David Copperfield
Charles Dickens (1812–1870), 1850
★ 4.05 from 267.8k ratings on Goodreads
A boy survives debt, school and unreliable adults, and learns how memory turns a life into a story. A warm, unhurried voice carries you through childhood memories, with moments of gothic shadow and tender nostalgia along the way.
Feels like nostalgia and tenderness. About memory and time.
Who it’s for
You may like this if you enjoy Victorian memoirs that linger over memory, family and the slow shaping of a life. Be prepared for long, dense nineteenth-century sentences and stretches where the story moves at a patient, old-fashioned pace.
Why read it
It shows how a scattered, difficult childhood becomes a story through memory, and gives you a rich sense of Dickens's own imaginative roots.
Pages from the book
The eerie certainty that you have lived this exact moment before.
We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time—of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances—of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it! I never had this mysterious impression more strongly in my life, than before he uttered those words. A classroom where even the animals seem to have given up.
A long room with three long rows of desks, and six of forms, and bristling all round with pegs for hats and slates. Scraps of old copybooks and exercises litter the dirty floor. Some silkworms’ houses, made of the same materials, are scattered over the desks. Two miserable little white mice, left behind by their owner, are running up and down in a fusty castle made of pasteboard and wire, looking in all the corners with their red eyes for anything to eat. A bird, in a cage very little bigger than himself, makes a mournful rattle now and then in hopping on his perch, two inches high, or dropping from it; but neither sings nor chirps. Looking back for the marks of a life that simply flowed past.
My schooldays! The silent gliding on of my existence—the unseen, unfelt progress of my life—from childhood up to youth! Let me think, as I look back upon that flowing water, now a dry channel overgrown with leaves, whether there are any marks along its course, by which I can remember how it ran. Charles Dickens.Dickens drew on his own childhood factory work and his father's debtors' prison; he called David Copperfield his 'favourite child.'
Books that feel like this
More by Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens, 1843
Three ghosts, one night, and the cheapest man in London forced to look at what his life has actually cost.
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens, 1859
London and Paris on the edge of revolution: a man released from eighteen years in prison, a woman who knits a register of enemies, and a crowd nothing will stop.
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens, 1861
A blacksmith's orphan is made rich by a stranger, and finds out what money does to love, friendship and memory.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is David Copperfield for me?
- You may like this if you enjoy Victorian memoirs that linger over memory, family and the slow shaping of a life. Be prepared for long, dense nineteenth-century sentences and stretches where the story moves at a patient, old-fashioned pace.
- What is David Copperfield like?
- A warm, unhurried voice carries you through childhood memories, with moments of gothic shadow and tender nostalgia along the way. Feels like nostalgia and tenderness. About memory and time.
- What should I read after David Copperfield?
- If you liked David Copperfield, try The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau (Jean-Jacques Rousseau), The Velveteen Rabbit (Margery Williams Bianco) and My Reminiscences (Rabindranath Tagore).
A taste of the feed
What it costs to become real, told by someone who has already paid.
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
The Velveteen Rabbit · Margery Williams Bianco
Grief keeps returning you to the same place, to look for what isn't there.
The terrible darkness which was disclosed to me through this rent, continued to attract me night and day as time went on. I would ever and anon return to take my stand there and gaze upon it, wondering what there was left in place of what had gone. Emptiness is a thing man cannot bring himself to believe in; that which is not, is untrue; that which is untrue, is not. So our efforts to find something, where we see nothing, are unceasing.
My Reminiscences · Rabindranath Tagore
What does the limitless geography of a child's mind look like?
Anne was curled up Turk-fashion on the hearthrug, gazing into that joyous glow where the sunshine of a hundred summers was being distilled from the maple cordwood. She had been reading, but her book had slipped to the floor, and now she was dreaming, with a smile on her parted lips. Glittering castles in Spain were shaping themselves out of the mists and rainbows of her lively fancy; adventures wonderful and enthralling were happening to her in cloudland—adventures that always turned out triumphantly and never involved her in scrapes like those of actual life.
Anne of Green Gables · L. M. Montgomery
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