David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, and Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
As a fan of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels going back to The Poisonwood Bible, her new novel Demon Copperhead has been on my radar, and on my hold list at the library, ever since I heard about it. However, I had another little assignment to finish first: I wanted to read the book that inspired it: David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens.
I’ve struggled to enjoy Dickens over the years, though I have had some success with reading and liking A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist. Bleak House and Great Expectations, which I read much earlier in life, did not work as well for me. I’ve always sort of intended to read David Copperfield, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.
I think I must be growing into Dickens more as I get older, because I genuinely enjoyed David Copperfield. Yes, there was the requisite sentimentality and long passages of way too descriptive prose, but there’s also genuinely moving descriptions of poverty, especially childhood poverty, in Victorian England, and David (who Dickens considered his most autobiographical character, apparently; some aspects of his biography do echo the experiences of his author) is an engaging narrator I couldn’t help cheering for as he makes his arduous climb from rags to semi-riches. It has a huge cast of vividly sketched characters, and best of all, it’s genuinely funny — probably the funniest Dickens I’ve read, especially when David is besotted with his incredibly dumb girlfriend, Dora, and able to comment sardonically on the passions of his younger self.
The novel has its flaws too, the biggest probably being that the three young women — Dora, Emily, and Agnes — are largely stereotypes, each standing more for an idea or type of womanhood than a fully developed human being (a flaw not shared by the older women in the novel, Peggotty and especially Betsey Trotwood). And although the novel is sometimes described as a searing indictment of social ills in 19th century England, for my money there’s more serious critique of societal, structural causes of poverty in “A Christmas Carol” than in David Copperfield, where David’s misfortunes seem to be more the result of individual, personal cruelties, able to be overcome by individual grit, courage, and determination such as David manifests for most of the novel (when he’s not busy falling for Dora).
The same critique cannot be leveled at Demon Copperhead, Kingsolver’s reimagining of the novel set in Appalachia beginning in the late 1980s. This novel, too, is the story of a smart, determined boy born into poverty and hardship, orphaned young, subjected to the worst his society has to offer children. After David Copperfield’s mother dies, his cruel stepfather sends him to work in a factory. When Demon (birth name Damon, but the nickname sticks quickly) loses his equally hapless and unlucky young mother, he is ushered into the social services/foster care system; even this early in his story, Kingsolver is serving up a ringing indictment not just of abusive stepfathers (though yes, Demon has one of those too) but of a larger societal system that heaps far more abuse on children than an individual can ever do.
It was a great idea to read the two books back to back. While I’m sure Demon Copperhead works fine as a stand-alone novel without knowing the source material, and people who read it after having read Dickens decades ago probably smile at the faint echoes of the Victorian novel, reading it right afterwards highlighted what a brilliant job Kingsolver did of taking the major plot arcs and characters of Dickens’ story and translating them into a modern American setting. In some cases she has improved on the original, particularly with the young woman: Dori, Emmy, and Angus/Agnes are significantly more well-rounded and interesting as people than their Dickensian originals. Some things are timeless: Mr. Micawber’s/Mr. McCobb’s frantic search for a money-making hustle and his wife’s desperate round of the pawn shops translate almost seamlessly from Victorian London to modern-day America.
Demon reaches his teens just as the opioid crisis reaches Appalachia, and it’s here that Kingsolver’s social critique is at its most scathing and pointed. I’ve read a few reader reviews saying that the characters and the situations in which they find themselves in Demon Copperhead are “too stereotypical,” but this is surely the point, much as it is in David Copperfield: these characters are types, little slices of life from a moment in history. Mr. Micawber is a great comic character, but also an indictment of the economic system that kept such a man from ever getting ahead in life. Demon’s Dori is a teenager caught in a cruel cycle of poverty and addiction; her story may be predictable (even if you haven’t read about what happened to David’s Dora), but it’s also what really happened to a lot of young people in that place and time.
I enjoyed both of these books tremendously, though Demon Copperhead was a much faster read: I loved the characters and the world in which I was immersed while reading both of them. Both writers are, to an extent, writing about a world they know: Kingsolver has spent much of her life in the region where Demon Copperhead is set, and of course Dickens was writing about a time and place that was very much his own. While David Copperfield is not fully autobiographical, many of Dicken’s early experiences, particularly that of being a child forced into factory work (though not for the same reasons) make their way into the novel. In reading David Copperfield, I feel relatively confident that the specific type of Victorian poverty David Copperfield experiences — that a boy growing up in a family with some pretensions to gentility who falls on hard times (even when David and his mother are apparently destitute, they have a servant, and while David loves Peggotty and her family dearly, it’s very that these working-class people are of a lower class than he is, and no matter how low he sinks he will not find himself doing the same kind of work they do), and his climb up from that poverty, is something Dickens got right because he knew it from experience.
While Barbara Kingsolver certainly has experience of living in Appalachia and knowing people like those she writes about, it is just as clear that she has not lived the kind of life that Demon and most of his family and friends have lived. Whether this makes Demon Copperhead less authentic than David Copperfield is not for me to say. Only someone who has lived a life similar to Demon’s could say whether Demon is believable or is, indeed, a bit of a stereotype. All I can say as an outside reader is that it feels authentic, and completely absorbing.
I highly recommend both these books, and if you can read them back to back over a period of a couple of weeks, that’s how I’d recommend doing it.
