I, despite being a voracious reader through my childhood, have never read a Dickens cover to cover. My motivations to read this come from wanting to read Demon Copperhead - booker prize winner from 2023. That is a modern retelling of David Copperfield from what I have been able to glean (I don’t like to spend time reading reviews pre-reading). David Copperfield is a coming of age story and this genre is called bildungsroman - another overly specific German word. It deals with the moral and intellectual growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood. I love that this read coincides with my own moral and intellectual growth. It is no surprise that David Copperfield is semi autobiographical else I’d think Dickens was a mind reader. Reading David’s account is the same as being David himself, you are this child, over analytical and nervous. The goings on around him are immaterial, they’re big and depressing, yes but all you want to know is how David’s doing. There is a deep sense of concern in the reader’s, ahem - my, mind.

Aside from my first Dickens, this is also my first audiobook. I’ve been travelling and I felt that was a practical way to make progress. Richard Armitage really brings the characters to life. He does different voices for different characters and the continuity is maintained throughout.

Okay, it’s been about a month since I finished the book. It took me a whole month. A whole fantastic month. What a lovely tapestry is weaved by Dickens in the writing of this. You know, this couldn’t have been anything but autobiographical, there is no way one can imagine the inner workings of a mind so clearly and trace its lucid evolution.

David is a little baby when this story begins. His father is dead, his very concerningly young mother is living (barely) with a maid - this is from a time when a slave maid was the norm in England.

His mother remarries a much older man and it is a tale of a cruel stepfather who plunges David’s life into misery. He is taken out of school swiftly and sent to London to work in a factory, despite his mothers concerns (which are methodically disregarded in all aspects).

He runs away, finds his aunt who is said to live in a cottage in Dover. Along the way, he has many (mis)adventures that are told with the vividity of true nightmarish memory. His aunt is a feminist icon to a larger extent than I expected, she is not a feminist by the standards of the day but of today (low bar, eh).

His aunt raises him very well and soon David is going to school, taking vacations and excelling as a proctor in London. He gains fame for his writings and soon becomes a well regarded writer. Through this story - we are met with many characters - old and new. He renews his friendships with people from his previous life in his mother’s home - friends from the school, the maid and her extended family, the family he boarded with while working at the factory in London. He falls in love, then out of love and in again. Through all of this, David actively reflects on what friendship and romantic companionship mean to him. The book ends with a non event. All it is is a normal day in an extraordinary life.