David Copperfield - C. Dickens

This book is the answer to such questions as “What were people doing before TV was invented?”. I decided to order it from a bookshop nearby after having found its incipit quoted somewhere:

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

When picking it up, I received with my surprise a 900ish pages long brick, and a bit unsure whether the book was the story of a magician (it’s not). Essentially it’s this guy telling the story of his life, which starts out quite unlucky, proceeds okay and concludes well. Reading it felt most of the times more like murdering time than killing time, but this might have to do with the book having aged a bit.

One of the morals of the book seems to be that social order needs to be respected. Copperfield is born in a good family and fights his way back when he falls into disgrace. Characters that try to rise from lower classes are either evil or victims of their passion. I also liked how death is sistematically used to solve troublesome situations: Copperfield wants to marry a girl, her father is against it and cannot be convinced otherwise - he’s not evil, just against it. But he dies, so they can marry. Old schoolmate fell in love and ran away with a girl from a lower class, his (social) life is destroyed, he repents and is coming back. He dies during the trip. Copperfield realises he married too hastily, maybe it wasn’t the right choice. Young wife dies of unexpected illness.

My feeling is that in certain situations there did not exist in the “good” society back then a way of solving the issue. You could not expect the members of society to accept back among them qualcuno macchiatosi di azioni tremende, much less you could write it in a book. So you just made the persons repent and solve the problem killing them, and the book goes on. In this kind of view, had the first wife of Copperfield not died, he would have been lifelong prisoner of a mistaken and unhappy marriage and this would have been the right and acceptable course of events. The characters that, being unworthy, still manage to survive the author, get sent to Australia, which I take to be something like Mars for Dickens.

I am a bit puzzled by the character of Copperfield’s first wife, Dora. I thought it was interesting that (without this being ever explicitly mentioned) she is very similar to his mother. While there seems to be a critique to the way women are treated are playthings e lasciate vivere nella bambagia, this is never dealt with heads-on. Dora is by no way an evil character, she comes up with some memorable quotes:

It is better for me to be stupid than uncomfortable, isn’t it?

I didn’t marry to be reasoned with. If you meant to reason with such a poor little thing as I am, you ought to have told me so!

But nobody seems to think she’s stupid either.

One good remark from David’s aunt, when he overthinks a situation and then asks for advice:

Perhaps it would be better only to consider whether it is right to do this; and, if it is, to do it.

Which I read again as a festina lente kind of thinking.

I also liked this paragraph on what David thinks helped him along his path:

I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor could come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feeling constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules.