David Copperfield David Copperfield Quotes

Mr. Creakle is obviously a sadist. He "had a delight in cutting at the boys." He loves whipping boys so much that he feels "restless in his mind" until he finds a new victim. But it's also worth noting that David remembers Mr. Creakle so vividly and fiercely because of the suffering he brings – the reason there's so much pain and sorrow in this book is because it's these things that we remember. And David Copperfield is supposed to be a memoir.

Poor Traddles gets the worst of Mr. Creakle's brutality because he's plump, and Mr. Creakle likes beating fat boys. (So horrible!) But he also has this interesting coping mechanism of drawing skeletons all the time. David thinks, at first, that these skeletons have a huge symbolic meaning: that Traddles seeks comfort in the fact that all of our suffering will eventually end (even if it's in death).

The boys are so horribly treated by Mr. Creakle that they seize every opportunity to act out against other people when they have the chance. Suffering doesn't necessarily make you more sympathetic. In fact, the brief freedom that the kids get from Mr. Creakle make them torture poor Mr. Mell, mocking his poverty, clothes, and even his mom eventually.

After Emily leaves and Mr. Peggotty decides to seek her, Mrs. Gummidge's whole grim attitude turns around: suddenly, she's unselfish and always ready to help those around her. When Mrs. Gummidge was unhappy among a group of happy people, she could never stop reminding them of her own sorrow. But now that Mrs. Gummidge is sad among a group of miserable people, she forgets herself in favor of helping others. She gets resentful when other people are happy, but she's really great in a crisis – a handy kind of friend to have around.

David's doing something rather brave here, because he's confessing to an all too human, but still not exactly praiseworthy, emotion: jealousy of Mr. Spenlow's death. When Mr. Spenlow dies suddenly, Dora is left in deep mourning. And David hates that his beloved Dora can be thinking of someone else so much, even if that person is her dead father. David is selfish in seeing Dora's suffering, and he wants to keep it all for himself. Perhaps this is a further sign of the fundamental problem of David's relationship to Dora: he has this intensely possessive love of her that makes Dora seem child-like and in need of David's care. With Agnes, on the other hand, David trusts her to look after herself – she's a true partner for David in his mind.

David doesn't really seem to feel the full impact of Dora's death until he goes to Europe to recover; before then, he's got the support of his family, including Miss Betsey and Agnes. It's only when he's abroad that David is really alone. And loneliness seems to be the worst kind of suffering of all in this book.

This moment really stands out, as David contemplates Nature itself without immediately connecting it to characterization or plot. By contrast, in descriptions of the Yarmouth storm, the wildness of the landscape clearly foreshadows the deaths of Ham Peggotty and Steerforth. Here, David is once again staring at the landscape, but this time, it seems almost meditative. David finds the solution for his emotional suffering in the recognition of the scale of nature – its "eternal clouds" and "not earthly music" – which give him the serenity to "weep as [he] had not wept yet, since Dora died." Most of the novel takes place on a truly human scale, inside small houses of David Copperfield's characters. This is one of the only moments (well, except perhaps with Traddles's skeletons) that we get a real sense of scope beyond the day-to-day lives of David and his companions.

Mr. Peggotty is a poor man, but a generous one: he has adopted his orphaned niece and nephew and allowed widowed Mrs. Gummidge to share his home. But the real mark of Mr. Peggotty's greatness as a character is that he does these things without wanting to be thanked. We can compare Mr. Peggotty's generosity with the charitable institutions that produce Uriah Heep, in which Uriah Heep is constantly reminded that he should be grateful to his betters. Mr. Peggotty's generosity produces other sympathetic human beings – fallible, maybe, but good-hearted – while Uriah Heep's institutions produce an angry, destructive jerk. Perhaps this is a lesson about how Dickens think the poor should be treated: with unselfish generosity rather than grudging charity

This is a very, very brief look at the life of Mrs. Mell, Mr. Mell's mother, who lives in the nineteenth century equivalent of a homeless shelter. Her extreme poverty seems to make her mistrust the most ordinary things in life, such as having a fire and being able to cook on it. What tone does David use to describe this scene? How does he seem to feel about Mrs. Mell's poverty? Does this description remind you of other moments in the book when David confronts similar poverty?

Even though Mr. Mell is morally right in this scene, his poor clothes distract David from the truth of his position. Mr. Mell is correct to demand that Steerforth, his student, treat him with respect. But the reality of the social structure Steerforth occupies means that Mr. Mell will always be Steerforth's social inferior, even if Steerforth is a pupil in Mr. Mell's classroom. The odd thing about David Copperfield is that Dickens seems to be acutely aware of the need to respect the poor – Steerforth's poor treatment of Mr. Mell and the Peggottys does not go without criticism from our narrator – but at the same time, the book constantly supports the importance of class difference. For example, David insists that he is different from the other factory boys because his father is a gentleman. Is there a contradiction in this logic, that Dickens wants respect for the poor, but he also believes that working class characters should stay in their social places? Can this logic be reconciled?

Uriah Heep grows up poor, from a poor family. He, his father, and his mother have all gone to schools run by charities. And his whole life, Uriah Heep has been reminded of his poverty: he "was to be umble to this person, and umble to that." The humiliation of this steady reminder that Uriah Heep's social position is lower than, well, everybody else's, is what makes him such a complete bastard to David and the Wickfields. Does this detail increase your sympathy for this character? Is an explanation of bad behavior an excuse?

In the last chapter of the novel, David relates that Dora's old friend, Julia Mills, has married an extremely rich man in India. She has loads of servants and fine clothes and so on. But the money has made her "peevish" – no longer contented with anything, but always fretting. The old days when Julia Mills was so generous in bringing David and Dora together are quite gone. Instead, she "talks and thinks of" money and nothing else. The implied message of this book seems to be that only those who work for their money deserve to have it; otherwise, you get careless, selfish characters like Steerforth and Julia Mills.

Obviously, as a narrator, David has to be pretty invested in the idea that we can remember more from our childhoods than most people think. He wouldn't have a nine hundred page novel, otherwise. But we're also interested in this statement that men who are fresh, gentle, and easily pleased, retain these qualities from childhood. Dickens seems pretty strongly invested in the idea that children are born good, and that growing up in society makes them evil. When David looks back on his old days, he sounds nostalgic not only for past times, but for David's own past goodness.

David knows best that Mrs. Copperfield "is proud of being so pretty" because he is a child, and she is one, too, at least emotionally. The two of them share this intense mutual sympathy not only because they are mother and son, but also because they're both so young. This is a moment in the second chapter when narrator-David lapses into present tense narration. By moving from past to present tense, he makes the scene David describes seem that much more immediate, as though it's happening right in front of us. What's the emotional effect of this shift in narrative tone?

We love this passage because it is a really interesting experiment. Dickens isn't just describing how a child sees the world as he is growing sleepy. He is also trying to evoke that sense of sleepiness for the reader. This is an amazing word portrait of that feeling you get when you're just about to go to sleep and you're really, really fighting it. These word portraits contribute to the realistic effect of the novel's narration: we trust that David has an excellent memory of what happened to him as a child because he can conjure what it's like to be a child so skillfully.

This passage sums up in a nutshell the difference between main-character-David and narrator-David. Main-character-David is still a child, with a child's instincts. He knows that something is wrong with Mr. Murdstone, but he doesn't know what. But narrator-David knows all too well what Mr. Murdstone will mean for character-David. And narrator-David's pity for his past self, who "could observe, in little pieces" but could not "[catch] anybody," influences our own sympathy for character-David.

Mr. Murdstone brings David on a visit to Lowestoft, which is near Blunderstone, David's home town. This is when he is still courting Mrs. Copperfield, before Mr. Murdstone has sealed the deal. So, he doesn't want to mess things up by alienating David yet. On this visit to Lowestoft, Mr. Murdstone meets up with two friends of his. And he warns them not to talk too openly of Mrs. Copperfield because "Brooks of Sheffield" – a.k.a. David – is listening. David is so innocent and naive that he does not realize who Brooks of Sheffield is, and he doesn't know that they are laughing at David by making him drink a toast to his own confusion. This scene is an excellent illustration of one of the common lessons of this novel: to be innocent is to be easily deceived. Emily would be another great example of this cynical lesson.

When David returns to his home made strange by his mother's marriage to Mr. Murdstone, the narrator goes into this long speculation about his entire life might have been different and better if Mr. Murdstone had offered him one word of encouragement at this key moment. This seems to be the key tragedy of this novel: there are a thousand moments when a single word can make all the difference in improving (or ruining) that kid's life. But you can only know in retrospect, looking back on the event, what would have made things better.

David hears Mrs. Copperfield singing to his nameless baby brother and immediately starts remembering how Mrs. Copperfield used to sing to David himself. David's baby brother isn't really an independent figure in the book. He represents David's own vanishing childhood trust and innocence. Once Mrs. Copperfield dies and David is left alone with Mr. Murdstone, it makes narrative sense that this symbol of David's own infancy must also die, to underline David's transition to a new phase of his life.

David seems really committed to the idea that youth is "calm" and "untroubled." So, when Mrs. Copperfield passes away, she is at peace again: she becomes like a child winding her "bright curls round and round her finger." And children who are not untroubled grow up too fast – like David himself, or like Emily. What do you think of this line between childhood and adulthood, where childhood is calm and adulthood is troubled? Is childhood really all that calm? Don't David's own experiences provide strong proof that childhood is a time of profound vulnerability and difficulty?