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David Copperfield
This novel tells about how a youth, David
Copperfield, struggles to succeed in society. David is a posthumous child.
His mother, a weak and gentle woman, is remarried to Mr.Murdstone, a
vile-natured man. Mr.Murdstone sends David to a school where he is badly
treated. Also David’s mother died later under Mr.Murdstone’s threat and
ill-treatment. After his mother death, David is taken out of school and sent
to work in a blacking factory as a child-laborer. Under the miserable
sufferings, David runs away and walks miles to his great-aunt for shelter.
The eccentric but good-hearted old lady adopts him and sends him to a good
school. After schooling, he goes in for law and becomes a pupil of
Mr.Spenlow. He marries Spenlow’s daughter, Dora. Yet this marriage does not
grant him any happiness and only lasts a brief period. After Dora’s death,
he marries Agnes who has always loved him. At this time, David has become a
famous writer. Finally, David not only gets achievements in career, but also
obtains love and happiness from his family.
This novel is autobiographical to some extent,
because David Copperfield is known to embody many of the early
experiences of its author, although it is not an exact autobiography. Many
characters in this novel were drawn from living originals known to Dickens.
Micawber, for instance, is partly based upon his own father; Dora, the
“child-wife?of David, represents Maria Beadnell, an early love-flame of the
author; Mr. Creakle and Salem House indicate a former school, Wellington
House Academy that Dickens attended; Clara Peggotty owed much to Mary
Weller, a nurse of Dickens; Miss Mowcher, Rosa Dartle, and others have also
been identified with actual persons known to Dickens.
Yet the novel’s significance is much greater than
that of the author’s autobiography. It involves many social problems, such
as the plight of the weak, the equality in marriage. Throughout David
Copperfield, the powerful abuse the weak and helpless. Dickens focuses on
orphans, women, and the mentally disabled to show that exploitation is the
rule in an industrial society. Dickens draws on his own experience as a
child to describe the inhumanity of child labor and debtors?prison. His
characters, even those morally good people, suffer punishment at the hands
of the powerful. The arbitrary suffering of innocents makes up the most
vividly affecting scenes of the novel. For example, David starves and
suffers in a wine-bottling factory as a child and the boys at Salem House
are helpless to be against the cruel Mr. Creakle. In both situations,
children who are deprived of the care of their natural parents suffer at the
hands of their own supposed protectors. In order to challenge the superior,
the weak must ally themselves with equally powerful characters. David, for
example, who doesn’t stand up to Mr. Murdstone and challenge his authority,
flees to the wealthy Miss Betsey, who affords David shelter. Thus the weak
are really helpless and the way they can be equal or succeed to their
oppressors is to get the back of the powerful.
Dickens also shows his opinion on the
equality in marriage. In the world of the novel, Dickens holds up the
Strongs?marriage as an example to show that marriages can only be happy if
neither spouse is subjugated to the other. Indeed, neither of the Strongs
views the other as inferior. Conversely, Dickens criticizes characters who
attempt to get superiority over their spouses. Mr. Murdstone’s intention to
improve David’s mother’s character only crushes her spirit. He forces Clara
into submission in the name of improving her, which only leaves her meek and
voiceless. In contrast, although Doctor Strong does attempt to improve
Annie’s character, he is not out of a desire to show his moral superiority
but rather out of love and respect for Annie. Doctor Strong is gentle and
soothing with his wife, rather than abrasive and imperious like Mr.
Murdstone. He still assumes that his wife, as a woman, depends upon him and
needs him for moral guidance. By depicting a marriage in which a husband and
wife share some balance of power, Dickens does point toward an age of
empowered women.
As the hero in this novel, David Copperfield
narrates his story as an adult yet relays the impressions he had from a
youthful point of view. Readers can see how David’s perception of the world
deepens as he comes of age. David, for instance, is ignorant of Steerforth’s
treachery at the beginning, but later readers can feel that David does not
think Steerforth deserves David’s adulation. Though David always keeps the
virtue of honesty, kindliness, and so on, which are considered as good
virtues of human beings, he also has moments of cruelty, like the scene in
which he intentionally distresses Mr. Dick by explaining Miss Betsey’s dire
situation to him. David, especially as a young man in love, can be foolish
and romantic. As he grows up, however, he develops a more mature point of
view and searches for a lover who will challenge him and help him grow.
David fully matures as an adult when he expresses the sentiment that he
values Agnes’s calm tranquility over all else in his life. In a word, in
David’s first-person narration, Dickens conveys the wisdom of the older
man’s implicitly through the eyes of a child.
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