David Copperfield Unbound: A Genetic Study

David Copperfield was Dickens’s most personal novel, a first-person narrative that reworked details of both the author’s lived experience and his complex psychological profile. The present study is a highly original exploration of the sources and motivations underpinning this canonical work, treated here as a melting pot of ideas and a proto-modernist masterpiece. Jeremy Parrott casts himself as a literary detective, tracking down clues hidden in the text, following in Dickens’s footsteps, and laying bare a previously unsuspected symbolic scaffolding which ranges across Greek mythology, English history, Romantic poetry, and the latest advances in science. Following the example set by Betsey Trotwood, every proper name in this enormously rich text is subjected to rigorous analysis, laying bare the deepest currents of Dickens’s mind and showing him to be an even greater artist than previously imagined. From the search for an elephant in Great Yarmouth to the discovery of the mysterious reader whom Dickens loved in 1850, this engaging and readable study will radically alter what you thought you knew about the best-loved Victorian novelist and his own ’favourite child’.

Jeremy Parrott taught English at universities in Britain, France and Hungary until 2014, since which time he has been an independent Charles Dickens scholar. He publishes in Dickens Quarterly and The Dickensian and has posted over 50 videos on various aspects of his research on the YouTube channel Dickens & Co. He is currently a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham and Associate Editor of the Dickens Online Letters Project.