David Copperfield (Penguin Popular Classics)

Customer Review

Utterly fantastic

For me, this may just pip "Great Expectations" as my vote for the BBC's Big Read thing.

Written in the first person, like "Great Expectations", the early part of the book is regarded as highly autobiographical. The range of styles, and the sweep of the plot, though, dazzles throughout.

True, the Little Emily stuff may be too melodramatic for today, but the characters here are Dickens at his very best. The odious Heep, the oh-so-brilliant Steerforth and the fumbling Mr Micawber.

On one level, yes they are caricatures, but I have met people just like Mr Heep, and not too far from Steerforth.

And when my boss denied me a raise in my salary the other day, claiming that were it down to her, she would certainly be looking to do it, but that her hands were tied by the senior management, I cast my mind straight back to David Copperfield trying to get a raise out of Spenlow and Jorkins. Timeless.

For a Dickens, it's a middling size of book, so it'll take time, but it won't wipe out a month, like "Little Dorrit", say.

Read this. Comic and tragic at turns, it is staggeringly brilliant writing.