Money can't buy you love (but it can keep you out of debtor's prison)David Copperfield is a fictional biography of the life of David Copperfield starting with his birth. David has a very unhappy childhood, subject to much torment. How will this shape and mold David? On whom can he rely? How will Mr. Copperfield turn out?What is the best part of going on vacation? Certainly not the one week of the vacation but the year in advance thinking about vacation. When the day is drizzling and the sun hasn...

After reading such a density, it is a bit like a friend left on the road. Dickens himself will admit to having difficulty quitting David Copperfield after such a long intimacy!In the preface, this novel is his favorite, and when he has to read an extract in front of an audience a few years later, the choice of this extract is anguishing because this novel is a whole. A set of entangled narratives, one in the other, that he cannot separate without breaking the fabric of the work.It is also worth ...

In your reading life, you encounter all sorts of books: books you like, books you love, and books you wish never to have crossed your path. On rare occasions, you come across a book you feel privileged to have read. David Copperfield falls into this rare category. The book needs no praise from me. It is only another addition to the millions of love and appreciation it has received from its first publication. Charles Dickens himself has said that David Copperfield was his "favourite (literary) ch...

David Copperfield is an early queer novel by Charles Dickens. It follows David Copperfield, a gay man in early 19th century England, as he tries to seduce and betroth another gay man, James Steerforth. Copperfield first sets his eyes on Steerforth at Salem House where they both must subdue their love for each other, giving their age difference and the society of the time. However, as the novel progresses, Copperfield and Steerforth live openly as a homosexual couple. Their relationship comes int...

“This narrative is my written memory”, declares David Copperfield in the last section of this elephantine novel, a sentence that strongly implies an autobiographical imprint of the author in the making of his famous middle-class hero. But is that aspect what I most value of this work? Far from it.This thick volume is quite an ambitious journey: partly a comic story, which often verges on a tale for children, and partly a picaresque book tinged with distinctive dramatic intention that fluctuates ...

Read as part of The Infinite Variety Reading Challenge, based on the BBC's Big Read Poll of 2003.Charles Dickens can do no wrong, except perhaps keep around 100 pages of rather irrelevant tangents in this book.It was such a powerhouse of characterisation and world-building that I barely know where to begin. All of the characters were utterly divine, even the detestable Uriah Heep and the unbelievably pathetic Dora, and most especially the wonderful early Feminist icon that is Betsy Trotwood. I o...

David Copperfield is a convolutedly grotesque and darkly satirical Bildungsroman.First of all, David Copperfield is a colourful collection of inimitable characters. And we pass through this flowery assembly as through the gallery of images taken from Hieronymus Bosch’s canvases…The gloomy taint that was in the Murdstone blood, darkened the Murdstone religion, which was austere and wrathful. I have thought, since, that its assuming that character was a necessary consequence of Mr. Murdstone’s fir...

DAVID COPPERFIELD: MASTER VILLAINoh you architect of doom!your devious passivity and willful naivete know no boundaries!your crimes are many!your poor doting mother - hustled off to an early grave, and you do nothing!you repay the Murdstones' attempts at improvement with intransigence and a savage bite!you return Mr. Creakle's guiding hand with laziness and scorn!you do nothing as your idol Steerforth humiliates Mr. Mell!you run from honest work in a factory! you must be too good for that!you im...

2.75 :(

Call it an act of heresy but I’m abandoning this. I’ve got to page 600 which means I’ve only another 150 pages to go but I’ve completely lost interest. The characters are too one dimensional and you can see the plot coming as if it’s daubed in road marking paint. I’ve read all of Dickens’ novels except the early ones and mostly loved them except for Tale of two Cities and the reason I’d never read this was I believed, mistakenly, it was another early one. However it reads like an early one, so I...