Dickens's past
David Copperfield is the contemporary of two major memory-based works, William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1850), an autobiographical poem about the formative experiences of his youth and Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) which eulogises the memory of his friend, Arthur Hallam.[19][N 2] There is Wordsworth's romantic questioning on the personal development of the individual and there is Tennyson's Victorian confrontation with change and doubt. According to Andrew Sanders, David Copperfield reflects both types of response, which give this novel the privileged position of representing the hinge of the century.[20]
The memories of Dickens are, according to Paul Schlicke, remarkably transmuted into fiction.[19] The experience Dickens lived, as the son of a brazen impenitent, is celebrated through the comic figure of Wilkins Micawber. Dickens's youthful passion for Maria Beadnell resurfaces with tenderness, in the form of David's impractical marriage with Dora Spenlow. Dickens's decision to make David a novelist emphasises how he used this book to re-invent himself as a man and artist, "The world would not take another Pickwick from me, but we can be cheerful and merry, and with a little more purpose in us".[21] If the preoccupation with the adventures of a hero, associated with a parade of comic or grotesque characters, looks back to Dickens's earlier novels, the interest in personal development, the pessimistic atmosphere and the complex structure of Copperfield foreshadow other novels.[19]
Contemporaneous novels
In 1847, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë's first-person narrative, was acclaimed as soon as it was published. Unlike Thackeray, who adored it, Dickens claims years later never to have read it.[22] True or false, he had encountered Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, a novel that called for understanding and sympathy in a class-eaten society.[23] Thackeray's Pendennis was serialised at the same time as David Copperfield and it depicts its hero's personal and social journey from the countryside to the city. A rivalry existed between the two writers, though it preoccupied Thackeray more than Dickens. The most direct literary influence is "obviously Carlyle" who, in a lecture given in 1840, the year of his meeting with Dickens, on "On Heroes, Hero-Worship" and "the Heroic in History", claims that the most important modern character is "the hero as a man of letters".[24][25][20] This is David's destiny, through experience, perseverance and seriousness.[24]
