How everything works out so handily with all the good characters in Moves up the rungs, we begin to see Dickens pulling strings. Is told but is swept along on a tide of anxiety and hope.īut then, as the boy becomes a young man, starts making choices and The reader has no time to consider how well the story Dickens appears not be writing this at all but reporting Poor fishermen on the coast and the poverty-stricken Micawber family His adolescent introduction into the lower rungs of society amid the Seems to write itself-through his various persecutions by elders to It follows-so honestly and naturally that the plot The novel starts very quickly with David's birth and the travails One would be less disappointed with the second half if the first The intrigues of his friends and lovers, is a good and affecting Dickens novel. The second half, as the boy grows into a famous writer involved in

It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.The first half of David Copperfield, concerning the struggles of the young boy against repressive step-parents and draconian schoolmasters, is one of the greatest, most affecting novels ever written. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. The story contains some of the most memorable characters in English literature, including the unctuous Uriah Heep and the ever-optimistic Mr. It’s still a good book.”ĭickens’ favorite of his own works, and his most autobiographical, David Copperfield records the struggles of a young man in early Victorian England, following him from childhood to young manhood. But about three years later I really looked into the kind of thing that David Copperfield showed me was there, and I’ve always prized that experience of having read David Copperfield as my first real book. I didn’t then and there settle down and read a lot of Dickens. For example, by the time I had read David Copperfield, I knew David better than anybody I’d ever known, including myself, and I realized that that was a world that was available to me. And I read it, and I knew then, without doing anything about it or making any resolution over it, that I had entered into a world that was in many ways better than the world I or anybody else lived in.

And then when I was 11 or 12, as a Sunday school prize I was given a copy of David Copperfield, which was an enormous book to my mind it was 300, 400, 500 pages long.

First I read the Bobbsey Twins, then the Rover Boys, and Tom Swift and Tarzan.

David copperfield novel