In the Library
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens, 1850
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 26 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 64
- Length
- Length 354k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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Joyce takes the Dickensian bildungsroman and makes it modern: the same trajectory, but the sentimentality is gone.
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About the book
Send a boy to paste labels in a riverside warehouse, let him go hungry among strangers and learn the exact price of a loaf, and you have the wound at the heart of David Copperfield, the one Dickens carried all his life and handed, barely disguised, to the narrator he loved most. The grown David tells the story looking back, so the boy's blind faith in Steerforth, the charming school friend who will cost him everything, aches with what the man already knows. And what people he gives you along the way: Mr. Micawber forever waiting, against all evidence, for something to turn up; Uriah Heep writhing in his oily false humility; Dora, the child-wife adored too completely to be seen clearly; Agnes, steady at his side across the years. Dickens draws every one of them with a tenderness that never once softens the truth. The book opens wondering whether David will be the hero of his own life, and answers by letting you live that life beside him.