Thoughts on Copperfield, Bleak House, and Lions
I think the thing that interested me the most about finally reading David Copperfield was how much I enjoyed the novel. As I mentioned in an earlier post, in high school I didn’t much like Dickens. The second or third chapter of Copperfield started to bog down and I almost gave up, but, pushing on, I enjoyed most of the rest of it… until about the final third.
A number of essays at the back of the edition I read mentioned reading and re-reading the novel, but I don’t see myself doing that. But I might re-read various segments. My favorite parts come mostly before Steerforth leaves the narrative as a speaking character. After that the text produces more and more of Macawber. I gather I’m supposed to find Macawber funny, but the deeper into the text I got, the more I groaned when I saw he was to be a central character of a chapter. I disliked his meanderings so much that I began to blip over huge swathes of paragraphs where he was talking. I likewise didn’t find the machinations of Uriah Heep of great interest. Some villains you hate and you long to see when they will get their comeuppance — the Murdstones, for instance. Heep I just found so irritating I wanted to get him out of the narrative. Not necessarily because I wanted to see him get his just desserts but because I was tired of him.