Reflections from the 19th Century

For more than two years, I’ve been reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. As I’m surely the slowest reader on planet Earth, the Herculean summit of more than 800 pages is not easily conquered, and progress is further decelerated by my thirst for fragments of story and for the full experience of the world in which David’s life unfolds. For months, I’ve been stagnant, reading only a little at a time, not because I don’t want to know what happens, but because I want to dwell in that place and time as long as possible. I have a love for the characters and the world they inhabit. As with the setting of every excellent story, it has come to feel like a real place, one I will be sorry to leave when the last page is turned. The story is told in first person, so the reader views the world entirely through David’s eyes, and what a charming sense of goodness it inspires; David himself is quite intelligent, but also sincere, even-tempered, and incredibly kind. As an adult, he retains a certain innocence complemented by great sensibility, and as a child, he perceives quite keenly, despite his innocence, the truest forms of joy and qualities of character that merit admiration. The purity