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"I'm wallowing in words!--David, later working as a legal proctor on wordy legal documents, and I, the readers of this 900-page book!
I had several hours in a car so took on rereading this tome, listening to a great reader. I have a vague idea of then reading Barbara Kingsolver’s also huge book after that. We’ll see!
7/1/23: Can anyone do bathos (look it up, kids!) like Charles Dickens? The deliciously agonizing misery of childhood: Hard Times has depictions of harsh and cruel schooling and so does this tale, where poor David is made to wear a signboard that warns people that he bites people. This is like the orphanage of Oliver Twist, but is a school to punish bad children.
And what did Davey do? Well, his Dad died while Davey’s mom was pregnant and at 4 Davey has a new Daddy who outgrinds Gradgrind in “firmness” and beats him into submission until. . . that fatal bite that puts him in strict "charity" school for wayward children. What is it about nineteenth-century schooling? Jane Eyre’s school, yikes. But I understand that David Copperfield is seen as Dickens's most autobiographical novel. Virginia Woolf also said it was Dickens's "most perfect novel." It was Dickens's favorite book that he had written.
7/4: Still in the first 1/4 of the book, and it's such a continuing load of misery, as Davey is forced to leave the frying pan of the cruel charity school back to the fire of his step-father, and his cruelly manipulated mother, whom Davey is largely forbidden to speak with, and who now has a second baby with the evil Murdstone, who threatens him (he's ten now) with flogging if he disobeys him on any issue. Then. . . after he leaves to go back to school he learns (spoiler) that his mother and the new baby have died. He's an orphan, supported for a time by his loving nurse Peggotty, then (at ten) Davey's working long hours in London for a wine merchant at slave wages (no child labor laws in Victorian England, which some states are repealing in summer 2023 so we can go back to the good ol' days!). Early on there is almost constant misery in the Victorian fashion, but there are so many great characters in this bildungsroman, a coming-of-age book for the ages.
“It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets.”
7/9/23: About halfway.
David Copperfield’s life is a rollercoaster of anguish and despair at the bottom, which constitutes largely the first third of the book where he, destitute, goes to an unlikely source of help, his grumpy Aunt Betsey Trotwood, who top of the rollercoaster!--surprisingly agrees to take him in, be his benefactor, gets him a good education where he is Head Boy in the school, and is given a healthy endowment to begin his life in London, where he finds good friends, and young women--oh, kissing! At one point he kisses a girl: “Oh! Ecstasy! I might have died happy that day.”
David’s the veritable Horatio Alger (not that secret Clarence Thomas society) Pluck ‘n’ Luck boy of the late nineteenth-century sentimental novels, but those others are pale copies; DC is the real thing, genuinely good and insightful, and all the supporting characters richly and entertainingly described. David befriends Steerforth, who betrays his wife and family and gets Emily, an old sweet friend, pregnant. He trusted and loved this guy! So good David is sometimes not as insightful as we’d like and altogether too trusting at times. He’s human. He makes mistakes, is not perfect, but in general he is what we know about Dickens, a veritable Boy Scout Handbook of virtues: charity, humility, kindness.
“. . . I hope that simple love and truth will be strong in the end. I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.”
From the beginning, reading bolsters him: “These books were a way of escaping from the unhappiness of my life.”
David learns how to face adversity, from Aunt Betsey: “We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to frighten us, my dear. We must learn to act the play out. We must live misfortune down!”
Such great characters. David is out of money and needs to sell his coat to this old guy in London:
"Oh, my lungs and liver," cried the old man, "no! Oh, my eyes, no! Oh, my limbs, no! Eighteenpence. Goroo!"
--The Micawbers--kinda goofy, verbose, struggling, asking David for money, plotting schemes to make money.
--Uriah Heep (not the rock band!) is a creep, taking advantage of his (alcoholic) boss Mr. Wickfield, and aiming for David’s dearest Agnes. David initially says he is glad to meet young Uriah, and Uriah replies, “I would be proud to meet you, too, except I know pride is a sin.” Later he says, “Oh, I’m too 'umble to accept a gift from you!” But he finds a way to get over this fawning pride/humility conundrum when he has a chance to swindle Wickfield.
7/11/23: “I am almost completely earnest, all the time”--David
“I like to be liked”-Dora, who (spoiler) actually becomes David’s wife (oh no!).
So David/Davey/Davis/Doady/Trot (depending on who is talking to him) is doing quite well until Aunt Betsey suddenly loses most of her money and can no longer support him. David has fallen head over heels with and is engaged to (the pathetic) Dora, one of the shallowest characters ever, who does not want to marry him if he is poor. I guess in his defense, sweet Dora is a little like dear old Mum, nice but naive. She has no practical skills, and David even admits her family treats her like Dora treats her little annoying dog, doting on her, spoiling her. This is a flaw in David at this point, his idiocy in making romantic choices.
David’s lifelong friend Agnes even helps him change Dora’s mind, which leads to some excruciatingly painful/comical early marriage scenes. Yes, alas, dear reader, she marries him. Agnes at this time is being pursued by evil villain Uriah Heep (oh, no! hiss!), who has taken advantage of Agnes’s (alcoholic) father Wickham, and who now is partner with Wickfield.
A good deal of the last third of the book focuses on romance and the nature of true love and bad relationship choices, though we also began the book with a disastrous one, when David’s widowed mother for some reason chooses the vile Murdstone as a second husband. Barkis married nurse Peggotty and that worked out pretty well, so love can work.
I love Aunt Betsey Trotwood, one of the most insightful and outspoken critics of bad characters throughout, and an often admirable feminist.
David gets a job as a legal proctor, so he begins to make a decent living, and supplements this job working on mounds of legal documents-- “I’m wallowing in words!”--with writing articles, stories, and even beginning a novel. Dickens autofiction! At 900+ words, we who read David Coppperfield are ourselves wallowing in words, though I am not really complaining.
7/16/23: Okay, a nearly 900-page novel completed--check!--reread, and it is a triumph. We open in misery, a life Charles Dickens actually lived, recorded in this auto-fiction, experience that shaped all of his work, focused on cruelty to women and children at the hands of megalomaniac men, ending in a kind of triumph, good news pretty much all around, endorsing generosity and kindness, huzzah! That’s a good summary right there. Yes, if you are looking for happy endings (and some of the most entertaining characters in the history of literature, though I am thinking of all of his novels, too), it does not end at the bottom of the rollercoaster.
We have, in the last two hundred pages, a lot of plot threads to resolve, so (spoiler alert for this more than 100-year-old novel):
*Uriah Heep, the rockstar villain, we discover, has defrauded almost all of the good guys, and (improbably) the too-talkative, somewhat bumbling Mr. Micawber follows the clues to determine Heep (H-h-h-Heep, he calls him, unable to pronounce his name without stuttering) had taken money from not only Wickfield, but also taken (indirectly) money from Our Hero David, via his benefactor Aunt Betsy and others. Turns out there’s a very good reason that Micawber, Traddles and Copperfield Himself have gone into law careers. Lock him up!
*We also needed to resolve the situation with poor (young) Emily, done wrong by the villain Steerforth, who in typical patriarchal fashion is (cruelly) blamed by many for “ruining the life and career” of this profligate, dastardly married man and father, who had taken her to Europe and dumped her and gone on to other women. So the noble Uncle Daniel Peggotty rescues Emily from a life of destitution and prostitution to take her to Australia for a few years. But she comes back, saved from further ruin to see her childhood friend David again. The ways some characters humanely treated Emily is hopeful, finally.
*We meet the villain Murdstones again, destroying the life of yet another young person.
* We hear the villain schoolmaster Creakle (these names!) runs a prison according to his (“firm”) system.
*Spoiler now, but poor Rosa dies in complications following a miscarriage. David always loved the (sweet and shallow) Rosa, but in her parting words she admits that she had married David when she was too young and naive, and we agree.
*This leaves things open for the good David to marry the good Agnes. Yay! David, a sweet and trusting man, is a little slow to see the true nature of people. Doesn’t always make the best choices with women or men. Errs by seeing their potential, which sometimes gets him in trouble.
This autobiographical novel does not have adequate room to go deeply into David/Charles as a successful writer, but his fame grows by novel’s end.
I joked about all the misery of the opening 2-300 pages, but this is a great book, no question, and I am already reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, that (in part) maps a contemporary Southern trailer park on to Dickens’s template, showing us the relevance of Dickens's ideas for reflecting on the twenty-first century world.
I had several hours in a car so took on rereading this tome, listening to a great reader. I have a vague idea of then reading Barbara Kingsolver’s also huge book after that. We’ll see!
7/1/23: Can anyone do bathos (look it up, kids!) like Charles Dickens? The deliciously agonizing misery of childhood: Hard Times has depictions of harsh and cruel schooling and so does this tale, where poor David is made to wear a signboard that warns people that he bites people. This is like the orphanage of Oliver Twist, but is a school to punish bad children.
And what did Davey do? Well, his Dad died while Davey’s mom was pregnant and at 4 Davey has a new Daddy who outgrinds Gradgrind in “firmness” and beats him into submission until. . . that fatal bite that puts him in strict "charity" school for wayward children. What is it about nineteenth-century schooling? Jane Eyre’s school, yikes. But I understand that David Copperfield is seen as Dickens's most autobiographical novel. Virginia Woolf also said it was Dickens's "most perfect novel." It was Dickens's favorite book that he had written.
7/4: Still in the first 1/4 of the book, and it's such a continuing load of misery, as Davey is forced to leave the frying pan of the cruel charity school back to the fire of his step-father, and his cruelly manipulated mother, whom Davey is largely forbidden to speak with, and who now has a second baby with the evil Murdstone, who threatens him (he's ten now) with flogging if he disobeys him on any issue. Then. . . after he leaves to go back to school he learns (spoiler) that his mother and the new baby have died. He's an orphan, supported for a time by his loving nurse Peggotty, then (at ten) Davey's working long hours in London for a wine merchant at slave wages (no child labor laws in Victorian England, which some states are repealing in summer 2023 so we can go back to the good ol' days!). Early on there is almost constant misery in the Victorian fashion, but there are so many great characters in this bildungsroman, a coming-of-age book for the ages.
“It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets.”
7/9/23: About halfway.
David Copperfield’s life is a rollercoaster of anguish and despair at the bottom, which constitutes largely the first third of the book where he, destitute, goes to an unlikely source of help, his grumpy Aunt Betsey Trotwood, who top of the rollercoaster!--surprisingly agrees to take him in, be his benefactor, gets him a good education where he is Head Boy in the school, and is given a healthy endowment to begin his life in London, where he finds good friends, and young women--oh, kissing! At one point he kisses a girl: “Oh! Ecstasy! I might have died happy that day.”
David’s the veritable Horatio Alger (not that secret Clarence Thomas society) Pluck ‘n’ Luck boy of the late nineteenth-century sentimental novels, but those others are pale copies; DC is the real thing, genuinely good and insightful, and all the supporting characters richly and entertainingly described. David befriends Steerforth, who betrays his wife and family and gets Emily, an old sweet friend, pregnant. He trusted and loved this guy! So good David is sometimes not as insightful as we’d like and altogether too trusting at times. He’s human. He makes mistakes, is not perfect, but in general he is what we know about Dickens, a veritable Boy Scout Handbook of virtues: charity, humility, kindness.
“. . . I hope that simple love and truth will be strong in the end. I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.”
From the beginning, reading bolsters him: “These books were a way of escaping from the unhappiness of my life.”
David learns how to face adversity, from Aunt Betsey: “We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to frighten us, my dear. We must learn to act the play out. We must live misfortune down!”
Such great characters. David is out of money and needs to sell his coat to this old guy in London:
"Oh, my lungs and liver," cried the old man, "no! Oh, my eyes, no! Oh, my limbs, no! Eighteenpence. Goroo!"
--The Micawbers--kinda goofy, verbose, struggling, asking David for money, plotting schemes to make money.
--Uriah Heep (not the rock band!) is a creep, taking advantage of his (alcoholic) boss Mr. Wickfield, and aiming for David’s dearest Agnes. David initially says he is glad to meet young Uriah, and Uriah replies, “I would be proud to meet you, too, except I know pride is a sin.” Later he says, “Oh, I’m too 'umble to accept a gift from you!” But he finds a way to get over this fawning pride/humility conundrum when he has a chance to swindle Wickfield.
7/11/23: “I am almost completely earnest, all the time”--David
“I like to be liked”-Dora, who (spoiler) actually becomes David’s wife (oh no!).
So David/Davey/Davis/Doady/Trot (depending on who is talking to him) is doing quite well until Aunt Betsey suddenly loses most of her money and can no longer support him. David has fallen head over heels with and is engaged to (the pathetic) Dora, one of the shallowest characters ever, who does not want to marry him if he is poor. I guess in his defense, sweet Dora is a little like dear old Mum, nice but naive. She has no practical skills, and David even admits her family treats her like Dora treats her little annoying dog, doting on her, spoiling her. This is a flaw in David at this point, his idiocy in making romantic choices.
David’s lifelong friend Agnes even helps him change Dora’s mind, which leads to some excruciatingly painful/comical early marriage scenes. Yes, alas, dear reader, she marries him. Agnes at this time is being pursued by evil villain Uriah Heep (oh, no! hiss!), who has taken advantage of Agnes’s (alcoholic) father Wickham, and who now is partner with Wickfield.
A good deal of the last third of the book focuses on romance and the nature of true love and bad relationship choices, though we also began the book with a disastrous one, when David’s widowed mother for some reason chooses the vile Murdstone as a second husband. Barkis married nurse Peggotty and that worked out pretty well, so love can work.
I love Aunt Betsey Trotwood, one of the most insightful and outspoken critics of bad characters throughout, and an often admirable feminist.
David gets a job as a legal proctor, so he begins to make a decent living, and supplements this job working on mounds of legal documents-- “I’m wallowing in words!”--with writing articles, stories, and even beginning a novel. Dickens autofiction! At 900+ words, we who read David Coppperfield are ourselves wallowing in words, though I am not really complaining.
7/16/23: Okay, a nearly 900-page novel completed--check!--reread, and it is a triumph. We open in misery, a life Charles Dickens actually lived, recorded in this auto-fiction, experience that shaped all of his work, focused on cruelty to women and children at the hands of megalomaniac men, ending in a kind of triumph, good news pretty much all around, endorsing generosity and kindness, huzzah! That’s a good summary right there. Yes, if you are looking for happy endings (and some of the most entertaining characters in the history of literature, though I am thinking of all of his novels, too), it does not end at the bottom of the rollercoaster.
We have, in the last two hundred pages, a lot of plot threads to resolve, so (spoiler alert for this more than 100-year-old novel):
*Uriah Heep, the rockstar villain, we discover, has defrauded almost all of the good guys, and (improbably) the too-talkative, somewhat bumbling Mr. Micawber follows the clues to determine Heep (H-h-h-Heep, he calls him, unable to pronounce his name without stuttering) had taken money from not only Wickfield, but also taken (indirectly) money from Our Hero David, via his benefactor Aunt Betsy and others. Turns out there’s a very good reason that Micawber, Traddles and Copperfield Himself have gone into law careers. Lock him up!
*We also needed to resolve the situation with poor (young) Emily, done wrong by the villain Steerforth, who in typical patriarchal fashion is (cruelly) blamed by many for “ruining the life and career” of this profligate, dastardly married man and father, who had taken her to Europe and dumped her and gone on to other women. So the noble Uncle Daniel Peggotty rescues Emily from a life of destitution and prostitution to take her to Australia for a few years. But she comes back, saved from further ruin to see her childhood friend David again. The ways some characters humanely treated Emily is hopeful, finally.
*We meet the villain Murdstones again, destroying the life of yet another young person.
* We hear the villain schoolmaster Creakle (these names!) runs a prison according to his (“firm”) system.
*Spoiler now, but poor Rosa dies in complications following a miscarriage. David always loved the (sweet and shallow) Rosa, but in her parting words she admits that she had married David when she was too young and naive, and we agree.
*This leaves things open for the good David to marry the good Agnes. Yay! David, a sweet and trusting man, is a little slow to see the true nature of people. Doesn’t always make the best choices with women or men. Errs by seeing their potential, which sometimes gets him in trouble.
This autobiographical novel does not have adequate room to go deeply into David/Charles as a successful writer, but his fame grows by novel’s end.
I joked about all the misery of the opening 2-300 pages, but this is a great book, no question, and I am already reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, that (in part) maps a contemporary Southern trailer park on to Dickens’s template, showing us the relevance of Dickens's ideas for reflecting on the twenty-first century world.
