Switzerland

Switzerland becomes the setting for a gradual turning point in David Copperfield’s life: after months of grief and aimless travel, its mountain landscape offers him a first moment of consolation, and a valley where he can begin to recover, work, and form new attachments. The change is neither immediate nor complete. The Alps initially deepen his sense of wonder without relieving his sorrow; only later does the calm of a particular evening help him imagine that his inner life might change.

A country entered in grief

David reaches Switzerland after coming from Italy over one of the great passes of the Swiss Alps. For months, he has travelled under a darkening cloud, sometimes moving restlessly from place to place and sometimes lingering, without a sustaining purpose. He describes himself as carrying sorrow through foreign towns and their palaces, cathedrals, temples, pictures, castles, and tombs, scarcely conscious of what he sees. The country therefore enters the narrative not as a destination chosen for pleasure, but as part of a prolonged, unsettled passage through bereavement.

With a guide, David wanders along mountain byways. The heights, precipices, torrents, and wastes of ice and snow give him sublimity and wonder, but at first they teach him nothing beyond that experience. The distinction matters: Switzerland does not instantly cure his grief. Its restorative effect emerges slowly, after an initial period in which even imposing natural grandeur cannot reach him.

The valley and the first easing of sorrow

One evening before sunset, David descends a winding mountainside track toward a valley where he is to rest. From above, he sees the valley shining below him, and feels a faint, unfamiliar softening: sorrow remains, but it is no longer entirely oppressive, and for a moment he almost hopes that change within him is possible. The landscape is closely particular. Green slopes rise to dark fir forests and then to rock, ice, patches of pasture, and snow; isolated wooden cottages and a clustered village appear small beneath the surrounding heights. A wooden bridge crosses a stream tumbling over rocks.

In the quiet air, distant shepherd voices carry across the mountains. David has come out of the village to read a packet of letters while supper is being prepared; other packets have missed him, and he has scarcely written home beyond brief notices that he is well and where he has arrived. As evening settles over the valley, the natural quiet soothes him enough to weep for the first time since Dora died. The scene marks a change in his capacity to feel: grief is not erased, but tears become possible where numbness had prevailed.

Agnes’s letter and a change of direction

The packet contains writing from Agnes Wickfield. After reading it, David puts the letter in his breast and recognizes a change in his own state: although night falls over the valley, he feels that the night in his mind is passing. He reads the letter repeatedly and writes back before sleeping, acknowledging that he needs Agnes’s help and that her belief in him inspires him to try to become the person she thinks him to be. The letter gives the landscape’s initial consolation a human continuation; recovery begins through both the stillness of the valley and renewed connection with someone at home.

David does not answer this moment with a sudden resolution. For the remaining three months of the year since his sorrow began, he determines only to try, and stays in the valley and its neighborhood. When that period ends, he chooses to remain abroad longer, settling for the present in Switzerland, which has become dear to him in the memory of that evening. He seeks out nature and allows himself to accept human companionship again. Before winter he leaves for Geneva, then returns in spring; by then, the greetings of his valley friends have acquired a homely quality, despite not being spoken in English.

Work, companionship, and recovery

In Switzerland, David rebuilds the habits that grief had interrupted. He works early and late, patiently and hard, and writes a story whose purpose grows from his experience. He sends it to Thomas Traddles, who arranges its publication to David’s advantage; news of his growing reputation reaches him through travellers he meets by chance. After a period of rest and change, David begins another work of fiction, his third, and applies his energies to it. He is still writing it when, during an interval of rest, he thinks of returning home.

His stay also restores his physical condition. He combines patient study and work with robust exercise, and his health, severely impaired when he left England, is fully restored. Switzerland thus serves as more than a striking backdrop to bereavement: it is the setting in which nature, correspondence, friendship, disciplined work, and exercise accompany David’s gradual return to feeling and purpose. The account preserves the limits of that recovery—the sorrow precedes it, and memory of one evening remains central—while showing how a place can become associated with the beginnings of a new life.