Recommendations
Books Like David Copperfield
Best books to read after David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield is Dickens's most autobiographical novel and the work he called his favorite child — the story of a young man's rise from orphaned poverty to literary success, told with the warmth and humor that made Dickens the most beloved novelist in the English language. If the novel's emotional generosity and its portrait of the world as a place of comic villains and generous friends moved you, these books share its faith in the human capacity for goodness and its delight in character.
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Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
The psychological deepening of David Copperfield — another orphan's journey, but told with greater irony and more formal control; where David Copperfield arrives at success through virtue and good fortune, Pip arrives at wisdom through disillusionment; the essential companion in Dickens's own work
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Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
The female Bildungsroman published two years before David Copperfield — an orphan girl's rise from hardship through moral integrity to achieved selfhood; the essential companion to Dickens's novel in the Victorian Bildungsroman tradition, showing how the same story looks when the protagonist is female and the obstacles are specifically those of gender
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
Salinger openly named David Copperfield as the book he was responding to in the opening sentence of The Catcher in the Rye; where Dickens's first-person narrator looks back on his youth with earned perspective and achieved success, Salinger's Holden Caulfield narrates from the crisis itself, with no resolution in sight
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
Joyce's autobiographical Bildungsroman about the Irish Catholic Stephen Dedalus's artistic development — the modernist heir to the tradition David Copperfield established; where Dickens's novel arrives at the achieved self, Joyce's ends at the threshold of artistic independence, and the prose itself embodies the development of consciousness it describes
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Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
The natural next Dickens novel after David Copperfield — more formally ambitious, more panoramic, and darker in its vision of the social world; where David Copperfield is organized around the growth of a single consciousness, Bleak House is organized around the exposure of a social institution; the culmination of Dickens's mature art
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Nicholas Nickleby
by Charles Dickens
The earlier Dickens Bildungsroman — less autobiographical than David Copperfield, more melodramatic, but sharing the picaresque energy and the gallery of memorable characters; recommended for readers who want more of the early Dickens after David Copperfield
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Père Goriot
by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's novel about the ambitious young Eugène de Rastignac, who arrives in Paris from the provinces and learns the price of social success — the French parallel to David Copperfield's portrait of a young man making his way through a social world that rewards certain kinds of ambition and punishes others
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Boyhood
by J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee's autobiographical novel about a South African childhood — told in the present tense, third person, with an unflinching refusal of the consolations of retrospective narration; the most searching contemporary examination of what the Bildungsroman does and what it suppresses, written against the tradition that David Copperfield established
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