David Copperfield | Resources

David Copperfield For Further Reference

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. London, England: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990. Ackroyd says that the first biography by John Forster is too dull in places and that Edgar Johnson in his 1952 biography is frequently wrongheaded. Accordingly, he provides all the known facts about Dickens and enlivens his account with a "Prologue," describing the reaction in England and America after the writer's death, and several chapters which include a mock interview he has with Dickens during the author's lifetime, another chapter featuring Dickens in a fictional conversation with T. S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Chatterson, and another chapter in which Ackroyd himself is interviewed about how he wrote this biography. A thorough and entertaining book.

Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. A full study of the genre from its origin in Europe through the major British authors who have produced these works.

Ford, George H., and Lauriat Lane Jr. The Dickens Critics. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972. A reprint of a book published by Cornell University Press in 1961. Includes essays by contemporaries of Dickens such as Poe, Henry James, and John Ruskin, and continues into our century. George H. Ford's perceptive essay on David Copperfield is included.

Frank, Lawrence. Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. A Freudian analysis. Dickens, for Frank, stands between the writers of Romantic autobiography such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas de Quincy, and Freud. David Copperfield is "poet of the memory, the heir of Rousseau and...
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