Abstract

By the time David Copperfield appeared in 1850, most Victorians felt that heaven was unimaginable without their worldly identity and relationships. But while evangelical ministers and authors of death-consolation literature promised a social and marital reunion in heaven, they also worried about the status of remarriage in an eternally present afterlife. This essay first examines a variety of complex Victorian responses to the promise and problem of a conjugal heaven and then unfolds the eschatology of David Copperfield. The seemingly conservative language of Victorian angelology unexpectedly allows for David's fantasy that he will share heaven with his two sequential wives.

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