Charles Dickens was born on
February 7, 1812,
and spent the first ten years of his life in Kent, a marshy region by
the sea in the east of England. Dickens was the second of eight
children. His father, John Dickens, was a kind and likable man,
but his financial irresponsibility placed him in enormous debt and
caused tremendous strain on his family. When Charles was ten, his
family moved to London. Two years later, his father was arrested
and thrown in debtors’ prison. Dickens’s mother moved into the prison
with seven of her children. Only Charles lived outside the prison
in order to earn money for the struggling family. He worked with
other children for three months pasting labels on bottles in a blacking
warehouse, where the substance people used to make boots black was
manufactured. His experiences at this warehouse inspired passages
in David Copperfield.
After an inheritance gave John Dickens enough money to
free himself from his debt and from prison, Charles attended school
for two years at Wellington House Academy. He became a law clerk, then
a newspaper reporter, and finally a novelist. His first novel, The Pickwick
Papers (1837), met with huge popular
success. Dickens was a literary celebrity throughout England for
the rest of his life.
In 1849, Dickens began to write David
Copperfield, a novel based on his early life experiences.
Like Dickens, David works as a child, pasting labels onto bottles.
David also becomes first a law clerk, then a reporter, and finally
a successful novelist. Mr. Micawber is a satirical version of Dickens’s
father, a likable man who can never scrape together the money he
needs. Many of the secondary characters spring from Dickens’s experiences
as a young man in financial distress in London.
In later years, Dickens called David
Copperfield his “favourite child,” and many critics consider
the novel to be one of his best depictions of childhood. Dickens’s
other works include Oliver Twist (1837–1839), Nicholas
Nickelby (1838–1839),
and A Christmas Carol (1843). Perhaps
his best known novel, Great Expectations (1860–1861) shares
many thematic similarities with David Copperfield. Dickens
died in Kent on June 9, 1870,
at the age of fifty-eight.
David Copperfield is set in early Victorian
England against a backdrop of great social change. The Industrial
Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
had transformed the social landscape and enabled capitalists and
manufacturers to amass huge fortunes. Although the Industrial Revolution
increased social mobility, the gap between rich and poor remained
wide. London, a teeming mass of humanity lit by gas lamps at night
and darkened by sooty clouds from smokestacks during the day, rose
in dark contrast to Britain’s sparsely populated rural areas. More
and more people moved from the country to the city in search of
the opportunities that technological innovation promised. But this
migration overpopulated the already crowded cities, and poverty,
disease, hazardous factory conditions, and ramshackle housing became
widespread. Dickens acutely observed these phenomena of the Industrial Revolution
and used them as the canvas on which he painted David Copperfield and
his other urban novels.
