ABSTRACT
The Robinson Crusoe that affected Charles Dickens positively is the hero of the second plot, the man who creates a world with the work of his own hands and so demonstrates the relationship between the self, the world, and work. This chapter discusses David Copperfield, the novel which most clearly establishes Dickens’s attitudes toward work. David, like so many of Dickens’s children, sees things accurately; he perceives the integration of Yarmouth life. David’s activity, like his earlier reading of the “crocodile book” to Peggotty, intimates his vocation; the little boy who reads stories grows up to write them. David’s interest in homes is as intense as his interest in work. He describes in detail all of the many households in which he lives. David slowly begins to shed the aristocratic yearnings which have controlled his life for so long. The dinner party with Steerforth and his Oxford friends leaves David hung over and disquieted.
