It is a simple, rather old fashioned quote, but still rings true for today, nevertheless: Micawber, who is taken to a debtor’s prison after he is unable to pay his creditors, again gives David Copperfield this advice, which he should have followed himself. This experience traumatized Dickens and became a major influence in his writing, including in David Copperfield. That number is now set to increase dramatically.īut, at least we don’t have a debtor’s prison to worry about.Ĭharles Dickens’ father spent several years in a debtor’s prison, unable to pay off the debt that kept him there and was entirely reliant on his family to try and save him.

It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.Credit cards, personal loans, debit cards - getting into debt has not only become easy, it has become the normal way of life.īefore the pandemic, 8 million people in the UK were recorded to be in serious financial debt. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. The story contains some of the most memorable characters in English literature, including the unctuous Uriah Heep and the ever-optimistic Mr. It’s still a good book.”ĭickens’ favorite of his own works, and his most autobiographical, David Copperfield records the struggles of a young man in early Victorian England, following him from childhood to young manhood.

But about three years later I really looked into the kind of thing that David Copperfield showed me was there, and I’ve always prized that experience of having read David Copperfield as my first real book. I didn’t then and there settle down and read a lot of Dickens. For example, by the time I had read David Copperfield, I knew David better than anybody I’d ever known, including myself, and I realized that that was a world that was available to me. And I read it, and I knew then, without doing anything about it or making any resolution over it, that I had entered into a world that was in many ways better than the world I or anybody else lived in. And then when I was 11 or 12, as a Sunday school prize I was given a copy of David Copperfield, which was an enormous book to my mind it was 300, 400, 500 pages long. First I read the Bobbsey Twins, then the Rover Boys, and Tom Swift and Tarzan.

David copperfield story