On 7 January 1849, Dickens visited Norwich and Yarmouth in Norfolk, with two close friends, John Leech (1817–1864) and Mark Lemon (1809–1870). Leech was an illustrator at Punch, a satirical magazine, and the first illustrator for A Christmas Carol by Dickens in 1843. Lemon was a founding editor of Punch, and soon a contributor to Household Words, the weekly magazine Dickens was starting up; he co-authored Mr Nightingale's Diary, a farce, with Dickens in 1851. The two towns, especially the second, became important in the novel, and Dickens informed Forster that Yarmouth seemed to him to be "the strangest place in the world" and that he would "certainly try my hand at it". During a walk in the vicinity of Yarmouth, Dickens noticed a sign indicating the small locality of Blunderston, which became in his novel the village of "Blunderstone" where David is born and spends his childhood.
A week after Charles's arrival in Yarmouth, his sixth son, Henry Fielding Dickens, was named after Henry Fielding, his favorite past author. Per Forster, Dickens refers to Fielding "as a kind of homage to the novel he was about to write".
Barry's New Palace of Westminster was rebuilt using the sandy-colored Anston limestone. However, the stone soon began to decay due to pollution and the poor quality of some of the stone used. Although such defects were clear as early as 1849, nothing was done for the remainder of the 19th century even after much studying.
In Dresden, the capital of the Kingdom of Saxony, the people took to the streets asking King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony to engage in electoral reform, social justice, and for a constitution.
Before the powers could respond to the founding of the Roman Republic, Charles Albert, whose army had been trained by the exiled Polish general Albert Chrzanowski, renewed the war with Austria. He was quickly defeated by Radetzky at Novara on 23 March 1849.
As always with Dickens, when a writing project began, he was agitated, melancholy, "even deeper than the customary birth pangs of other novels"; as always, he hesitated about the title, and his working notes contain seventeen variants, "Charles Copperfield" included. After several attempts, he stopped on "The Copperfield Survey of the World as it Rolled", a title that he retained until 19 April. When Forster pointed out that his hero, now called David, has his own initials transposed, Dickens was intrigued and declared that this was a manifestation of his fate. He was not yet sure of his pen: "Though I know what I want to do, I am lumbering like a train wagon", he told Forster.
On March 28, 1849, the draft of the Paulskirchenverfassung constitution was finally passed. The new Germany was to be a constitutional monarchy, and the office of head of state ("Emperor of the Germans") was to be hereditary and held by the respective King of Prussia.
On April 2, 1849, a delegation of the National Assembly met with King Frederick William IV in Berlin and offered him the crown of the Emperor under this new constitution.
On 1 May 1849, a meeting of the democratic people's associations was held in Kaiserslautern. About 12,000 people gathered under the slogan, "If the government becomes rebellious, the citizens of the Palatinate will become the enforcers of the laws.
On 2 May, they decided to establish a ten-man "State Committee for the Defence and Implementation of the Constitution." They did not declare a republic, as had happened in Baden.
On 7 May 1849, Bernhard Eisenstuck, representative of the central authority for the Palatinate, legitimized the defense committee. He was dismissed on 11 May for exceeding his powers.
On May 9, 1849, together with the leaders of the uprising, Wagner left Dresden for Switzerland to avoid arrest. He spent a number of years in exile abroad, in Switzerland, Italy, and Paris. Finally, the government lifted its ban against him and he returned to Germany.
German composer Richard Wagner passionately engaged himself in the revolution in Dresden, supporting the democratic-republican movement. Later during the May Uprising in Dresden from May 3–9, 1849, he supported the provisional government.
Workers from Solingen stormed the arsenal at Gräfrath and obtained arms and cartridges for the insurgents. Frederick Engels was active in the uprising in Elberfeld from May 11, 1849, until the end of the revolt.
On May 17 through 18, 1849, a group of workers and democrats from Trier and neighboring townships stormed the arsenal at Prüm to obtain arms for the insurgents.
Engels and Marx became editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Less than a year later, on May 19, 1849, the Prussian authorities closed down the newspaper because of its support for constitutional reforms.
In May 1849, the Grand Duke was forced to leave Karlsruhe, Baden, and seek help from Prussia. Provisional governments were declared in both the Palatinate and Baden. In Baden conditions for the provisional government were ideal: the public and army were both strongly in support of constitutional change and democratic reform in the government.
In May 1849, a resurgence of revolutionary activity occurred in Baden. As this was closely connected to the uprising in the German Palatinate, it is described below, in the section titled, "The Palatinate."
Austria and Prussia withdrew their delegates from the Assembly, which was little more than a debating club. The radical members were forced to go to Stuttgart, where they sat from June 6–18 as a rump parliament until it too was dispersed by Württemberg troops.
In June, Blackwell enrolled at La Maternité; a "lying-in" hospital, under the condition that she would be treated as a student midwife, not a physician. She made the acquaintance of Hippolyte Blot, a young resident physician at La Maternité. She gained much medical experience through his mentoring and training.
On June 13, 1849, Engels joined an 800-member group of workers being formed as a military corps by August Willich, a former Prussian military officer. He was also a member of the Communist League and supported a revolutionary change in Germany.
The Palatine uprising was a rebellion that took place in May and June 1849 in the Rhenish Palatinate, then an exclave territory of the Kingdom of Bavaria. Related to uprisings across the Rhine River in Baden, it was part of the widespread Imperial Constitution Campaign. Revolutionaries worked to defend the Constitution as well as to secede from the Kingdom of Bavaria.
The provisional government first appointed Joseph Martin Reichard, a lawyer, democrat, and deputy in the Frankfurt Assembly, as the head of the military department in the Palatinate.
In 1849, Lincoln received a patent for a flotation device for the movement of boats in shallow water. The idea was never commercialized, but it made Lincoln the only president to hold a patent.
The Prussians defeated this revolutionary army, and the survivors of Willichs Corps crossed over the frontier into the safety of Switzerland. Engels did not reach Switzerland until July 25, 1849. He sent word of his survival to Marx and friends and comrades in London, England.
By this time Muhammad Ali had become so ill and senile that he was not informed of his son's death. Lingering a few months more, Muhammad Ali died at Ras el-Tin Palace in Alexandria on 2 August 1849 and ultimately was buried in the imposing mosque he had commissioned in the Cairo Citadel.
Changes in detail occur during the composition: on 22 August 1849, while staying on the Isle of Wight for a family vacation, he changed on the advice of Forster, the theme of the obsession of Mr Dick, a secondary character in the novel. This theme was originally "a bull in a china shop" and became "King Charles's head" in a nod to the bicentenary of the execution of Charles I of England.
On 4 November 1849, when Blackwell was treating an infant with ophthalmia neonatorum, she spurted some contaminated solution into her own eye accidentally and contracted the infection. She lost sight in her left eye, causing her to have her eye surgically extracted and thus lost all hope of becoming a surgeon.
In the spring of 1849, the Prussian government called up a large portion of the army reserve—the Landwehr in Westphalia and the Rhineland. This action was opposed: the order to call up the Landwehr affected all males under the age of 40 years, and such a call-up was to be done only in times of war, not in peacetime when it was considered illegal.