The Personal History of David Copperfield

First edition in book form, published in London by Bradbury & Evans in November 1850, shortly after the completion of the 19 monthly parts begun in May 1849. Illustrated with 40 compositions by Hablot Knight Browne, known as Phiz: frontispiece, engraved title and 38 full-page plates.

Contemporary English half dark green shagreen with corners. Spine with flat false bands, decorated with gilt rolls across the bands and gilt fillets. Some rubbing. Internally fresh and clean. As is frequently encountered in this edition, the plates show moderate browning and foxing, chiefly around the edges. A faint dampstain to the plate Changes at Home. A handsome copy.

The present copy retains several of the bibliographical features associated with early copies of the first edition in book form: p. 16 reads “recal” for “recall”; the errata leaf contains six lines; Chapter XXVII is listed in the contents as beginning on p. 283 but actually starts on p. 282; and the final i in the pagination viii is out of alignment. On p. 132, line 20, however, “screwed” is correctly printed, whereas the earliest sheets contain the erroneous reading “screamed”. The copy is therefore best described as an early mixed state of the first edition, preserving several initial errors while incorporating one correction made during the course of printing.

These variants are particularly meaningful in the material history of the novel. David Copperfield was not produced as a book intended to appear all at once: for nineteen months, text and illustrations reached readers in successive instalments. Each monthly part combined the developing narrative with new illustrations by Phiz, and corrections introduced as printing progressed account for the coexistence in bound copies of sheets representing slightly different states.

The collaboration between Dickens and Hablot Knight Browne was by then of long standing. Beginning with The Pickwick Papers, it accompanied much of Dickens’s career and went well beyond the simple graphic transcription of scenes already written. Phiz worked within the rhythm of monthly publication itself, giving characters and episodes their first visual form as readers encountered them. The 40 compositions in David Copperfield therefore constitute a parallel visual narrative, helping to shape the reader’s memory of the novel from its first appearance.

One plate stands apart within this cycle. Facing page 482, The River depicts Martha Endell at the edge of the Thames, followed by David and Mr Peggotty shortly before they prevent her suicide. Here Phiz employs, for the only time in the novel, the technique known as the dark plate. This is not technically a mezzotint, but a steel etching in which fine mechanically produced lines, combined with etched work, create tonal values far deeper than those of the conventional plates.

The River was only the second dark plate Phiz produced for Dickens, following his experiment in Dombey and Son. The method was therefore not yet a routine decorative device, and its exceptional use gives the scene particular force. The sky, dark water, decaying structures along the river and Martha’s isolated figure turn the plate from a literal record of the action into a visual expression of its psychological atmosphere.

This unusually close relationship between text and image is especially appropriate to the most personal of Dickens’s major novels. Narrated in the first person, David Copperfield follows its hero from childhood to maturity and transforms several decisive experiences from Dickens’s own life into fiction: the humiliation of premature child labour, the struggle for independence, shorthand reporting, journalism and, finally, the formation of the writer. Dickens had in fact begun an autobiography a few years earlier, abandoned it, and subsequently drew upon some of that material in composing the novel.

Dickens himself remained particularly conscious of this intimacy. In the preface written for a later edition he confessed, “Of all my books, I like this the best”, before describing the works of his imagination as his children and admitting that one stood above the rest: “And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD.”

Virginia Woolf, whose judgement of Dickens was often considerably more reserved, likewise recognised the novel’s exceptional place. In her 1925 essay on David Copperfield, she found in its pervasive sense of youth, hope and gaiety the force that holds its abundance together, describing it as “the most perfect of all the Dickens novels”.

A handsome copy of the first edition in book form, complete with all 40 illustrations by Phiz, retaining several early bibliographical points and the remarkable dark plate The River: material traces of the monthly process through which text and image developed together to produce the novel Dickens would later call his “favourite child”.