page_title: David Copperfield
section_title: First inspirations
hierarchical_section_title: David Copperfield / Development of the novel / First inspirations
caption_attribution_description: English: Charles Dickens in 1850
context_page_description: David Copperfield is the eighth novel by Charles Dickens. The novel's full title is The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery. It was first published as a serial in 1849–50, and as a book in 1850.
  The novel features the character David Copperfield, and is written in the first person, as a description of his life until middle age, with his own adventures and the numerous friends and enemies he meets along his way. It is his journey of change and growth from infancy to maturity, as people enter and leave his life and he passes through the stages of his development.
  It is often described as his masterpiece, "the triumph of the art of Dickens", which marks a turning point in his work, the point of separation between the novels of youth and those of maturity. Though written in the first person, David Copperfield is considered to be more than an autobiography, going beyond this framework in the richness of its themes and the originality of its writing, which makes it a true autobiographical novel. In the words of the author, this novel was "a very complicated weaving of truth and invention".
context_section_description: On 7 January 1849, Dickens visited Norfolk county at Norwich and Yarmouth, with two close friends, John Leech (1817-1864) and Mark Lemon (1809-1870). Leech was an illustrator at Punch, a satirical magazine, and the first illustrator for A Christmas Carol by Dickens in 1843. Lemon was a founding editor of the same Punch, and soon a contributor to Household Words, the weekly magazine Dickens was starting up; he co-authored Mr Nightingale's Diary, a farce, with Dickens in 1851. The two cities, especially the second, became important in the novel, and Dickens informed Forster that Yarmouth seemed to him to be "the strangest place in the world" and that he would "certainly try my hand at it". During a walk in the vicinity of Yarmouth, Dickens noticed a sign indicating the small locality of Blunderston, which became in his novel the village of "Blunderstone" where David is born and spends his childhood.
  A week after his arrival in Yarmouth, his sixth son, Henry Fielding Dickens, was named after Henry Fielding, his favorite past author. Per Forster, Dickens refers to Fielding "as a kind of homage to the novel he was about to write".
  As always with Dickens, when a writing project began, he was agitated, melancholy, "even deeper than the customary birth pangs of other novels"; as always, he hesitated about the title, and his working notes contain seventeen variants, "Charles Copperfield" included. After several attempts, he stopped on "The Copperfield Survey of the World as it Rolled", a title that he retained until 19 April. When Forster pointed out that his hero, now called David, has his own initials transposed, Dickens was intrigued and declared that this was a manifestation of his fate. However, he was not yet sure of his pen: "Though I know what I want to do, I am lumbering like a train wagon", he told Forster.
caption: Charles Dickens 1850
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