Mr. Micawber Conducts David Home

Harold Copping

1924

Colour lithography

Approximately 7 x 5 inches (18.2 x 12.8 cm)

From Character Sketches from Dickens, facing p. 102.

Scanned image, caption, and commentary below by Philip V. Allingham

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL.]

The painful memories of his menial employment at Warren's Blacking Warehouse at Hungerford Stairs, Thames-side, Dickens sublimated into the scenes of his young protagonist's working at Murdstone and Grimby's wine-bottling facility at Blackfriars. Whereas the solitary young Dickens, his family in the Marshalsea Prison with his father, boarded in a rooming-house, after his mother's death David stays with the Micawber family, whose pater familias, Wilkins Micawber, one of the writer's greatest comic achievements, is in fact based on Dickens's childhood memories of his own father, the quixotic John Dickens. Having arrived in London and begun work, David meets singularly shabby-genteel "stoutish, middle-aged person, in a brown surtout and black tights and shoes, with no more hair upon his head . . . than there is upon an egg." This eventful meeting occurs in instalment four (chapter 11, "I Begin Life on My Own Account, and Don't Like It"), August 1849.

References

Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924. Copy in the Paterson Library, Lakehead University.

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Last modified 16 February 2009