Victorian Q1 Read-Along: David Copperfield

David Copperfield's full title is "The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)". As with a lot of novels from that period (and earlier), the long title is usually not used for modern editions.

It is a semi-autobiographical novel mixing real events from Dickens' life with made-up stories and adventures.

It was initially serialized in 19 monthly installments between May 1849 and November 1850, each installment (except for the last one) containing 32 pages of text and two illustrations by Phiz. The last installment was a double one.

The installment were as follows:
I – May 1849 (chapters 1–3);
II – June 1849 (chapters 4–6);
III – July 1849 (chapters 7–9);
IV – August 1849 (chapters 10–12);
V – September 1849 (chapters 13–15);
VI – October 1849 (chapters 16–18);
VII – November 1849 (chapters 19–21);
VIII – December 1849 (chapters 22–24);
IX – January 1850 (chapters 25–27);
X – February 1850 (chapters 28–31);
XI – March 1850 (chapters 32–34);
XII – April 1850 (chapters 35–37);
XIII – May 1850 (chapters 38–40);
XIV – June 1850 (chapters 41–43);
XV – July 1850 (chapters 44–46);
XVI – August 1850 (chapters 47–50);
XVII – September 1850 (chapters 51–53);
XVIII – October 1850 (chapters 54–57);
XIX-XX – November 1850 (chapters 58–64).

The first bound edition was published on 14 November 1850.

As the novel was published in a serialized form first, it makes it easy to split it into manageable chunks following the original serialization.

Note: The thread WILL contain spoilers -- so heads up :) No need to hide under the spoiler tag - but it will be very helpful if you can mention which chapter you are at when discussing something from the novel.

If someone is reading in a language different from English, please tell us what translation you are reading :)

Welcome to the thread everyone! And happy reading!

Perhaps we should adopt as a motto "let us have no meandering"!

If I am able to join in I will be reading the David Copperfield book from a Set of Dickens my husband received for his Bar Mitzvah in 1963. He wasn't much interested in Dickens at age 13, but I'm glad he kept the set.

Thanks for the installment breakdown. That's a great reference. We have 14 weeks to read 20 installments. : )

I've read David several times; I think I may listen on audiobook this time.

I'll be joining, but I'll need to order the book. Does anyone have a preference for Penguin vs. Oxford? I think most of the previous Dickens novels that I read were Penguin.

Looking on my bookshelves I have The Biographical Edition. London : Chapman & Hall 1903 with forty illustrations by Phiz.

>6 DieFledermaus: There is a free version at Project Gutenberg
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/766

I'll be following along. I've got an audiobook read by Richard Armitage.

>8 majkia: That audio edition is excellent. It's been a few years since I read it, so I might join in as well, but I'm also in a slow read of Dombey and Son, and I really try to avoid reading multiple books by the same author simultaneously.

>6 DieFledermaus: While I haven't looked at the differences between the Penguin and Oxford editions of this book in particular, lately I've been picking up more of the Oxford editions in general. They are slightly more affordable (at least where I am), and I've liked the quality of the supplementary material they include. Of course, I also have liked the Penguin editions I own, so...I guess no real preference between the two?

I'll be reading in French, and I'll be reading the translation that is widely available in the public domain (wikisource, gutenberg, etc.): the book is in two volumes and the translation is by Paul Lorain.
I have another reading commitment in January so will join in a few days or couple of weeks at most.

>6 DieFledermaus: I think Oxford is taking over what used to be a lot of former Penguin territory. The notes and editors are usually really good in both. I can't find my old well worn Penguin edition, so will be reading the newer Oxford one. I also have an older Oxford edition with the illustrations, but without notes.

I read most of chapters 1 and 2 yesterday during the obligatory 15-minute post-vaccination wait. Looking forward to going further with it (preferably not in the same circumstances, though). For the moment I'm reading a generic ebook that was already on my reader, which seems to be the 1869 edition. I may look for something better later on, but I despair slightly at the thought of how many books will have to shuffle along shelves to make a hole that width in the "D" section of fiction...

I’ve both read and listened to this, and the last time was not too long ago, so won’t be joining in. I’ll definitely pop in to see everyone’s comments. I think it is my favorite Dickens.

Again, lurking, as I read this last summer. Fwiw, there is quite a nice Irish reader on Librivox who reads Copperfield for free.

I started this morning and enjoyed these opening two chapter. (>12 thorold: to me 40 minutes!)

Question: Does anyone know the year or approximate year David is born? Are we looking at like 1780? Earlier? Later?

>15 dchaikin: Don't know for sure, but I've always thought, maybe wrongly, that David Copperfield had autobiographical elements, and Dickens himself was born in 1812.

>15 dchaikin: Later. Depends on who you ask it varies from 1812 (Dickens’ birth) to 1820 (based on some of the actions in the later chapters - due to closures a d opening of places in the real world which are referenced) and anywhere around them. As it is fiction after all, there is a bit of time dilation and expansion when needed - so the second decade of the 19th century is the best guess really.

>16 arubabookwoman: >17 AnnieMod: thanks! That really helps orient me. (of course, it makes our subject 37 at time of first installment. Noting time dilation...)

>18 dchaikin: Thereabouts. Later in the novel we learn why the narrator (in the fictional world) writes the story and the timeline gets clearer. :) In the real world it came to be because Dickens could not write a memoir - too many people were alive. So he stopped revising the memoir and incorporated parts into this novel. :)

Ch.1 — Wikipedia on caul births: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caul

Apparently David is only one in a very long line of literary figures born with cauls, from Tyl Eulenspiegel to Diana Gabaldon.

>16 arubabookwoman:

I have read the introduction to my Biographical edition of the book (published 1903) which was written by a certain A. W. this was Arthur Waugh father of Evelyn Waugh. In his introduction he makes the following points of interest:

It was the authors favourite.
It is his unquestionable masterpiece.
It contains elements directly autobiographical - essentially work of fiction, but there are just enough elements of autobiography in it to give it that particular value, over and above its art, which renders it the Mecca of every true Dickensian.

He touches on the biographical/autobiographical elements of the book:

Murdstone and Grinby’s office - Dickens worked in a Blacking factory, but this is a wine merchants in the book.

Mr Micawber is based on Dickens father - John Dickens.

Dora is the girl Dickens fell in love with in his teens

Miss Mowcher is taken from real life, so much so that a woman recognised herself in one of the printed instalments and complained to the author. Apparently Dickens changed the character of the woman when she re-appeared lated in his novel to appease the complainant.

David Copperfield is based on Dickens own character

I’m on the fence about this one. Are we following some sort of schedule or is it just everyone at their own pace?

>21 baswood: cool edition and great info

>23 Nickelini: Sort of. This is a first quarter read. But that’s the only restriction. (If it helps, that’s 14 weeks for 20 installments. So I’m targeting 3 installments every 2 weeks.)

Oh, I'm on the fence too - I was in until I clocked how long it is. I'm not sure I fancy another long read this month. We'll see.

>25 AlisonY: The read is for the quarter--January through March.

I will be listening to Simon Vance, and I have the Norton Critical Edition on hand.

Just started my reread last night. It's been awhile since the last reread, and I'm really enjoying the humour . It's marching along quickly, just like Miss Betsy Trotwood herself. That won't last, for David is about to encounter his first setback.

I got my copy from the library and will start tomorrow. I'm going for a minimum reading rate based on finishing in six weeks which assumes I'm going to be able to extend my loan.

Just a question to throw out there for possible further discussion: Does the marriage plot in the novel speak to people now?

I have been reading three Victorian novels that deal with marriage: Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady, and David Copperfield. My guess is that readers might have some sympathy for those in difficult marriages because of the time's stricter marriage laws, but they are mostly thinking, "Oh, well, that couldn't happen today because people can just get divorced."

>29 nohrt4me2: I'll have to learn more about the marriage to answer. But, so far, it definitely feels like something that could and does happen today. I'm on chapter 4.

>29 nohrt4me2: Which marriage?

>29 nohrt4me2: But that is the worst thing you can do when reading period (or historical) fiction - applying your own current understanding to the story. If you are going to ignore the reality of the times you are reading about, you will be better off reading only modern novels. Part of the charm of the older novels is the opportunity to see how life worked in a different time -- and trying to analyze it using the nowadays norms will always find faults...

There are topics that are timeless but even they need to be understood in the context of the world the novels exist in.

And now I will shut up :)

>29 nohrt4me2: I have read quite a lot of Victorian fiction and I think I very much look at the plot in the light of the social mores of the day. It's interesting to consider how things have changed, but I don't think you can apply current day attitudes to your expectations of how people will act.

Re marriage, I have some comments about marriage if we are talking about David's marriage. These comments may be spoilerish, so if that bothers anyone, please avoid:

In my comments the last time I read David Copperfield (about 6-7 years ago, after I was on LT at any rate) I noted how bothered I was by Dora, her childishness and simpering, and how I couldn't believe David would marry her. I said I was surprised, b/c this hadn't bothered me the first time I read David Copperfield in my late teens/early 20's, but as I said that first reading was before I read The Feminine Mystique.

No spoilers in this post. I was assuming I would be reading the copy of David Copperfield my husband got for his bar mitzvah in 1963 and just went to the shelf to pull it down and couldn't find it anywhere. I panicked, thinking it was lost in the move, and then I finally remembered that prior to the move I divided the set up among the 5 grandchildren. So I will have to see if I can find a cheap or free Kindle version.

I was looking for my copy because I wanted to note what great openings many of Dickens's novels have, some of them very famous--the best of times/the worst of times in A Tale of Two Cities; the creeping fog in Bleak House, and here in David Copperfield, something along the lines of: whether I will be the hero of my own life remains to be seen (paraphrasing/guessing because I don't have a copy available.

Talking about what exactly we are reading - a decade or so ago Easton Press put together one of their better deluxe editions - David Copperfield bound from parts, fully reprinted with the advertisements, in the original colors and so on. At this point I am spending more time on the ads around the installments than on reading the book (oops). Some very interesting thing in there - especially in the books advertisements...

>35 arubabookwoman: If you can tolerate online reading while looking for a copy, the novel is in the public domain... :)

PS: "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." -- LT CK to the rescue so I do not need to retype it.

>32 AnnieMod: >29 nohrt4me2: huh. I try to see the commonalities, the human aspects that are always but in different contexts. Clara and Edward's courtship is of its time (or, possibly, of its imagined time), but the nature of their relationship feels more timeless to me. : )

>37 dchaikin: In a way. Although keep reading - I almost envy you at the moment - knowing where the novel is going allows you to see things earlier but it also robs you from surprises. :)

>38 AnnieMod: blissful oblivion

I'm game, I guess. I adore reading Dickens' novels, but I was going to read them in chronological order. This one is way down the list. I've never particularly liked this one, but there certainly is a lot to recommend it.

Wait, all of a sudden I feel great enthusiasm.

I had quite forgotten how funny these first chapters are. The labor scene in the first chapter, with Betsy Trotwood as the unwilling auditor, and the buttons popping off Peggoty's dress in the second chapter, made me laugh out loud, and they weren't the only laughs.

It wouldn't surprise me if Peggoty's dress only gave up a button once, and it made such on impression on Davy that he remembered it as frequent.

Finished Chapter 2

I should begin by noting that I know absolutely nothing about this story going in - not even a vague idea of what will happen.

I'm finding the writing a little difficult early on (e.g. having to reread sentences to understand), though I suspect once I read more I'll get into the rhythm of it.

I wasn't expecting humour and I especially liked the description of the young Davey attending church.

I have a bad feeling about the fortnight at Peggotty's brother's place.

>42 rhian_of_oz: I have a bad feeling about the fortnight at Peggotty's brother's place.

I was struck by how cleverly Dickens mixes the voices of the knowing adult narrator with hindsight and the innocent young Davy who doesn’t know what’s in store for him — there’s all that “objective” hindsight stuff about Miss Betsy’s dislike for boys and the story of the caul, and then he plunges into subjective mode so that he can overlook all the hints about what’s going on between his mother and Murdstone until he’s confronted with the awful fait accompli. And we hardly notice the joins. I’m sure I took it all at face value when I read it in childhood, and ignored all those hints too. Obviously Dickens knows he’s writing for people who are going to be reading it aloud around the fireplace…

>42 rhian_of_oz: One of the things I’ve appreciated about Dickens as an adult is the humour in these books. It totally went over my head as a child.

>32 AnnieMod: But that is the worst thing you can do when reading period (or historical) fiction - applying your own current understanding to the story. If you are going to ignore the reality of the times you are reading about, you will be better off reading only modern novels.

Couldn't agree more and well said.

> 43 we hardly notice the joins
I'm sure I took that trip to Yarmouth at face value too when I first read this as a child, so that I was then horrified by the reason for it. An older person would certainly see it coming. It really shows how this book works right through life at any age.

>21 baswood: Always like this kind of background information.

>42 rhian_of_oz: Dickens can be very dark and grim but he does have a humorous streak in him. Different novels carry that differently and it can be rather subtle in some places but it is almost always somewhere in there.

Ah, have fun discovering the story for the first time. I suspect that some places will make you want to strangle someone and some will want you to just go and hug someone... as is the case with most good novels. :)

>43 thorold: That threw me up for a loop when I read these first chapters for the first time. My English was away from stable at that point so it took me awhile to realize that nope, I am not misreading, the perspective does change (and being 15 or so at the time, I don't think I had seen that mix before in my life - not that inter-weaved anyway).

>44 NanaCC: I "met" Dickens in school (after reading Oliver Twist as a child that is - talk about changed perspective when I finally got back to it in my early twenties) - in long excerpts which were grim and dark, with no humor in them (or almost none anyway - the teacher was pointing to things as funny but to a struggling English student, they were anything but). The reason I went to read the full novels was exactly because some of the things sounded tantalizingly interesting (plus they were available and I needed to read in English).

I've read through chapter 4. What I love about this, and the one other Dickens I read, is how much he stays with and enlivens the moment. Davy foreshadows, but he's always there in the now and the moment at hand is always something that keeps our attention. ... well mine, and so far.

>45 SassyLassy: I must have put my Q badly re marriage to make everyone so testy and dismissive. To clarify: I am not talking about *judging* the book by modern mores, just asking whether the marriage plots *reflect* any recognizeable truths we still hold about marriage, and if so, what? My theory is that literature doesn't survive in the popular (vs academic) realm if readers can't recognize or identify with universal human themes.

>48 nohrt4me2: I don't think that anyone was dismissive - sorry if it sounded that way :)

Arranged marriages exist today (I have someone from my office who went home to get married to a woman he had never seen before a few years ago). Marriages of convenience also exist. And staying in a bad marriage is still something that people would do for appearances (my Mom still thinks that divorce is a bad word... my grandmother was scandalized when my cousin and his then girlfriend held hands while walking in the village - not because she minded but because "people will think that he got married"). And staying is easier than leaving -- doing nothing vs. actually acting will always tilt the same way.

So for all of the modern veneer we seem to have on top of marriages and what's not, things had not changed that much really. Except that the current generation is more likely to stay together without the paperwork than a previous one would have I guess.

I agree though - people need to connect to something in a tale for it to succeed (or they need to be scandalized enough to want to read because of that). Dickens is good at writing people and people are people - so it works.

Dunno. Never married (or really wanted to) so my observations are a bit from the outside of the whole thing.

Back to the reading part - I never really thought about how it was read originally and how the installments break out - it does make somewhat of a difference - finishing the first installment with Davy returning to his seemingly changed mother after the weeks in the boat/house is heart-breaking. Having to wait until you can continue makes that even worse for a reader (and here I thought that finishing an episode/volume in a series on a cliffhanger is a new invention - even if that does not qualify completely, the idea is the same - make you want to return).

And those first three chapters are so funny and light, almost to the very end of the third one, but you can see the clouds gathering... :)

>48 nohrt4me2: Dickens paints different types of marriages in David Copperfield. Some spoilers: It appears David's biological parents had a happy marriage, but his mother's re-marriage was not. Aunt Betsy had a disastrous marriage, and this affects her outlook on life. Mr & Mrs Micawber have a very loyal marriage; David himself will have a complicated marriage.
So it depends, and I think current-day readers could find a marriage that they may have observed in their own lives--some positive, some negative. Dickens himself was portraying marriages he observed and experienced in his own life.

Last year I read The Artful Dickens by John Mullan, in which Mullan provides a list of "tricks and ploys" in his novels, like naming, characters' speech, rivers and drowning, etc. Mullan then surveys all of the major works and cites examples. It's a wonderful book, but if you haven't read most of the novels, it has lots of spoilers throughout the text.

One of these devices is the use of present tense in the novel as a way to heighten tension, and, per Mullan, Dickens was one of the first authors to use this extensively, particularly in later works like Bleak House and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. So I'm paying attention to all the times present tense creeps into the narrative.

Im in; my first dickens was a read of Oliver Twist after watching the movie Then Little Dorrit (and saw the house in london that was supposedly where it all takes place) When I was older it was Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (the latter I always loved for Miss Haversham and the description of her several decade old wedding party) Tried reading Copperfield but never was interested -Until I watched the film A Personal History of David Copperfield which linkes the story to dickens life and also realized I knew more about the book then I thought. Anyway, do not have a copy but can easily get it!

I downloaded a cheap Kindle version, and started today. There are 64 chapters, so I'm going to aim for at least one chapter a day. So today David was born with his caul, and we met Miss Betsy Trotwood and good old Peggoty. I really love the names of the characters in Dickens.

Which reminds me, one factoid about Dickens that sticks in my mind is that Nick Hornby stated in one of his essays in The Polysyllabic Spree that over the course of his writing career, Dickens created more than 13,000 characters!

Just received the penguin classic and it is a door stopper, fortunatly the print is readable. Planning to hit this tonight, see how far I get.

Chapter 2
I found the musings on childhood memories and how well children can remember early events fascinating. What age are you in your earliest memory?

And a child's perspective is so perfectly presented: the "fowls look terribly tall to me, walking about in a menacing and ferocious manner."

Wondering, "Is the sundial glad...that it can tell the time again?"

And meeting Mr. Murdstone--can anyone with such a name be a good and trustworthy character? The name alone makes me shiver.

All in all reminding me of how much I like Dickens!

>56 arubabookwoman: the childhood memories and how adults with better memories seems to not have grown up caught my attention too.

>52 kac522: so i’ve thinking about tense every since I read this post.

>57 dchaikin: I know--now I can't help noting the tense. Last year I read Drood for the first time and he literally alternates chapters with past and present tense; I even marked them in my book, and I normally don't write in my books.

Chapter 4
In a word, heartbreaking.

I know coercive control is modern terminology but I wonder what Victorian readers thought about the Murdstones' behaviour towards Clara. I must admit it turned my stomach quite a bit.

I had to smile at the comfort Davey received from the books left by his father. Who among us hasn't at some point during the last two years escaped into books?

I love this description of Miss Murdstone:

She brought with her two uncompromising hard black boxes, with her initials on the lids in hard brass nails. When she paid the coachman she took her money out of a hard steel purse, and she kept the purse in a very jail of a bag which hung upon her arm by a heavy chain, and shut up like a bite. I had never, at that time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was.

>56 arubabookwoman: I recently made a discovery that my earliest memory was a somewhat traumatic event that happened when I was 2. I had always assumed that I was about 4 when the incident happened, and it had a sort of mythical status in my memory, but I recently encountered someone who could confirm the year that it happened and I must have been much younger than I thought.

>59 rhian_of_oz: early steam punk?!

>59 rhian_of_oz: >61 kac522: Nice!

A classic Dickens move, though, using physical objects in that ultra-explicit way to represent character traits. None of your discreet symbolism.

I've finished chapter 3. I love the tone he strikes - these memories are almost like a wonderful dream it seems one that he respects, dwells on in reverie and yet can have gentle fun with -- and one perhaps endlessly dwelt on, given what happens. Held dear and yet we know also known from a real world perspective. Is it something wonderful to be so able to be with the wonder, given that real world?

I agree with you Dan on how he is with the moments.

Given what goes on to happen, in its most general sense, that gives an interesting perspective on how he comes to hold on to this in such a way, as a treasure it strikes me.

>61 kac522: Ha! I feel like steam punk is softer than Miss Murdstone :-).

I think the early chapters of David Copperfield do illustrate how difficult it is at times to get into the mindset of the original readers, probably virtually all of whom would have accepted a certain level of corporal punishment as a regrettable but unavoidable evil, particularly for boys. From our modern perspective where even milder forms of corporal punishment, such as smacking a child, are frowned upon if not downright illegal, I suspect we’re even more horrified about the young David’s treatment than were his original readers. (Interestingly, in the U.K., smacking is illegal in Scotland and Wales but not in England.) It’s noticeable that Dickens is at pains to point out that the punishments meted out to David and the boys at Salem House are unwarranted, and they are beaten whatever their behaviour. Presumably, his original readers would not have been so sympathetic about corporal punishment following genuinely bad behaviour.

I'm thinking about that lack of discreet symbolism - I think David is so involved in this story that that lack of discretion is part of his authentic voice.

It seems to work to give comedy. For those he likes a sort of comic sentimentality -- for others it gives them a comic ridiculousness. And in a way it seems part of defending the values of his dream.(There are two words i don't want to mention yet about that.)

It's also a sort of poetic view - he's mentioned at least twice I think moments that strike him as he falls asleep. I begin to wonder if your (his) poetry has been attacked by a uncompromising and hostile prose of the world if to defend it you have to let it go on the attack like this, and this knowing use of it in a way stops it becoming delusional, it's been challenged to become an active sort of love and discrimination of what is not. It's central to who he is (?) and something he seems able to control, yet healthily and rather fun-ly is able to indulge. If he used it discreetly we'd not be so engaged with him in his world, but more distant. It's very subjective yet honestly so. ETA -- and he cannot afford to be more discreet, its a battle for survival?

>56 arubabookwoman: How old was I? Well if my dreams are any indication - I had the same dream over and over again till I was about 9. I was in one end of the pool, my sibs on the other, and I tried to walk to them. Never got there of course. When I mentioned this at dinner to my family, they gasped: apparently when I was 2 I was indeed in the shallow end of a neighbors pool,and next thing they knew I was under water. Neighbor pulled me quickly out and was able to get me breathing(not sure what the equivelent of CPR was in 1959... but it worked. Never had that dream again.

Enjoying everyone's thoughts about the early chspters. I am not a wholehearted Dickens fan, but I do love David Copperfield. Sometimes when I can't sleep, I imagine myself in Mr. Pegotty's house.

I remember having my adenoids out at age 3. The smell of ether is burned into my olfactory memory.

Earliest memory... that's complicated.

Somewhere in elementary school is probably the valid answer for me. I think I may be remembering some earlier ones (being 3 years old and walking with my grandfather (who died the same year) for example or a birthday celebration in kindergarten) but... I am not entirely sure how much it is a memory and how much it is reconstruction based on being told the story very often.

On the other hand, I rarely remember what I ate for lunch yesterday unless I really think about it so... my memory is not really that reliable for everyday occasions (books, study and work-related things are a different matter).

BTW did anyone read the preface that Dickens wrote? Its a love letter to writing

It would concern the reader little, perhaps to know how sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two years imaginative task; or how an author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, whena crowd of creatures of his brain are going from him for ever. Yet, I have nothing else to tell; unless indeed I were to confess that no one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than have believed it in the writing.

Instead of looking back I will look forward. I cannot close this volume more agreeably to my self than with a hopeful glance towards the time when I shall again put forth my two green leaves once a month, and with a faithful remembrance of the genial sun and showers that have fallen on these leaves of David Copperfield, and made me happy.

Reminds me, as a reader, when I close those leaves and am still in that world and characters, and how long it takes me to wake up to the real world again, sorrowfully.

>59 rhian_of_oz: I also love that description! That might have described some of the nuns I had for teachers in elementary school.

>70 cindydavid4: I’ve been reading wondering how much of that is promotion and how much is sincere. 🙂

maybe, but I don't think at that point he needed promotion; Id like to think he would be sincere. But then I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt.

>70 cindydavid4: It’s not in my books as it is only in the bound versions. Thanks for reminding me that it exists. :)

The cheap (maybe it was free) kindle version I started with had an 1850 preface and then an 1867 version, which simply restated it (literally) and added a bit saying it was still true. So I think sincere. I migrated to a penguin version though, which only had the first.

Chapters 3 & 4

The image of Peggoty's family living in the old boat stranded on the beach is one that has stayed with me over the years since I first read this, and which still appeals.

And I think I'm going to start using the term "gormed." "Nobody had the least idea of the etymology of this terrible verb passive to be gormed, but that they all regarded it as constituting a most solemn imprecation."

The description of Miss Murdstone's eyebrows meeting over her large nose "as if, being disabled by the wrongs of her sex from wearing whiskers, she had carried them to that account." And the description of her and everything about her as "metallic," embellished with "numerous little steel fetters and rivets," and "stringing steel beads."

And now the Murdstones have succeeded in sending David away.

>76 arubabookwoman: gormed

Thanks to Dickens, it made it into the OED! They have four non-Dickens citations, the earliest being from Punch in 1883.

Etymology: Shortened < God damn.

>76 arubabookwoman: >77 thorold: My Oxford World Classics edition has a footnote for gormed giving it as 'damned' One of the many East Anglian dialect words, derived both from Moor's Suffolk Words and Phrases, and, probably from Dickens' own record.
It appears to follow along the same theme as >77 thorold:

It also gives further dialect references for language in David Copperfield in the Times Literary Supplement 30 April 1949, and the 1981 introduction to the Clarendon edition by Nina Burgis

On a lighter note, I wonder how this could connect to one of my favourite words: gormless

>65 SandDune: I suspect we’re even more horrified about the young David’s treatment than were his original readers.
I'm wondering if the original readers were all that horrified: 'Spare the rod and spoil the child' would have been a widespread belief. Not all children were physically disciplined, but it was pretty common. I think what might have been more horrifying was the severity of a particular physical punishment, rather than the broader idea. I think the fact that legislation had to be introduced against the practise indicates it was widespread.

>66 tonikat: I think David is so involved in this story that that lack of discretion is part of his authentic voice.
I like that idea.

>70 cindydavid4: My edition has that preface and it is lovely.

deleted this to repost where it should have gone - the Victorian Tavern

Read up to the end of Chapter Ten.

Another quote that amused me:

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 do love Davy's earnestness and positive outlook despite his circumstances. Though possibly by the title of the next chapter, I begin Life on my own Account, and don't like it, that doesn't last.

I have not read any Dickens recently and so it took a little time for my head to get in tune with the pace of the novel. When Dickens paints a picture (in words)of a person or a particular place, he does it fairly thoroughly. If you were directing a film of the story you could just follow Dickens prose, almost job done.

I have read the first three chapters. It seems very autobiographical with the story teller intervening from the standpoint of a man remembering his childhood. Already some great characters emerging, but not really David himself.

I had to find out what a "caul" was and as this occurred on the first page, it slowed me down at once.

My edition has a heading on every second page which points to the subject of the text: very useful

>79 tonikat: -- oh dear I posted that on the wrong thread, will report on the Victorian Tavern.

eta - reposted!

>65 SandDune: etc. punishment — Dickens seems to be objecting in the first place to the bullying, arrogance and lack of empathy here, adult men victimising those weaker than themselves purely to reinforce their own sense of righteousness and power. His villains are almost always bullies of one sort or another.

>78 SassyLassy: gormless — No obvious connection, sadly — apart from one being Suffolk and the other Northern, gormless comes from Old Norse gaum, meaning sense or wit. Emily Brontë seems to have been responsible for popularising it outside Lancashire and Yorkshire, so it's just about possible that Dickens might have had it in the back of his mind when he wrote "gormed", though.

>83 thorold: >78 SassyLassy: I just happened to be reading Knausgaard's The Morning Star last night and I came across the word "gormless." I didn't go to look it up, but assumed it was related to Dickens's "gormed." So thanks for that clarification!

>84 arubabookwoman: Gormless - I think it's actually a much more fun word, unless of course it's aimed at me.

I just finished chapter 8. A chapter in which I recognised how it and some of the other chapters (all?) flow so beautifully from the start -- the writing is so wonderful, it carries you (me) - barely have I started than I am halfway through. And then the chapters seem to turn, as this one of course does. It's not that it is an easy read, but there is something easy about reading it even when it tackles difficult things, though then maybe I stop and start more as I did in the second half of this chapter. That's my experience, or some of it, i wondered whether anyone else notices these flights in the writing, I find wonderful how they carry me.

Read up to the end of Chapter Sixteen

I am enjoying how well Dickens pulls off the naive child voice with there being no obvious or overt nods to adults knowing exactly what's going on. I'm not explaining this very well.

I'm referring to how he describes the situation with Mrs Strong and her cousin Jack Maldon. It's as clear to the audience what is going on as it's not clear to David. But it's not delivered in a 'nudge nudge wink wink' manner.

As a contrast, I believe The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is an example where the naive child is not done well, but is heavy handed and unsubtle.

Up to Chapter XXI

This rereading has been a joy so far, reacquainting myself with all the characters. I had completely forgotten Dickens's wonderful portrayal and sympathetic portrayal of Mr Dick.

>86 tonikat: I'm finding the same kind of reading experience, though I couldn't have described it as well. I keep ignoring other things I'm supposed to be reading in favour of David. This reread is a close one, an indulgence, no scanning here.

>87 rhian_of_oz: Annie Strong and Jack definitely, but also the same situation of the reading audience seeing what's going on when David has tea with Uriah Heep and his mother, and David says watching it was like watching a ball being tossed back and forth. David at least escapes being the object with the Jack Maldon situation conversations.
I haven't read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, so will have to think of a heavy handed comparison for my reading.

I had a few days of comparative stuckness - around the chapter of his time in London - but have come unstuck yesterday evening and this morning and just finished chapter xiv. I'm glad to hear >88 SassyLassy: thank you, though i have a high opinion of your powers of description.

During those fallow days when i wasn't thinking of anything much i did think about how tuned Dickens was to an idea of a person being an english person -- to a sort of image of ourselves as a yeoman (woman) villager, or maybe to say it better to being a gentleperson, and how often he is ironic about this as hard to achieve, not a natural state. I was also very taken by the note in my copy about David's father's books, about how Dickens had read many of those as a child. And I wondered if that image was conveyed in those books (I have not read many of them from the C18th myself). So it made me think a bit on this as a political/social sort of comment, but also a comment as to earlier novels compared to his own. A similarity of theme struck me - a sort of English dream of a place in the world, with Great Expectations. Both of them childish ideas of this. David's sense of shame at his fall in the world is very powerful, and that sense of differentiation of himself from this milieu isn't one given before, is it? No sense of it in Yarmouth? Some awareness with Mr Mee? But of course central to all his readers lives.

In the recent chapters I also found very powerful as a motivating image that which sustained him to Dover - it is a small touch but seems so true of a time of such challenge.

I've never read this before, but have seen the recent film (which I liked a lot). In the film i don't think they explained much about the Charles I aspect of Mr Dick. I will love him (Dickens) and Betsy Trotwood forever for her presentation of understanding of such an issue.

Saturday night i finished chapter 9, which finished installment 3 - ending with the funeral.

>89 tonikat: one thing I noticed about those books is that they were all written by men. No Austen, for example. But without a clear date, not sure how Austen would fit into his father’s reading. Perhaps his father never had a chance to read her.

>90 dchaikin: there was a point made by one of the notes in my edition, about how Steerforth I think feminised David. But for me the issue was much more that he sought male role models. Maybe that would have impacted which books he would read. But maybe too, gender impacted which books his father would have.

>91 tonikat: "Feminised"? Would be interested to know when those notes were written. One of the benefits of moving away from binary gender ideas is that we need not put things into "masculine" and "feminine" buckets all the time. I agree with you that Copperfield can be read as young David's persistent search for strong parental role models (his mother is quite passive), often disappointing ones.

>92 nohrt4me2: Penguin classics, kindle edition:

1. Arabian Nights of it: Already alluded to in the description of Peggotty’s boat and in ch. IV, in The Arabian Nights Shahrazad tells stories night after night to save herself from death from her husband, King Shahriyar. Note the importance of narrative as deferring death, and the feminization of David by Steerforth.

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield: Personal History of David Copperfield (Penguin Classics) (p. 948). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

revised ed. 2004

I do see some point to it -- but think youngest boy at the school, no male role models, vulnerability and possibly keeping a bully happy, all at least as relevant.

Chapter XXXIX

This doesn't relate to a particular incident in the novel, but it occurred to me that Dickens is often accused of padding his novels to make them longer and thus have more instalments available for publishing.

As I have been reading David Copperfield this time around, I have wondered what exactly might have been cut while still managing to leave the story intact. I haven't found anything, and was wondering if anyone else had any other ideas about this.

>90 dchaikin: I think that the books David's father had are of a type, the adventurer kind of book, 'boys' own', used to give David a sense of going out into the world. Had there been books by female authors, this aspect of his character development might not have worked out as well. It just occurred to me now.

>91 tonikat: >92 nohrt4me2: I'd agree that David is seeking male role models, somewhat desperately at times. However, I think Steerforth is infantilising David (if that is a word) without any particular gender in mind. In his attempt to be seen as a man of the world, even while in school, reducing the boys around him to small children is one way to do this.

The Victorians were very big on the symbolism of flowers, devoting many dictionaries and books to interpreting messages in flowers based on the type of flower, and even the colour within a particular variety (red rose vs white for instance). While my flower books are currently in piles while their room is being painted, so I can't get at the full version, daisies do stand for youth and innocence, so not a bad choice for a nickname for David.

>94 SassyLassy: I noticed at the end of Davy's boarding school year the book got random, and things were just sort of dropped in, and I couldn't help imagining Dickens pushing himself to fulfill his installment commitment and just adding adventures. Actually I find myself really curious about how he met these deadlines. Some chapters just don't flow, and others (chapter 10) are quite wonderful and hit all the right notes, and I wonder if he just hit flow for some installments and not others.

So - Micawber goes bankrupt in chapter 11 - coincidence? (not sure a US legal makes sense here, but I looked and couldn't find a date for the US legal code)

A line i liked, on Mr. Barkis's wooing:

"But I could not help observing that he seemed to think he had hit upon a wonderful expedient for expressing himself in a neat, agreeable, and pointed manner, without the inconvenience of inventing conversation."

I'm up to the end of Chapter 15, we've just met Uriah Heep and Agnes.

It was great to meet the Micawber family again, although they somehow seem to have got smaller since I first read the book, and the horror of the bottle factory also seems to take up much less space than I remember. It's really striking when I read it now, how the main thing David complains about there is not the physical work or the rat-infested building, but having to associate with lower-class co-workers.

Interesting that Dickens makes a point of Mrs Micawber's constant breastfeeding — as he also talked about David's mother feeding her baby — evidently that was one aspect of physicality that Victorian readers were not allowed to be too squeamish to notice.

The Orfling I remembered as being a significant character, but actually we hear almost nothing about her, and it's only Dickens's repeated harping on the nonstandard word she uses to describe herself that makes her stand out. Interesting to see that the OED records "orphan" and "orphelin" as two separate English words, with different etymology (one direct from Latin, the other via French).

Miss Betsey is quite something — I'd forgotten what a one-woman feminist movement she is, with her lack of concern for public opinion and the surreptitious masculine touches in her costume. She reminds me of the 1890s generation of old ladies who were still around when I was a child, tough characters who'd grown up in a time when there weren't enough young men to go round (but maybe that was just me projecting her features onto the people around me at the time when I first read it...).

>95 dchaikin: Fun! But from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_in_the_United_States it looks as though the current terminology in the US only dates from 1978. And a modern American Micawber would presumably fall under Chapter 13, anyway...
Presumably Micawber would have been applying to the court under the Insolvent debtors' act 1813 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolvent_Debtors_(England)_Act_1813)

Out of curiosity, I looked up which entries in the OED cite David Copperfield — there are 185 citations from 177 entries, from accident ("‘accidents will occur in the best regulated families") to Yarmouth bloater.

Dickens is cited in the dictionary a total of 9208 times, in 6523 entries (210 times for the first use of a word), making him sixteenth in their league table of sources, just behind Dryden, and three places ahead of the Bible (https://www.oed.com/sources).

Given that he wrote about twenty full-scale novels, that could mean that Copperfield is only about half as linguistically inventive as we would expect for an average Dickens novel. Pickwick Papers is his most-cited work, and gets 972 citations in 861 entries, so the real explanation for that discrepancy is probably simply that the dictionary looks for the earliest example of a particular use of a particular word, and Dickens must have established his linguistic oddities at the beginning of his career and stuck to them. (Although oddly enough Our Mutual Friend is second, which rather undermines that theory...)

Words that appear for the first time in Copperfield include gorm as a verb (see above), ruler as a verb (to hit with a ruler), and Suffolker. Nothing very spectacular.

>96 thorold: thanks for all that in both posts. I was under the impression that chapter 11 was revised in 1978, not created then. But I might be mistaken.

As a follow up- I found that the 1978 law revamped an 1898 law - and an old chapter 11 was incorporated into the new chapter 11. But I suspect the phrase postdates the 1978 law.

https://www.bankruptcydata.com/a-history-of-bankruptcy

>96 thorold: Interesting background on "orfling." I had just assumed it was a mash-up of orphan and foundling.
I also had thought the bottle factory section was longer, but wonder if I'm confusing it with other writings about Dickens' own experience, perhaps taken from the Forster biography.

I completed chapter xxi last night.



So, I am seven months into his writing quest. Is there a sense that the nature of the writing changes a bit with the seasons, I wonder it, wonder if I get an edge of it sometimes. Someone has probably researched it. It would be interesting to compare images of nature to wherever he was in this process.

The orfling is interesting - in part as that was his own situation, yet he does not recognise that at all, there seems to be a difference in the nature of their orphaning? Had she lost her parents even earlier? Part of that also seems possibly related to gender and part to his interpretation of class. Part of me wondered if the word was a reflection on the Micawbers, the sort of thing they would say / get wrong and objectify her that way.

I take the point that his main concern in the bottle factory seems to be about being placed in a class situation that was not his own. But he does not altogether judge or turn his nose up at that situation, I think - he survives and is perceived as different, because he is. He befriends the Micawbers - or is that as they are fallen/-ing in class and so recogniseable somehow? He seems to get along with people ok, to some extent. I loved the 'finest ale' episode - it seemed so true.

But the main thing I take from the bottling episode is a threat to his identity. The book seems to be very much about that - and how identity is best found and known in love.

I don't see him as a class snob -- look at how he loves Pegotty and the Yarmouth crew? He has no connection really to the Bottling people - he's been placed there in an act of hate really, an attempt to be rid of him and to deny that identity - and he's lost his claim on his inheritance (no wonder he is focused on his standing and position). He has no experience of a city working class mileu like this really either. It is not who he is. Look at how he stands out over the finest ale episode - yet is served beer by default in the inn in Yarmouth (I don't think it can have been as it was unusual to give beer to a child - but could learn more of that).

Love seems taken right out of the equation in London - at best he get's its replacement, respect. It's with the Micawbers that he gets a taste of love amidst their mixed up feelings.

There are also a string of other characters that seem to have lost one parent - Steerforth, Agnes, Mrs Strong and now Steerforth's cousin. I'm wondering if they all compensate in some way to find love / be worthy of it / to know where they stand in life.

Not much is said of it but Copperfield seems to me to be most unlike himself really in how he treats the Orfling in that he does not get to know her, he usually appreciates something about almost everyone around him, it seems - does he almost suggest there is nothing to know (is that what he sees as special about her)? Is he scared of her and what she represents, lost in many ways, with no footing. Does he have no energy to love(?) someone that needs as much as he does in London? and is so alien and yet so close to home? Looking back that parting from the Orfling is the preceding paragraph to his resolution - he doesn't connect them, but does her situation (together with the Micawber's departure) make him come to this choice? (though he says he 'had' already decided.) To go to find someone that does not know him at all, but still may know him for who he really is?

Maybe there is an element of the snob in him that comes out of this situation - and he's a young person. He mentions some of the men at the factory calling him david, which seems to be a step in acceptance - maybe he doesn't know hwo to be with that. there is a theme to the book of how people are isolated maybe in their manners which can be linked to class and also by what they are ignorant of - we have Uriah Heep of course but also 'bold' David and the elder Miss, or Micawber who seems so unknowing of how to find work and do it, or Murdstone and his closest relatives.

I'm thinking about how happy Dickens also says he was writing this book - and will have to think about himself also finding himself in doing so, maybe.

edit - is the Orfling trapped in the name given her? Do we see a lot of people trapped in others misunderstandings, or their own misunuderstandings of others understandings? the happiest people so far don't seem to do it at all? David in London had a trap foisted on him, a lot in life that was not what he expected nor true to who he had been.

>100 tonikat: I'm only through Chapter 15, but that covers about everything in your post. I was surprised how distant we are kept from the orfling, who remains ever as much an object as a person (unless she comes back). And yet, her situation couldn't have been all that much different than Davie's except that he wasn't employed by the Micawbers...which is a key difference within the household. He got such a warm goodbye. If+ she got one too, we certainly didn't see it.

>100 tonikat: >101 dchaikin: No, I’m sure you’re right that David isn’t a snob, but class is the only thing he’s got to hold onto in his identity, so he is very anxious about preserving difference. The Peggoty clan always treat him with a kind of amused deference, in the proper servant/rustic manner, so they are no threat to him, but the bottling factory people are from a layer of society that doesn’t do deference and has learnt to hate any kind of privilege, and David is scared of sinking into that and never getting back (as Dickens must have been when his parents were in the Marshalsea).

Notice how he gives the Orfling a tip when they say goodbye: he cares about her, but he’s also establishing that he’s the gentleman and she’s the servant. And he has a family to fall back on somewhere, even if it’s tenuous and a long way away. She only has the parish, and it’s pretty obvious what a dire prospect that is from the way she sticks to the Micawbers even when she knows they can’t pay her.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the beer anecdote: I think the point must be that there’s nothing especially adult about drinking beer (water wasn’t safe), but that it’s still incongruous for a small boy to want to drink good (presumably stronger?) beer. And it was probably a version of something that actually happened to Dickens during his roaming-the-streets period.

Just finished DC this evening. Will post thoughts later. I'm so happy I took the time to reread it from cover to cover.

>102 thorold: In my edition, there is an Appendix A, which is a fragment of Dickens's unfinished autobiography, used by John Forster in his Life of Charles Dickens, the first biography, in which he says the ale incident was recounted. It seemed almost as if he was so desperate for human company that this was a way to obtain it.

Crossposted from my CR thread

These are my thought on completing the novel. There aren't any real spoilers here, but if you are reading David for the first time, you may want to skip it for now.



David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
first published in serial form May 1, 1849 to November 1, 1850
this Oxford edition published 1999 based on the first one volume edition
finished reading January 23, 2022

The basic plot of David Copperfield is well known. There are many reviews documenting it on LT, so this won't be another. Instead, it's my thoughts on how the novel has changed for me over the years through five readings.

My grandmother gave me an older Oxford edition when I was nine years old, just a little older than David was when he was sent to school and then to the factory. I saw the world through David's eyes. I would have been duped as he was duped. If David worshipped Steerforth, I would too. When he spent time in Mr Peggotty's boat, I compared his room to my own little room at my grandmother's when winter storms howled in along the Clyde. Uriah Heep was repulsive, but for no reason I could pin down. Mr Micawber was a hopeless buffoon. Barkis was a one liner.

My first reread was at thirteen or fourteen. My focus was that of a girl in her early teens. I wanted to think there would be someone to love me as David loved Dora. Em'ly was interesting, but a hopeless case, and Agnes was just too goody-goody. She should never have been the second Mrs Copperfield. For that matter, David should never have remarried.

The third reading was about ten years later, this time from a strong feminist perspective. Betsy Trotwood, a favourite through all readings, shone out. Unsurprisingly, Dora was reduced to zero. Agnes advanced based on her life of study. Little Em'ly was seen as the victim she was.

Reading number four was a summer read; the kind where you want something familiar to carry along. This time, context and setting played a much larger part, especially as seen through the very real plight of the Micawbers. Mr and Miss Murdstone came into focus more, rather then just being summararily dismissed as evil.

This fifth reading was every bit as enjoyable as the first. There was no motive for the read other than the pure pleasure of it. Dickens has been acused of padding, but I couldn't see any story line which could have been left out without detriment. I was struck by the adult David, looking back at how his"undisciplined heart" had led him through his early life. Now he was a disciplined adult reflecting on his life, and the earnestness, the diligence, and the discipline he had acquired were well earned.

In his introduction, Andrew Sanders says ‘In many ways the novel is a key text of mid-Victorian civilization, a text in which the self fashioned hero is redefined for a post-Romantic generation. Shorn of his solitary quest, of military enterprise, and of religious zeal, if not of his earnestness, the modern hero is now required to find his field of action in the professional, domestic, and the social spheres.’ David certainly managed that, but best of all he did it while remaining open to all.
___________

The cover portrait is Portrait of the Artist's eldest Son, John Charles by John Constable, 1830

>104 SassyLassy: Wow, thanks, maybe I had heard this in the dim past. The pose of it somehow seemed true. Also noting his alienation from others, perhaps due to his manners in part - and the dangers of respect never mind love without his social foundation securing him.

>105 SassyLassy: wonderful thoughts -- this is a book I am sad not to have had such an ongoing relationship with.

Life has derailed my further progress in the last two days.

>105 SassyLassy: Interesting how some books become completely different stories, depending on where we are in life.

Re Sanders observation: Interesting! I can't think of an earlier English-language protagonist who has to navigate life in the Industrial Age. I don't recall reading in pre-Victorian lit so much detail about money: How much David makes, how much he needs, how much he spends, who wants his money, who is giving him money, how much money he might inherit or marry into, who is demanding money, how much money David might inherit. Everybody is connected with money and David's fortune somehow. We even get that great description of Miss Murdstone's purse to keep us focused on money. And, arguably, Heep, the worst villain, is an accountant. It's like reading a ledger with a plot!

>107 nohrt4me2: Well, in pre-Victorian Pride and Prejudice we know exactly what Darcy, Bingley and even Mr Bennet earn per year; what each of the Bennet girls will bring to the marriage when they marry; how much Georgiana Darcy is to inherit, which tempts Wickham to elope with her; how much Miss King is to inherit (who Wickham attempts to marry); how many windows Lady Catherine's Rosings Park has and how much each window costs; how Darcy has to pay off Wickham and all of Wickham's debts to get him to marry Lydia; and of course the entire story all stemming from Mrs Bennet needing to marry off her daughters because of the entail, so that they are provided for when Mr Bennet dies. Money makes the Hertfordshire world go 'round...

>108 kac522: Yah, but none of that takes place in the world of the Industrial Age, in which people have to find their way in a world without inherited wealth or by making a living off farmland, the military, or the church.

>109 nohrt4me2: Yes, well I suppose pre-Victorian is pretty much pre-Industrial age, so that would make sense. So it would be hard to find a book with those themes.

>107 nohrt4me2: >108 kac522: Jane Austen did have a very acute ear and eye for all things related to income and expenditures as you say. I think a lot of the incomes though were not earned, but were rather in the form of annuities and other investments. These gentlemen were not actually going out to work each day. I'd have to look back to check for sure though, that's just a notion.

David and other Victorian characters are actually earning money from employment, be it legitimate or otherwise. That's not to say there still weren't people with independent means. It would be an interesting study to see where and when the change took place in literature between these two types of income. I'll have to start watching for that!

>111 SassyLassy: Wordsworth was quite focused on establishing an income so that he could then write - and Coleridge had the problem solved for him by a grant of sorts by the Wedgewoods I think.

>111 SassyLassy: Yes, there are only a few men earning money by "working" as we know it; Bingley's father earned his income by "trade", but Bingley does not need to. Elizabeth's uncle, Mr Gardiner, is an attorney in London. So there are people who earn money by working, but they are few and far between, and their social status is not on the same level.

And of course people who had enough education to write books prior to the Victorian era probably were not factory workers or laborers. Dickens is the exception to this, and that is what makes his experiences and observations all the more remarkable. He is a gentleman's son and eventually receives some education, but has worked in a factory and visited his father in the workhouse. Similar to his characters David Copperfield and Amy Dorrit, he has a foot in each world.

Finished to the end of chapter 42 and just wanted to say "boo hiss!" about Uriah Heep.

I've not made much more progress. But I was just thinking of how some of David's escapades are sort of presented in a tone of how they are the follies of youth, to be expected of a young chap. Yet I might also think they are a bit more than that and what occurred to me is also how much they show he's missing a guiding male influence. He's described as "bold" by that elder sister he was infatuated with, but how excruciating a mistake he made and to be invited later to stay with them - he seems to have no idea at all of what was really going on. The fighting with the butcher too. Then that makes me think hwo though he stays with lovely people that Mr Whickfield gets sozzled nightly over his grief -- and as for his aunt she sends loveably nutty Mr Dick to see him weekly. I'm suddenly seeing this as a book about how he finds a way despite sort of lacking anyone firm, maybe Agnes (interesting name) is there for him - but in a way there's always a distance between him and others (even Pegotty, and his mum there became a distance) - and of course he spends a lot of time tryign to breach this distance. And he manages actually very difficult situations and people by seeing the best in them . . . would it be too much to say he puts into them what he needs? And that of course is what they need, to be seen as if they've given him what he wants, what perhaps they know they lack?

I'm stalled at being about to throw his bachelor pad party for Steerforth -- oh it hurts too much to think of (and maybe i have seen something of this before), I must face it, but it hurts. I'll take these thoughts on to his further development.

But that tone is interesting - it suggests older David uses it to describe his scrapes - but at the same time Dickens may be suggesting how much he doesn't realise he has missed and maybe boundaried differently from others under closer supervision. Which suggests Dickens was aware of this (or does it?).

>115 tonikat: ...he manages actually very difficult situations and people by seeing the best in them . . . would it be too much to say he puts into them what he needs? And that of course is what they need, to be seen as if they've given him what he wants, what perhaps they know they lack?

I'm thinking about this with regard to Mr Dick, where David has to come up with ways to keep him calm, but yet is rewarded by Mr Dick giving him just that and more when David is with him. This seems to be the case with Tommy Traddles too, but then Tommy is able to mature as David matures. Did David have a hand in that? I would think to a certain extent just by being a constant, as we would say now, 'being there' for him.

With Mr Wickfield, it seems to me that the older David recounting his story recognizes the drinking problem, and does an excellent job of having the younger David report it, without necessarily recognizing it for what it is, and for the terrible toll it will take.

Oh, that party for Steerforth - I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on it, and whether it was necessary for David's development, and for their future relationship.

Agnes (interesting name) I had the same thought and think it is the best name for her for all the things it would have represented to Victorian readers.

Of course I'm only 1/3 of the way through -- but the Micawber's especially Mr Micawber also seem to gain from his acceptance.

Uriah Heep is different, though he's not been a uge part just yet - but he doesn't really give anything for David to respond to positively anyway.

I also wonder now if David also does this for himself in some ways, sort of nurtures or soothes himself. A word I didn't mention earlier was trauma in relation to him, but that is what it seems to me. He seems to hold onto a dream of what is good.

And i wonder if David and the well named Agnes have a reciprocal relationship in this way, for reciprocal reasons.

I finally got passed the party -- oh visions of nights out -- but, reading on to the next party along and inviting uriah home for coffee -- i wondered if all Bond villain conversations where instead of doing him in they talk about the grand plan were related to this? Or perhaps it goes back further? Whatever, it creeped me out, he is a rather good writer, i mean he has everything, the vision and wisdom and the pen. I wondered if for the party part I have seen soemthing in tv as their are specific views of his rooms i have, but not uriah in the parlour, so vivid.

>116 SassyLassy: Wondering at your comment on the significance of the name Agnes. Does it have a special meaning (especially to Victorians)?

Agnes denoted purity and chastity, later a certain seriousness was also associated with the name.
This purity and chastity set her apart from the early slights on the character of Annie Strong (later corrected), and the seriousness from the insipidness of Dora.

I sometimes think that the association with the homophone agnus (lamb) plays a part in the naming of some characters, but not with this particular Agnes; she is too strong in her own way.

>120 SassyLassy: Thanks. I had actually thought of the connection with angus (lamb) in religion.

I read Agnes as also meaning holy as well as pure. Then too the homophone and association with agnus especially comes in.

I'm even more taken with that by this latest chapter of their meeting in London.

Meaning of names:

Agnes recalls agnus dei, "lamb of God," the symbol of sacrifice and salvation in a Christian context.

Agnes = "lamb." Dora = "gift." Emily = "one who strives."

Does that open up anything? Dora is a rather fleeting gift. Emily strives to move beyond her social position.

But these seem more like interesting coincidences.

I wasn't having a problem. Agnes strikes me as more than coincidence. I've not considered the others. But isn't Dickens usually quite good with names?

I've been struck this week by how beautiful a name Copperfield is, say if used in poetry or song.

I'm lagging behind as well: I just got to the end of Ch.27 last night (Tommy Traddles and the Micawbers).

I've had similar experiences to what >105 SassyLassy: describes, although not so much with this book, I think I've only read it right through once before. You do notice different things at different ages, and when you get to know a book better, of course. I think what's been striking me most on this read is how much fine shading is involved in David's perception of class. All those observations of the different grades of servants people have, from the Orf'lin to Steerforth's impeccable valet, and the very Victorian business of middle-class people hiring in temporary extras for parties: if you recognise them as local shopkeepers or ticket-porters, the host goes down in status. All straight out of Thackeray and the Book of snobs! (Or the mid-19th century equivalent of Abigail's Party...)

But I was also wondering how much of the creepiness of Uriah Heep simply comes from the way he aspires to a place he's obviously not socially qualified for. If he'd been at school with David, would we be so uncomfortable with the idea of him wanting to marry Agnes?

You're a chapter ahead of me.

In some ways Uriah seems almost political - he understands his position in terms of class. He takes it so seriously he seems to withold himself from others, to impose on himself a more 'umble character, just as the full humanity of those of higher class is withheld from him (I think he feels), he seems to fawn on social graces and observing them. Yet at the same time he seems angry about them and feeling far away from it, so he covets this (and people). Unfortunately for him this is further confused as how he fawns/writhes then seems e.g. to David to speak of him as creaturely and he's quite trapped in himself in a way. Whilst David goes to tea with them there are still many barriers. In some ways if, as I feel, David responds to what he hasn't got and doesn't get from someone by acting as if it is there, in a sort of generosity of spirit (and desperate need) -- then Uriah is opposite, acutely aware of what he doesn't have and isn't getting from people and focused on getting it. Somehow he's exactly someone David cannot work his magic on - and of course he is pictured in the way he is by David himself.

Being seen as sort of half human speaks to me in how some people treat trans people. It also speaks to me in terms of how those who believe they are of a higher class treat those of lower class, even now - and maybe it is a parable in how the way to escape it may not be in terms of accepting its reality.

If Uriah had been even to Salem maybe he'd have found some fellow spirit. Maybe I underrate how much his writhing might still have got in the way.

edit - it'd be interesting to read of Uriah as a counselling client.

It'd also be interesting to read of David as such.

>126 tonikat: Yes, that makes sense. If the novel had been written a hundred years later, Uriah would have been the narrator and David his slightly patronising but well-meaning friend.

>127 thorold: lol

politically it occurred to me it was written in 1849/50 of course, an interesting time.

>125 thorold: If he ‘d been at school with David he wouldn’t be the angry, calculating person he is, or at least he wouldn’t need to hide it under unctuous sycophancy. David is deeply wounded by being “unclassed” as a wine merchant’s employee, as Dickens was in real life when his father placed him in a blacking factory, but this did not give him any sympathy with those who aspired to rise above their station.

I don't want to say too much given where you are in the story (and assuming you haven't read it previously), but the problem with Uriah Heep isn't that he has ambition above his station, but more what he is prepared to do to achieve his goal.

Dickens is really good at including physicality in his descriptions of people, perhaps nowhere better than with Uriah Heep. All this writhing, and the long lean body with unpleasing colouration, make me think of a snake trying to shed its skin, which is what Uriah is trying to do with himself; shed one iteration for another one that he thinks will fit him better. Writhing was also connected to ideas of madness at the time, and Uriah's ideas of where he wants to go were positively mad to contemporary readers.

>125 thorold: If he'd been at school with David, would we be so uncomfortable with the idea of him wanting to marry Agnes?
In Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady, there is a beautiful but horribly disfigured man, Miserrimus Dexter (another great name), who is well off and brilliant, but nobody is willing to marry him because of his appearance and mental instability, which increased gradually over the novel.

While I think readers would shudder still at the idea of Uriah marrying Agnes, if he had a similar background to David, Agnes herself would have had the fortitude to resist. However, there would be other women from her background who unfortunately would succumb to parents telling them to marry him despite their repulsion.

>127 thorold: Terrifying thought!

Just finished Chapter 27 (or XXVII) and the reacquaintance with Traddles and others. And I’m of course thinking through these thoughts on Uriah Heep too. His physical description warps perspective, the snake outside coloring the snake inside. I keep wanting to improve him physically, just for fairness sake. But if he’s a cute young man outside, would we like him more or hate him more? He’s snaky exterior generates some sympathy. I mean, how would you handle his situation? There isn’t a good answer even if we don’t like his answer.

David is too kind to Miss Murdstone.

>123 nohrt4me2: this is helpful

>131 SassyLassy: oh, that's very good about Uriah trying to shed his skin like a snake!

In case anyone wonders where I got lost in the last weeks, I am not commenting because I am still at chapter 4 (mainly because new shiny books get my attention). Should be catching up and commenting shortly.

On the other hand, I stopped after the first installment, as a reader at the time would have done and Dickens really masters the craft of writing in installments - there are hints that things are not going to go as before and that much worse times are coming but not just how bad it will be. I plan to read with the installments in mind - the text's cliff hangers are there - they just tend to get resolved very fast in the next chapter so if you do not stop, you may miss it :)

Wikipedia has a succinct account of the mysterious Doctors' Commons and what it did here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors'_Commons. The reforms that removed its role in the English legal system started to take effect a few years after Copperfield was published, but they must have been under discussion long before that.

>136 thorold: thanks!

does anyone else struggle with Micawber's legalese and financial thinking? I'm guessing this was meant to be sort of nonsense at the time, and comedy, but wondered if in the end it does make any sense. Bushels of corn too. I've read it and I have a sense of it, but I'm not entirely sure why, not to mention some of his agreements.

>138 tonikat: “Price of a bushel of wheat” seems to have been used as a kind of generic indicator of economic prosperity in Victorian England, probably similarly to the way people talk about the FTSE or exchange rates nowadays. Mr Spenlow is saying, apparently without any evidence, that if you try to reform Doctors’ Commons you risk damaging the economy. Dickens would be annoyed by people who used it in that facile way, not least because high grain prices were as bad for working people as they were good for landowners. Google “Corn-law reform”.

>138 tonikat: My understanding is that Micawber and his use of language is loosely based on Dickens' father.

>140 kac522: I didn't know that - very interesting, thanks.

>139 thorold: I have gone a bit further forward in the book and was thinking of that. But yes it was used earlier. The Corn Laws, oh dear makes me think of O Levels.

But Micawber's later note I am not sure I have understood exactly how it worked nor Mrs M's plan (whether it would even be practically possible). And I wondered if that was part of the point, that they talk rubbish and misunderstand and so of course they are vulnerable. I don't want to say too much more for spoilers sake. But I also wondered if you untangle it all (the note) if it does make more sense than my general sense of the outcome. Copperfield himself flags the legalese.

I find Micawber's use of such language, like he is born to it in a way and yet clearly doesn't have a grip, to be haunting - and the needing to get a grip of it by showing he sort of understands in a way (like havign done his lines for some headmaster). It struck me, as most sad, literally pathetic. Is he really from a high class, or has he himself over rated his own class background? In some ways he has suddenly made me think of certain tories now, who are expecting to be treated differently or to have their bad actions understood differently from the way the system works.

I wonder if it is ever made clear exactly how Micawber does squander his money. I've not picked up on it so far. Is it that he lives above himself, due to his class background to seek to maintain that? he seems to fall into it almost by his affability and not saying no - and yet there is also a knowingness that it is happening.

But that he will try to speak as he does and claims some status with his language, does speak in a way to David who has his own status issues -- and of course this company must have had some impact on him (it was in that time that he made his request for the finest ale). Perhaps it is part of what led him to throw himself on his aunt, to connect with someone who would know he belonged to that language, together with maybe Mrs M's references to family.

A bushel of wheat would have been one of the standard measures for commodity market prices.

I winced too at "Corn Law Reform"

>141 tonikat: Micawber's florid language is interesting, but I think perhaps as you suggest he overrates his class standing. It's difficult to imagine a true financial person speaking as he does. It does make him sound pathetic as you say, especially combined with the deterioration in his clothing and housing levels over time.

I think perhaps Mrs Micawber, and through her Mr Micawber, overestimate the status of her family, and early attempts to live up to that possibly imagined status have put them in trouble. Speculation using what little money they did have, combined with the ever increasing family size just made things more and more difficult. David never seems quite convinced of Mrs Micawber's former social standing, less and less so as time goes on. The family certainly seems to have written them off/out.

Micawber must have had something though, despite being worn down by the class system, given his ability to succeed once he left England.

In some ways he has suddenly made me of certain tories now, who are expecting to be treated differently or to have their bad actions understood differently from the way the system works. I have more faith in Micawber's nature! The current tories, who would be completely familiar to Micawber, seem to consider themselves completely outside the system, while to me, Micawber is being ground through it.

>142 SassyLassy: I have more faith in Micawber's nature!

that is a nice thought -- I do like him better than they, they are far more knowing yes.
Yet that person hiding from the milk man and watching the stairs, seems a bit different from he whom Copperfield knows.

I wondered if the over estimation of class status is affecting where he has property/rents property and if that in itself is what is making outgoings unmanageable. And beyond that I wondered if his class is making it impossible to be in some neighborhoods, if he is almost scared of them in his pomposity (scared of the truth), or would be rejected from them (or fears that). If so, then he's also not unlike David when he was cast into labouring.

I deleted a thought that people who play money markets say and know them would not tend to speak of how they go wrong in them - he made me think about that.

>141 tonikat: >142 SassyLassy: >143 tonikat: — Sorry about bringing up the Corn Laws: I grew up around Manchester, where those battles of the 1820s and 30s were still a hot topic for a lot of people...

I read Micawber's real problem as being incorrigible optimism. He's constantly spending money he hasn't got yet, because he knows the next big scheme for restoring his fortunes is going to make him rich. And it is probably the need to prove to Mrs Micawber's family that she didn't make a mistake by marrying him that keeps him aiming high, looking for business opportunities rather than mere steady jobs, when obviously the sensible thing would have been to take a post as a clerk long ago. There's that very poignant moment when he's reduced to accepting Heep's offer of a job and Mrs M insists on being reassured that working as a clerk won't injure his prospects of becoming a judge later on, and she's obviously the only person in the room who doesn't see how absurd it is to imagine Micawber completing five years of unpaid pupillage to become a barrister.

Something else that struck me is how the Micawbers were the first people to make friends with David on equal terms and treat him as a responsible adult (when he was about 10 years old!). He's always absolutely loyal to them and values their friendship, despite the fact that he knows they aren't to be trusted with money. And that's the guarantee that reassures us of their social standing.

I got quite hooked yesterday, and I’m now up to the end of Ch. 45.

I’m starting to get intrigued by the parallels between the situation of Annie and Doctor Strong and that of Dorothea and Mr Casaubon, twenty years later. Both learned men engaged in projects that are never likely to be completed, both married to adoring young pupils, and both with a dashing young man somewhere in the picture. But worked out in completely different ways. I wonder if George Eliot had that consciously in mind, or it’s just a coincidence.

>144 thorold: I read Micawber's real problem as being incorrigible optimism. I think I agree. And also a sense of entitlement that is fostered by his wife. I haven't read as far as many people, but I don't see his failure to get on as fostered by the class system at all, and I find it very difficult to believe that he would have got on any better elsewhere. Nineteenth century Britain was a time when the middle classes were expanding hugely so it isn't a time when people (well, men anyway) were necessarily stuck up in one class for life. People moved up (and down).

He reminds me of a man I knew (well I knew his wife) who was made redundant from a pretty high paid professional job about the age of fifty. He could never get another job that fitted with his sense of what he was entitled to, and he wouldn't take the jobs that he could get, and so ended up never working again apart from the odd bit of consultancy, leaving his wife working all the hours God gave to support the family. If it had been my husband I think there would have been an ultimatum ...

At some point in my recent reading Micawber makes a comment about fancying a house in a terrace at the west end of Oxford Street overlooking the park.

I'm not a londoner by any means but to me that meant Mayfair. A quick look at wiki confirms that had the highest status already by the 1820s/30s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayfair
Maybe it is a symptom of utter delusion? But if he has had no part of such a life why would he ever think such would be within his reach?

but then as a non Londoner I also see that west of Oxford street might mean Paddington, which I think may be Marylebone -- maybe more reasonable than Mayfair but still I think quite smart. I found this: "Bentinck Street leaves Welbeck Street and touches the middle of winding Marylebone Lane. Charles Dickens lived at number 18 with his indebted father (on whom the character Wilkins Micawber was based) while working as a court reporter in the 1830s, " (it doesn't overlook the park and is not right to the west of Oxford street) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marylebone

But then spefically the area west of Oxford Street and overlooking the park was an area known as Paddington Estate and later Hyde Park Estate and i wonder if this is what was in mind -- and it seems quite affluent, and imagine was so at the time, Robert Stephenson had lived/lived there. Oh and Thackeray too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyde_Park_Estate -- such specific taste might have been especially humourous to readers then?

His language also makes me think of him as a wreck of some sort. I wonder if in his frustration to be seen as he feels he was if he overstates. David of course is happy to treat him as though he is what he is really quite far from. But I also think of him as someone that has survived a trauma (also like David). SandDune's comment makes me wonder about reaching for history books on the porousness of C19th class in England - I am not sure it will have been terribly porous at all, even with money.

>147 tonikat: I think we were meant to read that as a wildly extravagant bit of optimistic delusion.

From the bits and pieces I’ve read, I’d agree with >146 SandDune: that class boundaries were fairly porous — up to a point. Usually with the proviso that it was only the next generation that would count as really belonging to a higher (or lower) class. David Cannadine is very good on how it worked at the highest levels. The people with the ancient titles and landed estates needed the people with the coal-mines and shipyards, and vice-versa.

I’ve just finished Copperfield — I’ll collect my thoughts a bit before posting about it. But a general thought that occurs to me — not just about this book — is that the Victorian era could have been at least a volume shorter if young men had only learnt that you should always marry the wise sisterly one, not the pretty one with ringlets. And mutatis mutandis(*) for young ladies.

(*) Latin for “change your underpants”, as one of our teachers used to claim

>148 thorold: I have consulted my resident historian, who is refusing to give a definitive answer on the grounds that ‘it’s not his period’. But he did say that he thought that there was more fluidity of class at the beginning of the Victorian period than at the end. I suppose it depends what you mean by changing class as well. A clerk and a barrister would both count as middle class, but they wouldn’t consider themselves social equals.

>148 thorold: yes optimistic delusion - I'm just trying to understand it for some reason, and understand how it looked to readers. After learning Micawber is based on his father and that they lived for a while where they did I wondered if it was something his father might have said. I'm thinking of reading Ackroyd's biography.

I take your point about the next generation and class. And also SandDune yours about the difference between the start and end of the period, that makes a lot of sense.

For some reason I'm thinking of seeing a Question Time in recent years in which an audience member was talking about the 1% -- somehow the conversation identified that he on his income was indeed in the 1%, to his amazement, and that he well out earned at least two of the panel, however his perception that he was not at all included in the elite seemed to stand and I cannot remember anyone even starting to get into that with him.

>146 SandDune: Consensus is that Mr Micawber is Dickens’ father seen from a positive perspective—-an unrealistically positive perspective, probably, given the fairy tale ending to his part in the story. Little Dorrit’s father is the same man seen from the other side—-a deluded n’er-do-well who has dragged his family down with him.

I've posted my review: I don't think there are any real spoilers in it, but those of a sensitive disposition who're still only halfway through might want to skip over this post.

David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens (UK, 1812-1870)

  

Probably Dickens's best-known full-scale novel, and certainly his most personal from the numerous ways it draws on his own early life. We all love it because of the striking, scary childhood scenes: I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had nightmares about Mr Creakle's appalling school, the rat-infested blacking factory, or David's walk from London to Dover. And because — as always with Dickens — it's packed with memorable minor characters, most of them entirely gratuitous. There's absolutely no necessity in the plot for Miss Mowcher to be a dwarf hairdresser, but it wouldn't have been the same book without that. Best of all, of course, are the endlessly lovable Micawbers, the slimy villain Uriah Heep, and the feisty Miss Betsey Trotwood. But they are only the tip of a very large iceberg.

As usual, Dickens manages to get in some house-trained but still quite fierce social criticism, most of all in defence of his idea that childhood should be about fun and discovery, not being "firm" and "earnest" and prematurely taking on adult responsibilities. He also takes time off along the way to bash familiar targets like unregulated private schools, imprisonment for debt, and the continued existence of obsolete parasitic branches of the legal system (Doctors' Commons).

It's harder to get involved with what should be the main channel of the novel, the marriage plot. We know that there's only one way David's story can end, and it's hard not to find his wrong turnings along the way contrived and artificial, and to feel sorry for poor Dora who is so obviously only there in the story on condition that she can be eliminated when no longer convenient. I find myself dreaming up silly alternative endings in which Dora goes off to join Miss Mills in India where she learns to play the sitar in an ashram (David would meet her, many years later, lecturing on Eastern religions). Or Agnes gently refuses to marry David until she's finished her legal studies and taken control of her father's old firm. And it goes without saying that Em'ly really ought to return in triumph to Yarmouth with her Neapolitan husband and horde of bambini, to set up East Anglia's first pizzeria ("La piccola Emilia")...

Crossposted from my CR thread

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

I'm not sure I can describe this any better than the blurb on the back.

It chronicles David Copperfield's extraordinary journey through life, as he encounters villains, saviours, eccentrics and grotesques

This was my first reading of this Victorian classic and I'm not sure there's much I can say about it that hasn't been said better by others (though I must admit it has been amusing to read some of the negative reviews).

Yes it is long, and yes some of the characters aren't very nuanced, but I don't care. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm not sure what I was expecting going in but I certainly wasn't expecting it to be funny. I liked the characters I was supposed to like (seriously how sweet are Traddles and Sophy), and disliked the characters I was supposed to loathe (boo hiss to Uriah Heep). I occasionally had to reread sentences that I didn't parse on the first pass, but at other times his use of language was exquisite.

I'm glad I read it and would definitely recommend it.

>145 thorold: , >148 thorold: Appreciate the comments about marriage.

Thought of Casaubon also, but, yes, whole different outcome where temperaments differ.

"Marrying the sisterly one," yes. I sense that "sisterly," though, refers to someone with good sense willing to lay it on the line for you when you're messing up. The ideal seems to be that a comfortable sense of familial intimacy wears far better than romantic/sexual desire. As the middle professional class grows, a partner who is practical, thrifty, of a similar background, and devoted to maintaining a well-regulated home becomes the ideal.

Victorian poor marriage choice = misery until somebody dies. My sense is that there isn't much Victorian lit that deals with divorce or separation until later in the period, say after 1880.

>154 nohrt4me2: Yes, it’s only really around the time of Trollope that failing marriages are allowed to be centre stage. Although — Dickens slips quite a few in on the sidelines, including Betsy Trotwood here.

The “sisterly” thing also must be tied up with complicated Victorian extended family households. People who aren’t close blood relatives grow up in quasi-sibling relationships and later find themselves being slightly incestuously paired off by the author. Agnes and David, Ham and Em’ly, Pendennis and Laura, Fanny Price and Edmund, Heathcliff and Cathy, etc., etc.

>154 nohrt4me2: >155 thorold: One novel dealing with a terrible marriage would be The Tenant of Wildfell Hall first published in 1848, and later suppressed by Anne's sister Charlotte.

The Bride of Lammermoor, 1819, is also a sad tale, but entirely different circumstances.

Then there are the hidden failures as in Jane Eyre.

No divorces in any of theses, but definite unhappiness.

Bad marriage of course has a long long literary history. Boccaccio’s Decameron simply assumed that _all_ real romance is extra-marital and that this is a standard of (literary?) conventional wisdom.

ETA also see Andreas Capellanus - De Amore - 1186-1190

I guess I'm thinking that bad marriages in Vict lit end only when someone dies, and that they generally support the cheerful thrifty housewife as the marital ideal. And I'm thinking this shift from the cynical "marriage market/cuckold" themes of earlier periods reflects something about an emerging professional middle class. Not tho't thru entirely, just thinking out loud ...

I am way behind (my mood had not been where it needs to be for this kind of prose) so I am now trying for an installment per day - which should get me to the end this month.

I’ve never thought about the installments before and how someone would have read the novel back when it was published that way - so I’ve been trying to take breaks based on that and it had been interesting - highlighting things I was not really seeing as much.

Take installment 9: which can as well be named “Meetings”. Late in the previous installment, David bumped into Agnes (and made an ass of himself). Then in this one, you get in quick succession: fixing things with Agnes, Uriah Heep, Tommy, Uriah sharing his plans for Agnes, Dora, Miss Murdstone, the Micawbers. Up and down and up and down like a rollercoaster. It never registered how fast it really happened until I read it in isolation like that. Or that it went in a bad-good sequence.

>159 AnnieMod: Interesting to see the "bad-good sequence" as you say. I never thought about it until now.
I have been listening, a little at a time, since January and I am on the last CD (#27), so should be done soon.

Finally finished the book so here are some thoughts. I knew most of the plot in outline before I started, as I suspect most people do.

My first encounter with David Copperfield was at a very young age, when I was given it to read by my class teacher at 6 or 7 because I had read all the other books in the class. I think the idea was it would keep me quiet for some considerable time, but I can't remember how far I got. Definitely not to the end! I'm not 100% sure why there were no other books, but it was a brand new school so maybe they hadn't got around to kitting out the library? And since that early introduction there have been any number of T.V. series and films, most recently Armando Iannucci's 'The Personal History of David Copperfield' which I enjoyed a lot. Anyone else see that one?

Anyway some thoughts on the book. One of the reasons that I do enjoy reading older books (apart from the fact that they have stood the test of time) is for the light they shine on what it was like to actually live during the period. What comes over very, very strongly to me in David Copperfield is the importance of choosing the right marriage partner. David's mother gives an extreme example of what can happen to a woman who marries the wrong man, and even such a strong character as David's Aunt Betsy Trotwood can never truly extract herself from the claims of her separated husband. But for the men too, in an economic sense, marrying the right woman is essential. A married couple form an economic unit and there is no safety net if things go wrong. The complete inability of David's wife Dora to manage the household could have reduced them to penury if David's career had not progressed so well, and it is difficult to see how David's friend Traddles, who married on pretty much the minimum for a middle-class life, would have progressed in his career if he'd been married to someone similar, rather than the capable Sophy. I can't help thinking that even Mr Micawber would have got on a great deal better had he been married to a more managing woman than Mrs Micawber, especially to someone who would not have encouraged him in his more fanciful schemes. (And I absolutely don't believe that Mr Micawber would have prospered in Australia - he'd have been up to his ears in debt in no time, just like in London!)

Reading such a long book takes a different attitude. It's perhaps best approached like a soap opera, dipped into on a regular basis, rather then read from cover to cover in one fell swoop. And I suppose that's how the original readers would have experienced it, in instalments. Once I'd got into a more relaxed way of reading I found that its length didn't worry me too much.

So all in all, I enjoyed this quite a lot. I believed in the characters and got emotional about them at all the requisite moments, and even though I knew the outline of the plot, the details kept me interested. I think that I'm coming to appreciate Dickens more as get older.

The narrator for this audiobook was Richard Armitage, who is excellent.

>161 SandDune: 'The Personal History of David Copperfield' which I enjoyed a lot. Anyone else see that one?

Yes! I was familar with the book so was curious what would happen. We were just blown away; was helpful adding new perspective when I read it hear.

>160 kac522: >161 SandDune: I'm wondering how the experience of listening to David Copperfield rather than reading it works, since it was written before well before audiobooks. It's true that some people at the time listened to it as part of a group in the evening with someone reading it aloud, but that allows for group discussion, and it also had the intervals between instalments that the book had when it was first published in serial form.

I'm not saying one format is better than another, just wondering how it worked, especially if you have read part of it. I'd also like to know if the reading was edited in any way.

>163 SassyLassy: I listened to the Librivox version last year. The reader was Irish. Had a very empathetic voice, and also did the various English accents well. I sniffled a little when Dora died, which I would not have done if just reading silently. I hasten to add that on all those tests you can take, I am on the aural and tactile "channels" much more than visual. So hearing a story often pulls me in deeper than reading silently.

>163 SassyLassy: I always read unabridged audio books, so it would have been the original text. My narrator was Richard Armitage and he was excellent: a poor narrator can completely ruin an audiobook. (I remember Girl, Woman, Other being completely ruined for me when the narrator got the North of England accents completely wrong.) I am a great fan of audiobooks though - when I was commuting to work I listened to them a lot. I find that for some books, especially those where you have to really focus on more descriptive passages, they work better than print. Sometimes it's too easy to skim through a print book too quickly where nothing much seems to be happening plot wise. Audiobooks don't work as well where the plot is complex and you start to want to flick back to previous pages to remind yourself what is happening.

I actually think that listening to a Dickens book on audio approaches just as closely to what people would have originally experienced as does reading the book. I'm pretty sure a large number of people would have experienced his work by it being read aloud in a family setting, especially in poorer families.

I've not read any Dickens in a paper copy for a very long time so I can't really compare. Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations are the ones that I have listened to on Audible over the last few years and they all worked well in that format.

Reading a book aloud in a social setting was big in Victorian times, as SandDune points out; the whole family gathered in the parlour for the next instalment of a serialised novel, or a literate friend or fellow-servant shared it with a less-educated audience. We recall in Our Mutual Friend a character praises her son’s efforts at reading the newspaper to her: “He do the Police in different voices.” Dickens of course did his own readings of his novels to large and enthusiastic audiences. He was very attentive to the aural character of his novels. Listening to a Dickens novel as an audiobook reveals a new dimension of his art.

>163 SassyLassy: I loved the audiobook read by Simon Vance (also reads under the name Robert Whitfield). He does all kinds of different voices, and I thought he was particularly effective with his voices for Aunt Betsey, Mr Micawber and Uriah Heep.

As everyone has pointed out, I think the audiobook experience is very close to the reading out loud many people experienced in the 19th century. For myself, I always read the physical book first to get the names, plot, and general idea of the book. My second reading (third, fourth, etc....when it comes to Austen and Dickens!) is usually on audiobook. Sort of like reading the book before watching the movie.

While listening to the audiobook, I'm listening more to the actor's voice (esp. in terms of Vance) and the drama, emphasis, and emotion in each character and in the narrative. Three scenes that I thought Vance did particularly well were: 1) Mr Pegotty's interview with Mrs Steerforth 2) Mr Micawber's "explosion" and 3) a poignant reading of Aunt Betsey's revelation to David about her prior marriage.

I'm also listening to the language and word choice of the text that I probably read too fast the first time--having read the book, on audio I concentrate on the writing, and worry less about whether I miss a detail or two of the plot. When I'm listening to a reading of Dickens on audiobook, I feel so immersed in that world. I only have 1 chapter left for listening, and I'm really going to miss it.

I don’t think that modern authors think about audiobooks more than the Victorians - if anything, it is probably the other way around (even if they did not have the technology back then). The literacy levels during the Victorian period was rising but not that fast and there is a big difference between “I can write my name or write a quick letter” and “i can read a book when I can afford to buy it”. So reading aloud was the way most of these were consumed - and the authors knew that. Audiobooks did not invent anything new when they started appearing - they just allowed the reading to be independent from someone being there to read (the same way how music recording did not invent music).

>163 SassyLassy: As long as the book is unabridged, it is what the edition they read says. That’s important for heavily edited authors (Shakespeare for example) or translations - but for the ones where the text rarely get edited (and that’s most of the Victorians), any copy of the book will have the same text - so the unabridged audio editions will follow that.

I have a few Dickens novels on my audible account not because I plan to listen to the whole of them but because I just like listening in to random parts now and then (I often do that with the paper books when I am home as well). It is different but not worse - both ways have their own charm.

I think we sometimes overestimate the availability of printed material in Victorian times, especially in the first half of the period and particularly for the poorer elements of society. Poorer people wouldn’t be able to purchase the periodicals in which many books were serialised and would have been dependent on them being passed on by their more prosperous friends and neighbours, and they would be passed on again in their turn. So the copy wouldn’t necessarily be in the house long enough for all members of the family to read it individually (even if they could all read). One of the reason that commonplace books were so common in earlier periods is that the owners frequently did not own, or have easy reaccess to, the books or magazines from which they were copying extracts.

When I did my English Literature degree we did a module on the Nineteenth Century novel which included a small section on the process of publishing. One fact that fascinated me was that earlier in the period printers did not have enough type to print the entire book at once (the type was too expensive) even for books that weren’t serialised. So the first section would be proofread and then printed and then the type used for the next section. So it was impossible for the author to ever review their book as a whole once the sections had been printed, and reprinting books for a second edition required typesetting the whole book again. I can’t remember when that changed (because of changes in printing technology) - I have some idea that it was sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century but I could be wrong.

>171 SandDune: Hot-metal typesetting machines didn't come in until the mid-1880s, but there might have been other things going on in book printing.

There are all sorts of technological and social landmarks like that — the appearance of the first free public lending libraries was perhaps one of the biggest (1850s in the UK), but there are also things like machine-made case bindings (from the 1830s) and gas lighting that allowed people to read comfortably outside working hours (from the 1820s). The first large-scale efforts to provide primary education for working-class children started in the 1810s, but compulsory primary education in England didn't come in until 1870. And of course all those things actually penetrated at different speeds in different regions and different social layers. So it's not all that easy to work out under what conditions "typical" early readers of Dickens were reading.

>172 thorold: your mention of typicality sends me on s tangent - one of the things I love in all this is the diversity of people and especially their ways of speech, of living too in a way. It seems to mean they work harder to recognise the humanity of others, but also where they recognise something they cannot be with there is a harshness that may not be intended (e.g aunt b leaving in chapter 1) . It leaves me wondering in our generally better educated yet homogenised world if we are better off -- though totally against any Tory wish to reinstitute unfairness and disparity behind a facade of laws of competition.

I don't know if I've said that well, maybe living in an upturned boat is romanticised here, and maybe all their lives were harsher. And maybe characters like Mr Pegotty are rare.

On an earlier theme of the installments and pausing. Im still at chapter 40. I think in part I'm digesting where I've got to. It occurs to me this may be part of a lot of my pauses with books, though I may need to go backvto them to complete more reliably. Its that thing of when you speak of a book being hard, it may not be the language or ideas, but the emotional journey. I will get going again, I've enjoyed it so much. Though, Dora! Someone else may have said something too, about the tone of voice, sometimes I don't want to be with it, though that is largely my memory caricaturing it, as once you read him he defies easy categorisation of his words, he's more than that memory. Though sadly Dora isn't nor miss Mills, so far, for me.

>172 thorold: all those things actually penetrated at different speeds in different regions and different social layers And with different religious backgrounds. More emphasis on learning to read earlier on in non-conformist communities.

I've finished David Copperfield on audiobook; it was my third reading. What I've been reflecting on this time are the characters who, although flawed and human, do courageous things to help someone else--sometimes big and sometimes small. I'm thinking of (SPOILERS ahead):

--Pegotty doing her best to shelter young David and his mother from the Murdstones;
--Young Tom Traddles speaking up in defense of Mr Mell at school (and getting hammered for it) and older Tom near the end standing by Mr Micawber against Uriah Heep;
--Aunt Betsey's staunch defense of Mr Dick and her willingness to take in a ragged young boy who shows up at her door, despite her own troubles;
--Mr Pegotty's relentless search for his niece (compared to Mrs Steerforth's cold and distant treatment of her son);
--Mr Micawber's explosion, pushed to the brink not by what Heep has done to Mr Micawber, but by what he sees happening to Agnes and Mr Wickfield;
--Mrs Gummidge, who amazingly puts aside her own cares to support Mr Pegotty;
--Martha providing shelter for Emily and tracking down Mr Pegotty and David;
--and of course, Ham's brave rescue attempt.

There are more, but these are the ones that I remember most. Except for Ham, none of these are particularly "heroic" deeds, but they are all small but brave actions done by every day people living in limited circumstances. None of them are rich or powerful. And they aren't done by our narrator--Dickens could have made David the source of all these heroics, but he didn't--they are all actions that David observes and presents to us. So that perhaps we the readers will be moved to step in when someone is being bullied or to take in a lost soul or to support a friend in need or to just do some kind action for someone else, whatever our lot in life.

>175 kac522: I like these observations! Dickens sometimes likes to turn the class stereotypes upside down. The Pegottys are salt of the earth, decent, brave, kind, and loyal. There is a belief in the decency and dignity of all humans that undergirds a lot of his stories.

>175 kac522: I had been thinking along similar lines...

A few more things I've been pondering:
- Most people will be unhappy if a girl is born. How often do we have a character pounce and be disappointed because the baby is a boy?
- When a child becomes an orphan, how often the relative who finally gives them a home in any literary text treats them with respect and make sure they get the best possible education and life and NOT end up abusing them?
- The whole book is a series of redemptions - even the incorrigible rascal Mr Micawber manages to turn his luck around (but not before he does a good deed for other people).
- Could Steerforth have ended up differently if it was not for the two harpies in his house? And would David ended up similar to Steerforth if he had ended up with someone else and not with Betsey?

And then there is Dora. I always had issues reconciling her with everyone else in the novel. She is almost 1-dimensional compared to everyone else (her dog has more character...). But then we only see her through the eyes of an older David, one who loved her and lost her, one who almost went to being sorry for marrying her (although she died before he got to even thinking about it). One who learned that he had always loved another and had to reconcile that with the memory of Dora. So that idealistic and simplified rendering of Dora starts sounding like a protection of her memory and his love; a way to not resent her...

>177 AnnieMod: I think if David had stayed with the Murdstones or on his own in London, he would have turned out more like Steerforth, possibly worse.

However, if David didn't stay with the Murdstones, he most probably would have sought out the Pegottys, since those were the only other people he knew. He doesn't go there initially because he doesn't want to burden them (and he has a relative to go to), but if the Pegottys were his only choice, he would have ended up there. In that case he would have turned out fairly well, I think, even if less educated.

Interesting point about Dora...the more times I read the book, the (slightly) less annoying she becomes, so perhaps that retrospective aspect softens me, too.

After a couple of months of not really getting in the mood for David, I finished the second part of the novel in a few nights... Review below (and in my thread and in the work) for anyone interested - no real spoilers I think...:

This is not the first time I had read David Copperfield, it probably won't be the last either. There is always something new to see and discover - as verbose as Dickens tends to be, he also knows how to use these words and he builds such memorable characters that revisiting them is always bound to make you notice something more about them. As in most of his novels, it is the secondary characters that shine - David and his love life can be dull at times but there is always someone else in the frame - his aunt and Mr. Dick, the Peggotty family and Ms. Mowcher; the Micawbers and Agnes; Emily and Martha. Even the villains are full blooded - cruel, awful and despicable but oh so human. There is only one exception in the whole book and it is Dora - and even that makes sense to some extent - it almost feels like a protection mechanism from an older David who is trying to reconcile the love of his youth with all he had learned about himself - so she needs to become a perfect ghost, a presence which does not contradict his own heart.

One thing I never appreciated was how skillful Dickens is with the timing of the actions in the novel - modern editions rarely mark the serialization breaks. The edition I read had the original layout of the serialization (including the advertisements) and having to stop at the end of each installment (to either look at the ads or leaf through them to get to the next part) made me see the novel in a somewhat new light. It was always a novel of redemption for anyone even remotely good - even the incorrigible rascal Mr. Micawber manages to find his niche. It was always a novel of contrasts - Dora to Agnes, Mr. Murdstone to Mr. Peggotty, Uriah to Mrs. Micawber (in some things anyway - they both kept repeating what they are but only one of them meant it), Betsey Trotwood to Mrs. Steerforth - the more you look, the more pairs you will find. But reading the novel in its original installments added another layer to it - with contrasts (good/bad) between different installments and sometimes in the actions inside of the same one; with the choice of which characters to revisit in the same installment - some of those chapters which may sound almost as fill-in and removable in the novel, suddenly appear a lot more logical - they are fill-ins but they are necessary so that the installments work the way they were designed.

It was also interesting to see all the advertisements from those days - from books to alpaca umbrellas (what's with that?), from snake oil medicines to clothes (one of the these even had a poem written in almost every installment). The world had changed a lot since then but some of the ads could be written for something today and still work... most of them around the "fast cure" and "solve your problems" variety and I am not entirely sure what that says about humanity.

>179 AnnieMod: Ordinary umbrellas are for when it’s only raining cats and dogs. When it’s raining alpacas…

>180 thorold: Right? :) I need to check again but that may have been one of the ads that made into every single issue... :)

>179 AnnieMod: The contrasts you point out are interesting. However, I would contrast Betsey Trotwood with Mr & Miss Murdstone (David's two sets of "adoptive" parents) and Mrs Steerforth with Mr Pegotty (two parents who each "lose" a child). And in fact each pair confronts each other--the memorable scene when Aunt Betsey confronts the Murdstones and the even more memorable scene when Mr Pegotty confronts Mrs Steerforth.

>182 kac522: Depends on what you contrast them for -- these pairs also work. There are a LOT of pairs you can see if you look for them. :)

Mr. Murdstone and Mr. Peggotty both got to take care of a child that was not theirs - in such a different way.

Betsey Trotwood and Mrs. Steerforth both have a young charge and the means to support him - one of them disowns hers for following his heart, the other one supports hers even when she disagrees with him...

>183 AnnieMod: Mix 'n' match :)

>184 kac522: Pretty much. :) And I was looking for the less... obvious ones - Betsey and the Murdstones are designed from the start to appear the same on the surface (they did not want David) but to ultimately end up complete opposites (tying to my redemption note as well).

I finished up my David Copperfield quarter by viewing the 1999 3-hour TV series, starring Daniel Radcliffe (pre-Harry Potter) as young David, Bob Hoskins as Mr Micawber, Ian McKellen as creepy Mr Creakle and Alun Armstrong as Mr Pegotty.

But in my opinion Maggie Smith steals the show as Aunt Betsey Trotwood--a perfect performance for me.



Overall I thought the film well-done and faithful to the book, although of course some characters had to be left out to fit the plot into 3 hours (no Tom Traddles; no Dr Strong & family; no Mowcher or Martha). Lots of dialogue and narration (narrated by Tom Wilkinson as older David) taken from the text.

>186 kac522: This has been on my to-watch lists forever! Daniel Radcliffe was adorable in the scenes I've seen. I may even own it. Hmm, off to check . . .

>186 kac522: I enjoyed that version, too. No better Murdstones than Trevor Eve and Zoe Wanamaker.

>188 nohrt4me2: Oh yes, they're hard as nails.

>186 kac522: No Traddles? : (

I finished last night. Just about 2 weeks late. Haven’t had a chance to think about it, though. It’s really long but I guess that’s the nature of Dickens style. I really appreciate the sense of mastery he conveys throughout, and his touches on wonder he lets enter whenever he’s in the mood for it. Ultimately more of a character novel than than a plotted one. The plot is entertaining enough but seems a little soft in hindsight. The impossible coincidences are a little crazy but I don’t imagine anyone really complains. And of course there is a heavy personal touch. I never doubted the sincerity of the first person voice. I think it was a good experience. I’m certainly happy to have read it and own a little sense of what Dickens was doing (it’s only the 2nd Dickens novel I have read.)

>190 dchaikin: I know. He's my hero.

>99 kac522: I always assumed that "orfling" was simply a dialectical error, a mispronunciation of "orphan" due to her lack of any real education, and a similar lack of people who cared to correct her speech because they didn't care about what the orphan knew. Can't you hear it as a error? I imagine, though, it was an error common in the people she knew best in her youth.

>99 kac522: >192 sallypursell: it has a warmth to it too though, it can be error, but it can also be the creative langauge alive, adopted (no pun intended) as what they chose to use, and maybe in preference to labels foisted by institutions and schools -- but I just don't know, I noticed it and thought about and don't know, i do like that it may break a prisons bounds, even if it began in error.

I finally finished ch39 last night and most moving it was.

>100 tonikat: Although I think the loss of family is a theme in the book, I don't think it was at all unusual to have lost one parent, or both parents. Women, especially, died young a great deal, from infections like childbed fever, and UTIs, and pneumonia as a consequence of exposure with a preexisting lung involvement in a cold that wasn't cared for. Many people are malnourished, even some of the higher-status people, with vegetables hard to source in winter. None of our rapid transport of produce was available then. Many people live without heating in their homes, or adequate bedding or clothing. Many, many children are on their own--London is thick with them. Even some toddlers are on their own, horrid thought!

As far as beer to a child--ale was frequently used to replace water, even for children. The water was not always safe to drink. I also thought that offering beer to David was a sign of respect--that he had some sort of temporary adulthood due to his social class being higher than the people around him. They were acknowledging him.

As far as getting to know the orfling--I think David was uncomfortable about her. It may be that he is noticing femaleness about her that discomfits him, or maybe her unfortunate position makes him loathe to speak more naturally to her. I also remember thinking at times that it was a nod of affiliation to the Micawbers that he should treat her this way.

>192 sallypursell: I don’t think it would have been an “error”: Dickens obviously picked it for its ear-catching and slightly subversive oddity, but probably wouldn’t have used it unless it was a real dialect word that he had actually heard (in London or Kent). Apart from Hard times, where he parachuted into the North and didn’t have time to pick up its language, his dialect tends to be fairly realistic. And the OED does record “orfelin” as an English word.

Reading chapter 40, The Wanderer, it crossed my mind to compare Mr P to John Wayne's character in The Searchers, to some degree, I know it doesn't work perfectly. It's also then interesting to think how out of the order of society Steerforth's actions are. It also occurred to me how much what they do is rebellion against society - which is then interesting to compare with Dora's friend's literary interests.

But then listening to Pegotty talk again, and thinking of the orfling question, I was intterested again by the unique words often used by some people, and for all their being wrong they are somehow right and they are understood by people around them. It made me think a bit how people use the right words now maybe but they often don't have the impact or connection of these technically wrong words. Which also makes me think of reading about the differences in the right and left brain in the work of Iain McGilchrist. It feels connected to standardisation and homogenisation in language that has in some ways, i wonder, standardised relationships and maybe diverted us a bit from right brain outlook to getting words right, which is more often to do with the left brain, especially words for concepts, which is so much part of how we think now. in a way i am saying we seem diverted from emotional connection - maybe in many other ways, and it is noticeable in this book how often it is achieved in ways grammatically incorrect especially by people low in society -- and how many examples of people with status there are who seem locked into unemotional thinking and relating yet are somehow 'correct' (e.g. that first headmaster, the Murdstones, the treatment of Steerforth's mother towards Pegotty, Uriah H's understanding of humility drummed in by a church school), it's almost as thought the language itself in misuse and misinterpretation is used as a weapon and a form of social discipline . . . and freedom lies in creative language and emotional honesty . . . Steerforth and Little Emily may be trapped by a narrative/s that they seek to revise or do not give them room to express themselves as they wish, depending on how you see his motives (and hers), but have done soemthing unacceptable to both codes, they've collided.

edit - maybe it is just me, lost in concepts myself - and maybe their words aren't even wrong, just unusual, especially to us. But there seems a distinction between people that do and don;t relate emotionally in the story.

>196 tonikat: it's almost as thought the language itself in misuse and misinterpretation is used as a weapon and a form of social discipline . . . and freedom lies in creative language and emotional honesty . . .

That’s pretty much how I’ve always read Dickens. He hates repression and standardisation, especially when applied to children, and he expresses that to a large extent by the way characters use language.

Standardization of the language is a relatively new phenomenon for modern languages - not just in English but globally. And it tends to be driven by the educated and/or the higher classes. Go a few generations back and that shows up everywhere...

Dickens is pretty good at showing that - his dialects can be hard to read for non native speakers sometimes (although I find it a lot easier these days than 20 years ago - and not because I knew the text - my brain makes connections differently now). I've learned to pay attention to what language his characters are using - it tells you a lot more about them than their description sometimes.

>198 AnnieMod: Also, of course, “standard” varieties of spoken language aren’t static, even nowadays. Our conventions of how to distinguish “respectable” and “uneducated” speech are quite different from those of 150 years ago, so Dickens’s representations of dialect pronunciations are a kind of code we all have to learn, even as native speakers, the first time we see them. When we think of uneducated speech, we don’t think of people mixing up v’s and w’s like Sam Weller’s father, or turning final n into ng like the Orfling.

>199 thorold: Oh, absolutely. Languages, especially spoken ones, are static only in the minds of language purists.

Yeah, learning what they mean and what they tell you about the characters is probably similar between native and non-native speakers - it is a function of familiarity with the times and language usage and not of language itself. And the more you are exposed to Victorian writings, the more you get used to it (which is why I like browsing the journals and the newspapers of the day - they give you another view into the language of the time - similarly to how my English classes always combined literature and the current press).

I suspect though that most native speakers can read and understand these conversations without too much trouble - or at least with less trouble than someone just learning the language (and of course those were some of the sections in my textbook (8th grade, my English would have been somewhere in the High B2/High Upper Intermediate level) so I and Mr. Dickens took quite a bit to start seeing eye to eye...). This time around? Somewhere halfway through the book I realized I don't even need to stop thinking about them... :)

>197 thorold: That’s pretty much how I’ve always read Dickens. He hates repression and standardisation, especially when applied to children, and he expresses that to a large extent by the way characters use language.

I'll be gormed, good to know :)

>196 tonikat: >197 thorold: >198 AnnieMod: I was thinking about what I've said a bit more - I spoke of Steerforth and Em'ly changing their narratives and it occurred to me with regard to the better emotionally connected use of language that it also seems to be a theme that such large narrative dislocations are better approached with the emotionally connected language and those connected to through it -- and that they are least succesful when the language just demands to be met. An example of this may be Murdstone's approach to his new household -- and i wonder a bit if David took some of his old status into the bottling factory and kept his distance from others, but he also adapted e.g. the beer buying episode. Mr Micawber has the emotionally connected language but is he true to it? Uriah Heep has his stilted language and does not adapt at all as he attempts to bend narratives to accomodate his view. Aunt Betsy, and i don't know how this comes out yet as I've not read it, has a challenge to her own narrative too, but is thrown onto emotional engagement with her allies. It is this, love, that is at the core he seems to be saying, neglect it at your peril, ignore it at your peril, seek to have it in some dead and fossilised correctness of status and grammar and then be very vulnerable, a vulnerability you're always fighting with that same dead language clobbering everyone else all the time.

It's striking how the language use has impacts on others but also on the growth or lack of it of the self -- and impacts the experiences of the users of the language. And he seems to be saying to stick to the right use of language and things will turn out nice, somehow, even in bad narratives.

edited for typos and a tiny bit of clarification.

>195 thorold: I didn't mean an error on Dicken's part, but an error on the part of the undereducated people who have heard the word but never seen it written.

And this is not to say that they are "wrong", but that this word is commonly pronounced this way by the Orphan's same-class society.