The End of Copperfield

Finished rereading David Copperfield last night. God, the last hundred pages or so is such a slog. Can anyone believe any of it? From brilliant observation we dive into stupid wish fulfillment. If Dickens ever wrote anything less convincing than Copperfield’s spiritual conversion in the Swiss Alps, I’ve never read it. What silly twaddle! I suppose that the narrative tension of the misunderstanding between Copperfield and Agnes has to be indulged and conceded, since he didn’t have generations of rom-com plots behind him, but – honestly! Just end the book already. I can stand melodrama – the vividness of the great storm narrative buys the silly patness of Ham dying in the attempt to rescue Steerforth, with change left over. But after that, it’s mostly ugh. Anyway, I soldiered on. And I remain convinced that Dickens is by far the greatest English novelist: no one comes close to him. If only some tragic accident had destroyed the final hundred pages of Copperfield, we could lament its loss, speculate that it was probably the best novel ever written in English, and say, “Oh, if only we had the end of it!”