Details

Title

David Copperfield

Author

Dickens, Charles

Place of Publication

New York, NY

Publisher

Ward, Lock & Co.

Copyright Date

1850 Show more1850-01-01T00:00:00.000Z
1850-01-01T00:00:00.000Z Show less

Collection

Scans provided by and used with permission of Archival & Special Collections, University of Guelph Library. From the L.M. Montgomery Collection.

Note

Montgomery cited phrases and characters from Dickens’ ‘David Copperfield’ in three of her own novels. Character names are cited in both ‘Anne of the Island’ and ‘Magic for Marigold’ (Uriah Heep and Mrs. Gummage, respectively). In ‘Emily Climbs,’ Emily tells her diary about the evening that “Aunt Ruth found me reading David Copperfield and crying over Davy's alienation from his mother, with a black rage against Mr. Murdstone in my heart. She must know why I was crying and wouldn't believe me when I told her.” Aunt Ruth replies, with shock, “Crying over people who never existed!” Emily, and no doubt Maud, too, tells her “Oh, but they _do_ exist, … Why, they are as real as you are, Aunt Ruth. Do you mean to say that Miss Betsy Trotwood is a delusion?” Dickens’ characters were even real enough to Montgomery that she used many of their names as shorthand descriptions of other people in her real life. For example, when reflecting on the Canadian Church Union Bill in her journal in 1924, she notes “It won’t please anybody. But a good deal of water will flow under the bridges in two years and the ghost of Mr. Micawber broods over the troubled waters” (‘The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery, The Ontario Years 1922–1925, p. 247). Mr. Micawber, of course, is known for his incessantly optimistic, if often misguided, sense that “something will turn up.” But besides her clear connection to the characters, Montgomery just adored Dickens' works and ‘David Copperfield' in particular, listing it among her favourites in various interviews. In Hoffman’s ‘Fiction Writers on Fiction Writing’ she noted that “No book do I love as I love David Copperfield. Yet during my many re-readings I must have wept literal quarts over David’s boyish tribulations” (p. 160). Scanned here are the pages that Montgomery underlined and an illustration she tucked into this treasured volume.

Genre

novel