Home: David Copperfield and Joseph Andrews

Consider the respective namesakes of Joseph Andrews and David Copperfield. Briefly, how much do we know about these two characters? Are they fully developed characters? Are they atypical in terms of their respective novels? What does that information suggest about the respective methods of characterization of Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens?

The naming of the protagonists of the novels David Copperfield and Joseph Andrews is important, as these two characters are, to use Dickens's phrase, the heroes of their own lives. David's birth is filled with portents, from the caul around his neck, to his weak mother whom is a foreshadowing in waxen doll like attitude and form to her son's eventual wedlock with the silly Dora. The younger David becomes a kind of replacement father to his mother, taking the name and place of his ghostly, elderly father whom barely functions as a...
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