This was an Audible original adaptation, produced by Sam Mendes, and published in 2023. And what it adapts, of course, is the eighth novel by Charles Dickens (1812-70), which first came out in serial form from 1849 to 1850.

As with Oliver Twist, also Mendes's work, we're offered an original score, a full range of sound effects (the mountain echo scene was particularly atmospheric), and a star-studded cast (including Ncuti Gatwa, Helena Bonham Carter, Richard Armitage, Jessie Buckley, and Toby Jones -- and those are just the ones I'd heard of...)

All in all, it was a highly enjoyable listening experience, and I'd agree with Fiona Sturges, who found it "a beguiling version", and adds: "A cinematic sound palette evokes the gentle textures of the seaside and the chaos and clatter of London, making this a series best heard via headphones." Definitely.

I have, in theory, read David Copperfield. It's on the original Memory of Books list, and the copy we once owned was dated 1987. I had very little memory of the story before starting. But having followed up a little once I'd finished listening, I think the bones of the adaptation are pretty faithful, even though some details have been changed, and some characters sidelined, and some scenes added for the sake of their audio possibilities. Copperfield is a much longer audio-production than Twist, weighing at 8 hours and 13 minutes. This gives the writers the chance to incorporate a fair number of the labyrinthine threads of the original.

The story, in brief, is the life journey of David Copperfield, as he moves from a truly dreadful childhood through adversity and tragedy and heartache to a happy marriage and a successful career.

Some of the book, of course, has taken its place in popular culture. Everyone knows Wilkins Micawber, for example: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." And most people would be familiar with Uriah Heep, and his constant, vexing insistence on his "umble" station in life. (Few would know, however, and I certainly didn't, that the physical description Dickens gives us is based on Hans Christian Andersen...)

I definitely feel inspired to read or listen to the original again some day. But in the meantime, four reflections:

1. Critical acclaim

Some regard Copperfield as "the apex of Dickens's art". And this wouldn't be an unusual view: "Tolstoy considered it his favorite of Dickens’s books, and Sigmund Freud gave a copy to his fiancee on the occasion of their engagement in 1882. Dickens himself believed it the best of his works -- 'Like many fond parents,' he wrote in the preface to the 1869 edition, 'I have in my heart of hearts of a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.' 'An author is not always a good judge of his own work,' wrote W. Somerset Maugham, 'but in this case Dickens’s judgment was sound. Matthew Arnold and Ruskin considered it his best novel, and I think we may agree with them. If we do, we shall be in pretty good company.'"


Dickens in 1850

Peter Ackroyd, one of Dickens's biographers, contends: "If there is one book which establishes Dickens's unique presence as a writer who can be considered the last of the great eighteenth-century novelists and the first of the great symbolic novelists, and which explains why it is that he is considered to be the true heir of the Romantic poets, it is David Copperfield."

G.K. Chesterton is a bit of a dissenter from all these favourable views. His commentary comes across as slightly disappointed: "David Copperfield begins as if it were going to be a new kind of Dickens novel; then it gradually turns into an old kind of Dickens novel." Yet he recognizes its calibre: "[Dickens] has created, especially in this book... creatures who cling to us and tyrannise over us, creatures whom we would not forget if we could, creatures whom we could not forget if we would, creatures who are more actual than the man who made them."

And yes, absolutely, it's awash with memorable characters, and the adaptation brings them to life brilliantly. James Steerforth (more on him below) is particularly fascinating; but so is Emily, the young woman who -- from girlhood -- longs for distant places and a better position in life, kicks against her restricted life, and finds herself constantly drawn to danger. Aunt Betsey (beautifully portrayed by Bonham Carter) is admirably indomitable. She's a bit harsh (especially if you're a donkey), but she's brave and outspoken and generous. And Micawber would drive you crazy in real life, with his circumlocution and his unsquashable optimism. But he's wonderful on the page (or in the headphones).

2. Autobiographical elements

This is the aspect of David Copperfield that seems to get the most attention. And Ackroyd agrees that it's the Dickens novel that draws mostly closely on the author's character and experiences.

When Dicken's sister Fanny died in 1848, bringing back, as deaths do, many family memories, Dickens wrote a few thousand words of autobiography detailing his time at Warren's blacking factory and his father's imprisonment for debt in the Marshalsea. He showed the fragment to John Forster (friend and future biographer), who encouraged him to try a first-person narrative for his next novel. In 1849, Dickens set off for Great Yarmouth, and it was here that the plot for David Copperfield emerged: "It was along its sands that Peggotty's upturned boat would be placed, and along its shore that the great storm would eventually rise and destroy both Ham and Steerforth." Soon afterwards he started a series of newspaper articles about the systematic abuse of orphan children. "Children without fathers, or without mothers, play a central role in the novel," notes Ackroyd; among them are Uriah Heep, Emily, Steerforth, and David himself.


48 Doughty Street, the London home of Charles Dickens, now a museum

It was in the fifth instalment that the autobiographical fragment, appropriately disguised, made its appearance. Here are the details of his childhood reading, and of the warehouse to which he was consigned (suffering an interruption to his education), and of the Marshalsea prison (only it's Mr Micawber, rather than Mr Dickens, who is incarcerated). And little David is an astute observer, who "does seem to be in many important respects a simulacrum of little Charles". The similarities continue. Copperfield's work as a shorthand reporter in Parliament directly reflects Dickens's experience, and he eventually becomes a renowned author. And David, like Dickens, also experiences "a vague unhappy loss or want of something".

And then there's Dora... She is based on Maria Beadnell, Dickens's first love. The relationship never came to anything, because Maria's parents scotched it. In the book, though, Dora is David's first wife, and she's a total airhead... She's actually the only thing I remember from my reading of the novel all those years ago. I distinctly remember thinking what a disastrous marriage this was going to be, and wondering how soon he was going to get fed up with her.

Well, she dies young. Which is handy. David can keep all his idolization, without being ground down, year after year, by the fact that she has no idea of household economy, and seems interested in nothing but her dog (who's really annoying in the adaptation, but then I'm not generally a dog-fan).

Chesterton is scathing about this authorial cop-out: "There is at the end of this book too much tendency to bless people and get rid of them. Micawber is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns him to exile [in Australia -- more below]. Dora is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns her to death. But it is the whole business of Dickens in the world to express the fact that such people are the spice and interest of life. It is the whole point of Dickens that there is nobody more worth living with than a strong, splendid, entertaining, immortal nuisance... Dora confuses the housekeeping; but we are not angry with Dora because she confuses the housekeeping. We are angry with the housekeeping because it confuses Dora." Well, no, actually, G.K. -- I, at least, rapidly ran out of patience with Dora, and just wanted her to get a grip.

But Chesterton is really upset by what he sees as Dickens's betrayal of his characters: "That is the whole meaning of Dickens; that we should keep the absurd people for our friends. And here at the end of David Copperfield he seems in some dim way to deny it. He seems to want to get rid of the preposterous people simply because they will always continue to be preposterous. I have a horrible feeling that David Copperfield will send even his aunt to Australia if she worries him too much about donkeys... [Dickens] is afraid of the things he has made; of that terrible figure Micawber; of that yet more terrible figure Dora. He cannot make up his mind to see his hero perpetually entangled in the splendid tortures and sacred surprises that come from living with really individual and unmanageable people."

Chesterton, incidentally, doesn't see much future for David's second marriage, to Agnes: "The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis. David Copperfield and Dora quarrelled over the cold mutton; and if they had gone on quarrelling to the end of their lives, they would have gone on loving each other to the end of their lives; it would have been a human marriage. But David Copperfield and Agnes would agree about the cold mutton. And that cold mutton would be very cold."

Again, I'm at odds with this view. If you read about Dickens's marriage, and his truly scandalous treatment of his wife, who bore him 10 children (he attempted to have her put away in an asylum, on spurious grounds, all the while doing a good job of gaslighting her), you end up feeling that he would be the last person to write about David and Dora finding a way through conjugal trials to conjugal bliss.

3. Australia

Several of the characters -- not only the Micawber family, but also Mr Peggotty and poor disgraced runaway Emily -- end up in Australia... They've all got something to live down, and welcome the chance of a new start.

Dickens was a great proponent of emigration: "Some five months before [he] published the seventeenth number of David Copperfield..., in the opening number of Household Words (30 March 1850), he placed before his readership a number of emigrants' letters given him by the founder of the Family Colonisation Loan Society, Mrs. Caroline Chisholm (1808-77), an irresponsible parent whom the novelist later satirized for her 'telescopic philanthropy' as Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House (1852-3), but whom Australians later memorialized as a principal figure in their history by placing her image on their 1967 five-dollar note... By way of preface to the article, Dickens penned an argument in favour of this scheme for transferring Great Britain's poor, unemployed, and starving from the slums of London, Liverpool, Manchester, and other blighted urban areas to the 'Bush' and the new cities of Australia, especially Sydney and Melbourne, where they could contribute their energies and skills to the greater good of the Empire and build prosperous futures for themselves."


Port Philip as we knew it. Dickens "provides illustrative excerpts from various letters: ... [including from] a woman in Port Philip, near Melbourne, writing to her brother and sister"

The creator of emigrants Micawber and Peggotty planned to travel to Australia himself. That never happened, but two of his sons did migrate there.

Chesterton, however, continues to be scathing: "Why did Dickens at the end of this book give way to that typically English optimism about emigration? He seems to think that he can cure the souls of a whole cartload, or rather boatload, of his characters by sending them all to the Colonies... Dickens does not use this emigration merely as a mode of exit. He does not send these characters away on a ship merely as a symbol suggesting that they pass wholly out of his hearer’s life. He does definitely suggest that Australia is a sort of island Valley of Avalon, where the soul may heal it of its grievous wound... There is here something of that hazy sentimentalism which makes some Imperialists prefer to talk of the fringe of the empire of which they know nothing, rather than of the heart of the empire which they know is diseased."

Others disagree: "Maugham notes that Dickens has come under fire from critics for giving the Micawbers a happy ending. These critics feel that it was wholly out of character for the feckless Micawber to acquire success and stability. I would argue that the resolution of Mr. Micawber’s story is a pointed indictment of the society in which the story takes place: a man of his considerable gifts needed only the right environment in which to flourish, and Victorian London was ruthless towards even the very gifted."

4. James Steerforth

David first encounters this character at the cruel and spartan school to which his stepfather has dispatched him. From the beginning, Steerforth is highly charismatic and influential. He's attractive to women, and his dashing, seductive qualities sweep Emily off her feet. She runs away with him to Europe, thus putting herself irreparably on the wrong side of Victorian British morals.

It has been speculated that Dickens based Steerforth on the figure of Lord Byron. Yes, the Byron who never seems to stay away from Purple Tern for too long... James Armstrong points up the similarities: "Both figures were spoiled by doting mothers, lashed out at servants as children, became infamous for womanizing, and ultimately left England in scandal to die in the prime of life. In spite of all this, David remained in the thrall of Steerforth, just as the British public retained a fierce admiration for Byron. The tragedy of Steerforth re-enacts the ambivalent and highly charged relationship the Victorians had with the most notorious hero-villain of the Romantic era."


David and Steerforth meet the Peggottys

But Steerforth also exercises a snake-like fascination over David. And the depiction of their bond is the element where the adaptation most strikingly departs from the text. As Audible rather coyly puts it: "There is old school friend James Steerforth: dashing, daring and seductive. This dramatisation explores the complexities and intimacies of that relationship beyond anything possible in Dickens' day, in an adaptation giving fresh life and vividness to this beloved tale."

In other words, there's a clear homoerotic element. It's not pushed too far, but it's definitely there. Is that justified?

Well, it doesn't come out of nowhere. As observed on the Dickens Museum website: "To David, Steerforth seems just perfect... [He asks David] to read to him at night, and David refers to this arrangement as cementing the intimacy between them. He compares himself to Scheherazade, the fictional queen from One Thousand and One Nights. In the story, Scheherazade reads to the king every night, and after 1001 nights, he has fallen in love with her. So while David is making a joke about reading lots of stories to Steerforth, he is also comparing himself to a Queen, reading to a King, waiting for him to fall in love with her...

"This relationship is fascinating. There is clearly an element of power involved, as well as the natural fascination of a younger student to an older one. But its also true that any exploration of gay passion, even an innocent schoolboy crush had to be explored through the language of brotherhood and fraternity. There's certainly a language used which, while not overtly sexual in itself, could easily be identified with by gay readers. It's worth remembering that, not withstanding the laws and social restrictions, there were probably as many gay people in the Victorian times as there are today. They were just a bit more hidden."

Anna VanSeveren feels there's no doubt that David Copperfield is an example of Victorian literature that explores same-sex relationships, albeit subtly. I'm not sure I would follow her analysis all the way. But if Steerforth is modelled on Byron, then ambiguous sexuality might well have been part of the mix.

And there's definitely food for thought in the original text. Steerforth wonders, for example, whether David has a sister: "If you had had one, I should think she would have been a pretty, timid, little, bright-eyed sort of girl. I should have liked to know her." He consistently addresses David as Daisy, which his awestruck friend has no problem with.

And it's not hard to find evidence of David's idolization: "There was an ease in his manner... which I still believe to have borne a kind of enchantment with it. I still believe him, in virtue of this carriage, his animal spirits, his delightful voice, his handsome face and figure, and, for aught I know, of some inborn power of attraction besides (which I think a few people possess), to have carried a spell with him to which it was a natural weakness to yield, and which not many persons could withstand... Except that Steerforth was more to be admired than ever, I remember nothing. He was going away at the end of the half-year, if not sooner, and was more spirited and independent than before in my eyes, and therefore more engaging than before... [On meeting him later] I grasped him by both hands, and could not let them go. But for very shame, and the fear that it might displease him, I could have held him round the neck and cried... A dashing way he had of treating me like a plaything, was more agreeable to me than any behaviour he could have adopted. It reminded me of our old acquaintance...; above all, it was a familiar, unrestrained, affectionate demeanour that he used towards no one else. As he had treated me at school differently from all the rest, I joyfully believed that he treated me in life unlike any other friend he had. I believed that I was nearer to his heart than any other friend, and my own heart warmed with attachment to him."

So, maybe the adaptation spells things out too much, but it's not as though it conjured this aspect up out of thin air.

***

This post has become way longer than I intended. Kudos to Sam Mendes's adapation for being so thought-provoking...


Dickens in 1867