Many view this novel as Dickens's masterpiece, beginning with his friend and first biographer John Forster, who writes: "Dickens never stood so high in reputation as at the completion of Copperfield",[154] and the author himself calls it "his favourite child".[155][N 10] It is true, he says, that "underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life",[156] that is, an experience of self-writing. It is therefore not surprising that the book is often placed in the category of autobiographical works. From a strictly literary point of view, however, it goes beyond this framework in the richness of its themes and the originality of its writing.
Situated in the middle of Dickens's career, it represents, according to Paul Davis, a turning point in his work, the point of separation between the novels of youth and those of maturity.[157] In 1850, Dickens was 38 years old and had twenty more to live, which he filled with other masterpieces, often denser, sometimes darker, that addressed most of the political, social and personal issues he faced.
"The privileged child" of Dickens
Dickens welcomed the publication of his work with intense emotion, and he continued to experience this until the end of his life. When he went through a period of personal difficulty and frustration in the 1850s, he returned to David Copperfield as to a dear friend who resembled him: "Why," he wrote to Forster, "Why is it, as with poor David, a sense comes always crashing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?"[158][N 11] When Dickens begins writing Great Expectations, which was also written in the first person, he reread David Copperfield and confided his feelings to Forster: "was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe".[159] Criticism has not always been even-handed, though over time the high importance of this novel has been recognised.
Initial reception
Although Dickens became a Victorian celebrity his readership was mainly the middle classes, including the so-called skilled workers, according to the French critic Fabrice Bensimon, because ordinary people could not afford it.[160] Issues I to V of the serial version reached 25,000 copies in two years, modest sales compared to 32,000 Dombey and Son and 35,000 Bleak House, but Dickens was nevertheless happy: "Everyone is cheering David on", he writes to Mrs Watson,[161] and, according to Forster, his reputation was at the top.[154]
The first reviews were mixed,[162] but the great contemporaries of Dickens showed their approval: Thackeray found the novel "freshly and simply simple";[163] John Ruskin, in his Modern Painters, was of the opinion that the scene of the storm surpasses Turner's evocations of the sea; more soberly, Matthew Arnold declared it "rich in merits";[24] and, in his autobiographical book A Small Boy and Others, Henry James evokes the memory of "treasure so hoarded in the dusty chamber of youth".[164]
Subsequent reputation
Falstaff (Adolf Schrödter, 1867), to whom J. B. Priestley compares Mr Micawber.After Dickens's death, David Copperfield rose to the forefront of the writer's works, both through sales, for example, in Household Words in 1872 where sales reached 83,000,[165] and the praise of critics. In 1871, Scottish novelist and poet Margaret Oliphant described it as "the culmination of Dickens's early comic fiction";[166] However, in the late nineteenth-century Dickens's critical reputation suffered a decline, though he continued to have many readers. This began when Henry James in 1865 "relegated Dickens to the second division of literature on the grounds that he could not 'see beneath the surface of things'". Then in 1872, two years after Dickens's death, George Henry Lewes wondered how to "reconcile [Dickens's] immense popularity with the 'critical contempt' which he attracted".[167] However, Dickens was defended by the novelist George Gissing in 1898 in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study.[167] G. K. Chesterton published an important defence of Dickens in his book Charles Dickens in 1906, where he describes him as this "most English of our great writers".[168] Dickens's literary reputation grew in the 1940s and 1950s because of essays by George Orwell and Edmund Wilson (both published in 1940), and Humphrey House's The Dickens World (1941).[169] However, in 1948, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition, contentiously, excluded Dickens from his canon, characterising him as a "popular entertainer"[170] without "mature standards and interests".[171]
Wilkins Micawber by Frank Reynolds, per Maugham "he never fails you."Dickens's reputation, however, continued to grow and K. J. Fielding (1965) and Geoffrey Thurley (1976) identify what they call David Copperfield's "centrality", and Q. D. Leavis in 1970, looked at the images he draws of marriage, of women, and of moral simplicity.[172] In their 1970 publication Dickens the Novelist, F. R. and Q. D. Leavis called Dickens "one of the greatest of creative writers", and F. R. Leavis had changed his mind about Dickens since his 1948 work, no longer finding the popularity of the novels with readers as a barrier to their seriousness or profundity.[173] In 1968 Sylvère Monod, after having finely analyzed the structure and style of the novel, describe it as "the triumph of the art of Dickens",[6] which analysis was shared by Paul B. Davis.[7] The central themes are explored by Richard Dunne in 1981, including the autobiographical dimension, the narrator-hero characterization process, memory and forgetting, and finally the privileged status of the novel in the interconnection between similar works of Dickens.[172] Q. D. Leavis compares Copperfield to Tolstoy's War and Peace and looks at adult-child relationships in both novels. According to writer Paul B. Davis, Q. D. Leavis excels at dissecting David's relationship with Dora.[7] Gwendolyn Needham in an essay, published in 1954, analyzes the novel as a bildungsroman, as did Jerome H. Buckley twenty years later.[7] In 1987 Alexander Welsh devoted several chapters to show that Copperfield is the culmination of Dickens's autobiographical attempts to explore himself as a novelist in the middle of his career. Finally, J. B. Priestley was particularly interested in Mr Micawber and concludes that "With the one exception of Falstaff, he is the greatest comic figure in English literature".[124]
In 2015, the BBC Culture section polled book critics outside the UK about novels by British authors; they ranked David Copperfield eighth on the list of the 100 Greatest British Novels.[174] The characters and their varied places in society in the novel evoked reviewer comments, for example, the novel is "populated by some of the most vivid characters ever created," "David himself, Steerforth, Peggotty, Mr Dick – and it climbs up and down and off the class ladder.", remarked by critic Maureen Corrigan and echoed by Wendy Lesser.[175]
Opinions of other writers
David Copperfield has pleased many writers. Charlotte Brontë, for example, commented in 1849 in a letter to the reader of her publisher: "I have read David Copperfield; it seems to me very good—admirable in some parts. You said it had affinity to Jane Eyre: it has—now and then—only what an advantage has Dickens in his varied knowledge of men and things!"[176] Tolstoy, for his part, considered it "the best work of the best English novelist" and, according to F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, was inspired by David and Dora's love story to have Prince Andrew marry Princess Lise in War and Peace.[177] Henry James remembered being moved to tears, while listening to the novel, hidden under a table, read aloud in the family circle.[178] Dostoevsky enthusiastically cultivated the novel in a prison camp in Siberia.[179] Franz Kafka wrote in his diary in 1917, that the first chapter of his novel Amerika was inspired by David Copperfield.[180][181][182][N 12] James Joyce parodied it in Ulysses.[183] Virginia Woolf, who was not very fond of Dickens, states that David Copperfield, along with Robinson Crusoe, Grimm's fairy tales, Scott's Waverley and Pickwick's Posthumous Papers, "are not books, but stories communicated by word of mouth in those tender years when fact and fiction merge, and thus belong to the memories and myths of life, and not to its esthetic experience."[184] Woolf also noted in a letter to Hugh Walpole in 1936, that she is re-reading it for the sixth time: "I'd forgotten how magnificent it is."[185] It also seems that the novel was Sigmund Freud's favourite;[186][187] and Somerset Maugham sees it as a "great" work, although his hero seems to him rather weak, unworthy even of its author, while Mr Micawber never disappoints: "The most remarkable of them is, of course, Mr Micawber. He never fails you."[188]
