David Copperfield is familiarly discussed as a novel about growing up and putting away the frivolities of childhood, including a toy or child-wife. A celebrated Victorian Bildungsroman, it has attracted a long shelf of critical commentary analyzing its concern with maturation, its very Dickensian proliferation of deaths and problematical loves, and its intertwined themes of memory, discipline, and the craft of writing. The novel's imagery and structure, the parallels (both internally within its narrative and to the contemporary literature), its characterizations, and its humor have been richly chronicled. While exploring the growth and maturation of the eponymous figure who so diligently reconstructs his past, only incidentally or tangentially, however, have scholars of Copperfield spoken of David's embedded elegy to lost innocence, his transcription of his mourning for it. Bert Hornback encapsulates this critical tradition: "David's 'progress' is, in one sense, quite a simple one. As a child, David is required to relinquish his innocence, and the world which he meets beyond this innocence contains all the evil which the novel describes" (78). The actual experience of relinquishing this innocence, certainly significant, is simply overlooked or summarily regarded. I would like to argue that it is interesting, appropriate, and rewarding to examine David Copperfield as a novel that mourns and elegizes the loss of innocence and its enthusiasms. The novel focuses on the development of David, which parallels his progress as a writer, and it emphasizes the centrality of memory in the evolution of its hero and the telling of his tale. But peel back that surface and coexisting with or underpinning the forward-looking story of success is the backward-glancing narration of a detailed mourning (four chapters are called "Retrospect"). For all of the deaths that punctuate David Copperfield, the determining, overarching loss that David experiences and mourns is the world of innocence, a loss he confronts repeatedly and that is periodically refracted in other figures.
