First Love, first disappointment, David Copperfield

Introduction :

What we have here is an extract of the novel David Copperfield, written by Charles Dickens in 1849. Charles Dickens was a british author, who grew up in misery, especially after his father was imprisoned. He was indeed forced to work in a blacking warehouse, in despicable conditions, at the age of 12.

It is the story of David Copperfield and how he managed to escape his impoverished and miserable childhood in order to become a successful and famous author. The whole plot and many details of the novel are inspired by Dickens’ own life.

The original title was The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account), but it’s obviously wayyyy too long and by using the mere name of the character, Dickens emphasizes that it is David’s story, as a lot of writer of his time did : Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë or Emma by Jane Austen.

Developpement :

This extract is devoted to David’s burning love for Miss Shepherd and to the slow fading of his flame. The narrator, which is a first person narrator (“my” line 1), is middle aged, possibly old and goes back to his “school days”.

At the very beginning, he uses both the past and the present. However, during the majority of the passage, he only uses present tense which creates hypotyposis. It is a figure of speech by which something not present is represented as though present. It thereby recreates the emotions he felt at the time and describes them as more lively, more real.

This whole extract revolves around the evolution of the romance of the two characters, David and Miss Shepherd. The romance follows the traditional pattern of adult love affairs and breakups : first unconditional love (“I am sometimes moved to cry out “Oh Miss Shepherd” in a transport of love”), then coolness (“yet a coolness grows between Miss Shepherd and I”), then betrayal (when Miss Shepherd avowed “a preference for Master Jones ! For Jones !”), then a gradual estrangement (“the gulf between Miss Shepherd and I widens”), then the breakup (“all is over”), and finally indifference (“the royal family know her no more”).

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