Customer Reviews

David Copperfield (Oxford World's Classics)

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David Copperfield was always a favorite of mine. It is wonderful, how, circling with the years, I can make my own retrospect and read it again from my older perspective.

When I was younger, I too, wanted to complain that all of Dickens' heroines were the same, and now I realize how wrong I was. Agnes is good and beautiful and patient of course, but what about the heroine Aunt Betsey? What about Miss Mowcher, who gives David a piece of advice "from three foot nothing ... Don't confuse bodily defect with mental!" she exclaims, and this is advice we coudl still use today! What about Peggotty, who is true and good and occasionally silly? Then there are the women who are not so good: Mrs Heep, Miss Murdstone, Mrs Markleham (the Old Soldier) and Rosa Dartle?

Dickens' characters are marvelous, but what I find most wonderful is the love that brings them together. Aunt Betsey takes David in, and is rewarded by the softening of her own heart; Mr. Peggotty seeks and finds his niece; Traddles finally marries "the dearest girl" and long-suffering Mrs Micawber will never desert her husband and something at last turns up Down Under. The characters who are courageous enough to choose love over pride are almost always rewarded at the end -- assuming that they survive, of course! (I'm thinking of Ham.) Perhaps it is just a novel, and those who have courage to love are not always rewarded in real life, but the idea is wonderfully satisfying.

If the critics are to be believed, David Copperfield was Dickens favorite of all his books and the most autobiographical. Narrated in the first person, it tells the story of a fatherless boy whose happy life with his mother and their doting servant Clara Peggoty is cruelly ended when his mother remarries. His stepfather, Mr. Murdstone, first sends him away to school (Salem House), where he is abused, then, after David's mother dies, puts him to work gluing labels on bottles. Eventually he runs away and is adopted by his stern but loving aunt, Miss Betsey Trotwood. She sends him to a better school (Dr. Strong's) and he is launched on a career that will see him become a law clerk, a reporter and ultimately a successful novelist. He marries Dora, the pretty but insipid daughter of Mr. Spenlow, for whom he clerked. She falls ill and dies after an unsuccessful childbirth and David marries Agnes Wickfield, who had been like a sister to him when he lived with her family while he was at Dr. Strong's school.

Such is the basic outline of David's life and it is not much to look at, is it? Nor is David a particularly compelling character--of course, Pip, in Great Expectations, isn't either but he at least is subjected to the demented machinations of Miss Havesham. No, the real strength of this novel does not lie in the narrator; it is the delicious cast of supporting characters who make this novel great. Early in life David is befriended by Peggoty and her wonderful brother Daniel, a fisherman raising his niece and nephew in a converted boat on Yarmouth Sands, and Mr. Barkis, the bachelor cab driver who asks David to inform Peggoty that: "Barkis is willing". While attending Salem House, David lives with the family of Wilkins Micawber, grandiloquent and eternally optimistic in the face of dire financial straights, he is always certain that something will turn up. David's Aunt is amusing, but even better is her friend Mr. Dick, an eccentric author who turns his voluminous masterwork into a kite.

Equally good are the villains of the piece. The stepfather and his sister, Jane Murdstone, are wicked enough for a fairy tale. David's schoolboy chum Steerforth proves to be a colossal heel. And there is no more malefic figure in literature than Uriah Heep, the scheming clerk who blackmails Agnes father, steals Betsey Trotwood's money and swears his undying enmity towards David.

Covering much of the same territory and offering up similar, but significantly different, characters, Copperfield offers a more benevolent view of life than Great Expectations. Because of this, and the general dyspepsia of literary critics and academics, it is often taken less seriously, tarred as somewhat lightweight. But it is vastly entertaining and if the ending is a little too pat, our complaint is less a function of the mechanics of the conclusion than our disappointment.... By any measure, it must be considered one of the truly great novels.

GRADE: A

Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is said to be Dickens' favorite book that he ever wrote. Copperfield's and Dickens' childhoods were classically the same and many critics believe that David Copperfield was actually a Charles Dickens autobiography. He modeled many of the characters in this novel after people he knew; for instance, Micawber was modeled after Dickens' own father who was sent to debtors prison. However, Micawber becomes a humorous, amiable character who was quite different from Dickens' own father. This book is definitely of 5 star quality and I will teach it in my College English classes when I begin teaching.

What could be more prosaic? A physically abused child surmounts all obstacles through diligence, devotion, goodness, and terrific good luck at key moments. But within this simple frame Dickens paints a tapestry of pity and terror and epiphany. To encounter such a broad spectrum of good and evil - the pure femininity of a lover, the earthy sweetness of a nurse, the generosity of a mentor, the frivolity of a sweetheart, parental naivete and cruelty, the destructive arrogance of a best friend, the viciousness of a Uriah Heep - would be an object lesson in Humanity. But we encounter all this each day. This dawns on you with each passing chapter - and that you are confronting yourself as you confront them: Your own evil and your own goodness rising above the shadows. Copperfield is a quick course in religion and philosophy and psychology. By the end, you're transformed vicariously and like David Copperfield dismiss the shadows: "Thus I leave them; thus I always find them; thus they wear their time away, from year to year".

Please note: Dickens is not my favorite author. His style at times is too melodramatic. But David Copperfield is wonderful. If we had only this, it would be clear Dickens was a master who walked the talk. Highly commended even for those who are not Dickens fans.