Where I Went and Had All the Emotions

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am and have been a Charles Dickens resister. Studied English in college; became an English teacher; read lots of books by lots of people; and had never finished a Dickens book until a few years ago. I didn't like the way he wrote and I didn't like his stories.

Until I did. And I really liked David Copperfield.

You have to have patience when you read Dickens. He has his way of getting to the point and working out the plot. If you don't have time for patience, like I didn't most of my life, it's tough going. But with more time for old books, my perspective has changed.

Dickens will give you sweet young women--here we have Agnes. She's adorable and impossible not to love. He gives you odd and creepy villains--here we have Uriah Deep, the creepy, insinuating, false manipulator, and Steerforth, who seems like a good guy but really disapoints. He gives you characters of deep moral conviction--here we have his old nurse and Mr. Peggotty. He gives you odd peripheral characters--here we have his great aunt and Mr. Dick, who are both a bit off but likable, and the Micawbers, who also have their failings but turn out to be important to the story and good friends to David. And you usually have at least one hard-working, humble young man, who in this case is the protagonist, but we also have his friend Tommy Traddles.

I was surprised to learn that some high schools use David Copperfield. As much as I like the book, that is (IMO) a bad idea. There is so much to get through (that patience I was talking about) to reach the good parts and the scenes that matter and the scenes that are any fun that most students would be exhausted with the effort before they got through it. Besides the difficulty of the style and the elevated language, there are cultural differences (for American students) that need to be explained in practically every page, and every one of those adds to the complexity that would make the instruction a bit like hacking your way through the wilderness.

Having said that--for someone approaching the novel voluntarily, with no pressure and no expectations, it can be great fun. I plan to see the Dev Patel adaptation and wanted to read the book first, and I am glad I did. I was emotionally invested, engaged with the characters, eager to see how it all turned out, and satisfied with the ending. Good stuff.

And to that young woman English major in a couple of my English classes at Queen's University in Kingston back around 1985, the one who always carried a copy of some Dickens book or another and wanted to talk about it: I wish I remembered your name so I could tell you that it was one particular image--you with a big old paperback copy of The Old Curiosity Shop, actually--that inspired me to try again until I saw something of what you saw. Here's to you, wherever you are! :)

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