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  • David Copperfield and the Tradition of the Bildungsroman
  • Julia Kuehn (bio)

Calling for a truthful creative engagement with common life, which had been thus far sentimentalized and falsely idealized, George Eliot (at this point still Marian Evans) refers to Charles Dickens in her 1856 review of Riehl's Natural History of German Life. Without mentioning him by name, she describes him as the "one great [British] novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population" (264). This is a mixed compliment, as Eliot's emphasis is on Dickens's preoccupation with externalities, however detailed and historically and culturally specific, which implies, as she views it, his failure to offer to the readers "psychological character–their conception of life, and their emotions–with the same truth as their idiom and manners" (264). Such shortcomings, Eliot laments, keep Dickens's novels from being "the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies" (264), and from also being useful to "the social and political reformer" (266).

I build this essay on two premises: Eliot is, I believe, mistaken when it comes to what Isobel Armstrong, in her recent study Novel Politics, calls Dickens's "democratic imagination" and social impact, and which Eliot assesses as both non-radical and failed. And she is partially wrong–if understandably so, given her own aesthetic inclination and practice and, to a degree, justifiably so given his abundance of flat characters and the conflicting demands comedy, sensationalism, externalities and melodrama placed upon him–when it comes to Dickens's supposed deficiencies in the portrayal of realistic psychologies. Eliot's assessment marks the beginning of a line of criticism that sees (high) realism through a psychological lens; a narrow approach that misses Dickens's art which uses various and different literary modes, types of character and narrative devices to represent the complex and disparate nature of modern reality (see Sanders 182). This essay revolves around one novel–David Copperfield (1849–50)–which, as a Bildungsroman, as I will argue, not only traces a character's individual psychological development from immaturity to maturity but also asks provocative, even radical, questions about the society the individual inhabits [End Page 25] during and after his period of learning.

A lot has been written about the Bildungsroman in the English, European and global traditions, and this is not the place to offer a comprehensive history of the genre's emergence or criticism. For the purposes of this essay and its analysis, I want to establish three reflections which provide context–derived from studies by Thomas L. Jeffers, Michael Minden, Todd Kontje, Heinz Hillmann and Peter Hühn and Ortrud Gutjahr– and offer critical approaches that build primarily on Franco Moretti's study The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987) and Mikhail Bakhtin's fragment "The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism" (1936–38).

First. Bildung–discussed by late eighteenth-century writers like Herder, Lessing, Schiller and Humboldt–refers to the German tradition of self-cultivation wherein philosophical and educational principles unite to refer to a process of both personal and cultural maturation. Such maturation is described as the process of harmonising the individual's mind and emotions and of combining the individual's senses of selfhood (that is, distinctness in relation to others) and identity (that is, shared sameness with others) with a broader social context. This process of harmonization is realized through a personal transformation that challenges the individual's beliefs. A crisis, or sometimes several, is central to this process of becoming, which Hegel calls, in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the individual's agonizing alienation from his "natural consciousness." Social coherence develops from free individuals with diverse talents and abilities meeting society's institutions in an eternal process of negotiation. In this sense, Bildung is the shaping of the individual's intellectual abilities as well as his or her humanity.

In a second sense, referring to especially Humboldt's idea(l)s about higher education, Bildung refers to the lifelong process of human development. Here is the continued expansion and growth of the individual in life, personal and social skills, which...

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