Theater Review: ‘David Copperfield,’ at 59E59 Theaters, NYC

Contemporary readers recognize Charles Dickens as a novelist of astonishing productivity, but Victorians also knew him as an enthusiastic theater amateur—writing and directing his own productions among friends, and acting the roles of his major characters in hugely profitable author readings.

He would surely have been delighted in the dramatic possibilities realized of the most autobiographical of his fictions, David Copperfield, in this Guildford Shakespeare Company import for the current “Brits Off Broadway” series.

Abigail Pickard Price, who directed the show and wrote it with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches, has magically compressed the novelist’s sprawling doorstopper into two hours and 15 minutes of nonstop action in 59E59 Theaters’ Upper East Side venue, sidelining subsidiary figures to focus on Copperfield’s growth from fatherless child to husband and famous writer.

Even so, 19 characters appear onstage, brought to life by a talented trio of actors who won Best Ensemble Performance Award at the London Fringe Theatre Awards 25/26. Eddy Payne ably anchors the show as David, skillfully evoking his boy-to-man transition.

Even more extraordinary are Luke Barton and Louise Beresford, handle nine roles each, including both sexes. The transformations are always startling and sometimes hilarious.

As David’s devoted childhood nurse Peggotty, the rangy, long-faced Barton suggests John Lithgow in drag from The World According to Garp, and he’s not afraid to burlesque Mr. Micawber’s melodramatic denunciation of Uriah Heep.

Beresford, having proven her comic skills in Britain in plays like Noises Off and Bedroom Farce, wrings every laugh possible here as Miss Betsey Trottwood and David’s annoyingly childlike first wife Dora.

The actors accomplish this feat of invention and endurance through a whirlwind of quick-change costumes, puppets, and accents, supported by set/costume designer Neil Irish and movement/associate director Amy Lawrence. Props do double duty, including:

*a set of trunks morph into a stagecoach and a portable bar;
* a tall hat and long coat on a coatrack represent the unbending Murdstone;
*a baby blanket unwraps in a later scene to become David’s jacket;
*Emily’s dress unfurls to suggest the sea just off the coast of Great Yarmouth.

At the matinee I attended, another theatergoer told me she wanted to see this clever show because she had caught the Guildford troupe’s similarly delightful adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice last year. Now, with this affectionate adaptation of Dickens (running through June 28), this immensely talented British theater company has built an eager audience for its next stateside visit.

This Day in Film History (Birth of Ronald Colman, Sterling Star of Silent and Sound Eras)

Feb. 9, 1891— Ronald Colman, an Oscar-winning actor who personified courtliness from Hollywood’s silent to sound eras, was born in Richmond, England.

Probably because I was annoyed by what seemed like an unduly stiff performance as an amnesiac war casualty in Random Harvest (1942), I was put off for years by Colman. I changed my opinion after watching his world-weary diplomat in Frank Capra’s adaptation of the James Hilton novel Lost Horizon (1937).

But it was his depiction of brilliant, alcoholic, self-sacrificing lawyer Sydney Carton in the 1935 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities that finally convinced me that Colman was a sterling talent, well-deserving of his reputation as one of Hollywood’s best leading men of the 1930s and 1940s.

Understandably, the actor saw this as one of the best roles of his career. Not only did he agree to shave off his trademark mustache to play the part, but, with great good humor, he recited his climactic speech from the film whenever Jack Benny visited him on the comedian’s radio and TV shows.

After a half-century, I think I really should re-watch Random Harvest, which enjoys a reputation as one of the finest romantic melodramas of Hollywood’s golden age. 

Colman himself had been badly wounded in the Great War while serving in the London Scottish Regiment (a legendary unit in which actors Basil Rathbone, Herbert Marshall, and Claude Rains had their own harrowing experiences, as related in this 2015 post on the “Sister Celluloid” blog).

The war was as psychologically as physically devastating, as Colman recalled later:

“I won’t go into the war and all that it did to all of us. We went out. Strangers came back. It was the war that made an actor out of me. When I came back that was all I was good for: acting. I wasn’t my own man anymore.”

Undoubtedly, it was Colman’s identification with the traumatized veteran in Random Harvest that helped him overcome an often far-fetched script—and win an Oscar nomination.

The war did not end Colman’s travails. Determined to appear on the New York stage, he initially encountered a long period of unemployment, to such an extent that he was reduced to scrounging for food. (“Figuring out the best way to spend five cents in an automat was an art at which I became adept. Doughnuts were the main standby.”) At last he broke through.

Colman found film to be the real, where he made his mark, however, when director Henry King cast him opposite Lillian Gish in the 1923 silent The White Sister. The movie was so successful that the trio reunited for Romola the following year.

Unlike many silent-film idols, Colman had no trouble adapting to sound. In fact, the new technology enhanced his career because he could take advantage of his distinctive voice: rich, cultured, mellifluous, enhancing his image as an English gentleman.

“Colman only really hit one note with it, a sort of wistful oboe note, but that note was enough if the writing of the picture suited his restrained lyricism,” wrote Dan Callahan in an October 2025 post on his “Stolen Holiday” blog.

No matter what genre he tried—western, melodrama, detective film, romantic comedy—Colman’s gentlemanly persona was tinged with melancholy, a trait of his off-screen temperament. That sense was reinforced early in his career because of a disastrous first marriage.

Colman wed Thelma Raye in haste in 1920, a union he came to rue as, stricken with jealousy at his increasing success, the actress took to stalking him. Increasingly withdrawn under this pressure, Colman was relieved when she sued him for divorce 14 years later. Fortunately his second marriage, to Benita Hume, was longer (20 years, until his death) and far happier.

To the greatest extent possible, Colman tried to live with discretion, so the public knew little of his private circumstances. What it saw onscreen, it loved. 

In addition to the films I mentioned previously, I also enjoyed him in The Talk of the Town (1942), a comedy in which his straitlaced lawyer risks his nomination to the Supreme Court by aiding an escaped convict whose innocence he comes to believe in.

With his fourth Oscar nomination in 1947 for A Double Life, Colman finally won formal recognition from his peers by winning the coveted statuette, as a Shakespearean actor whose latest role—the jealousy-maddened Othello—begins to mirror his own life.

(A recent biographer of Colman, the prolific Carl Rollyson, has a astute analysis of the actor’s “graceful, literate masculinity” in this Spring 2024 article for Humanities, a journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, With a Terrifying Churchyard Scene)

“ ‘Hold your noise!’ cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. ‘Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!’

“A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Great Expectations (1861)

The other day, while in a coffee shop, I picked up a copy of the Dickens classic and opened it to its second page, with the above passage. Wow!

The description grabs you by the scruff of the neck, not unlike the convict who appears out of nowhere and terrifies young Pip. You can imagine the terror of this orphan who just wants to mourn the family members buried here.

You’re fully expecting a crime story, but this is a novel in which things are not what they seem, and so it is here. Right after the threat in the dialogue, and that sentence about the “fearful man,” we are bombarded with verbs that suggest the vulnerability of this convict named Magwitch: “soaked,” “smothered,” “lamed,” “cut,” “stung,” and “torn.”

It’s no wonder that so much of Dickens’ work has been adapted for film and TV: any director worth his salt has an unforgettable picture to work with here.

(The image accompanying this post comes from David Lean’s magnificent 1946 adaptation of the Dickens novel, with Finlay Currie as Magwitch and Tony Wager as young Pip.)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on ‘Real Love and Truth’)

“I hope that simple love and truth will be strong in the end. I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), David Copperfield (1850)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on a ‘Riotously Excited’ Parliamentary Election)

“Party feeling runs so high, and the contest is likely to be so sharp a one that I look forward to the probability of a scuffle before it is over…. Such a ruthless set of bloody-minded villains, I never set eyes on, in my life. In their convivial moments yesterday after the business of the day was over, they were perfect savages. If a foreigner were brought here on his first visit to an English town, to form his estimate of the national character, I am quite satisfied he would return forthwith to France, and never set foot in England again….The polling begins on Friday and then we shall have an incessant repetition of the sounds and sights of yesterday 'till the Election is over—bells ringing, candidates speaking, drums sounding, a band of eight trombones (would you believe it?) blowing —men fighting, swearing, drinking, and squabbling—all riotously excited, and all disgracing themselves.”—English journalist-turned-novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Dec. 16, 1835 letter to fiancée Catherine Hogarth about a Northampton by-election he was reporting on for the Morning Chronicle, in The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley (2012)

I’m indebted to British historian Simon Schama’s historical overview of Parliamentary elections, in last weekend’s Financial Times, for bringing to my attention Dickens’ typically colorful account of what elections were like in the early 19^th century.

Much has changed since then, but the unbridled nature of the proceedings remains the same.

Was it only five years ago that Boris Johnson achieved what looked like significant party realignment by winning an 80-seat majority, making inroads even in former Labour strongholds?

Now, with Thursday’s landslide election, Labour has ended 14 years of Conservative (mis)rule, with current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak so hapless in warding off the electorate’s rebuke that he may well be called Poison Sunak by sour members of his party’s rank and file from now on.

Even so, elections have consequences, and the wreckage the Conservatives have left behind—most of all, through Brexit and former PM Boris Johnson's rampant constitutional violations—will not easily be reversed.

Voters have less patience and shorter attention spans than formerly, and Keir Starmer will have to continue moderating the toxic stands of former Labour chieftain Jeremy Corbyn even as he shows tangible progress on the issues on which the electorate found the Conservatives wanting.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan’s sharp warning from three years ago to American politicians applies equally well abroad: “Politicians are never so dangerous as after a triumph.”

One element of modern political life that also seems to have carried across the Atlantic is the specter of far-right extremism. At this point, the so-called “Reform UK” party has won five seats in the House of Commons and a 14.3% share of Thursday’s vote, making inroads at the expense of the Conservatives.

Reform leader Nigel Farage has vowed to “change politics forever" through the party’s stances on taking immigrants in small boats back to France, a public inquiry into vaccine harm, protecting defense forces from human-rights inquiries, and adding 10,000 detention places.

Despite Reform’s current small representation in Parliament, he ought to be taken seriously, as history is replete with fringe political parties wreaking damage, whether in combination with others or by seizing power themselves. 

Quote of the Day (Roy T. Bennett, on ‘The Simplest Act of Gratitude’)

“Everyone enjoys being acknowledged and appreciated. Sometimes even the simplest act of gratitude can change someone's entire day. Take the time to recognize and value the people around you and appreciate those who make a difference in your lives.”— American author and speaker Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart: Inspirational Thoughts for Living Your Best Life (2021)

The image accompanying this post comes from the 1999 BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, with Ray Winstone playing Abel Magwitch—an escaped convict whose gratitude to the young Pip will be demonstrated in a most unusual way.

Quote of the Day (Zadie Smith, on the ‘Tiresomely Gigantic Influence’ of Charles Dickens)

“Hanging over all this anxiety [about writing a historical novel set in Victorian England] was the long shadow of Dickens. To be my age, bookish, and born in England was to grow up under that tiresomely gigantic influence. Dickens was everywhere. He was in school and on the shelves at home and in the library. He invented Christmas. He was in politics, influencing changes in labor law, educational law, even copyright law. He was the original working-class hero—radiant symbol of our supposed meritocracy—as well as a crown jewel of the English Heritage tourist industry….He was also everywhere I wanted to be: in the theatre, in Italy, in America. Televised versions of his books were on rotation—there is a case to be made that Dickens is the reason that we have prestige-TV miniseries in the first place —and he was in the goddam Muppets and all over Hollywood, in conscious adaptation and unconscious theft. I personally read far too much of him as a child, and though I grew up to have all the usual doubts and caveats about him—too sentimental, too theatrical, too moralistic, too controlling — I was also never able to get out from under his embarrassing influence, as often as I’ve often wanted to….There didn’t seem to be a nineteenth-century pot he didn’t have his finger in.”— English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Zadie Smith, “On Killing Dickens,” The New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2023

The comic upshot of Zadie Smith’s anxiety over the influence of Charles Dickens was that she ended up making him a character—and a not-insignificant one—in her upcoming book The Fraud.

Yet, even as Smith fretted about viewing the Victorian Era through the lens of the astonishingly prolific author, she seemed never to have considered how Dickens wrote about times other than his own.

In other words, Dickens got around to writing historical fiction almost two centuries before she did.

Well, that first attempt is largely forgotten these days—and maybe Dickens would have been glad about that. Barnaby Rudge was, according to the late great editor Robert Gottlieb, in a 2012 piece for Publishers Weekly, “a tired and tiresome historical novel that the young Dickens kept putting off writing until contractual obligations forced him to finish it.”

But not too many people know anything about the subject of this 1841 novel: a 1780 outbreak of anti-Catholic sentiment in England that became known as the Gordon Riots. If his book sends interested readers out for literature about this incident, maybe all wasn’t lost for his labor.

Dickens’ other attempt at historical fiction was considerably more successful, at least commercially: A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens felt a powerful influence of his own as he labored over it: Thomas Carlyle’s epic history, The French Revolution. But, if Dickens was intimidated by that prospect, the finished product doesn’t betray that sense.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that for Ms. Smith. Just have at it…

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, Showing Why Students Hate Math Word Problems)

“Even when the lessons are done, the worst is yet to happen, in the shape of an appalling sum. This is invented for me, and delivered to me orally by Mr. Murdstone, and begins, ‘If I go into a cheesemonger’s shop, and buy five thousand double-Gloucester cheeses at fourpence-halfpenny each, present payment’ — at which I see Miss Murdstone secretly overjoyed. I pore over these cheeses without any result or enlightenment until dinner-time, when…I have a slice of bread to help me out with the cheeses, and am considered in disgrace for the rest of the evening.”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1850), David Copperfield (1850)

It's been nearly 50 years since I read David Copperfield, and with this novel so teeming with incidents and characters—and similarly lengthy Charles Dickens works I have read since—this particular episode involving the title hero, his wicked stepfather, and the latter’s only-slightly-less villainous sister had long since receded well back into my memory.

Then, about two weekends ago, as if in answer to one of my viewing prayers, TCM ran the wonderful 1935 adaptation of Dickens’ semi-autobiographical classic, produced by David O. Selznick and directed by George Cukor. It’s a model not just of terrific casting (W.C. Fields, most prominently, as Wilkins Micawber), but of editing a sprawling novel down to its essentials in just two hours of running time.

This scene stood out for me. David’s humiliation and fear on the page are not only captured but heightened on the screen, with fast cuts among David, his anxious mother, her goading sister-in-law, the smooth suitor turned household tyrant, and the whip that the latter carries and shortly uses on his stepson.

In addition, there’s a short addition of dialogue that I think would have further pained audiences that first saw this in movie theaters.

Right after Murdstone (played by Basil Rathbone, captured here in despicable perfection with Freddie Bartholomew as David and Elizabeth Allan as Mrs. Copperfield) mentions a “halfpenny each,” he continues, “And if I sell half of them at six pence-halfpenny, twenty at five pence, and use the rest myself, do I make a profit or loss?"

“Profit or less” would have been uppermost on the minds of Depression-era youthful moviegoers. Imagine them trying to quickly do this sum in their heads, floundering, and wondering how their inadequacy with this math might have contributed to their own failure to barely stay solvent.

Even now, the scene has a kind of horror for kids today, I think—not so much for the beating David endures at the hands of Murdstone (so sadistic that an unnerved Rathbone required several takes to get it right), but for what leads to it. The question is all too close to those word problems not only in algebra tests but also in standardized math tests taken by high school students of the postwar era.

Those of us who don’t recall those word problems with a shudder chuckle at jokes we’ll occasionally come across about them. (For instance, from Charlie Brown’s sister Sally in “Peanuts”: “Only in math problems can you buy 60 cantaloupes and no one asks what the hell is wrong with you.”)

“I have in my heart of hearts," wrote Dickens of the novel closest to him, "a favorite child and his name is David Copperfield." Let nobody forget that math was among the multiple traumas endured by this beleaguered orphan—and by no means the least.

(For more about Dickens’ pungent feelings and writings about math and education in general, try Brittany Carlson’s November 2020 blogpost for the Dickens Society.)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on ‘The Christmas Spirit’)

“[T]he Christmas spirit… is the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance! It is in the last virtues especially, that we are, or should be, strengthened by the unaccomplished visions of our youth; for, who shall say that they are not our teachers to deal gently even with the impalpable nothings of the earth!

“Therefore, as we grow older, let us be more thankful that the circle of our Christmas associations and of the lessons that they bring, expands! Let us welcome every one of them, and summon them to take their places by the Christmas hearth.”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), “What Christmas Is As We Get Older,” in Christmas Stories (1871)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on a Steady Source of Employment for Lawyers)

“If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.”— English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), The Old Curiosity Shop (1839)

Quote of the Day (A.N. Wilson, on How ‘A Christmas Carol’ ‘Invented the Modern Christmas’)

“A Christmas Carol changed not only Dickens's life, but the Western world. It invented the modern Christmas. By February 1844 at least three theatrical productions based on the book were being performed in London alone. In the years that followed, he would publish further Christmas stories, including The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) and The Battle of Life (1846). As far as he was concerned, Christmas had become the busiest time of year and one of the most lucrative—especially after 1853, when he had begun a series of public readings of A Christmas Carol. The Christmas edition of All the Year Round was something he spent six months planning. For it was always the Carol, of all his stories for Christmas, that captured the imagination of readers. Before the Carol was published, Christmas Day was not a public holiday in Britain. By 1846 the newspapers were reporting that ‘Experienced salesmen at Leadenhall-market state that the demand for Christmas geese this year exceeded that of any previous season, and that the establishment of clubs has, within the last few days, brought upwards of 20,000 geese into the market. In some parts of the metropolis, “plum pudding clubs” have been established.’”—English man of letters A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens (2020)

The image accompanying this post is one of the original 1843 illustrations by the Victorian cartoonist John Leech (1817-1864) in A Christmas Carol—in this case, one of the happier memories of Ebenezer Scrooge’s youth: Mr. Fezziwig’s ball. It comes from this post from The Victorian Web. (Scanned image by Philip V. Allingham.)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on an Early Victorian Detective)

“Inspector Field is the bustling speaker. Inspector Field's eye is the roving eye that searches every corner of the cellar as he talks. Inspector Field's hand is the well-known hand that has collared half the people here, and motioned their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, male and female friends, inexorably to New South Wales. Yet Inspector Field stands in this den, the Sultan of the place. Every thief here cowers before him, like a schoolboy before his schoolmaster. All watch him, all answer when addressed, all laugh at his jokes, all seek to propitiate him. This cellar company alone—to say nothing of the crowd surrounding the entrance from the street above, and making the steps shine with eyes—is strong enough to murder us all, and willing enough to do it; but, let Inspector Field have a mind to pick out one thief here, and take him; let him produce that ghostly truncheon from his pocket, and say, with his business-air, 'My lad, I want you!' and all Rats' Castle shall be stricken with paralysis, and not a finger move against him, as he fits the handcuffs on!”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), “On Duty With Inspector Field,” in Household Words, June 14, 1851, reprinted in The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories, edited by Michael Sims (2012)

While editing the weekly magazine Household Words in the early 1850s, Charles Dickens sometimes published his own work—roughly 100 stories and articles in the first three years of its existence. Although much of this output reflected his longtime concerns—notably, housing, education, factory life—another aspect of urban poverty began to grip him: crime.

In particular, he became fascinated with London’s Metropolitan Police, established by Robert Peel in 1829. Thirteen years later, Charles Frederick Field became one of the first members of its Detective Department.

Chief Inspector Field would have appealed to Dickens for his plain-spoken manner, his rich fund of stories drawn from his work, and, through his disguises in pursuit of wrongdoers, his flair for the dramatic.

But, as the quote above indicates, Dickens also valued Field and his colleagues as stalwart bulwarks against the disorder that the novelist saw as increasingly threatening London. That sense had been further validated earlier in 1851 when Field apprehended Charles Gill, a would-be assassin of British Prime Minister Lord John Russell.

Upon retiring from the Detective Department at age 47 in 1852, Field set up shop as a private investigator, a trade he continued to ply for the next dozen years.

But even before he left the London police force, Field had left such an indelible impression that Dickens used him as the model for “Inspector Bucket” in the 1853 novel Bleak House—which, as noted in Claire Tomalin’s 2011 biography of the writer, is “a mystery story, a whodunnit, as well as an account of English society.”

The conventions of the mystery story—and especially of the police procedural—are so well established by now that it’s hard to imagine what it was like at its beginnings. But Dickens in effect set the prototype for Inspector Morse, Christopher Foyle, DCI Banks, Jane Tennison, and other British TV detectives with this metropolitan investigator as implacably determined to ferret out the truth as he was compassionate towards the victims of crime.

(Inspector Bucket also figures in the BBC mashup series Dickensian. I find it delicious that the Irish actor Stephen Rea—shown here in the role—played this pillar of Victorian England.)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on a Fine Specimen of the London Legal Establishment)

“[Barrister Hiram Grewgious] was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been put into a grinding-mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately into high-dried snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of anybody's voluntarily sporting such a head. The little play of feature that his face presented, was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away the chisel, and said: 'I really cannot be worried to finish off this man; let him go as he is.'”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

Vivid descriptions like this leave readers all the more mournful that Dickens did not manage to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood. For what it’s worth, we have his other novels, each brimming with life and remarkable in its own way.

Lawyers, appearing in in 11 of his 15 novels, particularly provoked his powers of observation and invective. If you think that Mr. Grewgious (which rhymes nicely with “egregious”) is bad, then look at Mr. Vholes of Bleak House, “a sallow man with pinched lips that looked as if they were cold," who appears "dressed in black, black-gloved, and buttoned to the chin." 

If he could only have shed that Eastern European accent, Bela Lugosi would have been perfect for the part, had the novel ever been adapted for film in Hollywood’s Golden Age. Movie fans familiar with the legal profession would have found him no more horrifying than in his other roles at Universal Studios.

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on a ‘Thick and Fast’ Early Morning Rain)

“Morning drew on apace. The air became more sharp and piercing, as its first dull hue: the death of night, rather than the birth of day: glimmered faintly in the sky. The objects which had looked dim and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually resolved into their familiar shapes. The rain came down, thick and fast; and pattered, noisily, among the leafless bushes.” — English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837)

Descriptions like this are part of the reason why Dickens has been adapted so often to the screen. All the images and sounds are here, ready for any screenwriter or director to use.

Flashback, November 1850: Dickens’ ‘Favourite Child,’ ‘David Copperfield,’ Published

With the last of its breathlessly awaited 20 monthly serial installments issued, David Copperfield was released in book form in November 1850, capping the publication journey of the most autobiographical novel by Charles Dickens. 

Just a few years before his death, the astonishingly prolific writer pronounced this his “favourite child” among his novels, and whenever writers use the adjective “Dickensian,” they, more likely than not, have in mind the miserable childhood remembered and subtly reworked here.

In some ways, the novelist didn’t realize just how autobiographical his fiction in this case was: He later wrote friend and future biographer John Forster that he hadn’t noticed that David’s initials were his own in reverse.

Even the title character’s first name has underdog overtones that Dickens would have identified with: Just as the biblical David had to overcome a direct threat to his life, so did Copperfield and Dickens, in the form of grinding poverty.

The story of a youth at bay, struggling with a broken home, adult cruelty, youthful infatuation and the meaning of true friendship surely shows up, in one form or another, in many reading lists for children and youth adults. But I wonder how much the great prototype of the coming-of-age tale—Dickens’ novel—is read today, either by youngsters at their leisure or by students?

When I eye its bulk (882 pages, minus the scholarly appendices, in the paperback I’m holding now), a quote from a considerably slimmer, more recent novel, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, inevitably springs to mind:  “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” 

And there goes, I suspect, any inclination to urge Dickens on younger readers.

Victorian readers had no such compunctions about the novel’s length or its sentimental, sometimes lachrymose, subject matter. David Copperfield did not initially sell as well as its predecessor, Dombey and Son, but it became Dickens’ best-known book, particularly admired by Leo Tolstoy and Somerset Maugham.

Part of the book’s appeal comes from its almost cinematic qualities. Dickens’ affection for the stage has been well-chronicled, but it is equally extraordinary how he anticipated the elements of the motion picture: realistic depiction of setting and atmosphere, memorable dialogue, and most of all, montage, or parallel action that drives narrative simultaneously among different characters (a technique, Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein noted in a famous essay, first employed by D.W. Griffith).

The 2020 film, starring Dev Patel in the title role, is only the latest adaptation of the novel for the big screen and television. The many extraordinary characters that Dickens created (Micawber, Mr. Murdstone, Uriah Heep, Steerforth, Betsey Trottwood) has attracted, over the past 85 years (since the classic MGM version), some of the brightest acting talents, including Basil Rathbone, Maggie Smith, Ralph Richardson, Richard Attenborough, Laurence Olivier, Cyril Cusack, Wendy Hiller, Edith Evans, Michael and Corin Redgrave, Ron Moody, Bob Hoskins, Lionel Barrymore, Edna May Oliver, Hugh Laurie—and, in the most unconventional bit of casting, W.C. Fields as Micawber.

(As I contemplate all these actors--and all the other actors, directors, and adaptations of Dickens--it occurred to me that I could create an entire blog on everyone associated with these versions for film, TV and stage, and never come close remotely close to running out of material.)

But as much as anything else, what contemporary readers responded to in the novel was not just its masterly characterization or its vivid description—both characteristic of Dickens’ fiction from the start—but a more naked honesty than Dickens had previously attempted, or, as G.K. Chesterton termed it, “a new torrent of truth, the truth out of his own life.”

To some extent, that derived from its form: not merely a story seen through the consciousness of a child (something Dickens had created 12 years before in Oliver Twist), but an entire coming-of-age novel told through a first-person narrator.

Forster seems to have suggested this device after reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. But Dickens’ technique and voice differed from Bronte’s: less inclined at the start of the novel to take the reader immediately into the action, but more oriented towards a bifurcated vision of the past. Copperfield is not merely re-telling his history, but interpreting, even re-interpreting it as an adult, while foreshadowing later elements in his tale (e.g., the seaside setting and the roles of debt and dispersion, suggested in the sale of his birth caul).

In particular, Dickens--37 years old as he began his narrative, recalling a life of tumult and triumph--mined and tweaked his experiences and the people who played major roles in his life. 

For instance, Maria Beadnell, a pretty woman who infatuated him before she rejected his courtship attempts, was turned into David’s doll-like, childish first wife, Dora. Traits of the novelist’s father, John Dickens, were assigned to David’s stepfather, Mr. Murdstone (callousness), and Wilkins Micawber (an inveterate and unwise optimism in the face of financial catastrophe that has spawned the “Micawber Principle” of money management).

In a sense, the novel functioned as a form of displacement for Dickens’ long-repressed humiliation and anger at his parents, whose impracticality and improvidence led him to working in a blacking factory rather than being placed in school. Except for a reduction in age by two years (thus accentuating the peril faced by fictional David), the facts and feelings in this passage exactly mirror those of Charles:

“It is matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.”

To be sure, the novel has its weaknesses: Chesterton complained that, in sending Emily, Peggotty and Micawber off to Australia in the conclusion, Dickens had conceived of the far-off colony as “a sort of island Valley of Avalon, where the soul may heal it of its grievous wound,” and I find Dora infuriatingly infantile at maddening length.

But altogether, Dickens’ recent biographer Claire Tomalin is correct in calling David Copperfield “a masterpiece built on Dickens's ability to dig into his own experience, transform it and give it the power of myth.” Midway through his career, it opened up a vein in his memory, leading to the mature period in which he would write Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations.

This Day in Literary History (Charles Dickens, ‘Generously Angry’ Champion of the Underdog, Dies)

June 9, 1870—Charles Dickens, whose prolific career included forerunners of the modern crime novel, left a few mysteries of his own when he died at age 58 of a stroke at his country home Gad’s Hill Place, in Rochester, England, including:

*How did he intend to finish the novel on which he was working at the time of his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood?

*Was he at home at the time of his fatal stroke?

*Why were his wishes for a simple burial disregarded?

The following is what we know—or don’t—about these questions:

*Drood: Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon, Dickens left no notes for how his book might turn out. We only know, based on the number of installments, that he had reached the halfway mark of the novel. Writing in installments for magazine publishing helped him to adjust plots and characterizations by gauging ongoing reader reaction, but it also deprived us of knowing his final destination for what turned out to be his last book.

*Dickens’ whereabouts on the day before his death: In her judicious 2011 biography, Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin reviewed the recollections of his beloved daughter, sister-in-law, and a local doctor called to Gad’s Hill. His careful concealment of involvement with his much younger mistress, Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, led Tomalin to offer an alternative scenario for the day of his stroke, one that she admitted was “a wild and improbable story, but not an entirely impossible one”—i.e., that, instead of suffering his stroke at home, Dickens collapsed at the home of Nelly, who—to preserve her lover’s reputation and her own—got him, with some help, into a hackney cab, where he was conveyed back to his own home.

*Burial: Dickens’ will specified that he wished to be “buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner; that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity.” That is hardly what occurred. In the end, his remains were brought to the Valhalla of English literati: Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. In a very revealing article this past February in Smithsonian Magazine, Leon Litvack disclosed that this circumvention of Dickens’ wishes was engineered by his friend and eventual biographer, John Forster, and the dean of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, both of whom stood to gain by creating an unstoppable groundswell of public opinion on behalf of this move.

(Incidentally, the involvement of Nelly Ternan in this closing chapter of Dickens’ story remains as murky as much else: At the final services, Dickens’ estranged wife Catherine was excluded; accounts of those present note that 14 mourners were in attendance. Many, but not all, were specifically named. It is possible that Nelly was the unnamed attendee.)

It is natural that Dickens, a spellbinding storyteller given to astonishing plot twists, left a few in his own life. But I could not write this post without considering his larger legacy.

Dickens pioneered so much in the writing and marketing of modern fiction, but his influence on the crime novel receives less attention than it should. From Oliver Twist to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he continually turned his attention to its significant presence in Victorian England. 

Just as masters of the genre have discovered in the past century, such subjects offers unique and abundant opportunities to consider both twisted individual psychology and larger social pathologies. In other words, the forces of injustice create the preconditions for crime, its exploiters and victims.

In contemporary America, where the police are increasingly regarded as abusers of power, it may come as a shock that Dickens sees the London police force as a bulwark of the moral order. The Dickens novel I was assigned in a college Victorian Literature course, Bleak House, even creates one of the first detectives in fiction: Inspector Bucket.  

A post from the Web site “Read Great Literature” offers the presence of this character as a reason to love this novel, noting his resemblance to my favorite TV sleuth, Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo: his humble nature, his dogged pursuit of clues, and even a beloved wife!

Above all, Dickens recognized that crime, like injustice, left untold victims in its wake, and it needed to be countered not just with the highly rational faculties of Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but with a fearless commitment to truth and a stout heart. That type of person would be a champion of the underdog like Dickens himself, as summarized by George Orwell:

“In the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”