Well I finished David Copperfield. It was so engrossing that I started to neglect all the stuff I was supposed to do, disappearing to the nearest Starbucks to read yet another few chapters.
As it is supposed to be loosely based on his life, I got the impression that Dora was a version of his wife, Catherine (God only knows who Agnes was supposed to represent, knowing Dickens it would have been his idealised woman, one who did not exist) and the perfect solution (for him, at least) would have been for her to expire away after her first childbirth.
Maybe I'm being unfair. After all, he did go on to have 10 children with her. After 10, he dumped her and took up with Ellen Ternan. Who surprisingly, did not resemble any of his "ideal" women, not Kate Nickleby, not Agnes Wickfield, (I don't seem to be able to remember any of the other perfect women he peppered his narratives with).
But I loved David Copperfield, nonetheless. I found it tremendously exciting, by degrees sad, by degrees hilarious...I couldn't understand why David kept loving that horrible Steerforth, right to the end when he had ruined that family and caused the death of at least one of them. I couldn't understand why he allowed Rosa Dartle to get away with the chastisement (maybe the chastisement was the point) of Little Em'ly. And I wondered what Martha did because it was never actually explained. Just that she was a bad girl and fallen woman.
Anyway, so I'm done with DC and have picked up my next Dickens - Barnaby Rudge. It's political, although I'm only at the beginning, and politics hasn't entered into it, only mystery. I remember that the person I interviewed about Dickens in Penang (I don't want to write her name here) said this was the one Dickens text she was saving for her deathbed...and this was the text they gave to Greece to read for the read-a-thon, because the Greeks had insisted on a political novel. (By the bye, A Tale of Two Cities would be the better known political novel).
There were shades of politics in David Copperfield, especially towards the end when David is inspecting a prison run by his former cruel headmaster Creakle, who used to beat the stuffing out of the boys (except for Steerforth, because he was rich) but who treated the prisoners with kid gloves and especially honoured the two who were the most hypocritical - Uriah Heep and Litimer.
Uriah Heep...I was glad that things didn't come to a pass between him and Agnes...that though he looked and expressed interest, things hadn't progressed to more than that between him and Agnes. From Dickens's disgust at the character he had created, I guess they wouldn't have been. And he did attempt some sort of an explanation for him...although I think he hated him more for being ugly and awkward (those eel-like wriggles) than for being a hypocrite. But maybe, that's me.
I liked Dickens's introduction to Barnaby Rudge, where he talked about his two ravens...I love his humorous descriptions...and I shall include it here at some point.
Today, however, I have to get back to the story I am supposed to be writing about the fallout from the euro debt crisis...which is not very Dickensian, although it might be Lewisian (I'm thinking Boomerang).
So I leave you with the following words of a hymn (not quite Dickens, but I'm sure it was one he heard during his time as well).
Keep thou my feet,
I do not ask to see,
The distant scene
One step enough for me....
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