David Copperfield Themes

David Copperfield is a classic example of the Bildungsroman, or "novel of education." It not only traces the events of its protagonist's childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, but also (and more importantly) aims to demonstrate the role that those events played in David's growth and development. The ideal Victorian man was active and independent—that is, able to control the course of his own life through force of character rather than allowing his character to…

Nineteenth-century England was a highly socially stratified society, but one in which it was theoretically possible to move upwards. Although the Industrial Revolution had in many ways worsened the wealth gap by creating a new class of poor, urban laborers, it also held out the promise of social mobility: capitalist ideology maintained that hard work and perseverance would ultimately pay off, and some individuals did in fact manage to rise from poverty to wealth and…

Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that its protagonist is a man, David Copperfield is deeply interested in questions surrounding womanhood and the place of women in Victorian society. Although Dickens is often criticized for writing one-note female characters, femininity actually takes multiple forms in the novel—a fact David himself underscores early on, when he says of the matronly servant Peggotty, "I thought her in a different style from my mother, certainly; but…

Although it overlaps to some extent with David Copperfield's treatment of gender roles, the question of what constitutes a home or family is also an important theme in its own right. The ideal Victorian home was one that served as a refuge from the outside world, with the wife/mother providing an atmosphere of calm for the husband/father, whose work took him out into a realm of stress and competition. It is only at the…