Published in 1850 and the most autobiographical of his works (even containing a vignetted modeled after his own experiences as a young industrial worker in a blacking manufactory), placed at the very middle of his publishing career (the eighth of fifteen novels), David Copperfield is certainly one of my favorite Dickens novels, if only for the strange scattering of the comic within the apparently “straight” Kunstlerroman. A rare first-person narrative, it follows David’s life: his birth in a pastoral wonderland of maternal love; her mother’s disastrous second marriage, leading in his being sent first to a harsh school and then to a factory, where he lives a free but difficult life in London (meeting Mr. Micawber); his flight after Micawber’s imprisonment to his aunt Betsy Trotwood’s house and care, with his subsequent tutelage living with the alcoholic lawyer Wickfield (with his lovely daughter Agnes and the treacherous apprentice Uriah Heep); his visits to the Peggotty household on the coast (the family of his mother’s old servant; with the lovely but misguided Emily, her de facto fiance Ham, and her faithful adopted father) and to the Steerforth household (having met James S. in his first school; with James’ overindulgent mother and his friend, the sinister cousin Rosa Dartle in love with James and bearing a scar that James made on her). Steerforth ruins Emily, dies in a shipwreck that also takes Ham who tried to save him; making Emily run away till finally found by Mr. Peggotty and taken to Australia to start a new life (but not before Uriah can endanger them!)
Copperfield’s own life is the story of his vocation, which he wavers on but eventually becomes a successful author. He marries his young sweetheart Dora, who is too weak and silly to become a good housewife and dies as a result (can’t survive miscarriage), and he marries the good housewife Agnes. Happily ever after.
This book succeeds on the strength of its unforgettable characters, especially Uriah Heep and Mr. Micawber, but I would also point to Betsy Trotwood and her faithful maid Janet (“Donkies! Janet!”) and the devastatingly charming James Steerforth. It includes the requisite domestic-warning figures (Emily, Ham, Steerforth), the critique of institutions esp regarding children (debtor’s prison, schools, factory work), and the punishment of the evil (we see Heep in prison at the end) / the reward for goodness. Any moral ambivalence must be read carefully into the novel, rather than accost you more obviously.