As the novel builds to a climax, in which Heep is imprisoned and Mr Micawber, free of his debts, finds redemption as a colonial magistrate in Australia, Dickens succumbs to the pressure to please a hungry public with a satisfying fictional feast. When the lovely, tranquil reflections on boyhood of the opening pages become replaced by the urgent demands of plot-making, protagonist and author morph together in ways that are not completely successful, though always revealing. There are the characteristic prose arpeggios, the virtuoso similes and metaphors, and the parade of timeless characters: Mr Micawber, Mrs Gummidge, Betsey Trotwood, Barkis, Uriah Heep, Steerforth, Mr Spenlow (of Spenlow and Jorkins) and Miss Mowcher.Īt the same time, Copperfield and Dickens, autobiographer and novelist, become so indistinguishable, the one from the other, that the novelist no longer has the necessary detachment from his material.
The second half of David Copperfield displays Dickens at his magnificent, and often uneven, best. But here, he focuses on the interior life of his hero, as if saving the plot for later. His own early novels ( Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and so on) are largely comic picaresques. Dickens is one of the first to acknowledge the inspiration of the emerging English canon: Robinson Crusoe, The Adventures of Roderick Random and Tom Jones, the books he finds in his father's library. In the first half, before Dickens's irrepressible storytelling kicks in and the motor of the novel starts to hum with incident, we find him almost meditating on his literary beginnings. The story – so appealing to Freud – is of a boy making his way in the world, and finding himself as a man and as a writer. I love David Copperfield because it is, in some ways, so un-Dickensian. Why not Pickwick Papers? Or, better still, Great Expectations? Or Bleak House? Or Little Dorrit? And why not, here in the holiday season, that festive evergreen A Christmas Carol? Or the granite brilliance of Hard Times? Yes, in different ways, all masterpieces. Some Dickens aficionados will be dismayed. At the outset, I'm going to anticipate your howls of rage.
Freud's choice – and Dickens's own opinion that David Copperfield was "of all my books" the one he liked "the best" – helps clarify an impossible selection midway through the 19th century.
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