I’ve just re-read David Copperfield, and very glad to do so.
Like Great Expectations, the gripping part is the opening quarter describing a boy’s emotionally deprived childhood in the first person. I was not so interested thereafter.
DC used to be regarded as Dickens’ masterpiece (it was his own favourite) but seems to have lost favour recently. I was struck that after we get past childhood, there is no sinister sense of society being itself threatening – the evil is from Uriah Heep’s individual plotting, rather than the corrosive effect of money or class, as in the other mature novels (the Law in Bleak House, the debtor’s prison in Little Dorrit, Pip’s pretensions, etc.)
Little Emily makes a very interesting constrast with two other “fallen women” I’ve read about this year, Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede and Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. (Lydia just avoids being fallen because Wickham is bought off. Unlike Emily, she has absolutely no regrets).
Any other thoughts?