David Copperfield summary

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life,” says David Copperfield in the opening lines of the novel, “or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” The rest of Dickens's novel – all 1,000-or-so pages of it – is devoted to answering the question posed here.  

David is born on a bleak Friday, at the stroke of midnight, a time which, according to village superstition, marks the young boy for a life of “immodest” fortune. His dramatic arrival is accompanied by the equally dramatic arrival of his great-aunt, Betsey Trotwood. Betsey intends to play the role of godmother to her niece Clara’s newborn daughter. She hasn’t considered that Clara might have a son instead. Finding that David is a boy, she leaves in disgust. Betsey suffered through a long marriage to a worthless husband and now professes to hate all men, infant boys included. 

David pawns his few possessions to fund the journey to his great-aunt Betsey Trotwood’s house, in Dover. At last, after many days of travel, including long stints of walking country roads, he reaches his destination. The comfortable cottage in its lush garden looks, to David, like something out of a dream. But Betsey, who still hasn’t forgiven David for being born a boy, receives David as her guest with marked reluctance. But when the Murdstones arrive demanding David’s return, she makes up her mind about her unexpected visitor once and for all: she defends David fiercely and tells the Murdstones she has taken him on as her charge.

With this settled, Betsey sends David to Dr. Strong's Academy, a school in Canterbury which is, thankfully, very different to Salem House. In Canterbury, he lodges with the Wickfields. Mr. Wickfield is a lawyer. His daughter, Agnes, is David’s age, and the two become fast friends. The Wickfields live a life of privilege and contentment, though the arrival of Wickfield’s newest employee, the clerk Uriah Heep, will soon sour their happy existence. Heep's subservient manner conceals vile ambitions. Mr. Wickfield is a jovial occasional drinker, yet under Uriah’s influence he takes to the bottle more and more frequently.

With his economic prospects considerably diminished, David tries to discuss financial practicalities with Dora, but his – admittedly rather spoiled and childish – lover is sent into hysterics at the mere mention of household management. Crestfallen, David seeks solace with the Wickfields. But here, too, fortunes have taken a turn for the worse. Wickfield’s business is completely in the hands of Uriah Heep. Wickfield is in Heep’s debt, and though Agnes does her best to resist Heep’s advances, she begins to feel she has no choice but to accept his proposal of marriage.

Dan Peggotty, meanwhile, feverishly pursues any leads he can find about Emily’s whereabouts, eventually tracing her to Italy. Steerforth’s manservant, Littimer, sends word to David that Steerforth has tired of Emily, leaving David and Dan to understand that Emily has been, essentially, abandoned. But when they try to deduce Emily’s exact whereabouts, her trail runs cold. Ham Peggotty, meanwhile, is wounded by his fiancée’s behavior but blames himself for not stopping Steerforth’s flirtation with the hapless Emily. He throws himself into his work as a fisherman.

Charles Dickens’s sprawling novels typically intertwine subplots from every social stratum in Victorian England. David Copperfield is no exception – and it is a particularly excoriating exposé of the conditions the English working classes suffered in the Victorian era. Dickens is unflinching in showing how the most vulnerable in society – children, women, the poor – are routinely exploited and abused by those with power over them. His descriptions of David’s time at the bottling factory are especially harrowing: “The deep remembrance of the sense I had,” says David, “of being utterly without hope now; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that day by day what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, would pass away from me, little by little, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written.” 

As a child, Dickens himself was put to work in a blacking factory, pasting labels on jars of shoe polish. Once he achieved success as a novelist, he campaigned to reform child labor laws and used his novels to draw attention to the plight of the working classes.