DAVID COPPERFIELD

I spent all of March working through David Copperfield (including some marathon reading sessions on the plane back and forth to Minnesota), and am ashamed that I didn’t manage to post about it at all. In short, it was really good, even better (literature-wise) than Nicholas Nickleby, but not quite so enjoyable to me personally. NN was formulaic but just more good old-time Victorian-melodrama fun; DC, written in the first person and occasionally in the present tense, with its focus on dreams and memory and shaping one’s own identity, felt shockingly modern, though still definitely chock-full of Dickensy flavor. (And inscrutable Victorian mores—even with all I knew of the period, it was hard for me to swallow it when after Little Em’ly ran off with Steerforth, her friends and family kept suggesting that she was obviously about to become a prostitute at any moment, and it would have been better if she had died than be seduced by him, even though after she leaves Steerforth she reunites with her family and ends up living a long and happy [if never-married] life in Australia.) I was maybe getting a bit overloaded on Dickens by the end of my two-month stint with him—so much so that when my company switched over to Microsoft Office 2007 recently, during a training session I found myself momentarily unable to interpret the phrase “widow and orphan control” in its correct typographical context, my mind clouded by diabolical Dickensian implications of oppression and villainy. Still, I know my thirst for Dickens will return after a short break—in fact, I’d like to try to read all of his novels eventually.