I reread this in preparation for my book club's next selection, "Demon Copperhead". I excited to be able to compare the two novels. Of this book Dickens said... " of all my books I like this best. " What more is there to say?
I'm excited to see how Kingsolver brings this tale into the present day. Can she create memorable characters to match those such as Betsey Trotwood, Mr. Dick and the Micawbers? ( )

I do not think this is the strongest of Dickens' novels. While David Copperfield, the main character and only POV, does have a difficult and interesting life, to a point, it is also far too convenient. After his struggles as pre-teen, most things seem to work out very well for him, including his married life. As is usual with a Dickens story, often there are far too many unnecessary words. Several characters seem to exist only to pad the word count. This isn't terrible, but not Dickens' best either. ( )

Hardback Green Linen, gold gilt lettering to both spines and gold gilt portrait of Dickens on front covers. A 2 volume set. contains illustrations with engravings on steel. Volume 1 has 446 pages. Volume 2 has 460 pages. PUBLISHED: 1877

Such a brilliant bloomin' profusion of memorable and entertaining characters, it's both gratifying and a shame that everyone's fate wraps up in the end like a didactic grade school lesson. Sure, I'm happy that Mr. and Mrs. Micawber found wealth and honor at last in Australia, but the worthy gentleman was such a joy as the loquacious sad sack as likely to find himself in debtor's prison as anywhere, and his wife as the determinedly deluded champion of her husband's industrious talents. And it's no less deserved that Uriah Heep is last seen in prison, but his writhing false 'umbleness is much more fun when provoking the earnest and sincere Master Copperfield to acts of physical violence.

The outdated notions of women's "lost virtue" are hard to take at this remove, though the transformation of Mr. Peggotty from genial fisherman and drinker to driven and heartbreaking father trying every desperate measure to rescue his lost Emily is touching.

The less said about the character of Dora, David's utterly simplistic and self-appellated "child-wife" who conveniently wastes away of some unnamed disorder and dies so that he can realize the error of his young undisciplined heart and end up with the angelic Agnes, the better, although learning that Dickens modeled Dora after his own apparently much-regretted wife does introduce some juicy and evil gossip into the lamentable storyline (if Mrs. Dickens did not heartily dislike her husband at the time of 'David Copperfield' publication, she certainly had cause after it!)

So the novel has some problems, sure, but damn, Dickens could write, and he could create such characters as to make any author jealous.
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"David Copperfield is the absolutely typical Dickens novel; maybe Dickens, the hammiest of all great writers, loved it best because it was just so him. But its very centrality makes it easy to overlook or take for granted. Compared to the early work, its miscalculations seem less understandable, its moralizing less tolerable; shouldn't he have known better by this time? Compared to the late work, it seems too merrily "Dickensian."

I don't know, am I making heavy weather of this? Shouldn't it be enough to remind folks that this novel, and no other, is the one with Uriah Heep and Mr. Micawber and Mr. and Miss Murdstone and Aunt Betsey and Peggoty and Steerforth and Mr. Dick and Rosa Dartle? No writer since Shakespeare could have put together such a cast of scene-stealers - as well as such supposedly minor characters as the respectable Littimer, the willin' Barkis, the lone and lorn Mrs. Gummidge, the Punch-like Mr. Spenlow and the volatile Miss Mowcher."
- from David Gates's introduction in the Modern Library edition
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In many ways, I found this novel delightful; it was the whimsical, parochial saga I had expected but failed to find in Middlemarch. Dickens definitely knows how to write characters. In other important ways, though, the novel was also a disappointment. In its efforts to reach resolution, it grew to feel interminable; this effect was exacerbated by the grating nature of the Micawbers, by whom Dickens seems particularly tickled. Far more interesting characters are relegated to the shadows of the Micawbers. While I imagine Dickens was writing too closely to the genre of autobiography to play fast and loose with the plot, I would have enjoyed spending more time with Ms. Dartle, Ms. Mowcher, Mr. Littimer, or even Steerforth, whose surface we barely scratch. Finally, the conclusion is too tidy in its treatment of loose ends, and the tidiness unfolds in too perfunctory a manner. ( )