David Copperfield Study Guide

Dickens drew heavily on his own life story while writing David Copperfield, and the parallels extend all the way back to Dickens's birth. Like David, Dickens was born to middle-class but relatively poor parents. His father John worked as a clerk in a naval office but habitually owed money (and in fact served as the inspiration for David Copperfield's Mr. Micawber). When John Dickens was eventually imprisoned for his debts, his twelve-year-old son was pulled out of school and sent to work in a blacking (boot polish) factory to financially support his family. Although Dickens was ultimately able to return to school, he found the experience of working at the factory incredibly traumatic and frequently drew on it when he began to make a living as a writer—first as a journalist and then, after the 1836 publication of The Pickwick Papers, as a novelist. David Copperfield's romantic frustrations also owe something to Dickens's life: Dickens' marriage to Catherine Hogarth, though happy at first, had become so strained by 1858 that the couple separated (Dickens himself was likely having an affair with the actress Ellen Ternan at the time). Dickens died of a stroke in 1870, having written a total of fifteen novels along with numerous short stories, essays, and articles.

Although a rigid class system had long been a feature of British society, Dickens wrote David Copperfield at a time when social stratification was worsening and becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Although the Industrial Revolution had made a handful of entrepreneurs wealthier than ever, England's new factories relied on labor from a vast number of poor workers with minimal legal protections. Child labor, for instance, was commonplace, and attempts at reform often did little to address the problem. For example, an 1833 act limited children ages eleven to eighteen to twelve-hour work days, and the act only applied to textile workers. Meanwhile, the ongoing trend of urbanization contributed to a decline in living standards for the poor. In David Copperfield, the overcrowding, pollution, and disease associated with nineteenth-century city life figure prominently in the chapters surrounding Martha Endell. However, the wealth generated by industrialization also contributed to the rise of a professional middle class distinct from both the aristocracy and the working poor. David himself is also a product of the economic changes that took place over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

David Copperfield was Dickens' first experiment with the bildungsroman genre, but it was not his last: Great Expectations, published in 1861, also charts a young man's rise from an impoverished and abusive childhood, but ultimately takes a much darker tone, challenging some of David Copperfield's optimistic assumptions about merit and success. Famous examples of the bildungsroman include Goethe's 1796 novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (which popularized the genre), and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (which, like David Copperfield, is written as a first-person memoir but features a female narrator and protagonist).