page_title: David Copperfield
section_title: Subsequent reputation
hierarchical_section_title: David Copperfield / Literary significance and reception / Subsequent reputation
caption_attribution_description: English: Wilkins Micawber a character from Charles Dickens David Copperfield
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: After Dickens' death, David Copperfield rose to the forefront of the writer's works, both through sales, for example, in Household Words in 1872 where sales reached 83,000, and the praise of critics. In 1871, Scottish novelist and poet Margaret Oliphant described it as "the culmination of Dickens's early comic fiction"; However, in the late nineteenth-century Dickens's critical reputation suffered a decline, though he continued to have many readers. This began when Henry James in 1865 "relegated Dickens to the second division of literature on the grounds that he could not 'see beneath the surface of things'". Then in 1872, two years after Dickens's death, George Henry Lewes wondered how to "reconcile [Dickens's] immense popularity with the 'critical contempt' which he attracted". However, Dickens was defended by the novelist George Gissing in 1898 in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. G. K. Chesterton published an important defence of Dickens in his book Charles Dickens in 1906, where he describes him as this “most English of our great writers”. Dickens's  literary reputation grew in the 1940s and 1950s because of essays by George Orwell and Edmund Wilson (both published in 1940), and Humphrey House's The Dickens World (1941). However, in 1948, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition, contentiously, excluded  Dickens from his canon, characterising him as a "popular entertainer" without "mature standards and interests".
  Dickens's reputation, however, continued to grow and K J Fielding (1965) and Geoffrey Thurley (1976) identify what they call David Copperfield's "centrality", and Q D Leavis in 1970, looked at the images he draws of marriage, of women, and of moral simplicity. In their 1970 publication Dickens the Novelist, F R and Q D Leavis called Dickens "one of the greatest of creative writers", and F R Leavis had changed his mind about Dickens since his 1948 work, no longer finding the popularity of the novels with readers as a barrier to their seriousness or profundity. In 1968 Sylvère Monod, after having finely analyzed the structure and style of the novel, describe it as "the triumph of the art of Dickens", which analysis was shared by Paul B Davis. The central themes are explored by Richard Dunne in 1981, including the autobiographical dimension, the narrator-hero characterization process, memory and forgetting, and finally the privileged status of the novel in the interconnection between similar works of Dickens. Q D Leavis compares Copperfield to Tolstoy's War and Peace and looks at adult-child relationships in both novels. According to writer Paul B Davis, Q. D. Leavis excels at dissecting David's relationship with Dora. Gwendolyn Needham in an essay, published in 1954, analyzes the novel as a bildungsroman, as did Jerome H Buckley twenty years later. In 1987 Alexander Welsh devoted several chapters to show that Copperfield is the culmination of Dickens' autobiographical attempts to explore himself as a novelist in the middle of his career. Finally, J B Priestley was particularly interested in Mr Micawber and concludes that "With the one exception of Falstaff, he is the greatest comic figure in English literature".
  In 2015, the BBC Culture section polled book critics outside the UK about novels by British authors; they ranked David Copperfield eighth on the list of the 100 Greatest British Novels. The characters and their varied places in society in the novel evoked reviewer comments, for example, the novel is "populated by some of the most vivid characters ever created,”  “David himself, Steerforth, Peggotty, Mr Dick – and it climbs up and down and off the class ladder.", remarked by critic Maureen Corrigan and echoed by Wendy Lesser.
caption: Wilkins Micawber by Frank Reynolds, per Maugham "he never fails you."
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