David Copperfield Charles Dickens

First inspirations

On 7 January 1849, Dickens visited Norwich and Yarmouth in Norfolk, with two close friends, John Leech (1817–1864) and Mark Lemon (1809–1870).[26] Leech was an illustrator at Punch, a satirical magazine, and the first illustrator for A Christmas Carol by Dickens in 1843. Lemon was a founding editor of Punch, and soon a contributor to Household Words, the weekly magazine Dickens was starting up; he co-authored Mr Nightingale's Diary, a farce, with Dickens in 1851.[27][28] The two towns, especially the second, became important in the novel, and Dickens informed Forster that Yarmouth seemed to him to be "the strangest place in the world" and that he would "certainly try my hand at it".[29] During a walk in the vicinity of Yarmouth, Dickens noticed a sign indicating the small locality of Blunderston, which became in his novel the village of "Blunderstone" where David is born and spends his childhood.[15]

A week after his arrival in Yarmouth, his sixth son, Henry Fielding Dickens, was named after Henry Fielding, his favourite past author. Per Forster, Dickens refers to Fielding "as a kind of homage to the novel he was about to write".[30]

As always with Dickens, when a writing project began, he was agitated, melancholic, "even deeper than the customary birth pangs of other novels";[30] as always, he hesitated about the title, and his working notes contain seventeen variants, "Charles Copperfield" included.[15] After several attempts, he stopped on "The Copperfield Survey of the World as it Rolled", a title that he retained until 19 April.[31] When Forster pointed out that his hero, now called David, has his own initials transposed, Dickens was intrigued and declared that this was a manifestation of his fate.[30] He was not yet sure of his pen: "Though I know what I want to do, I am lumbering like a train wagon",[32] he told Forster.

No general plan, but an inspired novel

Contrary to the method previously used for Dombey and Son, Dickens did not elaborate an overall plan and often wrote the summary of a chapter after completing it. Four character names were found at the last moment: Traddles, Barkis, Creakle and Steerforth;[33] the profession of David remains uncertain until the eighth issue (printed in December 1849, containing Chapters 22–24, in which David chooses to be trained as a proctor); and Paul Schlicke notes that the future of Dora was still not determined on 17 May 1850 (when 37 chapters had been published in the first 12 monthly instalments). Other major aspects of the novel, however, were immediately fixed, such as David's meeting with Aunt Betsey, Emily's fall or Agnes's role as the "real" heroine of the story.[10]

Once launched, Dickens becomes "quite confident".[34] The most difficult thing was to insert "what I know so well", his experience at the Warren factory; once the threads were woven, however, the truth mixed with fiction, he exulted and congratulated himself in a letter to Forster.[35] From now on, he wrote in this letter, the story "bore him irresistibly along". Never, it seems, was he in the grip of failures of inspiration, so "ardent [is his] sympathy with the creatures of the fancy which always made real to him their sufferings or sorrows."[30]

Changes in detail occur during the composition: on 22 August 1849, while staying on the Isle of Wight for a family vacation, he changed on the advice of Forster, the theme of the obsession of Mr Dick, a secondary character in the novel. This theme was originally "a bull in a china shop" and became "King Charles's head" in a nod to the bicentenary of the execution of Charles I of England.[N 3][10]

Last incidents in the writing

Although plunged into the writing of his novel, Dickens set out to create a new journal, Household Words,[36] the first issue of which appeared on 31 March 1850. This daunting task, however, did not seem to slow down the writing of David Copperfield: I am "busy as a bee", he writes happily to the actor William Macready.[37]

A serious incident occurred in December: Mrs Jane Seymour Hill, chiropractor to Mrs Dickens,[38] raised the threat of prosecution, because she recognised herself in the portrait of Miss Mowcher; Dickens did not do badly,[39] gradually modifying the psychology of the character by making her less of a caricature and, at the very end of the novel, by making her a friend of the protagonist, whereas at the beginning she served rather contrary purposes.[38] This was, writes Harry Stone, "the only major departure from his original plans".[40]

His third daughter was born on 16 August 1850, called Dora Annie Dickens, the same name as his character's first wife. The baby died nine months later after the last serial was issued and the book was published.[10]

Dickens marked the end of his manuscript on 21 October 1850[10] and felt both torn and happy like every time he finished a novel: "Oh, my dear Forster, if I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel to-night, how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World."[41][10]

At first glance, the work is modelled in the loose and somewhat disjointed way of "personal histories" that was very popular in the United Kingdom of the 18th century;[N 4] but in reality, David Copperfield is a carefully structured and unified novel. It begins, like other novels by Dickens, with a rather bleak painting of the conditions of childhood in Victorian England, notoriously when the troublesome children are parked in infamous boarding schools, then he strives to trace the slow social and intimate ascent of a young man who, painfully providing for the needs of his good aunt while continuing his studies, ends up becoming a writer: the story, writes Paul Davis, of "a Victorian everyman seeking self-understanding".[9]

Publication in monthly instalments

"The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery"[N 5] was published from 1 May 1849 to 1 November 1850 in 19 monthly one-shilling instalments, containing 32 pages of text and two illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"), with a title cover simplified to The Personal History of David Copperfield. The last instalment was a double-number.

On the other side of the Atlantic, John Wiley & Sons and G. P. Putnam published a monthly edition, then a two-volume book version.

• I – May 1849 (chapters 1–3);
• II – June 1849 (chapters 4–6);
• III – July 1849 (chapters 7–9);
• IV – August 1849 (chapters 10–12);
• V – September 1849 (chapters 13–15);
• VI – October 1849 (chapters 16–18);
• VII – November 1849 (chapters 19–21);
• VIII – December 1849 (chapters 22–24);
• IX – January 1850 (chapters 25–27);
• X – February 1850 (chapters 28–31);
• XI – March 1850 (chapters 32–34);
• XII – April 1850 (chapters 35–37);
• XIII – May 1850 (chapters 38–40);
• XIV – June 1850 (chapters 41–43);
• XV – July 1850 (chapters 44–46);
• XVI – August 1850 (chapters 47–50);
• XVII – September 1850 (chapters 51–53);
• XVIII – October 1850 (chapters 54–57);
• XIX-XX – November 1850 (chapters 58–64).