preview

Family Themes In David Copperfield

Decent Essays

We are going to focus on the book David Copperfield out of all that concern the theme of family and parenting issues, although Dickens’s work is known for the transition from childhood to adulthood theme, we can draw some scenes with the family theme and another theme that wasn’t really a matter in the time when Dickens wrote, the adoption which was added later in the Victorian time. Charles Dickens also targeted the father figure in his works, how he was viewed and how children dealt with the absent of a father figure.
Parents are important for the right upbringing of a child, their support and their care shape the child in what it would be in the future; the way parents behave and talk, their temperament also has an influence in the upbringing due to the fact that children copy what their parents do – most of the times – and a bad influence in going to take them on the wrong path when they grown up.
As the book opens, we find out the David’s father has passed away before the …show more content…

Peggotty […] did you give your son the name of Ham because you lived in a sort of ark?’ David discovers the error of his assumptions, finding he has misread the nature of the bonds between the boat’s inhabitants: ‘I was very much surprised that Mr. Peggotty was not Ham’s father, and began to wonder whether I was mistaken about his relationship to anybody else there’ (38)” (Furneaux, Paternal passions: queer boats and hands-on foster fathering in mid- Victorian fiction). For David and probably Victorians too, adoption and single parenting was kind of taboo topic but Dickens wanted to show a revolutionary writing topic and didn’t care what his critics will say. David was surprise since he never heard nor nobody ever explained to him about adoption and Dickens tries to show readers that this kind of relationship can exist in the society and should be view with good

Get Access