Memory and Nostalgia Theme Analysis

In addition to being a Bildungsroman (a novel of education), David Copperfield is a fictional memoir, ostensibly written by David himself. However, while David is a writer by profession, he says more than once that he does not want to publish his memoir, and in fact intends it "for no eyes but [his]." This raises the question of what exactly David hopes to achieve or accomplish in penning his life story, and the answer seems to lie simply in the pleasure David takes in reliving his past. Although his life has certainly not been uniformly happy, the tone of his memoir tends toward nostalgia—particularly when it involves feelings and experiences David has had to set aside in the name of maturity. In other words, the novel's depiction of memory is in many ways at odds with its status as a coming-of-age story: the pleasures of memory compensate for some of the sacrifices associated with growing older, but clinging to the past also threatens to derail David's growth as a character.

David's recollections of his childhood home, the Rookery, are a particularly good example of the emotional pull of nostalgia. He depicts the Rookery as a kind of idyllic, lost paradise: "Now I am in the garden at the back [of the house], beyond the yard where the empty pigeon-house and dog-kennel are—a very preserve of butterflies, as I remember it, with a high fence, and a gate and padlock; where the fruit clusters on the trees, riper and richer than fruit has ever been since, in any other garden, and where my mother gathers some in a basket, while I stand by, bolting furtive gooseberries, and trying to look unmoved." David's growth into a mature and independent man requires that he leave the Rookery behind (literally and figuratively) in order to establish his own career and family. However, when David remarks that the fruit at the Rookery is “riper and richer” than anything else, there is a real sense in this passage that no adult happiness will ever match the happiness of early childhood.

Likewise, David reflects fondly on his marriage with Dora, even though the marriage stunted his maturity and personal growth due to Dora’s childlike nature. He says the following of the days immediately following his engagement to Dora: "Of all the times of mine that Time has in his grip, there is none that in one retrospection I can smile at half so much, and think of half so tenderly." Of course, David elsewhere all but calls his relationship with Dora a mistake, in the sense that it was essentially a kind of extended childhood (with Dora herself noticeably resembling David's mother, Clara). By revisiting the relationship through writing, however, David is able to experience everything that was pleasurable about it without sacrificing the maturity he has since attained. However, David also tends to give himself over entirely to his memories and the feelings they evoke, relinquishing the conscious control over himself and his life that he has worked to achieve as an adult. Even the language he uses in these moments underscores the fact that he has become a bystander to his own life: he prefaces his memories of marrying Dora, for instance, by describing himself, "stand[ing] aside, to see the phantoms of those days go by [him], accompanying the shadow of [himself], in dim procession." In this way, the novel highlights how lingering too long in one’s memories can make a person stuck in the past and unable to move forward into the future.

David hints that he may never reread the memoir he has written once it is complete, presumably because the urge to lose himself within it would be too strong to resist. In this way, what makes David's nostalgia "acceptable" is the fact that he weaves his memories into a narrative that ultimately looks forward. In fact, the novel's final image is of his angelic second wife, Agnes, guiding David "upward" to better things. As pleasurable as memory and nostalgia are, they are also a distraction from the future, which is where David's focus belongs as a man establishing a career and family.