Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I am bad at reading, I'll do almost anything else except read until I force myself or I go to bed or whatever, I've fried my brain with dopamine.

But also I'm reading a couple of different things at once. I think I enjoy D.C. more because I'm not plowing through it. It's one of the longest books I've read and FEELS long. There's whole plotlines that are pretty tedious, despite the writing.

It's what Henry James would call a "baggy monster".
 

luka

Well-known member
I bet you don't remember a single thing about it though

I read with my whole spirit, I live it, in a sense I am David and Dickens and Heep writing a new Copperfield with every word I imbibe
the hero is called david copperfiled. in the beginning he is born
 

luka

Well-known member
with dickens you feel youve given himquite enough but youre only halfway thru. i loved little dorrit but gave up halfway.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
David Copperfield is a bumpy road because some of the plots/characters are no good—perhaps the doctor strong plot develops in an interesting way but so far the only good bit has been Heep's exploitation of it

I anticipate that when I finish it I'll think I loved that book but I certainly haven't always loved reading it
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Heep, Steerforth, Betsy, Micawber, these are the top tier characters. Mr Dick is good, too.

Traddles I can't really work out, Dora is (deliberately) quite annoying, Agnes is a saintly dud, doctor strong and his saintly wife, duds...
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Doctor Strong is the headmaster of the school David attends in Canterbury. He is an aging, scholarly man whose primary goal in life is to develop a new dictionary. Nevertheless, he is extremely considerate of those around him and is generous to a fault: for instance, he either does not notice or does not care that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Markleham, is using him to advance her relatives' prospects. Doctor Strong's kindness makes him a favorite with his students but actually places some strain on his marriage. In his selflessness, Doctor Strong assumes that if his wife, Annie, truly is having an affair with her cousin, Jack Maldon, it is the Doctor's own fault for marrying a woman so much younger than himself. This leads him to push Annie away, much to her distress, and the misunderstanding is ultimately resolved only through Mr. Dick's intervention.
 

jenks

thread death
Wilson's account of dickens, how Dickens was influenced by stage drama and how he has a bad tendency to write stagey melodramatic scenes, I thought of last night reading (skimming really) the tedious scene where tedious Doctor Strong's tedious young wife gives a big speech to him and we're meant to cry I suppose

Notable though that like David and Dora, Dr Strong and Alice(?) have a marriage which seems entirely sexless, in which the wife is compared to a child. Wilson talks about Dickens obsession with innocent young women (girls, really). He was apparently quite obsessed with his wife's younger sister, who died young.
Yeah. His reaction to her death was really extreme, he had never seemed that close to her while she was alive. And then when he left his wife (essentially Dora) his house was run by another one of her sisters. I think most agree it was a bit of wishful thinking killing off Dora in DC as after his wife had grown fat through countless pregnancies etc he grew to despise her.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Rosa Dartle is an intriguing character, with her throbbing white scar and her boundless hatred towards Emily, what's she all about?

I can't leap this paywall, if someone could I'd be grateful

 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Oh nevermind worked it out

One persistent cliché of Charles Dickens criticism is that he didn’t understand women, least of all their sexual psychology. It's an accusation to which I always retort: what about the magnificent Rosa Dartle?
She appears in David Copperfield as the orphaned cousin of Steerforth’s father and companion to his mother, standing in marked contrast to the novel’s milquetoast heroines Dora, Agnes and Little Em'ly. Aged about thirty and a spinster, she is described as looking "a little dilapidated", with a strikingly dark and slender figure and a livid scar on her lip (a feature which Dickens makes much of).
An intense and unrequited passion for Steerforth has left her bitter, resentful and savagely sarcastic. Vain as he is, Steerforth still enjoys playfully flirting with her and Dickens masterfully portrays her continuing vulnerability to his insincere attentions, exploring the way that thwarted love can curdle into self-hatred.
Her violent attack on Little Em’ly in Chapter 50 is brilliantly handled and oddly moving - her emotions seem so much more intense and authentic than Em’ly’s pieties that the reader can’t help but sympathise with her. Her ultimate fate is a cruelly ironic one - she is left trapped with Steerforth’s mother, the person most responsible for the degeneration of his moral character.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
From the intro to the penguin classics edition (that I've just FINISHED)

David Copperfield shows his own conflictual states of mind when he says he ‘has a sort of fascination’ for Uriah Heep (chapter XVI), just as when going through Highgate, after severing connections with Mrs Steerforth, he says that he went ‘in an attraction I could not resist’ to look over her garden wall (chapter XXXVI). In the same way when Uriah is asleep in David Copperfield’s room – Uriah’s psychopathology takes the form of his insinuating himself into sleeping here just as he insinuates his way into sleeping in Copperfield’s bedroom at Canterbury – David cannot sleep and keeps on looking at him, ‘attracted to him in very repulsion’ (chapter XXV). These moments strike at the foundations of identity: they show motivations which are not nameable, not conscious, and not part of the subject’s construction of himself. The dynamics between Uriah Heep and David Copperfield, both in love with the same woman, Agnes, are complex, and they take the novel beyond the imputation of being merely comic.

How unacknowledged homoerotic feeling intersects with class hatred, or how far both Uriah and David construct their own identities as two ‘upstarts’ (Heep’s word for Copperfield) in relation to each other, are matters for discussion. It has frequently been noted how in the Bible it is Uriah the Hittite who is the just husband murdered by David in his pursuit of Uriah’s wife Bathsheba (II Samuel 11). So Dickens’s naming of David and Uriah deliberately countermands the reading where David is hero and Uriah the villain. The text speaks for Uriah by showing how he knows that his own formation as a charity schoolboy has been split. He reacts to David’s complacent moralizing that greed and cunning are certain to overreach themselves, by saying that this is as ‘certain as they used to teach at school… from nine o’clock to eleven, that labor was a curse; and from eleven o’clock to one, that it was a blessing and a cheerfulness, and a dignity, and I don’t know what at all, eh?… You preach, about as consistent as they did’ (Chapter LII).

Uriah Heep has grasped the divided nature of Victorian ideology. The Evangelical principle – which often, historically, supported the charity schools – taught that labour was a curse, following Genesis 3.16–19; while the Utilitarian ethos, supported by Carlyle’s ‘gospel of work’, preached in the 1840s in his Past and Present and influenced by the idea of ‘self-help’, made bourgeois happiness and domesticity dependent on hard work and duty. Labour as a curse kept down the working-classes; labour as a blessing made them a disposable labour-force. Uriah Heep sees this hypocrisy at work.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The introduction reminded me of all the deadening tendencies of modern academia, schematising everything (under the guise of problematising everything), a distressing tendency, something perhaps Dickens himself would have satirised
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
ingenious (or spurious) theories - e.g. dickens cried reading steerforth's death because he had been obliged to kill off the 18th century version of masculinity steerforth represents

i mean maybe?
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I've got that penguin classics edition too and the introductory essay really, really annoyed me, absolute bullshit.

Plus I made the mistake of reading one of the footnotes early on and it practically gave away the ending! Terrible edition.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
When Esther visits the seaport Deal to see Richard, we have a description of the harbor: “Then the fog began to rise like a curtain, and numbers of ships that we had had no idea were near appeared. I don't know how many sail the waiter told us were then lying in the downs. Some of these vessels were of grand size--one was a large Indiaman just come home; and when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats pulling off from the shore to them and from them to the shore, and a general life and motion in themselves and everything around them, was most beautiful.”

Some readers may suppose that such things as these evocations are trifles not worth stopping at; but literature consists of such trifles. Literature consists, in fact, not of general ideas but of particular revelations, not of schools of thoughts but of individuals of genius. Literature is not about something; it is the thing itself, the quiddity. Without the masterpiece, literature does not exist. The passage describing the harbor at Deal occurs at a point when Esther travels to the town in order to see Richard, whose attitude towards life, the strain of freakishness in his otherwise noble nature, and the dark destiny that hangs over him, trouble her and make her want to help him. Over her shoulder Dickens shows us the harbor. There are many vessels there, a multitude of boats that appear with a kind of quiet magic as the fog begins to rise. Among them, as mentioned, there is a large Indiaman, that is, a merchant ship just home from India: “when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea…” Let us pause: can we visualize that? Of course we can, and we do so with a greater thrill of recognition because in comparison to the conventional blue sea of literary tradition these silvery pools in the dark sea offer something that Dickens noted for the very first time with the innocent and sensuous eye of the true artist, saw and immediately put into words. Or more exactly, without the words there would have been no vision; and if one follows the soft, swishing, slightly blurred sounds of the sibilants in the description, one will find that the image had to have a voice too in order to live. And then Dickens goes on to indicate the way “these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed”—and I think it quite impossible to choose and combine any better words than he did here to render the delicate quality of shadow and silver sheen in that delightful sea view. And for those who think that all magic is just play—pretty play—but something that can be deleted without impairing the story, let me point out that this is the story: the ship from India there, in that unique setting, is bringing, has brought, young Dr Woodcourt back to Esther, and in fact they will meet in a moment. So that the shadowy sea view, with those tremulous pools of light and that bustle of shimmering boats, acquires in retrospect a flutter of marvelous excitement, a glorious note of welcome, a kind of distant ovation. And this is how Dickens meant his book to be appreciated.
Nabokov - Lectures on Literature
 
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