What's So Special about Dickens? by Michael Rosen

Author:Michael Rosen [ Rosen, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781406368758
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2016-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

At the next house he stays in, which belongs to a lawyer called Mr Wickfield, David meets a girl called Agnes, the lawyer’s daughter. He goes to work for another lawyer and meets up again with Steerforth. Another series of events then happens involving the Peggotty family in Yarmouth. Steerforth gets their little girl Em’ly to break off her engagement and run away with him, and this leads to desperate unhappiness for many people until Steerforth drowns.

David marries a woman called Dora, and becomes a famous writer. Dora doesn’t live long, and David realizes that Agnes is the one he should have married, but by now her father, Mr Wickfield, is being tricked by a man called Uriah Heep, who is after Agnes as well. I won’t say how it all works out in the end.

As you can see, this is a huge rambling story (or stories), more like a soap opera than the other books we’ve looked at. There is a constant toing and froing of good and bad among the different groups of people in the story. Cruelty and kindness sit side by side, as people secretly plot against others who have no idea what’s going on. In fact, all through the book there are things we know are going on, but a character in the story doesn’t. And yet we don’t know how each scene is going to finish, whether the bad person will come to a sticky end or get away with it.

All this makes David Copperfield a gripping read. One moment we’re part of a secret, seeing how this or that person is plotting against someone else, and the next we’re surprised by how things turn out. It’s a bit like that for David too, just as it is for us in real life.

David Copperfield is also a book that takes us from the countryside to London and back to the countryside, and it takes us travelling abroad when Em’ly’s father goes looking for her. It takes us from life among the very poor to life among the well off. It takes us deep into family loyalty and contrasts it with the way people can mistreat their stepchildren. It shows us people who live by the law and have a very strong sense of right and wrong, and others who break all the rules and don’t care who they hurt. It shows us mad people, characters who aren’t mad and someone who is nearly driven mad. And, at the end of the book, we see how the people of England don’t only live in England. They’re now going “out to the Colonies” – working and making money in the British Empire.

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