Old Bestseller Review: David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

Old Bestseller Review: David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

by Rich Horton

As regular readers of this blog (you happy few! :)) know, I have been reading a lot of Victorian fiction lately, and enjoying it immensely -- that last appropriate enough as many of these books are immense! But perhaps the most famous Victorian novelist, as well as one of the most popular in his time and to this day, is Charles Dickens. And I had not read a Dickens novel since I was 15 or so, when I read A Christmas Carol (of course!) and Nicholas Nickleby. I should say I enjoyed both those books, and it's hard to say why I didn't keep reading him. In those days (perhaps less so now) it was pretty common for Dickens to be assigned in high school. At my school, I believe, the usual choice was A Tale of Two Cities, though I've heard that each of David Copperfield and Great Expectations were also common. But he wasn't assigned in the English Literature class I took. (I believe Wuthering Heights, which at that time I hated, was the only Victorian novel on the reading list.)

At any rate, I knew I'd get to Dickens eventually, and I had pretty much decided that either David Copperfield or Great Expectations were logical first choices. And Copperfield got the nod, primarily because I found a free Librivox recording, so was able to listen to it on the way to work over the past few weeks. (Of course I also have a print copy, a Modern Library Classics edition.) The reader was T. Hynes (I think, sometimes it's hard to know) and he did a very fine job.

The novel's full title is given, in my Modern Library edition, as The Personal History, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery Which He Has Never Meant to be Published on any Account. This is a curious alteration of the title given on the serial edition: The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery. As for the first book edition, the title page reads simply The Personal History of David Copperfield. (I don't know if a fuller version was given a bit later in that edition.) The novel was serialized between May of 1849 and November of 1850. (Not, as I understand, in a magazine, but in independently sold parts.) The first book edition appeared from Bradbury and Evans in two volumes in November of 1850. 

I don't wish to go to much into the plot, which is surely familiar to many people, and which anyway, though enjoyable to follow, is not the key to the novel. It is a purely classic bildungsroman in form, and it is also semi-autobigraphical. (In the years before Dickens wrote Copperfield he had produced some autobiographical sketches, which he claimed to have burned -- but surely some of what he wrote was reworked to form parts of the novel.) At any rate, it treats of the life of its first person narrator from his birth as already half an orphan (his father having died months before his birth), through his mother's disastrous remarriage and subsequent death, to his abortive education followed by factory work, then to his fleeing to his aunt's house, and his more successful education, leading to a job training to be a proctor (a sort of lawyer), his courtship of his boss's pretty daughter and then marriage, his early career as a journalist and then novelist, and his eventual success, in both his career and a later remarriage.

Obviously that description leaves out, well, pretty much everything! For the book lives in the other characters, and much of the incidents and extended plot elements concern other characters too: his schoolboy friend Steerforth and his terrible betrayal of David's childhood friends; his impecunious one-time landlord Mr. Micawber; the scheming villain Uriah Heep, etc. Best perhaps, to just mention all the glorious characters, most of whom are wildly eccentric in one way or another. There are villains -- Heep, of course; and David's sadistic stepfather (called "father-in-law" in the book) Mr. Murdstone and his equally sadistic sister Jane; and Steerforth, somewhat ambiguously villainous but with a truly villainous servant, Littimer; his first schoomaster, Mr. Creakle; the rackety Jack Maldon, who tries to seduce David's second schoomaster Dr. Strong's young wife. And the long catalog of less terrible people: Mr. Micawber, ever ambitious but never willing to work for it, and his loyal wife; Miss Mowcher, a spirited dwarf and hairdresser; Thomas Traddles, David's much put-upon school friend who is perhaps the most deserving hard worker in the novel; David's aunt, Betsey Trotwood, perhaps my favorite character in the novel, a greathearted woman with a suspicion of marriage and a curious devotion to David's sister Betsey (the girl she feels David should have been); Betsey's lodger Mr. Dick, obssessed with the severed head of Charles I but as loyal and honest a man as may be; David's mother's maid, Clara Peggoty, and her whole family: her brother, unmarried himself but who has adopted his niece Emily and his nephew Ham, both orphans (of different parents) -- Emily is, in a way, David's first love, and her story is one of the more affecting in the book; the carter Mr. Barkis -- "Barkis is willin'" is one of the book's great lines; Mr. Wickfield, Aunt Betsey's lawyer and David's landlord for a time, almost ruined by his drinking; Agnes Wickfield, a sweet and greatly moral character, perhaps a tad too idealized; Mr. Omer, the wonderfully portrayed undertaker who buries David's mother (and remains a figure in David's life); Martha, the ruined woman who redeems herself in the end; Rosa Dartle, Mrs. Steerforth's fierce companion, not a good person but one more to be pitied than despised ... and many more. Some of these characters barely appear but are still memorable, others recur again and again. Even the tiniest characters are fun -- there are several delightfully portrayed waiters, for instance; and David's servants over time are pathetically awful at their jobs, and for all that quite funny.

There are many wonderful scenes worth mentioning as well: David's birth, especially Aunt Betsey's appearance; several death scenes; the great storm near the end; Micawber's denunciation of Heep; the dinner party at the Waterbrooks'; every scene with Miss Mowcher. And again, on and on.

It's a huge novel (roughly the same length as Middlemarch, I'd estimate) and it fully inhabits its length. It is by turns powerful, horrifying, very funny, very sentimental. It is moving when it wants to be, earnest when it wants to be. Certainly I was brought to tears several times, and to gales of laughter at other times. It is great-hearted, I think. It is far from perfect -- as Randall Jarrell said, "A novel is a prose narrative of some length with a flaw in it." David Copperfield is a prose narrative of great length with great flaws. And it is big enough, joyous enough, heartfelt enough, that the flaws don't matter and often are in their way also virtues.

It seems that its reputation has wavered over time. I sense that some critics disapprove of its sentimentality, probably of its relatively happy ending (for most characters), probably of its lack of devotion to social issues (they are not absent, but they are not central to the novel.) And I suppose that by this time several of Dickens' novels rank more highly in the general estimation: Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend in particular, I'd say. And perhaps they deserve it! -- I expect to get to them eventually. But I do love David Copperfield.