I baked a pie, surprising my roommates, but one thing I'm not going to do during COVID is finish reading the novels of Dickens. I started David Copperfield last fall, and am coming to the end just now. My edition is 826 pages, so 8.26 pages a day for a hundred days would accomplish the task, though in my case I left off once for maybe a month before starting up again. In my life, I've been working backward through his oeuvre, more or less: the remaining unread novels include all the immense tomes from early in his career—Dombey and Son, Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge, The Old Curiosity Shop, others, he died at 57 and I'd like to know the ratio of words published to adult days lived—and these are going to remain forever unread by me. The novels widely regarded as his best are dull enough.
Now that I'm toward the end of David Copperfield, and the hero is married with marital problems, my interest is trending upward. I guess grown-up problems are more interesting to me than the exploitation of defenseless, pre-teen orphans? A poor advertisement for me, no doubt, but I'm pleading guilty. David's entire relationship with his wife, Dora, from their first meeting onward, is hazy to me. You're reading along, suddenly he's in love with this new character, and I anyway cannot discern why. She's the daughter of his boss, but if it's a matter of social climbing, he keeps that from both himself and the reader (he's the narrator). Though, by the lights of this reader, it might still be so, since he keeps to himself whatever the reason is. His aunt sees trouble ahead, which is some part of why the reader does, too, but a bit of a tangled web arises from the fact—I think it's a fact—that the reader foresees trouble even though the narrator is the source of all the reader's information, and the narrator does not himself foresee trouble till he's in it.
David Copperfield is Dickens' most autobiographical novel. Before he began it, he'd been at work on a straight autobiography, and apparently fairly long stretches of the novel are lifted directly from the nonfictional draft with only names changed. This suggests a possible reason for the haziness of the Dora sections. The wife with whom Dickens was unhappy was very much his wife and anyone who knew him well would understand that the novel was autobiographical. Into how much detail could he go? Along this line, another reason the marriage to Dora perplexes readers like me is that there's another character, Agnes, whom the narrator idealizes, working overtime to persuade the reader of her human excellence, without ever forming any matrimonial ambitions. Why, then, the silly, empty-headed Dora? In the novel, Dora dies, and David marries Agnes, the woman he should always have been with. Seven years after the publication of David Copperfield, Dickens deserted his wife—divorce was not an option in Victorian England—and took up with the actress Ellen Ternan, with whom he lived for the last 13 years of his life. The novel did not follow the author's life in every respect!
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