David Copperfield and Joseph Andrews Term Paper

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Home: David Copperfield and Joseph Andrews

Consider the respective namesakes of Joseph Andrews and David Copperfield. Briefly, how much do we know about these two characters? Are they fully developed characters? Are they atypical in terms of their respective novels? What does that information suggest about the respective methods of characterization of Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens?

The naming of the protagonists of the novels David Copperfield and Joseph Andrews is important, as these two characters are, to use Dickens's phrase, the heroes of their own lives. David's birth is filled with portents, from the caul around his neck, to his weak mother whom is a foreshadowing in waxen doll like attitude and form to her son's eventual wedlock with the silly Dora. The younger David becomes a kind of replacement father to his mother, taking the name and place of his ghostly, elderly father whom barely functions as a personality in the book. Even the name of the Copperfield home is from Mr. David Copperfield (the elder)'s fantasy of imagining birds swarming around the roofs, rather than reality.

His sister Betsy Trotwood says that it is typical of her brother to engage in such fantasy, fixating on not on practicality, as a name like Cookery would indicate, but only on the old and empty nests of departed birds. But perhaps the most evident aspect of the departed Mr. David Copperfield's character is the woman he leaves behind, who is barely more than a child, even though he was almost twice her age and of frail health. It seems cruel for an old man to marry so young a woman, particularly if he was in poor health and could not provide for her should he die, but this demonstrates once again the lack of practicality, optimism in the face of evident death (like the empty bird nests) and unwillingness to plan for the likely future characteristic of the man.

Thus, David Copperfield the senior emerges, despite his lack of a presence as a physical being in the novel, as a fully fledged character, as Charles Dickens prefers to 'show' rather than to tell about his characters, in other words he uses details rather than authoritative statements to characterize his protagonists, present and in the case of David Copperfield the senior, absent.

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Even this characterization of David's father as impractical, versus the practical Betsy is commensurate and typical with the practical v. impractical character dichotomy that is struck between so many of the protagonists of the novel, not only between Betsy and her brother, but Dora and David later on. Henry Fielding, in contrast, tells the reader what he or she should think about the various protagonists of Joseph Andrews.

Also, rather than stress the character of the main hero's progenitors, he gives a genealogy of the man's family, stressing how the family history led up to the main character's birth and circumstances. In other words, physical events rather than internal character are at the forefront of the narration, and there is little ambiguity or interpretation left to the reader, unlike Dickens' David Copperfield. Because of the static, 'told' quality of this narration, there is less vivid characterization and sense of reality given to Joseph's namesake, and this genteel character is less typical of the novel overall, whose most fascinating characters are often of the lower, rather than upper classes of society.

Question 2: Think about David Copperfield….....

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