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Title: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Peter Ackroyd ISBN: 0-7493-0762-5 Publisher: Heinemann Pub. Date: April, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $4.50

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Average Customer Rating: 4.46 (85 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: An outstanding reading of this abridgement by Anton Lesser
Comment: For those who don't have time to read for pleasure, or perhaps spend too much time reading as part of their daily job, audio books are a godsend. You can play them while travelling to work, and you're suddenly transported to another world, if they're any good.

Fortunately this Naxos abridgement read by Anton Lesser is superb. I haven't yet found an actor better at handling both the male and female voices, old and young, rich and poor. It's so easy to forget that that is not a large-cast dramatisation -- it's just a a one-man reading, brilliantly executed.

As a story, 'David Copperfield' means a lot to me because it means a lot to my Dad. Now 73 years old, he had a troubled childhood in and around London, and a difficult relationship with his stepfather. While Dickens needed to create some out-and-out baddies such as Uriah Heep and the Murdstones, many of his characters are basically decent folk, rigidly sticking to Victorian values, and I think this is how my father still sees the world.

Much of the detail in this story is specific to England, but the basic human themes are universal. As a first pass at getting into 'David Copperfield', I would very strongly recommend this 4CD audiobook.

Rating: 5
Summary: A Novel whose Familiarity should not Obscure its Brilliance
Comment: Both critics and Charles Dickens himself generally class
"David Copperfield" as his "greatest" novel. The strains of autobiography and the rich array of comic and tragicomic characters give the reader the best of Dickens' wit and social outrage. As the years go by, though, people begin to speak of David Copperfield as a "set piece", a bit of Victoriana different in format but not in importance from a very natty
but a bit days-gone-by bit of antique furniture. This view misjudges the novel. This book presents a rich set of characters in a complex novel, deeply satisfying and in many ways still a very modern work. It's very hard to write about "good" and "evil" without descending into morality play, but this novel succeeds. The story is broken into three
"threads": a young boy, orphaned early, endures an unhappy childhood refreshed by periods of happiness (and comedy);
that same boy goes through late adolescence, and comes "into his own"; and finally, the narrator, now a man, sees the resolution of the various plot threads built through the early parts of the novel. Many Dickens themes are played out here--the superiority of goodness to affluence, the persistence and affrontery of fraud, and the way in which social institutions frequently hinder rather than advance their stated goals. The book does not read like a polemic, though--it reads like a bit of serial fiction (which in fact it was).

If you are hunting a good, solid read about values and
curious characters, David Copperfield stands ready to show you his world.

Rating: 3
Summary: Why books should not be written in weekly installments
Comment: Three major pitfalls are usually inevitable in the work of an author who publishes his novels in serial format for literary magazines, as Charles Dickens did. The first is that the medium does not allow for editing and revision upon completion of a first draft. The second is that the author is under the constant pressure of a weekly deadline. And the third is that the author is paid by the word. All three flaws are glaring in David Copperfield.

If Dickens had been able to look over this novel as a whole, surely he would have made serious revisions to it. The dramatic tension of the plot is poorly calibrated. It peaks a half dozen times throughout the book, which only confuses the reader and leaves him feeling betrayed when the plot simply moves on to something else. What was the point of the climax in the early pages of the book, when Mr. Murdstone takes over Copperfield's happy home and begins to wreak havoc? Murdstone's character should have reappeared later in the book in more prominent fashion, as the evil foil to our hero, and he surely would have in a book that had been properly revised as a holistic work.

There are certainly many memorable characters and scenes in this book, but there are also several that should have been left out. But writing fifty chapters keeps an author employed for fifty weeks, and that is why this book is 750 pages instead of 450.