It resounds with feats of cruelty and snarling expressions of contempt. The novel, in fact, is more infested with carnivores than its cheerful reputation might imply.
Little Red Riding Hood was lucky in her predators.
By contrast, David’s stepfather, Edward Murdstone (Darren Boyd), and his sister, Jane (Gwendoline Christie), really are wicked, turfing the boy out of his home and exposing him to the iron rigors of warehouse work. Hence the noisy incursion of Betsey Trotwood ( Tilda Swinton), the sister of David’s late father she looks witchy enough to be wicked, and is appalled that David should be so ill-mannered as to be born male, yet her heart is sound and kind. Like Joe, in “ Great Expectations,” she is one of those solid bodies and spiritual comforters, barely educated and wholly dependable, who exist, under Dickens’s aegis, for the consolation of the stricken and the shamed.Įven if you’ve never read “David Copperfield,” or if you read it long ago, it can still feel as familiar as a fairy tale. (Later in the movie, in an Oedipal sleight of hand, the same actress will play Dora Spenlow, the flighty giggler to whom David, not always a good judge of character, plights his troth.) More robust by far is Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper), the maid of all work who oversees David’s childhood and never wavers in her love for him. We meet his fragile mother, Clara, who is played by Morfydd Clark. Without ado, we are lofted back to his origins.
We start in a crowded Victorian theatre, where the adult David (Dev Patel) sports a brocaded waistcoat and wonders, echoing the famous opening of the novel, whether he will turn out to be the hero of his own life. Is it best read alone, read aloud, or acted out? A new screen adaptation, “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” directed by Armando Iannucci, is instantly alive to this wealth of possibility. Like “ A Christmas Carol,” in other words, “David Copperfield” is a shape-shifter, blessed from birth with a rare pliability-a story so resilient, and so resourceful, that it can survive whatever you make of it. “I was half dead when I had done,” he said, in the wake of one such event. Later, choice morsels from the novel were added to the author’s repertoire of public recitations. It finally appeared in book form in November, 1850, and on Janua dramatized (and drastically shortened) version opened at the Lyceum Theatre in New York. Even as it was being serialized, stage adaptations were under way, despite the fact that producers didn’t-couldn’t-yet know how Dickens would conclude his tale. The novel first appeared in monthly installments, beginning in the spring of 1849. It did not take long for “ David Copperfield” to escape the confines of the page.
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