MusicSmiles.com
The Worlds of Gilbert and Sullivan

Charles Dickens, novel, David Copperfield, is written in an autobiographical style, in the first person¹. It is indeed skating close to being Charles' autobiography - at least in the opening chapters.

David Copperfield's father died before he was born in Blunderstone in Suffolk. His beautiful but weak widowed mother loved him dearly. When he was a young boy she sent him on holiday to the family nurse's relatives in Yarmouth. Mr Barkis, the Waggoner who transported him, was very fond of his spinster nurse. He asks David to give Clara Peggotty the famous message - 'Barkis is willing'. 

At Yarmouth in a wonderful beached houseboat he is warmly welcomed by Clara Peggotty's family: Mr Peggotty, his nephew Ham, Ham's cousin Little Em'ly, (both their fathers were 'droundead', and Mrs Gummidge, a widowed dependent (a 'lone lorn creetur'). David loves this houseboat home and the Peggotty family, and above all falls in puppy love with Little Em'ly.

When David returns home he is shocked to find his mother has married a Mr Murdstone. This cruel creature and his sister Miss Murdstone rapidly drive David's mother to an early grave. The terrified and recalcitrant David is sent to school under a tyrannical headmaster - Creakle. Here he makes two friends, the brilliant Steerforth, and the good-natured plodding Traddles.

From here he is banished by Murdstone to menial employment in London. He is miserable in this wretched environment, but meets up with the mercurial Mr and Mrs Micawber and their family. Micawber is constantly in financial difficulties, and incessantly waiting for 'something to turn up'. In the meantime he famously advises David: 'Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought, and six, result misery.'  Advice he unfortunately declines to relate to himself!

The distraught David runs away, and after several startling adventures walks penniless all the way to his Aunt's house in Dover. Beaten, robbed, and starved, more dead than alive, and filthy after his ordeal, he finally collapses at her doorstep. 'If you please Aunt, I am your nephew'. Aunt Betsy Trotwood was a rather fierce, eccentric lady but she receives David kindly, after consulting her resident amiable simpleton. 'What shall we do with him Mr Dick . . . Come! I want some very sound advice'. 'Why if I was you,' said Mr Dick, looking vacantly at David, 'I should wash him'. She then interviews the overbearing Murdstones, and sends them packing. The matter resolved, David settles to a very happy life, and makes firm friends with Aunt Betsy and Mr Dick.

Aunt Betsy pays for David, now a young man, to train for a career. He goes to Canterbury, to work for Miss Trotwood's lawyer, Mr Wickfield, whose serenely beautiful daughter Agnes has a profound sisterly influence on the rest of his life. He works incredibly hard to successfully master shorthand to report debates. Here he also meets one of Dickens' most loathsome, simpering characters, Uriah Heep ('umble as I am Master Copperfield'). 

Meanwhile Steerforth has run off with Little Em'ly, who is engaged to marry Ham. Mr Peggotty roams the world to find her, which he eventually does after Steerforth has ditched her. Steerforth, who has shamed his family and doting mother, is ultimately drowned in a shipwreck off Yarmouth during a brilliantly described furious storm, and Ham is killed trying to save him.

About this time David falls head over heels in love and marries childish, scatty, Dora Spenlow. They remain deeply in love and try their best, but . . . To make ends meet, David tries his hand at writing, and finds he has a talent. A few years later Dora dies leaving him heartbroken. By which time David has become a famously successful author.

In the meantime Uriah Heep has been defrauding Agnes's father and nearly ruined him, together with many others including Aunt Betsy Trotwood. Mr Micawber uncovers Heep's crimes and in collaboration with Traddles (now a barrister) exposes him and he is sent to prison. Peggotty, Mrs Gummidge and Little Em'ly, together with Mr Micawber and his family then emigrate to Australia where they ultimately prosper. Something also 'comes up' for Mr Micawber who becomes a well-loved local magistrate.

During several years abroad, mourning Dora's death, David finally comes to realise he is in love with Agnes. Thinking he has lost all his chances with her, he tentatively tells her, and she proclaims she has loved him ever since they first met. Ecstatically they marry and have a very happy family life, together with Aunt Betsy and Mr Dick.

In a postscript, Peggotty surprisingly returns to England for a 'holiday'. At David and family's insistence, he stays with them, and brings news of their friends they have all been waiting for. To conclude, he takes a clump of grass from Ham's grave back to Australia ('For Em'ly, I promised Mas'r  Davy').

Would you like return to Charles Dickens . . .?

1.    Footnote: 'Of all my books', wrote Dickens, 'I like this the best'.  It was first published in in 20 instalments in Dickens' weekly periodical Household Words, from May 1849 to November 1850. Return to story.

( Click number to view statistics > > >). Scribe thanks all our  223,547 MusicSmiles visitors up to beginning of September, 2010. 

You may find our special effects work best with Microsoft Internet Explorer