ABSTRACT
The first-person narrator of Dickens’s eighth novel, David Copperfield, concludes the last chapter – ‘I have a Change’ – of the first of the novel’s 20 monthly numbers 1 with a depiction of his childhood self roaming into the yard of his home, the rookless Blunderstone Rookery. His home has become alien to him now that Mr Murdstone, already married to his mother, is its master, and David is hoping to find something that still seems ‘like itself’. Instead, he is alarmed by the occupant of the dog-kennel, which, empty when he set off with Peggotty for his fortnight’s holiday at Yarmouth (during which time the marriage takes place), is now ‘filled up with a great dog – deep-mouthed and black-haired like Him – and he was very angry at the sight of me, and sprung out to get at me’ (p. 37). 2
