scholarly journals ‘Only Brooks of Sheffield’: Conversation, Crossover Writing, and Child and Adult Perspectives in David Copperfield and Its Juvenile Adapta

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Field
Keyword(s):  
David Copperfield

Dickensiana: 'David Copperfield'

1902 ◽  
Vol s9-IX (299) ◽  
pp. 391-391
Author(s):  
W. T.
Keyword(s):  
David Copperfield

Emigration Aesthetics: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Catherine Helen Spence

2018 ◽  
pp. 161-190
Author(s):  
Fariha Shaikh
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Global Network ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
Martin Chuzzlewit ◽  
A Site

Chapter Five takes up this reading and interrogates the ways in emigration literature becomes a trope in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield (1850), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854). This chapter asserts that to ask how central or liminal emigration is to the plot of the novel is to miss the point. What is far more interesting is the ways in which the novels discussed here register the effects of emigration. They draw on the familiar tropes of emigration literature, but at the same time, they imagine a world in which emigration literature connects emigrants and their families and weaves them into the larger global network of the British empire. Thus, collectively, the last two chapters of this book demonstrate the hold that emigration literature had over the cultural imagination. Not only does it produce a stock of common tropes that other genres and media drew on, it also becomes a motif in them, a site of interrogation for the interrogation of texts that produced a widening settler world.

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