David Copperfield, the Bildungsroman, and the Mobile Forces of Modernity

Abstract

David Copperfield (1849-50) is much more than just Dickens’s self-proclaimed ‘favourite child’: for the English-speaking world it was, arguably, a game-shifter in terms of the genre that Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship had initiated a few decades earlier – the Bildungsroman. The Bildungsroman – a story of the individual’s growing up via a journey that entails various crises which, in the end and after a learning process, allow the now mature individual to become a valuable part of society – is two things, as Franco Moretti has persuasively argued: a story of geographical and social mobility and, linked with this, a story of the exploration of an individual’s mind. These two interlinked movements, concludes Moretti, are essentially modern: the age placed a new emphasis on the stage of youth as it looked for a narrative and meaning for its own mobility, dynamism, restlessness and what Marx’s called its ‘state of permanent revolution’. The modern age found in the Bildungsroman its symbolic form. This paper is about David Copperfield – one of two Bildungsromane in Dickens’s oeuvre, the other being Great Expectations (1860) – and travelling and movement on a smaller scale (as a constitutive part of the journey of an ‘apprentice’ in the bildungsroman) and on a larger scale (mobility as constitutive of modernity). It looks at how the novel fits into the history of the genre – how it helped translate the German Bildungsroman into a British context, together with Pendennis, Thackeray’s novel which was published at exactly the same time – and how it helped shaped the narrative of modernity of a struggling individual disoriented by the forces of a changing society and changing world.