David Coppereld 's Wild Ride

Armando Iannucci’s mad, loving, and brilliant adaptation of Dickens’s novel

- By James Parker

The child and the writer are born at the same moment, to the same mother, each to his separate destiny. The children is to see everything, feel everything, be everything, and live in the scraps and sparks of language by which he understands everything; the writers is to wait, and hide, and grow, until the day when he steps in—pen in hand—to take possession.

In The Personal History of David Copperfield, Armando Iannucci’s mad, loving, and brilliantly cinematic extrapolation of the novel by Charles Dickens, the grown-up hero—now a successful author—attends his own birth. He also, later on, has a consoling, avuncular chat with his frightened boy self. David Copperfield (1850) was Dickens’s characteristically rowdy variant on the inward investigation that William Wordsworth had undertaken in his long poem The Prelude. It was the novel, in the words of Dickens’s friend and biographer, John Forster, in which he took “all the world into his confidence.”

David’s labile, one-crush-after-another nature was by all reports close to Dickens’s own. And David’s story—of being stunted and oppressed by terrible adults (largely of the professional classes); cherished and protected by wonderful adults (largely of the laboring classes); caught for a time in the gears of the Industrial Revolution (working in a factory at the age of 12); surviving, stormily, and by a mighty expansion of his sensibility—is Dickens’s life not fictionalized but mythicized.