David Copperfield
Charles Dickens(1850)
Extract
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
A child is born posthumously into a world that will alternately shelter and savage him, and the voice telling his story carries all the warmth of a man looking back at the boy he was. Charles Dickens published this novel in installments across 1849 and 1850, calling it his favourite child, pouring into it more of his own life than into any other work. The blacking factory becomes the bottling warehouse, the debtors' prison shadows Mr. Micawber, and Dora gives way to Agnes as Dickens traced the education of a heart. What endures is not the plot but the tenderness of the telling, the way even villains like Uriah Heep are rendered with reluctant fascination. It is a book that loves the world it describes, even when that world is cruel.
If you loved this
Dickens returns to the same territory of a boy becoming a man, but strips away the warmth and gives Pip a darker benefactor.
Brontë writes the same story of an orphan forging a self against the world, but with fire instead of comedy.
Joyce takes the Dickensian bildungsroman and makes it modern: the same trajectory, but the sentimentality is gone.