David Copperfield

 

Finished on: 2/14/2026

 

Rating: I beg your unbelievable pardon, Mr. Dickens? (Or, I dunno, ⭐⭐ stars I guess.) 

 

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Okay, so, I guess I'll preface this with a couple of the novel's strengths: I liked the first two-thirds of this book, and found certain scenes and character arcs to be genuinely very moving. For example, Mr. Peggotty's unwavering love for his adopted niece, Emily, is a beautiful portrayal of familial bonds, and I'll commend Dickens on treating Emily's character arc with a level of compassion. It read to me like a call for readers to interrogate the internal prejudices instilled in them by their time and culture. Also, Aunt Betsey and Mr. Dick are perfect, no notes. And lastly, I'll say that Dickens occasionally delivers stunning lines, like when David refers to human lives/mortality as "motes upon the deep of Time.”

 

All that being said, as I made headway through this novel, I found myself progressively more and more impatient with Dickens' portrayal of Dora's character, and her death scene in chapter 53 made me almost certain I can never read this book again.

 

David Copperfield is a fictionalized autobiography of Dickens' life. Most of the characters were modeled on real people (e.g., look up Jane Seymour Hill, who was the model for Miss Mowcher), most of the events in the book correlate to events in Dickens' life, and David Copperfield's character himself is clearly a representation of Dickens. It seems reasonable, then, to believe that Dora is intended to represent Dickens' real wife, Catherine.

 

Before I get into the specifics on why Dora's characterization so bothers me—and why her death scene, in particular, is infuriating enough to sour the whole novel—let me quickly review a couple biographical facts:

 

• Dickens became unhappy in his marriage to Catherine, and while we don't know specifics, he indicated to friends that he didn't think Catherine had ever been his intellectual equal.
• By 1855 (five years after David Copperfield was published), Dickens actively pursued affairs with other women, and in 1857 formed a long-term extramarital affair. (Little nugget: Catherine found out about her husband's affair when he had a bracelet sent to his mistress, but it was accidentally misdelivered to the Dickens household. Can you even imagine?)
• In 1858, Dickens and Catherine were separated. Dickens retained custody of their children, and from the sounds of it, he did not encourage them to maintain contact with their mother.

 

So, given that Dickens grew to dislike his wife because he perceived her as intellectually inferior, and given how he would go on to treat her, I find it extremely grating that Dora's character is portrayed in the following ways:

 

• She is stupid, and regularly refers to herself as such.
• She is relentlessly infantilized in every possible way (she literally asks David to think of her as his "child-wife"), is constantly referred to as childish/childlike, and her behavior is consistent with the behavior of a five-year-old.
• She is incompetent at everything except looking pretty and being cheerful. Readers are shown far too many scenes of her being unable to perform basic life skills, like addition/subtraction, grocery shopping, basic house cleaning and organization, etc., and all the while the reader is encouraged to sympathize with David's character because of how selflessly and earnestly he loves his "little child-wife," despite all these manifest flaws. 

 

But most egregiously of all, during Dora's death scene in chapter 53, she explicitly says to her husband David: "If I had been more fit to be married, I might have made you more so, too. Besides, you are very clever, and I never was." Then, mere paragraphs later, Dora says it's "better" that she's dying, actually, because, "After more years [of marriage], you never could have loved your child-wife better than you do; and, after more years, she would have so tried and disappointed you, that you might not have been able to love her half so well! I know I was too young and foolish. It is much better as it is."

 

Yes, Dickens made the fictional counterpart of his wife explicitly say to his own fictional counterpart that their disappointing marriage was her fault because she was too stupid and frivolous, and that it's better that she dies young. (I beg your unbelievable pardon, Mr. Dickens?) Meanwhile, in the early stages of their courtship/marriage, David's character is portrayed as so innocently, selflessly, and devotedly in love with Dora that he's naive to his wife's unsuitability for him; by the time he does clue into her unsuitability as a life partner, he's portrayed as a self-denying martyr who puts her happiness before his. It's artless, transparently self-flattering, and frankly obnoxious to read. Nothing yanks me out of a story faster than seeing the author so obviously tugging on the puppet strings.

 

I'd already known, years before reading this book, that Dickens had cheated on his wife and that the marriage ended unhappily. That in itself didn't deter me from reading more Dickens. Marriages end all the time, I didn't know any specifics, and I don't expect moral purity from the writers I read. But it's one thing to know the fact, and it's quite another to read hundreds of pages of intentional, egregious, and very public character assassination of his own wife. And it's impossible to ignore its presence in the story, because Dickens' disdain for his real wife hamstrung his ability to write a convincing character. 

 

It’s a profound failure of imagination (the writer’s very stock and trade) on Dickens’ part that he could not conceive of Dora having an interior life of more substance than simply being a mindless imbecile “child-wife," and it's this lack of imagination that was the final nail in the coffin of my patience. I have no grace left to give this book.