David Copperfield.  

   David Copperfield was written in 1850. The beautifully realized sense of place, achieved again later in the descriptions of the marsh country in Great Expectations, is typical of the best of David Copperfield; nostalgia is far too crude a term to define its evocative sensitivity. The attention paid to the other major novels of Dickens's later period by modern critics has led to some neglect of what was once regarded as the representative Dickens novel and it is a neglect that amounts to self-deprivation. But when this is said, it has to be admitted that there is much that is unsatisfactory in David Copperfield. In his Introduction to the Everyman edition, written in 1907, Chesterton commented that 'although this is the best of all Dickens's books, it constantly disappoints the critical and intelligent reader.' So much the worse for him, one is tempted to respond, but Chesterton defines the more worrying aspects of David Copperfield when he discusses the novel's conclusion: 'I do not like the notion of David Copperfield sitting down comfortably to his tea-table with Agnes, having got rid of all the inconvenient or distressing characters of the story by sending them to Australia.' Dickens was not above getting rid of his more inconvenient or distressing children by sending them to Australia in real life, but the fictional experience is somehow less excusable. The combination of fiction and selective autobiography makes David Copperfield a disturbingly self-centred book: its hero is embarrassingly prone to a tendency to self-pity and wishful thinking which he never really outgrows and which is hardly improved by the smugness with which he regards himself at the conclusion of the novel:

  I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect, I had been married ten happy years. (ch. 63)

  The unity which Dickens had had to create in Dombey and Son is embodied in David Copperfield in its first-person narrative but, in spite of the special circumstances surrounding it, it has important factors in common with. the other later novels. Like Florence Dombey, David Copperfield suffers a loveless childhood, emphasized in this case by the physical and psychological violence of his stepfather's oppression. In a variety of ways, most obviously in the story of Little Em'ly, this is a Dickensian Song of Experience:the novel has no clearer message than its demonstration of the fragility of childhood innocence. Coupled with this is the sense of isolation, amounting on occasions to desolation, which surrounds David himself as the people to whom he commits himself in his search for security - Steerforth, Dora, even, though through no fault of his own, Peggotty - prove fallible. Given such a demonstration of the instability of existence, how can the marriage to Agnes seem other than a sham? Marriage, in fact, is to seem increasingly a mockery as a means of conclusion in the later novels:what in Martin Chuzzlewit is an acceptable convention of comedy becomes in Little Dorrit, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend almost a matter for apology. 

  David Copperfield, for all its variety of character and situation, is, of course, a deeply introspective novel.