David Copperfield (Dickens, 1850)

Charles Dickens. David Copperfield. Pub. 1849-50. Ed. Nina Burgis and Andrew Sanders. Oxford: World's Classics, 2008.

Generally Notes

• 6 already a tension (light and funny) between individual and social identity - D wondering if he will be the hero of his own story and then going back to the hours before his birth, recounting Betsey Trotwood talking about his father and then calling his mother "Baby" to, again, play with the reference to self
  • the self-effacement involved with narrating the scene between Aunt Trotwood and his mother before he is born
  • 127 again boundary between individual and family blurred when D.C. identifies with his baby brother in the grave with their mother
• 7 potential alternative identities: Betsey Trotwood Copperfield
• 14 he denies the spirit-seeing imputed to him but is haunted in a way by the "ghost" of his altnernarice idenity, by the thought of his father rising from the dead when his mother reads the story of Lazarus
• 44 "God help me, I might have been improved for my whole life...by a kind word at that season."
• 56 that sense of criminality haunting D after Murdstone beats him - with even less literal relationship to it than Pip does in GE
• 86 "Here I am": montage-like present tense transitions between scenes of cruelty at the hands of Creakle at Salem House school (was this the type of thing Wisenstein thought about with Dickens?)
• 96 the word "blank" recurs, usually for expression
• 109-10 D's mother's "little contradictory summary" of her situation with Murdstone that Pegotty draws out

Theme Tracking

Reading and Writing

• 50ff David's reading and writing lessons, nominally from his mother but with the Murdstones lurking (Murdstone hits D with the book on 52)
• 66 Waiter mentions the paper duty tax to DC
• 86-87 Creakle's cyphering book (?), then Tommy Traddles drawing skeletons in his Latin Dictionary
• 88 D.C. "telling" the story of Peregrine Pickle and others to Steerforth to help him sleep or wake him up
• 123 Miss M deals with DC's mother's death by "reducing everything to pen and ink"
• 144 D.C becomes enamoured of the "large quarto edition of Fox's Book of Martyrs" at Barkis's house

Materiality

• 28-9 After describing all the boating works in Yarmouth, the tea things and bible, and scriptural paintings (which he remembers when he sees the like as pedlars' wares), D writes,

All this I saw in the first glance after I crossed the threshold - childlike, according to my theory - and then Peggotty opened a little door and showed me my bedroom. 

• • interesting that he associates thick description of objects with childlike vision
• 41 D feels as if none of the objects in the house are familiar anymore after finding out his mother has married Murdsrone - alienation from familiar objects after strong emotional upset reminiscent of Villette
• 46 D's mother is dispossessed of her housekeeper's keys, an embarrassing inversion of Esther being given the keys to Bleak House
• 120: Mr Omer, "Fashions are like human beings"

Shakespeare References

• 9 doctor walks like the Ghost in Hamlet