Dickens' Favorite Kid

He wrote 15 novels, and the story goes, his favorite of these well-regarded children was David Copperfield, the 877 pages of which I recently finished, and found myself moved to believe it one of my favorites as well.  Now, to be fair, it is to date my only cover-to-cover Dickens experience, so calling it my favorite Dickens is accurate by any standard.  I mean then it's become one of my all-time favorites, and one to which I may return.  It was touching, compelling, poetic, and everything else a novel should be.  What's more, you'll find in the opening chapters maybe the most poignant description of childhood in not only the Victorian canon, but in all of literature.  It isn't surprising to find
he was Dickens favorite child; the narrative of David's youth, both tender and tragic, maintains the delicious and resonant quality of something universally understood but rarely so well articulated, not to mention that very personal touch, as of something called into expression by an elevated conviction and genuine sense of purpose.  Dickens not only crafts the story well, he means it.  The tale reflects, better than any he wrote, his own stormy youth and strivings as a young man, and this is plain—a readiness not only to paint a complete picture, but to set it afire with the compelling realism and redemptive hope that only true experience can summon, his own soul available in every page.

What's so remarkable then about the work is not only the intricacy of its relationships, the complexity and chromatic richness of its characters, or the delicately interwoven threads of story Dickens draws to an arresting resolution, but what it reveals about the layers of experience upon which a life is built.  Much of it is spent not only resolving its many conflicts, but also canvassing David's reflective journey, his endeavor to frame the many seasons of his life and the very sort of life he might lead as a result.  As he claims in the opening of the novel, he may not turn out to be the hero of his own story.  His path in coming to understand the one person who can interpret all the colors of his mind and draw him ever upward in his human path is the very subject and heroism at which he hints and which the reader is allowed the marvelous pleasure of discovering.

Looking back, I marvel at the very turn of fortune that brought me to that same place, how I might never have read David Copperfield if not for picking it up in a Barnes & Noble one night years ago, cracking open its bulk to the very first page, and reading the line "I am born."  It begins as simply and wonderfully as a tale ever has.  No guesswork or any of the opaque exposition to which so many tales are prone.  And it ends as well as a novel ever could, with the fullest celebration of a life inspired by the author's own, replete with every tangible joy and grim desperation that teaches the very best lesson, that redemption is far better than perfection, that a grief endured is parent to a better joy than any other might have been.  And as the reader, I learned it too.  Between the first page and the last, I experienced what he experienced, felt everything he felt, all in such generous detail that it meant the world to have come full circle and know not just that simple truth, but to have internalized it, as if I had taken the very same steps myself through the very same life.  This is, I believe, the greatest joy of reading and the highest purpose of art.  Now, I can wish only to continue to believe, and by my own craft, to serve the very same purpose.  And begin.