Festive re-reads: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Continuing our series of Guardian writers picking the titles to revisit this Christmas, Sam Jordison recommends the great Victorian writer’s ‘favourite child’

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I’m aware that this must hardly be the first time you’ve had David Copperfield pressed on you. Not that I have any compunction about recommending such a masterpiece again. This novel has not yet been praised enough, even though we are approaching 175 years since it first appeared between two covers, in 1850.

To list all the virtues of the work Dickens himself called “his favourite child” would require a volume as long as the actual 250,000-word doorstopper. Instead, let me just focus on just one: Betsey Trotwood.

Betsey bursts into the novel just before its eponymous narrator is born. His aunt arrives, as she always does, dramatically. Her appearance frightens David Copperfield’s mother so much that she goes into labour. She continues to terrify everyone else on the scene for as long as it takes for the baby to be born – and then storms off, aiming a blow at the head of the doctor who has just informed her that she has a new nephew rather than the niece she desired.

Next time we meet her, she is just as formidable, meting out more physical violence on anyone foolish enough to approach her patch of garden in the company of a donkey. We gradually learn that her frantic dislike of these poor lovable creatures is not her only flaw. She has tragedies in her past that she is unable to manage in the present. Her life is full of compromises, in spite of the dauntless front she presents to the world.

But such weaknesses help us enjoy her strengths all the more.

There is her kindness to the eccentric Mr Dick. She feeds and houses and respects this eccentric man who spends his time obsessively writing about Charles I and his lost head, when most others would have locked him in an asylum.

There is her generosity to David Copperfield himself, her determination to help him where she can – and not to blame him when she can’t. Her noise and bluster may be her most immediately striking features – but she also has an admirable ability to stay quiet when her nephew is making mistakes, so that she can better help him out of them when the time comes.

There is also her endless supply of wisdom. “Never,” she says to David, “be mean in anything; never be false; never be cruel. Avoid those three vices Trot and I can always be hopeful of you.”

It’s sentiments like these that make me cheer every time she crashes on to the scene. It’s also worth pointing out that she calls her nephew “Trot”, because she refuses to give into the patriarchal system that gave him the name Copperfield, preferring the maiden name “Trotwood” that she also reclaimed for herself, after a disastrous marriage. This wonderful woman is a proto-feminist. She is not just one of the greatest literary characters I have ever encountered, she also contains the best of humanity. At the end of the book, when Mr Dick describes Betsey as “the most extraordinary woman in the world”, it feels almost as if she’s transposed into our own flesh and blood realm.

And it’s here I feel an extra appeal in meeting these characters that Dickens called the “creatures of his mind”, as if they shared part of his own soul. It gives me the heady delight of communing with someone from another age. Dickens enables us to approach our forebears not as the lifeless remains in the cold shadows of the tomb. Instead he invites us into a room that is “warm and bright with fire and candle”. A place where we meet living breathing people with all their complications and all their heart – and where we discover that they too deserve our love and admiration.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (Penguin Books Ltd, £18.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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