David Copperfield

source : Amazon.com
author : Charles Dickens

David Copperfield is the story of a young man’s adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr. Murdstone; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; the eternally humble yet treacherous Uriah Heep; frivolous,
enchanting Dora; and the magnificently impecunious Micawber, one of literature’s great comic creations. In David Copperfield—the novel he described as his "favorite child"—Dickens drew revealingly on his own experiences to create one of his most exuberant and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure.

Reader's review:
It is rich. I tend towards modern fiction nowadays, fiction that, unexpectedly, takes you deep inside the heart of its characters sometimes bewildering behavior and humanity. What strikes me about the complex nature of the characters in Copperfield is the way it seems that no effort at all has been used to distinguish each of them, yet there is no doubt as to how vivid they are. Each character speaks in a tone that is a perfect elucidation of who they are - you can hear, just in the dialogue, the calm wisdom of Agnes, the parasitic obsequiousness of Uriah Heep, the punctilious rambling of Micawber, the pleasantries that barely mask the aggression of Miss Dartle, the rigid boredom of the Murdstones, the spoiled impishness when Dora speaks (so precise I heard her voice in cloying and nasal babytalk in my head). It's a delicate balancing act to keep this level of detail so hidden in his work, and it makes the plot machinations speedy and exciting. The varied heights in this book astound - moments of drama, whimsy, intrigue, romance abound, and the book is even prone to its bit of slapstick - midgets falling over into umbrellas, or extreme umbrage taken when donkeys appear on lawns.

What I mean is that it's easy to know you "should" read David Copperfield, but as anyone who's ever had a reading assignment knows, that doesn't necessarily make it something you'd want to do. I know, in a way, that David Copperfield is considered a standard - a book Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, for example, hold as the pinnacle of English fiction - but then again, I slogged my way through supposed classics in school that, over time, have turned out to appear dull and unsurprising. David Copperfield is so underread these days that I had no idea what to expect, no notion of the amazing surprises within, the sublimely addictive cadence of Dickens' prose, the dazzle of his language. Reading it for no particular reason, then, was a triumph all around - a book that doesn't require a degree to "understand," that moves breezily through its pages, and that teaches a thing or two (or twenty) about the rich heights capable in fiction. It's as rich and winning as you've heard and then some. -- E. Kutinsky 

In the last two years I have read, in this order, Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and David Copperfield. All three of these books were exceptional reads, and if you are thinking about dipping your toes in the waters of Charles Dickens you can't go wrong with any of them. However, notwithstanding the fact that these three books are all in the upper echelon of world literature, I have no difficulty in distinguishing between them and coming to the conclusion that they are properly ordered, from "most best" to "least best": David Copperfield, Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations.


Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities are both excellent books, but David Copperfield is simply the best piece of literature I've ever read. To be sure, I'm only 24 and have only read 10 pieces of classic literature since my high school years. However, David Copperfield so outdid anything I've read that I feel more than comfortable in recommending it as certainly one of the best books of all time. Dickens did a remarkable job of capturing a wide variety of human emotions and mindsets. He was aided in this by two things. First, the length of the book gave him space to fully develop his sentiments. Second, the book is written in a first-person autobiographical voice, which I think made capturing sentiments much easier than in attempting to narrate them in the third-person. Further, because the book chronicles David's life from childhood through middle-age the reader is exposed to a wide variety of human thoughts. The characters, for the most part, are more believable and the plot is generally good; I took offense to only one chapter in the whole book. -- TEK

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