# books / David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
First Read: December 2024 - January 2025
If you sift the world’s prose literature, Dickens will remain; sift Dickens, David Copperfield will remain.
– Leo Tolstoy
For someone that claims to enjoy classics, I’ve dipped barely a toe into the pool of Dickens, and found the water cold. A Tale of Two Cities was a tale too slow for me (at least at the time).
Enter David Copperfield.
The first section, roughly a third of the story, is my favourite. David’s suffering as a child, seen through his innocent & unjaded eyes, evokes pity: self pity. Dickens’ brilliance with writing orphans isn’t in the extremes of youthful strife, but in drawing out the trauma and suffering and loneliness we all suffer, more or less, in our early years.
Copperfield asks himself whether he was the hero of his own story. To survive what he did – for us all to survive as we do – he is the hero. It is David’s unwavering goodness which draws me most.
Favourite Passages
CHILDHOOD & PARENTING
God help me, I might have been improved for my whole life, I might have been made another creature perhaps, for life, by a kind word at that season. A word of encouragement and explanation, of pity for my childish ignorance, of welcome home, of reassurance to me that it was home, might have made me dutiful to him in my heart henceforth, instead of in my hypocritical outside, and might have made me respect instead of hate him.
Doesn’t your heart just bleed?
Mr. Murdstone was firm; nobody in his world was to be so firm as Mr. Murdstone; nobody else in his world was to be firm at all, for everybody was to be bent to his firmness.
It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my favourite characters in them—as I did—and by putting Mr. and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones—which I did too. I have been Tom Jones (a child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe
our boys were, generally, as ignorant a set as any schoolboys in existence; they were too much troubled and knocked about to learn; they could no more do that to advantage, than any one can do anything to advantage in a life of constant misfortune, torment, and worry.
I have often wondered how ill-timed early education is: while we are busy figuring out ourselves, and finding our footing, we are also expected to learn everything else.
The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.
“…I am of opinion that it would not be at all advantageous to you to be kept at school. What is before you, is a fight with the world; and the sooner you begin it, the better.” I think it occurred to me that I had already begun it, in my poor way: but it occurs to me now, whether or no.
A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made;
That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my power to tell. But I kept my own counsel, and I did my work.
This was all, and yet he seemed to me to say as plainly as a man could say: “You are very young, sir; you are exceedingly young.”
I feel this way every time I go to a petrol station. You are not adult enough to be here.
Long miles of road then opened out before my mind; and, toiling on, I saw a ragged way-worn boy, forsaken and neglected, who should come to call even the heart now beating against mine, his own.
ON LOCATION
I could not help wondering, if the world were really as round as my geography book said, how any part of it came to be so flat. But I reflected that Yarmouth might be situated at one of the poles; which would account for it.
my favourite lounging-place in the interval was old London Bridge, where I was wont to sit in one of the stone recesses, watching the people going by, or to look over the balustrades at the sun shining in the water, and lighting up the golden flame on the top of the Monument.
a small trader bound to Leghorn,
Ahh, the Count again.
WIT & OBSERVATION
the feint everybody made, then, of not having been to sleep at all, and by the uncommon indignation with which everyone repelled the charge. I labour under the same kind of astonishment to this day, having invariably observed that of all human weaknesses, the one to which our common nature is the least disposed to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness of having gone to sleep in a coach.
I felt very brave at being left alone in the solitary house, the protector of Em’ly and Mrs. Gummidge, and only wished that a lion or a serpent, or any ill-disposed monster, would make an attack upon us, that I might destroy him, and cover myself with glory. But as nothing of the sort happened to be walking about on Yarmouth flats that night, I provided the best substitute I could by dreaming of dragons until morning.
“My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!”
ours is likely to be a rather long engagement, but our motto is “Wait and hope!” We always say that. “Wait and hope,” we always say.
Enjoyed Traddles’ reference to the Count of Monte Cristo!
we had both been hapless instruments in designing hands.
the Cottage of content was better than the Palace of cold splendour, and that where love was, all was.
I had (and have all my life) observed that conventional phrases are a sort of fireworks, easily let off, and liable to take a great variety of shapes and colours not at all suggested by their original form.
My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth.
you cherish a terrible mistake.
It has always been in my observation of human nature, that a man who has any good reason to believe in himself never flourishes himself before the faces of other people in order that they may believe in him. For this reason, I retained my modesty in very self-respect; and the more praise I got, the more I tried to deserve.
I was tired now, and, getting into bed again, fell—off a tower and down a precipice—into the depths of sleep.
LOVE & RELATIONSHIPS
Lovers had loved before, and lovers would love again; but no lover had loved, might, could, would, or should ever love, as I loved Dora.
Sometimes of an evening, when I looked up from my writing, and saw her seated opposite, I would lean back in my chair, and think how queer it was that there we were, alone together as a matter of course—nobody’s business any more—all the romance of our engagement put away upon a shelf, to rust—no one to please but one another—one another to please, for life.
I did not know how it was, but though there were only two of us, we were at once always cramped for room, and yet had always room enough to lose everything in. I suspect it may have been because nothing had a place of its own,
There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.’ I pondered on those words, even while I was studiously attending to what followed, as if they had some particular interest, or some strange application that I could not divine.
I think of every little trifle between me and Dora, and feel the truth, that trifles make the sum of life.
O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed;
NAMES
Mr. jorkins
Often spelt in lowercase: Is he a device rather a person and proper noun?
Mr. Dixon was so well pleased with his new name, and appeared to think it so obliging in Mr. Micawber to confer it upon him,
“David…Copperfield…Davy…Doady…Trot…Trotwood”
David has many names. For instance his Canterbury life is lived under the name Trotwood, given to him by his Aunt, without complaint.
“Copperfield” in contrast is used formally by men such as Mr Murdstone & Heep, who do not know or care to know David, often misjudge him, and send nothing but ill-will in his direction.