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David Copperfield & Charles Dickens: Examine the Character, Historical and Social Context

The purpose of this essay is to examine the character of David Copperfield and to compare the character to the author Charles Dickens. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical and social context in which David Copperfield was published and then to discuss ways in which the novel can be considered autobiographical, with a view toward identifying, through the prism of the novel, Dickens's attitudes toward life, literature, and the world in general.

It is a commonplace of literary history that David Copperfield can be considered a draft of Charles Dickens's autobiography. The pattern of ideas in the novel mirrors the pattern of events in early nineteenth-century England. In turn, the novel's pattern of events is very much drawn from the society in which Dickens grew up. The appalling social inequities exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the great influence of rationalist utilitarianism as a mode of respectable experience during the Victorian period are doubtless critical to the background of David Copperfield. Its emotional and narrative content is backgrounded in large measure by the milieu of emergent industrial capitalism. At the same time, Dickens draws vivid characters and describes human behavior in a way that is informed by Romanticism, satire, and a desire for social justice. It has been said that, especially in "the later novels," Dickens was "increasingly absorbed with social criticism . . . [and] that in the social criticism . . . Dickens was often prejudiced, amateurish and unfair, more ready to follow public opinion than to form it (Hibbert 300). Yet even a cursory reading of David Copperfield--one notices immediately that the initials of the author are the reverse of the initials of David Copperfield--makes it inconceivable that Dickens did not draw on a reservoir of personal experience and sensibility to craft the story.

Evidence of Dick...

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David Copperfield & Charles Dickens: Examine the Character, Historical and Social Context. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:33, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2001459.html