I’d be hard pressed to come up with a writer whose name is more widely recognized than Charles Dickens. The mastermind of some of the greatest fictional characters of the last century, Dickens’ popularity in the Victorian era is perhaps on par to that of Beyoncé today. Millions of readers who adored his works eagerly awaited his serialized periodic installments, much like we do TV episodes today. Does Pip ever find happiness? How will Copperfield survive the wrath of Murdstone? He had his international readership constantly on edge —everyone spoke about him. “Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing,” George Orwell fancied, “Even the burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you come to think of it.”^[1] Indeed, Dickens was a celebrity of the 19th century whose literature has transcended time. There must be something that he did right.

Yet Dickens’ novels which once reverberated across the world have since lost their charm. His works are stacked in every library across America, if not nearly every home, and handed out for free on Kindle. The once widely anticipated installments are now the “classics” known as mandatory school readings, only finely appreciated by scholars and the sort. Classics are rarely pleasure reads, as most would prefer binging Netflix over picking up a hundred-page novel. Reading classics clash with the rhythm of our lives, plagued by the newest and the hottest of this world. Social media gets in the way. Shopping gets in the way. Traffic gets in the way. Our frenzied lives get in the way. But those of us who can buckle down and grab a cup of coffee on a quiet afternoon, reading the works of Charles may actually give us a head start in life.

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            Most millennials have crossed paths with classics at some point in our lives. I recall my earliest encounter with Wuthering Heights in middle school, when I was told that “classics are the best books to read”. For a thirteen-year-old, the book did not live up to its hype. Classics quickly became a genre whose language was so archaic and pompous that it seemed as if these writers wrote for the purpose of flaunting their intelligence. Who in real life talks like that anymore? I skimmed through classics unsympathetically, trimming hundreds of pages of melodramatic writing down to their bare bone endings: Jane Eyre helps Rochester cope with his blindness, Pip finds out that wealth is no substitute for happiness, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet fall in love despite class differences. I stashed these novels away after going through them. For a teenager, these stories seemed highly unrelatable. I decided that Dickens and his alike would dwell in their old-fashioned language and manners while I basked in my twenty-first century life. I certainly lived fairly well, or at least I thought. After putting off classics for a few years, by chance, I came across a paperback copy of David Copperfield (with a “$2” tag from Ocean State Job Lot stuck on the back) this summer. At seven hundred something pages, it was longer than most all books I’d ever read. Despite my defeatism, I opened up the preface for just a quick skim. As I read Dickens’ elegantly penned 1867 edition preface, my prejudices against classics began to change.

It’s no understatement that childhood is a tremendously formative period of time of anyone’s life. No different, Dickens’ life was permanently marked by his harrowing early years. David Copperfield recounts the years of David’s orphan hood, schooling, maturity, to eventually becoming a successful writer. The novel is in fact Dickens’ veiled autobiography. In the most heart-wrenching pages, the writer vividly details David, banished from home, slaving for a wine-merchant, cleaning bottles. These details were a crippling reflection upon Dickens’ own life, when at ten years old he was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at a blacking warehouse of near poverty conditions. Both a blessing and a curse, the two years of hardship for Dickens became a store of inspiration for much of his best works of literature. There’s would have been no better way for Dickens to grasp in writing the worst social conditions than to suffer and struggle through them himself. Through David Copperfield, we get a glimpse of those memories:

English novelist Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870), circa 1860. (Photo by John & Charles Watkins/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone & Grinby.^[2]

This, of course, was Dickens himself speaking. In his unfinished autobiography, he voices in a poignant tone, with nearly the same words, the pain which he endured those years:

            It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me — a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally — to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school.^[3]

Needless to say, the rest of Copperfield’s experiences would be highly evocative of Dickens’ own life stories. Many “fictional” characters he relentlessly pimps at were renditions of those people from his own life; Mr. Micawber, who falls into debt, was inspired by Dickens’ father who was incarcerated in debtors’ prison, and David’s mother, who dies after giving birth to her second child, likely represented Dickens’ own mother who was eager for him to work at the blacking factory. Dickens was able to give such vivid descriptions of all his characters because he drew inspiration from the people who shaped his own world.

Dickens was just as keen and sharp and writer as he was human. He was in many ways, an artist, but of course no one would refer to him as that. He had an extraordinary ability of construing characters and grasping nuanced human thought and emotion through words. Few writers could write from a child’s point of view with as much potency as Dickens. Take the following passage, when David observes his new bedroom that Peggotty leads him into:

            The walls were whitewashed as white as milk, and the patchwork counterpane made my eyes quite the with its brightness. One thing I particularly noticed in this delightful house, was the smell of fish; which was so searching, that when I took out my pocket-handkerchief to wipe my nose, I found it smelt exactly as if it had wrapped up a lobster.^[4]

I can taste his words—the colors, the smells, the texture— so strongly that I might have been transplanted back to my six-year-old self. The level of excruciating detail Dickens achieves simply cannot be replicated by any writer or director. Orwell goes as far as to say, “The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing is the unnecessary detail.”^[5] It is with such potent precision that David observes his world and all the people he meets, and that is how Dickens creates an atmosphere in his writing that is uniquely his. Dickens’ writing is more cinematic and sensory than film could possibly achieve.

Even if you’ve never been in poverty, you’ve been a child once, and David’s untainted accounts of suffering during his childhood will strike a chord with any human with emotion. Embedded in David’s most honest eyes, however, is Dickens’ piercing criticism of society. He highlights the evil of child labor which David suffered through, he attacks the fact-based schooling of the Salem House that David escapes from, and he call out the Murdstones, the deceitful and cruel. The lessons that David effuses are frequent and many, and of course, those are the undercurrents of Dickens’ own values and morals. Dickens takes us from the most formative and harrowing years of his life all the way through his adulthood, capturing the world and everything in between in utmost detail. There is hardly a way to summarize the essence of David Copperfield. This is a feat only achieved by classics.

If Dickens informs us of anything, it is that humans are universal. I doubt anyone can go on a week after reading Dickens without recognizing the real-life version of the vicious Edward Murdstone, the foolish yet kind-hearted Mr. Micawber, or the lifelong companion Peggotty. His book is hard to detach from, and that is because the world of David Copperfield, as 19th century as it is, is still our world. Looking back on my younger self who was grappling with classics, I realize I couldn’t possibly appreciate classics simply because I was inexperienced with life and sheltered from the real world. And most of us still haven’t experienced the best or worst of our lives, but with Dickens rumbling in the background, we can remind ourselves that humans are all the same. A David Copperfield is within in all of us, and if we can find Dickens at a proper time in our lives, his words will sing and his prose will shine.

Still, why should we read classics over similar books that speak more to our current times? How can we find time in our busy lives that are flooded by work and events every day? We should be reminded that classics are the books that have been passed on through centuries; generations of people before us believed that these were the books that were most worthy of being read. Your latest celebrity autobiography, your Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up, your #1 New York Times best seller, will all be funneled out and forgotten in the stream of newer publications in the years to come. Dickens will outlive them all, as he already has. Modern books simply cannot achieve the universality of classics. It’s one thing to imagine someone spending the rest of his life exclusively chewing on Dickens, Robinson Crusoe, Kafka, Don Quixote, and Homer. To do this, he would have to distance himself from the rest the social world, disconnect from all his projects and papers and work, resist the temptation of bestsellers, and abstain from reading the latest news (which include politics, business, tech advancements, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, interviews, scandals, etc.). Of course, that is not realistic or worthwhile. Those who benefit the most by classics are those who read them with a healthy balance of real-world events, and let the past inform the present. Ideally, we should relegate the distractions of the industrial world as we do to the ruffling of trees in the wind or rumbling of vehicles outside the window. On days when we are swamped with work, striving for the next best internship or job or vacation, Dickens might remind us to take a breather and share a moment with David Copperfield.

We’d like to tell ourselves that society has been advancing and reshaping itself for the better, but Dickens highlighted issues that existed in the 19th century that continue to be highly problematic today— discrimination, class, child labor, education, and so on. We hear about these problems every day through television, social media, newspapers, radio. These issues have become so chaotic and monotonous that we tend to tune them out and dismiss them as white noise that is “just there”. What the media rumbles about today, Dickens did in the form of literature in the mid-nineteenth century. Except, Dickens’ writing at the time was effective social commentary—millions of people tuned into his novels. Two centuries later, media and social commentary co-exist in turmoil that is utterly indecipherable. Dickens imparted to us the universality of the human condition and, as a result, the transcendence of social issues. Dickens, in his prophetic ways, has distilled to us the essence of life, with all its joys and sorrows, its people and harrowing issues. We can spend our lives getting caught up in the never-ending distractions or to focus our energy on what should really matter to us. And what better way, than to start with reading David Copperfield itself.

^[1] Dag, O. “George Orwell.” George Orwell: Charles Dickens. p.1

^[2]Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. Dover, 2004. p.

^[3] Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. B. Tauchnitz, 1873.

^[4] Dickens, p. 27

^[5] Orwell, p. 5