Relation between Copperfield and Dickens' childhood
Relation between Copperfield and Dickens' childhood
"I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World," Charles Dickens wrote in a letter just before he finished the final chapter of David Copperfield. Dickens, as a matter of course, became intensely involved with all his books while he was writing them. His daughter once recalled how her father would sit in his study, speaking the characters' speeches as he wrote them, making faces, giggling, or sighing with emotion. But in 1869, the year before he died, Dickens wrote that Copperfield was still his "favourite child." Why was he so attached to this novel, of all the masterpieces he had created?
Readers of his own time assumed, of course, that David Copperfield was thinly disguised autobiography. After all, it was the first novel Dickens had written in the first person. Like Dickens, David is a novelist who started out as a political reporter. David's initials are even Dickens' in reverse (though Dickens himself was surprised when that coincidence was pointed out to him). But now that more is known about Dickens' life, it is clear that he changed the facts a great deal to write David Copperfield, Let's compare the two stories.
Whereas David is a naive village boy and an orphan, Charles Dickens spent his childhood in the bustling seaside towns of Portsmouth and Chatham, on the southern coast of England, and was the second of eight children. His parents, John and Elizabeth Dickens, were charming and utterly irresponsible people, who lived far beyond Mr. Dickens' salary as a civil servant. When their financial situation grew desperate, they packed up and moved to London, to a cramped, grubby house, where bill-collectors were continually hammering at the door. Finally John Dickens was arrested for debt and sent to Marshalsea Prison. Most of the family moved in with him (a typical arrangement in debtors' prison, which was a fairly open place), but twelve-year-old Charles lived outside in rented rooms so he could work in a factory, pasting labels on bottles of bootblacking (a kind of shoe polish).
Although this experience lasted only four months, it scarred Charles so profoundly that he never spoke of it to anyone. We only know about it from a fragment of writing he once silently showed to his closest friend- and from his fictional treatment of it, when he sends David Copperfield to work in a similar sweatshop. Dickens never really forgave his parents- especially his mother, who'd pushed the idea hardest- for sending him to the factory. Perhaps that is why he later identified so readily with the orphans in his novels, and wrote glowing descriptions of the "perfect" family he felt he'd never had. It's interesting, however, that John and Elizabeth Dickens' delightful personalities seem to have been the models for David's friends, the Micawbers, while Dickens created for David a wicked stepfather, Mr. Murdstone- a worthy target for the anger that still boiled deep in Dickens' heart.
A surprise inheritance from a distant relative freed the Dickens family from prison. Yet it took a bit of arguing for Charles to persuade his mother to let him quit working and go back to school. Unfortunately, the school he was finally sent to, Wellington House, was run by a cruel headmaster who liked to beat boys- much like Mr. Creakle at Salem House, where David begins school. Whereas David later gets a good education from Dr. Strong, Charles had to make do with the little he learned at Wellington House. Again Charles was resentful, sensing that he had talent and feeling thwarted by his inferior education. He went to work first as a clerk in a lawyer's office and then, dissatisfied with law, learned shorthand so that he could get a job taking down the debates in Parliament for a newspaper that published transcripts of them. David Copperfield does this, too.
When he was seventeen, Dickens fell in love with Maria Beadnell, who by all accounts was as winsome and flirtatious as David Copperfield's sweetheart, Dora. Maria's father, a banker, apparently disapproved of Dickens, and after a couple of years, he sent his daughter abroad to separate them, just as Dora's father threatens to do in David Copperfield. Maria showed no interest in Charles after her return, and he felt crushed. In describing David Copperfield's courtship of Dora, Dickens may have been reliving his infatuation with Maria- and, in David's marriage to Dora, Dickens may have been speculating on what could have happened if he had married Maria. (Soon after publishing David Copperfield, Dickens would run into Maria Beadnell again and discover, with chagrin, that the living model for Dora had become a fat and extremely silly middle-aged matron.)
Hurt by Maria's rejection, Dickens threw himself into hard work. Then began another courtship, this time with Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a fellow journalist. He was so desperate to settle down that he didn't judge his prospective bride carefully, for they were not really suited for each other in the long run. David's disappointment with his "child-wife" Dora may be realistically drawn from Charles' eventual discontent with the woman he did marry- dull, sweet Catherine.
But before he could get married, Dickens, like David, had to work furiously to set himself up in his career. He had won some fame as a journalist, and in 1836, just before his wedding, he published his first work of fiction- Pickwick Papers, a loosely connected series of comical sketches. This book appeared in serial installments, as all of his novels would. Month by month Dickens' fame mushroomed. Suddenly he was a celebrity. Even while Pickwick was still appearing, Dickens began a new book, Oliver Twist, which also was a best-seller- and he kept producing hits, year after year. By the time David Copperfield, his seventh novel, appeared in 1850, Charles Dickens was a British national institution.
To be a best-selling novelist in nineteenth-century England was practically like being a pop star today. In those days before movies, radio, or television, people read novels as their main form of entertainment. They didn't think of them as "literature." Dickens' books did a lot to make novels more respectable, because his novels were read by all levels of society. Intellectuals pored over them for their political satire and social commentary. Middle-class families in their cozy parlors looked forward to reading Dickens' latest book, admiring his sentimental scenes and moral messages. In poorer neighborhoods, people might gather in groups, breathlessly listening to it being read aloud; they laughed at the broad comedy and gasped at the thrilling suspense. Dickens had hit upon a formula for pleasing everybody: he spanned all levels of society with his multilayered plots and huge cast of characters, and he ended each serial installment with a thrilling climax, to make his readers rush out to buy the next month's.
Having begun his career as a political journalist, Dickens used his novels to examine problems he saw in society. In Oliver Twist, for example, he exposed the wretched living conditions of England's poorhouses and slums. In Nicholas Nickleby he attacked the cruel, negligent Yorkshire boarding schools. In Bleak House he went after the Court of Chancery. Thus, in David Copperfield, he protests against the sexual mores of his age that condemned "fallen" women- unmarried women (usually poor) who had affairs or gave birth to illegitimate children. He also shows the misery of child labor. (While his original readers probably assumed the warehouse scenes were invented for purposes of satire, we now know that Dickens was recording actual memories of his secret past.) Dickens criticizes the antiquated legal institution of Doctors' Commons in a few passages. He also devotes a chapter to satirizing prison reform.
Some of these bursts of satire are not really central to the book. It's almost as if Dickens felt he had to include satire, because that was what he was known for. Much of Dickens' popularity was based on his reputation as a social critic. Many middle-class Victorians liked to think of themselves as concerned citizens, whose rational, humane efforts were creating the perfect society. Dickens was, like them, a reformer but not a radical. Some of the conditions he criticized had already been improved by these reformers by the time he wrote about them. Dickens had no interest in tearing apart the framework of society- only in improving it to come closer to his ideals of justice and Christian charity. He was actually more of a conservative than many readers realize.
Some readers see the publication of David Copperfield as the turning point in Dickens' career. Until then, in novels such as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and Dombey and Son, he had written very much with his audience in mind. All the elements of comedy, melodrama, mystery, and social criticism appear in those books, for the author seems most concerned with entertaining his readers. But David Copperfield gave Dickens an opportunity to be more personal, to write about his own life and explore individual human nature rather than society as a whole. His later novels, such as Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, move further into this psychological territory and leave satire further behind.
At the time he wrote David Copperfield, Dickens was popular, admired, famous, and rich, just as David Copperfield is at the end of the novel. Yet Dickens' later years did not bring him the happy ending he had written for David. He found that the success he had driven so hard for only increased the demands upon his time and energies. He felt his ideal of domestic harmony falling to pieces. In 1858 he and his wife separated- a scandalous action in those days. Though his ten children remained with him in his huge country house, he was bitterly disappointed by his sons' failures. Melancholy, restless, and irritable, he continued to write novels, but they became tinged with pessimism about human nature and society. He tried to stave off depression with more and more work, as well as with amateur theatricals, lecture tours, and dramatic readings from his own works. But this frenzied activity only hastened his death of a stroke in 1870.
Like most great artists, Dickens was a complex man, perhaps more complex than his character David Copperfield. His writer's instincts compelled him to shape the events of his life into a richer, more artistic form when he wrote about them in David Copperfield. If you want to read a biography of Dickens, there are plenty to choose from. But if you want to read a great work of literature, turn to David Copperfield
dicken life/biography
Introduction A 450% increase in London, England’s population, from about one million people at the turn of the 18th century, to four and a half million in 1881 (“
London (England)”), spurred on by the Industrial Revolution, expanding job opportunities in the metropolis, and changes in farming techniques that made fewer workers necessary to farm the same amount of land, people (especially from the British countryside) poured into London in throngs. Living from 1812 to 1870, the esteemed English author, Charles Dickens, witnessed this explosion. The Industrial Revolution, which saw the beginning and growth of factories, along with new and improved transportation such as steamships and trains, also witnessed the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837. The Industrial Revolution did not bring only prosperity, though. An increase in population of London meant more slums and orphans, along with increased poverty, while factories demanded workers and were often rewarded with young children and women because their wage-levels were lower. Dickens reacted to both this historical backdrop and his own life’s story by using his novels to point out and criticize the social problems of the day.Dickens' Life Born in England on February 7, 1812, in the seaside town of Portsmouth, Charles Dickens had a happy, though financially and geographically turbulent, early childhood. His paternal grandparents were servants of the Marquis of Crewe, and his maternal grandparents were of the shabby genteel, so he was born into the lower-middle class. Charles Dickens’ father, John, “a loquacious, industrious man with a rather charming theatrical flair” (
Murray 37), had problems with money. He always spent too much and never could pay off his debts. Though poor, the family got along decently, living in many different places in England.One of the events of Dickens’ life that really impacted him, and later his literary works, took place in 1824. In 1822, the navy moved John Dickens and his family back to London, where John soon went into so much debt that, in 1834, he was sent to a debtors’ and smugglers’ prison called Marshalsea. As was common in Victorian England, his family came with him to live in the prison. Thus, in many of his novels, Charles Dickens focuses on prisons, criminals, and justice. While Charles Dickens’ family lived in Marshalsea, his older sister, Fanny, received a scholarship to keep attending the Royal Academy of Music. Charles, not as lucky, was sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse (a boot-blacking factory) for three months to one year (it is unknown the exact amount of time he was there), to supplement the family’s income. “He lived alone in a cheap rented room” (
Murray 38), and sent most of what he earned back to his family in Marshalsea. This situation is almost mirrored in David Copperfield, when an eight-year-old David is sent to “Begin life on [His] Own Account” (
David Copperfield 184) in London, working in a counting-house, lodging nearby, and using his wages to buy food to eat. Dickens expressed his shame at having to work side by side with illiterate boys who called him the “little gentleman” through David Copperfield’s words:I need to deal with this quote The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly without hope now; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that day by day what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, would pass away from me, little by little, never to be brought back anymore; cannot be written. (
David Copperfield 186) In 1825, after John Dickens’ release from Marshalsea, Charles Dickens attended Wellington House Academy for his last two years of formal education. Wellington housed a unkind headmaster who allowed the students to be beaten. Therefore he brings up education as a social problem in many of his novels. In his late teens and early twenties, he took up shorthand, and then reporting, to cover parliamentary sessions. The experience in this job made him think less of the government. In David Copperfield, Dickens shows how little he feels the government does: “‘Night after night,’ David recalls, ‘I record predictions that never come to pass, professions that are never fulfilled, explanations that are only meant to mystify’” (
Murray 26-27). Dickens was not enamored of the government, but then again, he was also afraid of the idea of social anarchy, which he felt would come about if the lower classes tried to revolt. He reveals this fear in The Tale of Two Cities, which tells the story of the French Revolution from the point of view of a nice aristocratic family, frightened by the lower classes in France.Dickens’ first really popular novel, The Pickwick Papers was published in novel form in 1837, the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation. After that he never stopped writing novels. He was actually in the middle of writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood when he died of a brain aneurysm on June 9, 1870. (Many scholars believe that he died because of the tiring work of his public-reading tours which he staged all over America and England.)Dickens as Part of the Lower Middle Class Charles Dickens’ birth into the lower-middle class really affected which social problems he concentrated on. Although he did criticize some problems facing the lower class, he spent more time on lower-middle-class problems, such as education. This can be understood if one examines the lower-middle class, “the wide world between the proletariat and the commercial and professional middle class” (
Cruikshank 12), which consisted of shabby genteel who had slipped down from the higher classes, and those artisans and working-classmen who had “improved themselves.” This class “jealously cherished its pretensions of being a cut above the proletariat, whom it thought to be dirty, immoral, drunken, profane, comical, and potentially murderous” (
Cruikshank 12). It also believed itself to be more moral than the “corrupt and sensual” (
Cruikshank 12) aristocracy. These two mentalities show up in Dickens’ characters. The most lovable, Bob Crachit and Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, the Peggottys in David Copperfield, and Joe Gargery in Great Expectations are all part of the lower-middle class, while Dickens portrays some of the lower class as trying to lewdly usurp the positions of the lower-middle class, and the upper classes trying to deceive the lower-middle class. One example is the “’umble,” lower class Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, who cunningly takes advantage of Mr. Wickfield’s drinking problem in order to take over his business and convince his daughter, Agnes, to marry him. Another is the sly, lower class Orlick in Great Expectations, who tries to kill Pip’s sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery; stalks the innocent girl, Biddy; and later tries to throw Pip into a limekiln in order to kill him. J. Steerforth, a rich, young gentleman in David Copperfield seduces and runs off with Emily Peggotty – a fisherman’s daughter – by promising that she will become a lady. He then uses her and loses her, which often happened to pretty country girls who caught the fancy of upper-class men. The upper-class “gentleman” transported these girls to London or elsewhere to “be a lady,” and then – when their looks failed or the “gentleman” got bored –discarded them (
Cruikshank 143-7). Child Labor One of the lower-middle-class concerns Dickens really highlights in his novels is children. After working in the boot-blacking factory at the age of twelve, Dickens became aware of the horrific, and often nonexistent child labor laws of the time (and adult labor laws, as well). In the early 1800’s, children as young as five or six could be made to work twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Around 1800, social reformers began calling for changes in the child labor laws, not only because of the long hours and unsafe conditions, but also because it bred “illiteracy, further impoverishment of poor families, and a multitude of diseased and crippled children” (“
Child Labor”). In the Factory Act of 1819 the reformers succeeded in getting a law passed that forbade children from working at night, and limited the children’s day to twelve hours. Factory owners could easily get around this law, though, because it possessed no policing mechanism, until passage of the Factory Act of 1833, which forbade children under the age of nine from working in factories at all, and limited the hours of work for children up to the age of eighteen. This Act also included a provision for paid inspectors, giving the Act “teeth,” so it would actually be enforced. In 1847 the Ten Hours Act helped extend some of these reduction of hours to all factory workers, as it established a normal workweek as ten hours a day, six days a week (
Winks 501). Though these laws improved the child labor situation, they did not rid the industry of its prized cheap labor. Dickens points out how discouraging child labor is in David Copperfield, because it relegates children, who might otherwise be expanding their minds with education, to doing a tedious, tiresome, and repetitive job.Education In his novels Dickens also makes a case for educating children; but not just however one chooses. He reveals the educational problems of the day, which especially visited the lower-middle class. In many areas of England there was no state-funded schooling available, so many lower-middle class children (whose families could not afford to send them to private schools) either went without schooling or went to Dame or evening schools. These schools usually had a lot of faults and usually were run by unmarried women trying to earn a small income. This lack of availability of true schooling is evidenced in Pip’s attendance at an evening-school that Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt kept in Great Expectations. “She was a ridiculous woman of limited means and unlimited infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in the society of youth who paid two pence per week each, for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it” (
Great Expectations 74). When lower-middle class children could attend a real school, they usually attended a school analogous to Salem House in David Copperfield, where the cruel headmaster Old Mr. Creakle believes that beating children is the way to knock sense into them. Dickens probably based Salem House on his experience in Wellington House Academy. He shows how this method of frequently beating children in schools (a common practice in the early 1800’s) makes students afraid to take risks in learning. Dickens sets up an excellent contrast in David Copperfield between Salem House and Dr. Strong’s school. Dr. Strong’s school is one filled with a love for learning spurred on by the students’ respect for the loving, kind, and eccentric Dr. Strong. This school is probably based on the school Dickens attended when he lived in Chatham from 1817 to 1822, but this type of school was probably not that common at the time. Locally funded public schools did not become available nationwide until the 1870 Education Act required neighborhood districts to use some of the district’s tax money to them. In 1881, another act made education compulsory for children aged five- to ten-years-old.Debtors' Laws Another lower-middle class problem Dickens highlights involves the debtor laws of Great Britain. In the early 1800’s these laws allowed government officials to lock those in debt in prisons, unlike in the United States, where the ability to declare bankruptcy – a specific guard against debtors prisons – is an integral part of the U.S. Constitution. Dickens’ experience when his father, John, was sent to Marshalsea in 1824 compelled him to show the world that not all debtors are low-down criminals. Therefore, Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, based on Charles Dickens’ father, John Dickens, is incredibly endearing, even though he always seems to be in debt. Later in the century the debtors’ laws were changed to reduce the number of debtors in prison. As an alternative to prison, the 1834 New Poor Law allowed for those in debt or poverty to go into workhouses where they could work for their keep. Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol refers to this law when he questions some charity workers about whether or not the “Union workhouses” are up and running and the Poor Law is in “full vigour” (
Dickens, A Christmas Carol 20). Prisons In some of Dickens novels, he does delve into some lower class social problems. Though he shared with his fellow classmen the distrust of the lower class, he also saw some of the abuses they underwent and could not keep quiet about them. After his experience in Marshalsea with his father, he noticed the bad conditions in most prisons. Prisoners were either haphazardly thrown together – leading to fights between the inmates – or put in almost solitary confinement – leading to antisocial behavior. Near the end of the novel David Copperfield, David finds two of the most obnoxious and loathsome characters, Uriah Heep and Mr. Littimer, shut up in a prison. Their hypocrisy comes out, though, when they tell their audiences how they have “changed” and how they now repent of their follies, which makes the prison magistrates label them “model prisoners.” David Copperfield can see that they do not truly mean this, and he explains “that the hypocritical knaves were just the subjects to make that sort of profession in such a place; that they knew its market-value at least as well as we did, in the immediate service it would do them when they were expatriated” (
David Copperfield 1032). In one of Dickens’ later novels, Great Expectations, Magwitch, whose whole life can be summed up: “‘in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail” (
Great Expectations 360), is sent to the Hulks, a prison boat for dangerous criminals, and later banished to Australia. Magwitch also reveals that Dickens notices the ugly cycle lower class people can end up in: one where a child grows up knowing only crime, and becomes earmarked as a “criminal” at an early age, leading to many trips in and out of courts and jail, not one of them rehabilitating or helping the individual change.Poverty Dickens also shows some aspects of poverty and its debilitating effects in David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. David Copperfield contains spurts of poverty, such as Mr. Mell's mother who lives in a run-down old building near London, and David Copperfield’s solitary walk from London to Dover, on which he finds out how difficult surviving can be when you have nothing. Oliver Twist contains more poverty as it explores the problems associated with orphanages of the time, which usually took in too many children to handle in order to receive more government funding. In the first half of the nineteenth century there was no real welfare system other than workhouses for the poor. Unfortunately some of the charities established to help the poor failed. The Speenhamland System, established in 1795 by a group of justices in Berkshire (and subsequently copied by many other groups) to provide wage supplements to workers who could not afford food, backfired when it allowed employers to pay lower wages knowing their employees would still be able to afford food using the wage supplements.Conclusion In many of his novels, Dickens illuminates the social problems of Victorian Era England. With a growing urban and Industrial English population, Dickens points out the problems inherent with a factory-driven economy, while his life experiences, especially those during his childhood, compel him to reveal the problems associated with child labor and the lack of access to good schooling. Therefore Dickens ties together his own occurrences and the collective occurrences of Victorian England in his novels to reveal the social problems of the day. Dickens enjoyed a large reader-base for his novels and became very popular not only because of his wonderful ability to tell a great, description- and character-laden story, but also because he wrote from his own experiences and those of his fellow countrymen in stories that reflected everyday life in understandable ways, and seamlessly employed his social criticism.
