Those of us who read fiction do so for many reasons, the majority perhaps to relieve the tedium of a long flight or empty minutes in the lobby of a doctor’s office, or as a verbal nightcap absolving the tensions of a frenetic day of undulating joy and sorrow, nuanced by disappointment or regret.
As a child, I read to escape into a fantasy world remote from the quotidian squalor of waterfront Philly and the domestic insecurity of a single parent home suffused with alcoholic addiction. In these maturer years, I read fiction mostly for connection and inspiration that my strivings have mattered, despite my myriad blunderings, providing solace and meaning—and best, that I am not alone.
Of the books I’ve read, David Copperfield resonates most by way of nexus: a childhood annulled by environment, a sensitive child seeking emancipation, a failed marriage and, at last, a soulmate found. It was Dicken’s “favorite child” among his fourteen completed novels over a brief twenty years.
In many ways, David Copperfield navigates the journey of its protagonist for sovereignty over life’s intemperate intrusions, impeding one’s happiness; the fissuring of expectation and event; in Tom Wolfian parlance, the looming challenge of having the “right stuff” to break through.
Observing the mythic triad of separation, trial, and restoration, David’s journey becomes our own.
I first came upon David Copperfield when in the eighth grade in Massachusetts at age thirteen. How wonderful the schools were then. Instantly, the book became a first love, an affection that has endured.
This novel differs from Dickens’ earlier ones, its early chapters autobiographical and penned in first person. A novel of memories and reflections, it plays down his usual melodrama.
As for its teeming, colorful characters—a Dickensian constant—latent behind their public personae lies a good deal of dissonance, the incongruity loved by Shakespeare between appearance and reality:
Micawber, outwardly jovial, masking an inner angst and volatile moods as debtor prison looms ever closer.
The narcissist Steerforth, whose duplicity manipulates David, but
achieves a lesson learned.
Mr. Dick, whose labored utterances suggest mental illness, sympathetically drawn.
I know David Copperfield ends in fairytale recompension, resilence rewarded, injustice vanquished—if only life were like that. Still, we need to dream that life may sometimes prove compensatory, a lotus land dulling life’s transgressions.
There’s so much in David Copperfield that revives dormant memory of my own childhood and early adulthood, its idealism and reality’s harshness; not least, growth paradoxically through failure.
It works the same way for many others as well. I think of a couple that nightly reads five pages of the novel to each other before turning in.
I understand that. As said, I also read to connect.
–rj
Brimmings: up from the well 