David Copperfield --- A Book Review

The Kindle Cover

After reading Barbara Kingsolver's 2022 novel Demon Copperhead, a retelling of Dickens' David Copperfield, my addiction to reading Dickens took over.

I say "addiction" because that's the best way I can describe my love/hate relationship with that venerable author. Periodically I get this uncontrollable urge to read him. Then about three-quarters of the way through I vow NEVER to read him again.

I did better this time. According to my eReader, I got to 83 percent complete before I hit the red line. 

I think Dickens himself understood my situation.
     “Ah, child, you pass a good many hours here! I never thought, when I used to read books,
     what work it was to write them.” Copperfield's aunt said.

     “It’s work enough to read them, sometimes." he responded. 

These quotes from David and his aunt come in Chapter 62 (Yes, I said 62, How many books these days even have a Chapter 62?! According to Google, most modern novels have 10 to 12 Chapters.)

This is the original illustration
from the publication of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield in serialized form

beginning in May of 1849 and running through November 1850. 

It was published as a 624 page book in 1850.

Of course this was then, its publication date, five years before the Flying Cloud, a clipper ship, set the world's sailing record for the fastest passage between New York and San Francisco, 89 days 8 hours. That was by sailing around the Horn, Cape Horn, the southern most tip of South America. Because that was more than a half-century before the completion of the Panama Canal.

It was also well before radio, television, the internet, and streaming sight-and-sound entertainment into our homes. Most of Dickens' novels, including David Copperfield, were originally published in weekly or monthly installments in journals, which Dickens himself edited. Each month, subscribers would get a few chapters wrapped up in printed wrappers with illustrations, by the same illustrator who did the book. Someone in the household, would read to the rest while they listened and did what they did -- darning socks, tatting, shelling peas, mending harness, or perhaps sitting comfortably in their favorite chair enjoying a manly cigarette and sipping sherry or dipping a lady-like strip of toast in their tea. 

For the price of a half-penny, those who did not have subscriptions and probably could not read, could have the latest installment read to them.

Hence, the wonderfully descriptive Dickens passages like these describing Copperfield's childhood home before his widowed mother remarried. When you read these sentences, listen to what you are reading as the people back then would have done. Maybe even read them aloud.

     "On the ground floor is Peggoty's kitchen, opening into a back yard; with a pigeon-house
     on a pole, in the centre, without any pigeons in it; a great dog-kennel in a corner, without
     any dog; and a quantity of fowls that look terribly tall to me, walking about, in a menacing
     and ferocious manner." 

And then several more sentences, equally long, and equally descriptive about the geese kept at the house Copperfield was born into. Keeping in mind that they lived in town not on a farm. In Victorian times, those well-enough-off to own their home, commonly kept food animals and had servants. David's mother had one, Peggoty.

Dickens describes the interior of the home quite completely including the store room one had to pass to get from the kitchen to the front door:

     "...a place to be run past at night; for I don't know what may be among those tubs and jars 
     and old tea-chests, when there is nobody in there with a dimly-burning light, letting a

     mouldy air come out of the door, in which there is the smell of soap, pickles, pepper,
     candles, and coffee, all at one whiff."

And from the bedroom window the young Copperfield could see "the quiet churchyard with the dead [including the father he never knew] all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon."

     
     "There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere, as the grass of that churchyard;

     nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early
     in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother's room to look out at it; and
     I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and think within myself, 'Is the sun-dial glad,
     I wonder, that it can tell the time again?'"

Those readers and listeners, back then, knew this world. For them, these complete descriptions put them into the story just like we would be brought into the story today, if we were watching it on a screen.

Today's readers read much more quickly and do not want so much description. Plus the repetition in Dickens books necessary to recap what was previously read in last week's or last month's edition make reading Dickens today a slog as we read on and on in the equivalent of binge-watching. So our patience is tested, and, in my case, too often found wanting. And I complain. Out loud to my husband.

But his stories! Oh, my his stories! They are wonderful. Because the world! He lived in the world he wrote about. He paid attention to the people around him and he wrote their characters realistically.

I also, probably too often, read the gorgeously descriptive passages to my husband. I suppose it's no wonder my husband is always relieved when I finish a Dickens book.

For example: Dickens understood about the character Mr. Micawber, the kind and eternally optimistic would-be gentleman who continually lived beyond his means and ended up in debtor's prison. Along with his wife and ever increasing family. Dickens' own father spent time in debtor's prison, along with his wife and the younger Dickens children. 

It was at that point that twelve-year-old Charles was removed from school and sent to board with various family friends and work long hours in a blacking factory at very low wages, which had to be used to help pay for his care and the needs of his family in prison. He and his older sister spent their Sundays with their family in prison.

And the Dickens villains -- In David Copperfield we have the very attractive Steerforth. Of course we would have fallen under his spell, too. And the disgusting Uriah Heep! It was to the point where if he showed up again I wanted to rip that page out and hurl it across the world! And his mother with him.

But, of course, I was reading on my eReader....

Can I recommend you read David Copperfield? Of course I can. But I think listening to an audio version would be a good choice.

And I understand that the audio version of Demon Copperhead is well-done and would also be a good choice.