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| David Copperfield |
Dickens called David Copperfield his favourite child, and it shows — not in sentimentality but in a quality of personal urgency that the novel carries throughout. This is the book in which he allowed himself to look most directly at the child labourer he once was, at the humiliation of a debtors' prison, at the way deprivation shapes a person in ways that prosperity never quite undoes.
David's life is a picaresque of environments — the warmth of Peggotty and the Yarmouth boat-house, the misery of his stepfather Murdstone's regime, the absorptive drudgery of the blacking warehouse, the more optimistic world of school — each one leaving its mark. What Dickens understands is that people accumulate their experiences differently, that some become callous and some become humane and the difference has more to do with where they direct their attention than with the severity of what they've survived.
The gallery of characters surrounding David is among Dickens's richest. Wilkins Micawber — perpetually insolvent, perpetually expecting something to turn up, perpetually borrowing money with enormous dramatic flair — is one of fiction's great comic creations and one of its most affectionate portraits. Uriah Heep, all writhing humility and secret ambition, is his perfect dark mirror: the same precarious social position, the opposite moral response.
Dora Spenlow, David's first love, is sometimes dismissed as a weakly drawn figure, but this misreads Dickens's purpose. She is exactly what first love feels like — luminous, insufficient, impossible to be angry at — and David's grief over her is handled with a restraint unusual for a novelist otherwise inclined to theatrical emotion.
Agnes Wickfield, waiting steadily in the background for most of the novel, has been criticized for her perfection, and the criticism has merit. But Dickens seems to understand that a certain kind of moral constancy, rare in the world, can serve as a fixed point that makes narrative growth possible.
David Copperfield is ultimately about memory — about how a person makes sense of a life by narrating it, and what gets lost or reshaped in the telling. As David works through his history, he is also constructing a self. That project, Dickens suggests, is never quite finished.
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