue shipwreck victims. Steerforth is aboard that ship and dies too.
Why it still matters
The novel takes the eighteenth-century personal history, the kind of book Fielding wrote in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, and builds something far more carefully structured. It gives readers a childhood rendered with unusual exactness and an adult narrator looking back at it with full knowledge of what the child could not see. That double vision is why the book still reads as modern. It also explains why Dickens, working without a plan and drawing on his own life, regarded it as his best.
