Daniel’s Reviews > David Copperfield > Status Update

'I now approach an event in my life, so indelible, so awful, so bound by an infinite variety of ties to all that has preceded it, in these pages, that, from the beginning of my narrative, I have seen it growing larger and larger as I advanced, like a great tower in a plain, and throwing its fore-cast shadow even on the incidents of my childish days.' (p790)

Chapter 55. 10 pages of perfect writing.

About 130 pages to go, and it feels like the book is winding down, like we're revisiting characters so we can see them one more time before the end. I love the way David keeps visiting cheerful Mr Omer, the increasingly decrepit undertaker he first met when his mother died.

The last few chapters have been much better than their predecessors. The story picks up a lot when the quest for Emily returns to centre stage. And Rosa Dartle is so wonderfully nasty.

'We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time - of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects and circumstances - of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it!' (p572)

'Here he shook hands with me: not in the common way, but standing at a good distance from me, and lifting my hand up and down like a pump handle, that he was a little afraid of.'

I'm still loving this but I'm putting it aside for a few weeks to rest my eyes, which are starting to protest after weeks of staring at screens for 14 hours a day and then reading a finely-printed book.
I may consider getting an ebook version if I can be sure of getting the same edition.