David Copperfield. I finished my first proper Dickens novel finally (I read A Christmas Carol last year, but that's really more of a novella). I'm a bit embarrassed to say when I started it. Earlier this year? Much earlier this year. It tended to get lost in the shuffle of books, but not because I wasn't enjoying it. It is one of those wonderful, long, entertaining Victorian novels that you can easily lose yourself in, and I would just read it in chunks here and there. Per David Gates, "Tolstoy, an impressionable twenty-two when Dickens completed David Copperfield in 1850, considered it the greatest achievement of the greatest novelists".
It deserves its own lengthy post, but I have to admit I am not up to it. I feel like I would be doing the novel a disservice if I tried to talk about it in any sort of enlightening way. It's the sort of novel that asks to be read and reread with new insights drawn out each time. This first time through felt like it was for entertainment purposes only, particularly when I read the introduction, where Gates picked things apart--in some cases it seemed a bit severely. I was starting to feel a little disappointed. Did we read the same novel? Okay, I wasn't reading critically--is there so much to pick apart? Apparently there are a few things I missed... But then Gates redeemed himself. He writes:
"I've dwelt on these problems--critics have pointed them out for years--just in case anybody still feels crazy for noticing them, and because I might as well clear the air before saying that David Copperfield is a staggering piece of work anyway: a novel any writer could still learn from, and should still be intimidated by. It would be scary enough if he'd put it through years of rewrites; in fact, he wrote it as he did all his novels, by the seat of his pants for serial publication. Unthinkable. Was he a martian? Dickens's contemporaries, of course, recognized just as we do his visionary verisimilitude and his Olympian stick company of characters. Today its easier to see his psychological acuity: half a century before Freud--whose work would have scandalized him--he knew by observation and imagination that people's irrational behavior made perfect sense. Of course David would marry a woman just like his mother, right down to her curly hair and the negligent housekeeping. Of course the fatherless Annie would love the geriatric Dr. Strong. Of course the stingy, taciturn Barkis would fixate on the explosively affectionate Peggotty. And of course sexuality will force its way to a hundred nongenital outlets: Uriah's writhing and hand-wringing, Dora's fingering the buttons of David's coat, Miss Murdstone's snapping shut her steel purse. And Dickens's master of the full range of the English language may now be...inimitable."
I read that this novel was written "smack dab in the middle of his career". It came after "his shamelessly weird, wildly uneven early work--The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Martin Chuzzlewit, and before his "bursting-at-the-seams social novels"--Bleak House (considered his masterpiece), Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend. I can see I have my work cut out for me when it comes to Dickens. In any case, next time around, with whichever novel I choose, I have a feeling that it will be an even better experience now that I have David under my belt.