“Think of me at my best!”

“Think of me at my best!” is J. Steerforth’s appeal to David Copperfield at their last conversation, made in an hour David did not know would be their parting. Recalled after Steerforth’s death, the phrase joins an appeal for remembrance to the painful fact of what David must now witness: the friend he had loved is dead, lying among the ruins of the home he wronged.

The request and its remembered answer

David recalls the appeal while looking at Steerforth’s body. His response is that there was no need for Steerforth to have asked: David had always remembered him at his best. The recollection does not present this as a new decision to forgive or remember him kindly; rather, it makes clear that favorable memory had already persisted through their final parting and survives the sight of the body.

The shore and the familiar image

The phrase is set against a stark physical scene. David sees Steerforth on the shore, where the two had once looked for shells, among fragments of the old boat scattered by the wind. Steerforth lies with his head upon his arm, in a posture David remembers from their schooldays. That repeated image links the dead man to the remembered boy and makes the request to be remembered at his best painfully present without erasing the harm he caused.

From private appeal to public mourning

After David’s recognition, the men carry Steerforth on a hand-bier, cover him with a flag, and take him toward the houses. They had known him and sailed with him, and remember him as merry and bold. When they reach the cottage where Death is already present, they hesitate to bring him into the same quiet room. The recalled appeal therefore stands between two forms of remembrance: David’s enduring personal image of his friend, and the sailors’ communal memory of the man they knew. It gives the scene its emotional tension, holding affection and loss alongside the knowledge of the wronged home among whose ruins Steerforth is found.