David Copperfield
I’ve read some Dickens in the past, pretty sure I read Hard Times, since I remember a bunch of character names, if not what actually happened. I definitely read A Tale of Two Cities, which had a very silly twist ending. But mainly, I read contemporary reviews of Demon Copperhead, and it sounded interesting, so I wanted to get in on the ground floor.
David Copperfield starts literally with him being born. His dad dies while he’s in utero, so it’s just him and his mother (Clara, who also has the same first name as Peggotty, which I am convinced was just Dickens not paying attention). Sadly, his mother then marries Edward Murdstone, who, like a lot of characters, has his thing that he says (he likes to talk about “firmness” quite a lot). Murdstone’s sister is also hanging around and they’re both just dickheads who are bad to David and his mother, until the former gets sent off to boarding school.
In school, he meets Steerforth - one of the book’s maybe three interesting characters - and falls completely head over heels in love with him. Seriously, it would not take much to turn the school section into a big gay romance. Steerforth is handsome and smart and bigger than all the other boys and gets a teacher fired and he’s nice to David. Doesn’t sound interesting, no, but we’ll get back to him. Also in school is Traddles, who comes back later as David’s friend (his thing is that he draws skeletons) and has a girlfriend in some other city.
He also spends a bit of time with the family of his nursemaid, Peggotty, namely her brother, and his niece and I think nephew. “Little Em’ly” who gets an apostrophe most of the time, and Ham. Sorry Dickens, but I will never take anyone seriously if they’re called Ham. That goes for you too, YHWY and Noah. David is still a child but Em’ly (I’ll stop now) is the first of his many extremely chaste loves.
School doesn’t work out, and David gets sent to work in a factory. He doesn’t like this very much so spends a week walking to Dover to see if his aunt will help him out. His aunt, Betsey Trotwood, is the best character in the book. She’s separated from her husband, who basically dies offscreen near the end of the book, she has an ongoing war with donkeys, she has pretty decent modern feminist ideas, lives with some kind of learning-disabled madman, and for some baffling reason, she just decides that her nephew is now called Trotwood Copperfield, and refers to him as Trot for the rest of the book. I have no idea why. His aunt turns out to be cool and sends him to a better school, where he apprentices under some sort of Casaubon-type figure who’s whiling away his life writing a capital-D Dictionary.
David/Trotwood finishes school and basically just walks up to his aunt and asks what he should do for the rest of his life. She says to become a Proctor, so he does and she pays some silly amount of money for him to get in the door. Traddles also works there.
Also milling around is Uriah Heep. Heep’s thing that he says is “umble”, as in humble, and by god he says it five thousand times in every passage of speech. He is constantly described as writhing and being shifty despite not, as far as I could tell, actually doing anything wrong. He’s studying the law, but he’s a bit gross to look at, so he’s bad. I thought Dickens was going to subvert things a little and make one regret judging Heep just for his appearance, but no, he turns out to do a whole bunch of fraud and go to jail. Oops.
I should throw a word in about Mr. (and Mrs.) Micawber, David’s deadbeat friend who goes on and on and on about nothing, endlessly. I get that this is on purpose, and we’re supposed to think he’s full of himself but it goes on and on and on. Anyway he ends up buggering off to Australia.
Meanwhile, the most interesting story happens entirely unmentioned in the background, where Steerforth and Little Em’ly (I didn’t stop) run away together, causing him to fall only really a tiny bit in the eyes of David, but causing her to be basically shamed forever. They travel Europe until Steerforth dumps her in Switzerland, whereupon her uncle Peggotty just haunts London waiting for her to appear. She does, and is found with the help of a local prostitute and they all bugger off to Australia with Mr. Micawber. My condolences to them on that journey.
David is obsessed with his boss’s daughter Dora for a long time and then marries her and by god it is the most awkward marriage in literature. Dora is a child, a simpleton, who can’t boil water and just faffs about all day with her irritating dog. Props to Dickens for making a dog extremely annoying in written form. I was thinking while reading it, very early on, that this marriage cannot last, David gradually realised his mistake but (Betsey aside) one does not leave a spouse in 1850, how will David get out of this one? Ah, she miscarries and dies. I lost track a little but I think they were about around 23 at this point. RIP Dora.
Oh yeah David had a childhood friend called Agnes who was wise and pure and, to her credit, realised that Steerforth was a dick pretty early on. David ran into her in the theatre while hammered, in a really excellent depiction of what being drunk is like, very true to life, and he made a complete ass of himself. Newly single, David wanders Europe for a bit but then realises he loves Agnes and might have fucked it by never mentioning it and going away, but when he gets back it turns out she has loved him forever. Hurrah!
Also Ham and Steerforth both die in the same storm but I don’t think either knew the other was there.