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april_does_feral_sometimes 's review for:
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
‘David Copperfield’ by Charles Dickens is a spectacular Bildungsroman! I don’t know why I believed I had read this one before now, but in my supposed re-reading, I not only discovered this is my first time enjoying ‘David Copperfield’, but it is one of the best books Dickens wrote! It still stands up as an excellent classic of literature in the passage of time and technology despite having been published in 1850, the Victorian England era. Although it is supposedly a fiction novel, I believe it is a fictionalized autobiography of Dickens.
I have copied the book blurb:
”David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his brilliant, but ultimately unworthy school-friend James Steerforth; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; the eternally humble, yet treacherous Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora Spenlow; and the magnificently impecunious Wilkins Micawber, one of literature's great comic creations.
In David Copperfield - the novel he described as his 'favourite child' - Dickens drew revealingly on his own experiences to create one of the most exuberant and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure. This edition uses the text of the first volume publication of 1850, and includes updated suggestions for further reading, original illustrations by 'Phiz', a revised chronology and expanded notes. In his new introduction, Jeremy Tambling discusses the novel's autobiographical elements, and its central themes of memory and identity.”
David, as the eponymous narrator, does not hide from the reader his missteps or how adults either took advantage of him or protected him without him knowing it. David makes a lot of mistakes due to his youth and inexperience, but he survives them. Dickens’ writing talent and intelligent insight into human nature shines brightly as the author does show readers the dreadful and kind doings of adults through the child David’s eyes. Dickens maintains the character of David’s innocence and ignorance while at the same time readers can see between the lines.
David grows up into a young adult in these 800+ pages, and Dickens continues to show David’s inexperience and mistakes made but as a young man, not just as a child, common to young people today. As an elderly reader, it is a delight and, sometimes, an embarrassment, to recall similar adventures of my own which mirror David’s.
One of the main themes:
“There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.”
David’s life difficulties which, when he is a young boy, almost cause him physical death as well as ruination of whatever possibilities for success in life he had, are because of his parents’, particularly his mother’s, inability to manage life, either with a spouse (especially so if the spouse is ‘wrong’ in some manner) or in being alone.
It struck me in reading these chapters that when David falls in love, it is with someone who is very much like his mother. Did Dickens arrange this intentionally? Were Victorians aware of psychological causes and effects then that we study today? Or was it simply in fictionalizing Dicken’s own life autobiography, or other real-life examples he knew of, he unintentionally reveals what we today know happens?
Anyway. Much as Stephen King is master of psychological depths in creating characters under stress, although within a different genre, so is Dickens in creating fictional characters who remain alive to us even when hundreds of years have passed. In every novel, I think 13 of them, Dickens created people who are apparently uncommonly but entertainingly idiosyncratic to read about on the page, while at the same time unforgettably recognizable as archetypes we know of today all about us, when we stop to think. Only in mannerisms do these characters appear odd, but in their personalities or devious or exemplary doings are they very recognizable as our own peers, family members and acquaintances. Dickens also spotlighted the real poverty and deprivations of the underclass while rich or privileged characters cavort about in the silliest pursuits of pleasure or whinge on about minor ailments made large in their small-minded pinheads. This is why, along with his superb writing skills, is Dickens worthy of the recognition of having written classics that are on reading lists of most educational and recommended reading lists.
I am so very glad I finally read this novel, and I highly recommend it.
I have copied the book blurb:
”David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his brilliant, but ultimately unworthy school-friend James Steerforth; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; the eternally humble, yet treacherous Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora Spenlow; and the magnificently impecunious Wilkins Micawber, one of literature's great comic creations.
In David Copperfield - the novel he described as his 'favourite child' - Dickens drew revealingly on his own experiences to create one of the most exuberant and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure. This edition uses the text of the first volume publication of 1850, and includes updated suggestions for further reading, original illustrations by 'Phiz', a revised chronology and expanded notes. In his new introduction, Jeremy Tambling discusses the novel's autobiographical elements, and its central themes of memory and identity.”
David, as the eponymous narrator, does not hide from the reader his missteps or how adults either took advantage of him or protected him without him knowing it. David makes a lot of mistakes due to his youth and inexperience, but he survives them. Dickens’ writing talent and intelligent insight into human nature shines brightly as the author does show readers the dreadful and kind doings of adults through the child David’s eyes. Dickens maintains the character of David’s innocence and ignorance while at the same time readers can see between the lines.
David grows up into a young adult in these 800+ pages, and Dickens continues to show David’s inexperience and mistakes made but as a young man, not just as a child, common to young people today. As an elderly reader, it is a delight and, sometimes, an embarrassment, to recall similar adventures of my own which mirror David’s.
One of the main themes:
“There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.”
David’s life difficulties which, when he is a young boy, almost cause him physical death as well as ruination of whatever possibilities for success in life he had, are because of his parents’, particularly his mother’s, inability to manage life, either with a spouse (especially so if the spouse is ‘wrong’ in some manner) or in being alone.
It struck me in reading these chapters that when David falls in love, it is with someone who is very much like his mother. Did Dickens arrange this intentionally? Were Victorians aware of psychological causes and effects then that we study today? Or was it simply in fictionalizing Dicken’s own life autobiography, or other real-life examples he knew of, he unintentionally reveals what we today know happens?
Anyway. Much as Stephen King is master of psychological depths in creating characters under stress, although within a different genre, so is Dickens in creating fictional characters who remain alive to us even when hundreds of years have passed. In every novel, I think 13 of them, Dickens created people who are apparently uncommonly but entertainingly idiosyncratic to read about on the page, while at the same time unforgettably recognizable as archetypes we know of today all about us, when we stop to think. Only in mannerisms do these characters appear odd, but in their personalities or devious or exemplary doings are they very recognizable as our own peers, family members and acquaintances. Dickens also spotlighted the real poverty and deprivations of the underclass while rich or privileged characters cavort about in the silliest pursuits of pleasure or whinge on about minor ailments made large in their small-minded pinheads. This is why, along with his superb writing skills, is Dickens worthy of the recognition of having written classics that are on reading lists of most educational and recommended reading lists.
I am so very glad I finally read this novel, and I highly recommend it.