Introduction

Hi, I'm Dr Alfie Bound

and I teach English literature at the University of Manchester,

specialising in 19th

century studies, 19th century studies

and especially Dickens.

This here is a series of six mini lectures on Dickens's major novel,

David Copperfield, one of the longest and most complex Dickens novels.

So what are we doing here?

Is talking about some of the major themes that this novel raises?

By no means will it be a kind of exhaustive

set of topics because the novel is really infinite in what you can say about it

here,

I'll just be giving a sort of introduction to the novel

before going on in the following five Many lectures to address

There is key themes.

The novel David Copperfield is closely thought to be

the most closely autobiographical

of Dickens novels.

Dickens biographer Jon Forster, who wrote A Very Famous Life of Charles Dickens,

which is very much worth a look for any students interested in studying Dickens.

Further,

he stressed, often in his in his biography of Dickens, how close

ties between David Copperfield,

the text and Dick and his own personal

life make it a very autobiographical piece and a

very interesting If you want to get to the heart of what Dickens was all about,

it's probably the first novel to

think about.

It is also well known as a forerunner in a way to Great Expectations, a novel which was

written 13 years later. 11 to 12 years later, in fact,

and that that's picks up on many of the same themes.

So it's got this kind of partner novel and great expectations. Um,

the novel addresses a huge variety of topics,

but the main one is how to talk about a life.

The novel is about how we narrate our lives, and it's got this huge,

and the first chapter is called I Am Born

and it takes us through two.

Not the end of Copperfield's life,

but the end of a sort of chapter or a sort of part of her life,

from the point of birth to the point of writing,

because no autobiography takes you to the end of a life.

And I think this is something Dickens is kind of playing with.

It's about how we talk about who we are, how we talk about our life and our childhood

and our adolescence. It's often thought of as a Bildungsroman novel,

and it came out at this time when these were new novels.

There were very many great many novels around the middle of the 18th century,

this novel

of 18 50

middle of the 19th century.

There are many novels dealing with autobiography biography.

Here You've Got Jane Eyre,

which I Do.

I've also done a series of mini lectures on which is available to You,

which has some connected themes. Also, words with the previews was published.

Although written over a very long period of time in 18 50 Tennyson's in Memoriam.

All these novels play with ideas of how to narrate a life,

and this is 11 of the main theme of David Copperfield, and the text really

explores how we remember who we are, how we tell a reader who we are.

Can we trust ourselves even to produce an accurate narrative of a life?

So what I'll be doing is exploring a number of these ideas in greater detail

throughout this

series of mini lectures.

One thing also to say by way of introduction,

is that Dickens was writing in a very different way by this point in his career he was,

he was writing in the early stages,

in a much more perhaps comic fragmented way.

Dickens first novel is a first text is sketches by Balls.

Now this was snippets of everyday life,

and there was no correlation between one group of people in Chapter one,

another group of people in Chapter eight, Uh, then he moved through.

Some other novels started dealing with more full narratives,

but they all involve lots of different characters,

lots of different relations between people.

And this is very different in that it's got a title character, David Copperfield's,

and it focuses on one person.

And so it's an experiment in how much an identity can be captured by a text.

And this is something I think also very much with us today.

We have many autobiographies, many

texts, films, novels, TV programmes which attempt to capture one person's story.

And it hasn't always been this way.

If you think about the history of literature, Shakespeare, for example,

wouldn't fit this format. It's only really in the 18th century, where

text starts to investigate this idea of how to

represent an identity in a complete and whole way

text like Joseph Andrews by Fielding, who was an inspirational Dickens.

Dickens once said that

stern, smaller and fielding with the three greatest English novelists,

and so so Dickens was in, inspired by these traditions,

which are relatively new to the idea of Can you capture a whole life in a text?

My provisional answer to you is that Dickens is

not saying you can be successful in doing that.

This is not a successful attempt to capture an identity, completely,

to say everything that is to say about David Copperfield.

It's an experiment in how

texts can try or start to try

to say everything there is to say about a person.

But Dickens text, I think, ultimately shows how that can never be achieved.

A complete picture of a person, a picture, a person's life

can never be achieved. In other words,

an autobiography could never be sort of completed,

and that's something that comes up very strongly in this novel.

So in the next five sections of exploring all these ideas,

further thinking really about the relationship between literature and identity,

because the text is best characterised as

a huge volume which deals with the subject of identity