The Personal History of David Copperfield: A Study In Psychoanalytic Criticism

In honor of the centenary of the publication of Dickens'

From May, 1849, to November, 1850, there appeared the monthly installments of the novel by Dickens which has always been accounted the most autobiographical of all his works. It followed closely upon that period of five years during which Dickens had been creating the canon of English Christmas mythology from A Christmas Carol through The Cricket on the Hearth to the final and little known allegory of memory known as The Haunted Man. Its immediate predecessor among the novels—Dombey and Son—marked the beginning of a period in Dickens' career as a novelist during which he attempted to make a fierce effort at self-analysis, a determined effort to come to grips with those figures of fact and fantasy which had plagued his conscious and unconscious psyche. In Dombey he had tried to exorcise the demon of the primitive father-fear through an attempt to penetrate with sympathy into a three-dimensional “father”. Further, he had tried to picture, sympathetically as well, a woman who was no longer virginal but who was neither a freakish maternal image nor a crabbèd spinster. He was to try something of the