This is a wonderfully written story of the growth of a young boy to adulthood. It has stirring passages from his time in school, time spent at child labour, and his forlorn solo journey to his Aunt Betsy’s house.

There is a cavalcade of characters that are so well etched. Each is so unique. The chapters are vibrant and flow from one to the other. It is a gripping epic by a master story-teller. I was particularly enthralled by his Aunt Betsy – a stolid, independent female character.

David is portrayed as flawed. He is mesmerized by his “friend” Steerforth, who is no more than a flaunting, charismatic phoney.

But there were some tiresome and predictable aspects to the novel. I found David’s love and eventual marriage to Dora onerous. Dora was such a silly “child”, which she acknowledges repeatedly, and I knew that somehow this relationship would not endure. So Dickens has her wither and die in short order of an unknown illness, enabling David to pursue his real true love, Agnes. I also found the “relationship’ or triangle of Doctor Strong, his young wife Annie and a purported lover of Annie – Jack Maldon rather puritanical, but such was the era.

One gets a view of the Dickens time period. I was struck by the constant flow of tears from both female and male characters in nearly every chapter! Were people more emotional than – or more in tune with their real feelings and unafraid to display raw passions? None of the “British stiff upper lip” from Charles Dickens! In all the Dickens novels I have read there are always strong emotional themes – nothing dry and distant.

“I giorni di scuola! Il silenzioso scorrere della mia esistenza - l’invisibile, inavvertibile progresso della mia vita, dalla fanciullezza alla gioventù! Lasciatemi pensare, mentre rivedo quell’acqua corrente, ora ridotta ad un secco canale coperto di foglie secche, se v’è qualche segno lungo il suo corso dal quale possa ricordare come essa scorreva.”

Alla fine di ogni libro che leggo di Dickens si rafforza l’idea di quanto la fortuna di quest’autore sia dovuta al perfetto rispecchiarsi nell’epoca in cui viveva.
Di quanti autori possiamo dire la stessa cosa?
Se è cosa pregevole saper anticipare i tempi, altrettanto lo si può dire di chi riesce ad intrepretare gli umori correnti. Dare al pubblico ciò che vuole in quel momento, insomma.
Qui, raccontando la storia di David Copperfield dalla nascita alla maturità, Dickens non solo, come è noto riesce a parlare di alcuni episodi della sua stessa vita ma trasporta sulla pagina tutta un’epoca.
La voce narrante è quella di David stesso che rievoca gli episodi vissuti per come gli sono stati raccontati e come li ricorda.

Come in altri romanzi, torna anche qui quel contrasto tra mondo infantile e mondo adulto dove, generalmente, quest’ultimo si caratterizza proprio per una marcata durezza d’animo.
Edward Murdston (patrigno di David) è proprio il personaggio adatto ad incarnare il gelo, anzi l’astio verso non solo i bambini ma anche verso le donne. La sua parola magica è fermezza, l’arma con cui sottometterà non solo David ma anche la giovane mamma del protagonista.

Rispetto ad “Oliver Twist” qui ho scorto (ed apprezzato) maggiori sfumature.
Alleggerito, insomma, di quel buonismo strappalacrime e stucchevole contrapposto alla malvagità più profonda.
Accanto alle sventure famigliari, David sperimenta con il lavoro le pessime condizioni che caratterizzano la prima era industriale.
L’avidità e l’egoismo rimangono parti fondamentali del motore narrativo e Dickens ne aggiunge pregio con delle pennellate che sanno essere leggere andando al contempo in profondità con il sarcasmo che le pervade e caratterizza.

Sulla forza descrittiva di Charles Dickens ed in particolare in questo romanzo condivido l’analisi che ne fa Zweig nel saggio a lui dedicato:

”La memoria visiva di Dickens non ha eguali, è una lama d’acciaio che fende la nebbia dell’infanzia; in David Copperfield, che è una sorta di autobiografia romanzata, sono presenti ricordi di un bambino di due anni, di sua madre e della cameriera, e i loro profili sono così dettagliati che sembrano emergere dal fondo dell’inconscio. Dickens non offre contorni confusi, non lascia spazio alle possibilità interpretative di uno sguardo esterno, ma costringe alla precisione. La sua forza descrittiva non permette alla fantasia del lettore di prendere il sopravvento, ma lo costringe violentemente alla sua visione (e per questo è diventato il poeta ideale di una nazione priva di fantasia). Ponete venti illustratori davanti ai suoi romanzi e chiedete loro di fare i ritratti di Copperfield e Pickwick: i disegni saranno simili, rappresenteranno con somiglianza inspiegabile (…)”

Comunque ho trovato più autenticità rispetto ad "Oliver Twist". Meno incalzante, però, rispetto a "Grandi speranze" (Pip per me è il migliore!).

"I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD"
I have also a favorite author and his name is Charles Dickens.

This novel is poetry. To truly appreciate the beauty of the English language, one must read David Copperfield. This book cannot be classified. It is a love story, a drama, and a comedy. It has elements of horror and suspense. I laughed hysterically, sobbed uncontrollably, and threw it to a wall in a fit of anger. It annoyed, bored, and entrapped me.
The characters in this novel are like real people to me and I feel for them as I feel for living creatures. I despise Mr. Murdstone, I adore David, I want to slap his mother, I would spit on Dora, I laugh with Peggotty, I cheer Emily on, I pity Uriah Heep, and I sympathize with his aunt Betsy Trotwood. It was such a memorable experience that more than 15 years later, I can still recall certain scenes as if they were part of my actual memory.

All that is good about this world (innocence, justice, truth) can be found within these pages. I cannot reccommend it highly enough.

But I have one helpful suggestion: Do not read it without notebook and paper in hand to keep track of characters. They are often introduced nonchalantly only to reappear later as central to the storyline.

David Copperfield I found to be a character driven story and Dicken’s characters are truly “characters” in every sense of the word I found many of them a delight.
Aunt Betsy one of my favorites with her frequent referrals to Betsy (as David was supposed to be a girl) like she really exists. This was an audio book and the narrator captured her indignation perfectly.
There is Uriah Heep so creepily described with his frequent use of the word humble to describe himself (big ole hypocrite) it no longer felt complimentary.
David’s laments of love when falling for Dora both endearing and hilarious.
There is so much to unpack is this novel, I feel Dicken’s novels are not to be rushed. I did enjoy Dicken’s characters and humor with a thoughtful and tidy ending. This was a long one I definitely enjoyed.

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!

This book is 35% filler (so many random scenes, coincidences and cardboard characters), 35% theatrics (all this moustache twirling bad guys; everyone is seconds before bursting into song and dance! passion!) and 30% emotional manipulation (the amount of tears shed would fill the ocean).

I liked the rest. I loved every scene with child-wife Dora and was so sad when he got free of her. Dickens did Dora dirty. Just ship her to Australia to get rid of her, come on! You shipped everyone else whose problems you did not care to resolve. #justicefordora

Was he paid by the word? Because it felt that way. He made up the story as he went and that's why it feels like a collection of random scenes for the most part and in the end when he tried to tie loose ends we got all these coincidences and encounters. The experience of reading this book reminded me binging a season of a soap opera on Netflix. And it was the soap of its day. But why it is valued now I have no idea.
Every character here being like:

Top Ten Tips to Young Ladies of Marriageable Age by Charles Dickens

10.tGiggle alot. Be innocent, stupid, and silly. Flirt with a rival and blush charmingly.
9.tHave an annoying lap dog.
8.tHave a best friend who will act as a go-between. Impecunious and overprotective fathers are to be avoided, but indulgent aunts should be welcomed.
7.tEnsure that the man courting you has the ability to provide for you and your future family. If need be, move to Australia.
6.tStay away, especially, from fortune hunters. Fortune hunters with evil sisters should be avoided like the plague.
5.tStay away, especially, from rich nobles. Rich nobles with evil cousins should be avoided like the plague.
4.tAvoid being young and silly, but learn how to support your husband-to-be in his efforts.
3.tBe pretty.
2.tSuffer in silence. Keep your feelings to yourself, and smile sweetly and lovingly to everyone, never thinking of yourself.

And the NUMBER ONE TIP according to Mr Dickens is

1.tKeep company as a child with a young boy who will regard you as a close sister and eventually grow to adore you and marry you.

Ever since I learnt that this book was Tolstoy's inspiration behind Andrei and Lise's marriage in War & Peace I've been desperate to read it...

David Copperfield is one of my favourite Dickens' books, and I tend to enjoy Dickens quite a lot. It's not a perfect book by any means, and on this read, I noticed that it lagged in the middle. (I suddenly found it much harder to pick up and was more easily distracted by the graphic novels that are my husband's bathroom reading materials.) But it picked up again by the end.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

Had to add a fifth star to my rating. Dont remember what held me back. Dickens is a rock star.

I finished reading David Copperfield on the Kindle a few days ago.

I’m not an English major, and so I’m not going to pretend to be one. I’m not going to discuss what themes the book touches on, what category it fits in, or generally dissect it to the point where it’s more monotonous than fun.

I read the book because I wanted to, not because I had to write a paper about it.

I must say, first of all, that this has got to be one of the best books I’ve ever read. The vivid descriptions of the characters were just fun to read. One particularly meek man was described like this: “He was so extremely conciliatory in his manner that he seemed to apologize to the very newspaper for taking the liberty of reading it.”

Some of the scenes in the novel are amazingly vivid and memorable. The hilarious and tense scene towards the end where one of the main villains is taken down was one, and of course just about every scene involving David’s aunt is too.

Dickens is a master of suspense. He does it through subtle premonitions in the book. You might not even really notice them as you’re reading. But it sure had an effect on me: I had trouble putting the book down, and stayed up later than I should have on more than one night to keep reading another chapter or three.

Like any good book, this one left me to think even after I was done reading it, and left me wanting to read it again. Right now.

There are some practical downsides to it, though. It was written in the 1850s, and some of the vocabulary and British legal, business, and monetary discussions are strange to a modern casual American audience. Nevertheless, with the exception of the particularly verbose Mr. Micawber, you can probably make it through without a dictionary, though one will be handy. I read it on the Kindle, which integrates a dictionary and makes it very easy to look up words. I learned that a nosegay is a bouquet of showy flowers. And that Mr. Micawber was fond of using words obsolete since the 17th century, according to the Kindle. If you remember that “pecuniary emoluments” refers to a salary, you’ll be doing OK.

The other thing that occasionally bugged me was that the narrator (David) would comment on some sort of gesture, or comment that wasn’t very direct, and then say something like, “But she didn’t need to be more explicit, because I understood the meaning perfectly.” Well, sometimes I didn’t. Though I usually figured it out after a bit. I was never quite sure if Dickens was being intentionally needling to the reader, or if an 1850s British reader would have figured out the meaning perfectly well. But that was part of the fun of it, I think.

This review also posted on my blog at http://changelog.complete.org/archive...

After reading such a density, it is a bit of a friend left on the road. Dickens himself will admit to having difficulty quitting David Copperfield after such a long intimacy!
In the preface, this novel is his favorite, and when he has to read an extract in front of an audience a few years later, the choice of this extract is anguishing because this novel is a whole. A set of entangled narratives, one in the other, that cannot separate without breaking the fabric of the work;
it is also that this novel is very personal and that Dickens has put much of it into this character! On this point, the notes are captivating.
But when I say I just left a friend here, should I specify "a bunch of friends," which is especially Copperfield's custodian of ups and downs?
David Copperfield, aged about 40, turns to his past, a long, quiet river, at a time when he will meet the Peggoty, brother and sister Murdstone, Emily, Steerforth, his aunt, Agnes, the Micawber, and finally Dora, of whom he will become a mad lover.
To enumerate the characters who will follow David in his journey - good, bad, sometimes both - I retrace the story thread and ask myself: what made it?
Dickens is an exceptional storyteller who is not afraid to occasionally throw away information about the narrator's future. Nevertheless, it keeps us in suspense for the seven hundred pages that follow, Not hesitating to add humor to dramatic scenes and a tender love when death is involved.
It was the little David, the orphan, who most moved me, but I give my affection to Mr. Peggoty, Agnes, and, of course, to David's aunt, who will completely change when she opens the door to a poor vagrant child.
It is also a sometimes moving portrait of industrial England and an almost cinematographic work that inspired the greatest of the years following its publication.
Goodbye, David!