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David Copperfield and the Autobiographical Fragment Reconsidered

At the very end of 1844, immediately after the success of the momentous readings of The Chimes, Dickens sent to Forster what would seem to have been his first extended “bit of autobiography” (Life 380; bk. 5; ch. 1),1 a long account of how, well before his first piece of writing was published in the Monthly Magazine of December 1833, he very nearly went on the stage, missing out on a crucial audition only because of “a terrible bad cold and an inflammation of the face.” He concludes the account by saying with an air of wonder, “See how near I may have been to another sort of life” (Life 60; bk. 1; ch. 4). In July of that year Dickens had uprooted himself and his family from London and based himself in Italy for a calendar year, returning only to read The Chimes. Away from old haunts and friends, and on a break from writing, he had plenty of time to mull over things. By the time he returned to England in July 1845 he was full of new schemes, seemingly determined to act out his musing and make “another sort of life” for himself. He wrote excitedly to Forster in July about starting a new periodical, The Cricket, and he ended the letter saying “like the parrot in the negro-story, I ‘think a dam deal’” (Letters 4: 328). After his return, much of his energy went into compensating for missing the stage career by directing and acting in a production of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour. He was soon also engaged in a far more ambitious and momentous undertaking than starting a periodical. He became convinced that he could achieve more public leverage as a social reformer by taking on the full-time task of starting up and editing a new newspaper. He threw himself into this venture with his usual overwhelming energy, and The Daily News duly began life in January 1846 under his aegis. He aborted his part in the enterprise, however, after less than a month, realizing that there was no way he could sustain the editorship if he was ever to continue writing fiction. None the less, in June he was still making an overture to see whether