David Copperfield's flight to Dover is the decisive act by which he tries to escape the exploitation of Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse and claim a chance of refuge with his only known relation, Betsey Trotwood. Planned with a borrowed half-guinea and a guessed destination, the journey becomes a six-day test of endurance after a donkey-cart driver takes his money and box. David reaches Dover ragged, hungry, and dispirited, but the imagined kindness of his mother and aunt has carried him across the road.

Causes and Decision

David resolves to leave after the Micawber family departs, and as he returns to his weary day at Murdstone and Grinby's he determines not to spend many more days there. He does not know whether the plan will succeed; what hardens into certainty is that he must go to the country and tell his story to Betsey Trotwood. The flight is therefore neither a confident journey toward a known welcome nor a calculated escape to independence. It is a desperate appeal to the only relative he believes he has.

His hope grows from a story told by his mother about his birth. In that remembered account, his aunt appears as a frightening figure, but David dwells on a small possibility of tenderness: his mother had thought Betsey touched her hair without harshness. David turns that uncertain detail into an image of his aunt relenting toward the young mother he loved. The image does not prove that Betsey will help him; it gives him a slender reason to try. In his later recollection, he allows that this thought may have been forming his determination long before he acted on it.

Planning and the Loss of His Means

Because David does not know where Betsey lives, he writes to Peggotty, disguising his question as curiosity about a lady said to live at a place he names at random. He also asks to borrow half a guinea, saying he has a particular need for the money but will explain it later. Peggotty sends the sum and reports that Betsey lives near Dover, though she cannot say whether the exact place is Dover, Hythe, Sandgate, or Folkestone. David treats the nearby towns as close enough to provide a destination. The loan, which he fears Peggotty had difficulty retrieving from Mr. Barkis's box, is to be his travelling fund.

David waits until Saturday night to leave. Because he had received a week's wages in advance when he first entered the warehouse, he believes he should stay through the end of the week and not appear at the counting-house to collect another payment. He also wants to leave without disgracing the memory he will leave behind among the people there. As the workers wait to be paid, he shakes hands with Mick Walker and asks him to tell Mr. Quinion that he has gone to move his box to Tipp's. Then he says goodbye to Mealy Potatoes and runs away. His care over a final day's work and an orderly excuse contrasts sharply with the vulnerability of the child setting out alone.

The box is at his former lodging across the water. David has prepared a direction on the back of a warehouse address card, asking that it be left at the Dover coach office until called for. Near the Obelisk in Blackfriars Road, he hires a long-legged young man with a small donkey-cart to carry it. David asks the driver to stop by the dead wall of King's Bench prison so that he can attach the card without his landlord's family discovering his destination. When he pulls the card from his pocket, however, the half-guinea slips out. He puts it in his mouth for safekeeping, but the driver jerks him by the chin and snatches the coin. The driver then threatens to take him to the police, seizes his jacket, and drives off with the box.

The Road on Foot

David pursues the cart, but the chase quickly becomes untenable. He repeatedly loses sight of it, is shouted at and cut at with a whip, falls in the mud, collides with people and a post, and narrowly avoids being run over. Frightened that half London might be searching for him, he finally gives up the box and the stolen money and turns toward Greenwich, which he understands to lie on the Dover Road. The direction is uncertain; his resolve is not. By the time he sits exhausted on a doorstep in the Kent Road, the clocks strike ten. He has only three halfpence left, and the loss of his travelling fund has turned a planned coach journey into a destitute walk.

The possibility of returning does not draw him back, even in his distress. He imagines that he may be found dead beneath a hedge, yet continues. The journey is measured not by the resources he has but by the refuge he is trying to reach. His recollection of his mother accompanies him through the difficulties: he associates that sustaining image with the sunlit street of Canterbury, its old houses and gateways, and the grey Cathedral with rooks circling its towers. Later, when he sees itinerant people on the road, an incident in which a tinker knocks down a woman frightens him so badly that he hides whenever such people approach. These delays deepen the exposure and isolation of the journey without dislodging its purpose.

Arrival and Significance

On the bare downs near Dover, David's imagined picture of his mother still relieves the lonely landscape with hope. It stays with him until the sixth day, when he reaches the town itself; then it vanishes, leaving him helpless and dispirited. The contrast is sharp: the image that sustained the journey cannot itself secure a welcome or solve the immediate problem of finding Betsey. His arrival is not a triumphant reunion but the completion of a journey with no money and almost no possessions.

David asks boatmen about his aunt, and their answers are mocking inventions; fly-drivers joke in the same spirit, while shopkeepers, put off by his appearance, often refuse even to hear his question. Ragged shoes, dust, sunburn, and inadequate clothing make his destitution visible, and he is hungry, thirsty, and worn out. Reaching Dover has brought him to the place associated with his imagined refuge, but not yet to the refuge itself. The flight's significance lies in this movement from helplessness toward self-directed action: a child deprived of care chooses a destination, secures what little help he can, endures the loss of his means, and keeps going. Its remembered form also makes the mother's image a thread across the road, sustaining David until the moment when hope must give way to the uncertain reality of arrival.