“I know enough of the world now to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield



'David Copperfield' contains more saints per capita than any beatified book by Butler. Dickens is amazing in his ability to be both grand and personal. David Copperfield is sprawling, with dozens of threads that weave around David Copperfield's youth and adulthood. IT is amazing not only how he can transform a character through time, but also show that our perceptions of those same characters are drawn often from imperfect information and overly simple assumptions. Yes, there are parts of 'David Copperfield' that float between the melodramatic and the grotesque, but one doesn't read Dickens for the unmoving, normal or embellished. There are a handful of novels that I would consider to be the literary equivalent of scripture: 'Les Miserables', 'the Idiot', 'Anna Karenina', and for sure 'David Copperfield'.

There are several moments in 'David Copperfield' when, as a reader, you recognize you will never be half the writer Dickens was (on deadline). He might just be second to Shakespeare in my book, or at least be among a small cadre of writers that belong on the silver pedestal below the Bard.

This isn't as technically perfect as 'Great Expectations', but it is top tier Dickens for sure. A massive novel that floats with the weight of a beach read half its size. If you are going to read a Dickens, this might not be your first stop, but it shouldn't be far from your second.

n  I think of every little trifle between me and Dora, and feel the truth, that trifles make the sum of life ... n

With Dickens, the magic lies in all the little trifles that make up the sum of David Copperfield's life.

When I was fourteen years old, I read David Copperfield for the first time. The only image I really carried forward from that time to this was one of Uriah Heep and even his exact role in the plot was extremely fuzzy. So, reading it again, with a marvelous group here on Goodreads, was a joy and a virtually new experience.

No one has ever unwound a story quite as brilliantly and methodically as Charles Dickens. He is the master of foreshadowing, tantalizing us all along the way with the knowledge of things to come...just enough to make us squirm, never enough to spoil the next installment. Reading this in installments, just as Dickens’ original audience would have, has been a true pleasure. I anticipated each stage of David’s journey from child to man and guessed (often incorrectly) at what was coming next. I wanted to read ahead, to know, but I resisted, and the anticipation made the read all the sweeter.

Dickens always draws strongly on his first hand knowledge of life in his writing, but David Copperfield is almost autobiographical in that it incorporates so many of Dickens' own experiences into David’s life. Perhaps it is this close association with the author that makes this novel so poignant and makes it such a favorite with his readers. I admit to being reduced to tears twice while reading, once over the powerful descriptions of a character’s misfortunes and once over a scene that might easily be classified as melodrama. Oddly, I knew what was coming and had not expected to affect me at all, but there I sat with eyes brimming.

I cannot resist reproducing a passage that I feel captures the descriptive mastery that makes Dickens endure through the centuries:

"The neighbourhood was a dreary one at that time; as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London. There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which—having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather—they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves. The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, arose by night to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke that poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year’s handbills offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb-tide. There was a story that one of the pits dug for the dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and a blighting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole place. Or else it looked as if it had gradually decomposed into that nightmare condition, out of the overflowings of the polluted stream."

Every sense in my body tingles when I read that. I can smell the stench of the river and the smoky chimneys, feel the slime that covers everything oppressively, taste the polluted air, and see the clutter, the deterioration, and the poverty that engulfs everything. With Dickens every description is a sensory experience.

Huge kudos to my friend, Jean, who provided scads of background information and historical context for the read, posed the right questions to spark a vigorous conversation, and served the purpose an expert professor would have done in my college days. If you want to read a truly great review of this, or any Dickens novel, you must read Jean’s.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

This is not a read I am ever likely to forget, and it brings me one step closer to having read or recently reread all of Dickens' works. The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Dombey and Son, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood yet to read. Great Expectations and Oliver Twist to revisit. Joy to be had in the future!

Una bonita lectura de mil páginas donde merece la pena sumergirse. Cálida y tierna, quizá ahora nos puede resultar algo ingenua, pero el viaje emocional de Copperfield nos muestra la vida misma.

Muy recomendable.

n  BookTube channel with my awesome brother, Ed - The Brothers Gwynnen
n  My personal BookTube channel - William Gwynnen

Starting the University Reading List. So it begins...

I will soon be drowning under the pile of compulsory reading, but I enjoyed this! I really did not enjoy Bleak House, as it felt like a battle to get through. So, I'm relieved this has not felt like a war of attrition...

This is a chunky, chunky book, as it tells of almost the entire life of David Copperfield, from when he was born to his life at home, his education, first jobs, first loves and so much more to far nearer the end of his life. Whilst it is intimate and small in scale, it feels like an epic. Of course, the length contributes to this, but Dickens makes the evocative scenes jump in your mind. You feel the fear, the shock or the joy of the characters when certain events unfold. In that sense, it was brilliant.

At times, the over-the top, hyper nature of some of the characters got on my nerves. They felt too extreme to be real, and really slowed the story down when they were on the page. Luckily, a character who was not like this, in my opinion, was David Copperfield himself. He is a character you are rooting for, and hoping for fate to go in his favour. You feel his countless tragedies, and love it when he gets a time of respite.

4/5 STARS

"Stuff and noncense" keeps saying Miss Trotwood. And that's exactly what I feel about this book. Boring and incredibly long story of an orphan (typical for Dickens). A lot of teaching on morality. Villains get punished and everyone get what they deserve

Finished. Having a hard time spinning superlatives for this review. It is more or less established I strongly like, or passionately love, every Dickens novel I read so why not slap a five-star badge on this masterpiece and hop down to Bev’s café for a veggie burger, free sexual innuendo with every purchase, a fly in every milkshake, and a 50p discount on all half-cooked omelettes? Fine. Some highlights. Improvements in characterisation. Notably, the villains. David’s friendship with Steerforth partially blinds the reader to his scoundrelly tendencies until his flitting with sweet Emily. Uriah Heep’s squirminess and umbleness wrongfoots the reader until his scoundrelly tendencies are unmasked (although David outs him as a beast from the start). The first-person narrator opens doors of eloquence in Dickens’s prose hitherto closed in the topographical omniscience of previous works. As usual, a memorable cast of eccentrics, stoics, loveable fuck-ups and social climbers. No sagging secondary plots like in Dombey and Son. Deeply moving passages on the passing of time, memory, penitence, friendship and naïve love (Dora is a female Peter Pan). High-class comedy a-go-go. An enriching experience. Your soul glows reading this. You want more from a book? Geddouttahere. Time for that veggie burger. Open til nine and never over capacity (like fecking GR).

This is my third time reading David Copperfield and I loved it just as much this time as I did the first time I read it. This timeless masterpiece had me laughing and crying all the while it warmed my heart with its central theme of kindness.

Apesar das mais de setecentas páginas, lê-se que é uma beleza; não lhe encontrei passagens enfadonhas e nunca me entediou. É verdade que alguns momentos podiam ter sido menos sentimentalões, que alguns desfechos só foram possíveis por excesso de bonomia do autor, ou que no final acabou tudo demasiado certinho.
Mas essa sempre foi a essência Dickensiana; através das piores provações a que sujeita as suas personagens, quase sempre em cenários grotescos e decadentes, denunciar a injustiça social e a maldade exercida sobre os mais desfavorecidos - em particular as crianças. Reserva sempre um lugar especial para aqueles cuja moral não quebra, cujo altroísmo se faz sentir de forma desinteressada, e que contribuem para num último remate compor um final justo e feliz, e deixar no coração de cada leitor um sentimento de satisfação.

A thoroughly charming and uplifting tale of an orphan who grew up through much hardship and travail in Victorian England. By pluck and good luck he finds the right people to support and inspire him, and to love and to protect in turn, and thereby approach his ambition to become “the hero of his own life.” It’s long, but it fulfills the quota for books you don’t mind lingering with, where each chapter in my Libravox audiobook version whetted my interest for the next. In the serialized version Dickens wrote this in, its 64 chapters must have spun people along for many months. Each chapter leaves the seeds of wanting to find another step in David’s success in bypassing or surmounting the slings and arrows that fate and the author assails him with. It’s not exactly the “Perils of Pauline.” I just came to look forward to him outsmarting the malevolent characters that get their hooks in him, foiling the schemes of exploiters of his generous spirit, and progressing toward a stable love relationship.

It’s been a long time since I read Dickens, and I was surprised that this wasn’t more “Dickensian”. By which most mean a tale full of poor people tormented and downtrodden from inequities of Victorian society. We do get a brief period after David’s sweet simpleton of a mother marries the evil Murdstone, who subjects them both to a tyrannical household with his vicious live-in sister calling a lot of the shots. A violent response on his part while getting an unjust beating gets him sent to a cruel boarding school for unruly children. That part clearly foots the bill for Dickensian. As does his fate of being consigned at about age 10 to work in the family sweatshop, a wine factory on the seedy Thames waterfront. When his one new friend, his landlord Micawber gets sent to debtor’s prison and a mother no longer on the scene (mum’s the word), he hits the bottom of despair. In a most triumphant and brave action, he decides to seek greater expectations by running away and successfully begging his great aunt Betsy of Dover to take him in.

Betsy is the first rung of people who make a ladder for young David to get on in life. He gets to go to a school where teachers inspire him, especially the headmaster Dr. Strong. Staying in the household of Betsy’s lawyer brings him the beginnings of a lifelong friendship with his daughter Agnes, whom he finds always guide him “upwards” to the right moral choices. By his late teens an apprenticeship as “proctor” doing administrative work in a law office is his ticket to autonomy, while success in selling stories for magazines in the beginning of a passage toward making a living from writing. There was no one big cloying romance on David’s journey, but a succession of partial hits and misses. First he yearned for his tender childhood playmate Emily from his lucky childhood sojourns with his nanny’s family of fisher folk in Yarmouth. As an adult he falls for simple, sweet Dora, whom he marries out of mutual devotion. It’s up to us to regret that she is not his intellectual equal. In later life, that level of match is achieved with Agnes, who has secretly pined for him for many years but came to accept his notion of her as like a sister.

Dickens dodges excess sentimentality in his wholesome plot through the surprises and comic touches of a bevy of eccentric characters, among them David’s most sustained friends. Long before Freud and personality theory was developed, Dickens was masterful in capturing all the ways that people adopt odd and even paradoxical behavior on the stage of life. For example, with the character Mr. Dick we get a certifiable nut obsessed with King Charles I, writing his own memorial, and kite-flying, but who is also admirable, loyal, and wise with advice to David and Betsy, who provides him haven as a boarder. His former landlord Micawber continues to be a steadfast friend to David, despite often being a basket case of anxiety over his financial straits. The bad guys in the tale are beset by odd quirks that humanize them beyond serving as nemeses for our hero. Finally, I got to experience the infamous Uriah Heep in action, a fawning sycophant whose pretension to humbleness barely obscures his passive-aggressive egotism, greed and manipulative scheming against Agnes’ father. While David is subject to murderous internal thoughts over Heep, Micawber can’t keep his anger from taking stuttering flight aloud:

“I'll put my hand in no man's hand,' said Mr. Micawber, gasping, puffing, and sobbing, to that degree that he was like a man fighting with cold water, 'until I have—blown to fragments—the—a—detestable—serpent—HEEP! I'll partake of no one's hospitality, until I have—a—moved Mount Vesuvius—to eruption—on—a—the abandoned rascal—HEEP! … I—a—I'll know nobody—and—a—say nothing—and—a—live nowhere—until I have crushed—to—a—undiscoverable atoms—the—transcendent and immortal hypocrite and perjurer—HEEP!”

Somehow, such a playful lens here and there on the odd ducks of the world made the somewhat melodramatic elements of the story have more emotional impact on me--the unjust perfidy of some characters and the tragedies that befell the ones we love. And as a jaded reader of violent thrillers, war stories, and tales of sexual obsession, I was surprised to be touched so deeply by Dickens periodic recourse to simple and tender scenes that reflected the basic goodness of David and the people special to him. Such rewards are worth considering by all those who have long put off reading this classic.

A re-read with the Dickensians group, a chapter a day. Such an enjoyable way to read Dickens and this is mostly a lighter book, although I must admit that I found Mr Micawber particularly annoying and found myself skimming his long speeches or letters! One of Dickens best female characters in Aunt Betsy and one of his worst, David’s first love Dora are a big contrast. And of course it is the characters that stand out here, Uriah Heep, little Em’ly and the Peggottys, Traddles, Steerforth and the wonderful Mr Dick! I’m glad I revisited this book.

This is in my top 10 books.

I wish that I could form a more articulate review of this book but I think that it has to rattle around in my brain for a few months first. I approached David Copperfield with trepidation. I was concerned that it would be too sad and too much like Great Expectations which I hated in high school. Because I love A Tale of Two Cities, however, I gave it a chance when it suggested itself to me again and again in the last year.

David is the hero of his own story but not without considerable help from the best kind of family and friends. This text is inspirational and encouraging while also drawing back the veil on the very serious problems plaguing Victorian England.

Dickens does several things brilliantly in this long but exciting story. First, his characters are very interesting. He employs a variety of techniques to drawn his characters but he gives us just enough substance about each to really invest in them and their storylines.

Second, Dickens has a keen wit about how to tell a tragic story in a way that feels light, hopeful and often funny. I appreciate his ability to keep the reader at the table and not torture them while they are there. There is no doubting the seriousness of the situations that David must walk through but we are filled with a sense that he will come out of it alright because the goodness and decency of minor heroes will do what kindness they can to keep the embers of his hope alive.

Thirdly, Dickens tells us enough of the subplots to be interested in what happens to nearly everyone. While the story is about Davey it is also about all of the people who are recalled to his memory in the final pages of the book. This story would not be what it is without Steerforth and Rosa, the Peggoty's, Mr. Dick, the Strong's, the Murdstone's, Traddles, The Micawber's, Agnes and her father, Dora and her father, and dear old Ham, Emily and all those at Yarmouth. Typically I lose track of the names of characters and have to look them up when I come to write a review. Not in this case. Each of these names evokes a strong set of memories for me and have a place in my heart.

Finally, Dickens has an artful way of working out the truth. Whether it is the truth that Davey must learn about relationships and marriage or the truth that his dear aunt must learn about men and their value or the truth that we the reader must grapple with pertaining to the vile conditions for many children, elderly, ill and poor in Victorian England, Dickens leads us there in such a way that we were happy to make the journey.

I love this book. I have many lessons still to learn from it. I cannot wait to share it with my children when they are on the brink of adulthood and are cultivating meaningful relationships outside the home.

Actual rating is 3.5 stars.

This is considered a classic and is a work of fiction. Even though it is a work of fiction it is more an autobiography of the author's life as he deals with an uncaring step parent, child labor, and classism during Victorian times.

This was a difficult one to rate for me. I can see why this is a beloved classic by many as the author does an amazing job with his writing. The vivid descriptions, the fantastic cast of characters, and dealing with issues of the time are dealt with perfectly. I might not read a book by an author that has a better grasp of the English language or with memorable characters both caring and villainous. The problem for me was the overall story as I would find some of it very tedious. I think this was due to the length of the novel as I feel some of the novel was just not needed. I can read about someone's life if I found it more interesting but I didn't find Copperfield's life extraordinary. I understand that the author's intent was to bring forth the issues of the time but some of these issues didn't land with me.

I am glad I read this classic book but this might be a case of its not the book but it is the reader. This was my first Dickens read and I did admire his use of the written word. But I read for escapism and this book wasn't fictiony (I know this isn't a real word but it does get my point across) enough for me and I just couldn't totally connect with the book. At times I did find myself wandering off and not really caring about the proceedings. Like I said this book wasn't really up my alley for books but I can see why it is a personal favorite for others.