David Copperfield

Dickens's own boyhood, moved into Chapter 11

In the spring of 1847 John Forster mentioned, by chance, that someone had once seen Dickens as a boy working in a warehouse near the Strand. Dickens went silent for several minutes. A few weeks later he told Forster the whole story. When he was about twelve, with his family deep in debt, he had worked at a blacking warehouse, a business that made boot polish, at Hungerford Stairs. His father was in the Marshalsea, the debtors' prison, for part of that time. He wrote it down as plain fact, meaning it to begin an autobiography.

He gave up the autobiography and used the warehouse in David Copperfield instead. The two texts are very close. In the fragment Dickens calls himself a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, and says it is wonderful to him that he could have been so easily cast away at such an age. Chapter 11 of the novel opens with David saying he was so easily thrown away at such an age, a child who was quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt.

The details moved across too. The real warehouse was a crazy, tumbledown old house by the river, overrun with rats. So is Murdstone and Grinby's, down at Blackfriars. At the real warehouse a boy in a ragged apron and a paper cap showed Dickens how to tie the knot, and his name was Bob Fagin. In the novel a boy in a ragged apron and a paper cap shows David his work, and his name is Mick Walker. Dickens had already used Bob Fagin's name for the villain of Oliver Twist.

Dickens noted in January 1849 that it was highly probable the fragment would never see the light, and that he had no wish for it to. He left the decision to Forster. The first number of David Copperfield came out five months later. Forster printed the fragment in his biography after Dickens died.

Dora, and the girl Dickens loved at eighteen

David falls for Dora Spenlow the moment he meets her, and the novel spends many chapters on his foolish, desperate courtship. Forster used to laugh and tell Dickens he believed in no Dora except the one in the book. Then, nearly six years after the novel was written, the real woman came back into Dickens's life, and Forster changed his mind. He decided there was more truth behind those chapters than he had wanted to think.

Dickens's answer to Forster, in 1855, is the plainest thing he said about the book. He wrote that the feeling had begun when he was his eldest son's age and had filled his mind for four years. No one, he wrote, could imagine what pain the recollection gave him in Copperfield. He could never open that book the way he opened any other. Forster does not name the woman.

Paris, in the book and in the writing of it

Paris comes into the novel through Dora. Mr Spenlow tells David his daughter is coming home from finishing her education in Paris. When David meets her and she asks whether he has been there, he says no. She hopes he will go soon. David cannot bear the idea that she could imagine him going anywhere away from her. So he runs down Paris and runs down France, and says nothing on earth would make him leave England.

France is also where the search for Em'ly goes. Mr Peggotty crosses the Channel and walks through France looking for her. Em'ly herself, after running away from Steerforth's household in Italy, reaches France and works at an inn in a port, waiting on travelling ladies. A man she fears turns up there, and she flees back to England.

Dickens took a short break in Paris while he was writing the book. At the end of June 1850 he went over with his friend the painter Daniel Maclise and stayed at the Hotel Windsor on the rue de Rivoli. He wrote to Forster that the heat was frightful and sleep next to impossible. They were going to the little theatres and to the Théâtre-Français, the Comédie-Française, for the actress Rachel's last performance before she left for London. He was dining at the Trois Frères, and refused an offer of a dinner with all the notable people of Paris.

Paris readers had the novel in French almost at once. The national library in Paris records a third edition, dated 1851, of Le Neveu de ma tante, which means My Aunt's Nephew. The book was subtitled the personal history of David Copperfield and came out in three volumes from the offices of the Revue britannique, with a biographical notice by Amédée Pichot. In 1856, during his long winter in Paris, Dickens sold the publisher Louis Hachette the right to translate all his novels, and Hachette kept David Copperfield in print for decades.

Mr Micawber's arithmetic

Mr Micawber is the novel's most famous comic figure, and his joke is money. He lives on the hope that something will turn up, which David says was his favourite expression. He can come home in tears saying nothing is left but prison, then go to bed working out the cost of putting bow windows on the house. Before he leaves London for Plymouth he gives David his rule for life. Twenty pounds a year spent at nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence means happiness. Spent at twenty pounds and sixpence, it means misery.

Dickens's own father, John Dickens, was locked up in the Marshalsea for debt while twelve-year-old Charles was working at the blacking warehouse. Micawber's rule is sound, and he never manages to keep it. He ends the book in Australia as a district magistrate, the subject of a public dinner reported in the Port Middlebay Times.