The New <em>David Copperfield</em> Movie Might Be Better Than the Book

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

In , 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. (1850) was Dickens’s characteristically rowdy variant on the inward investigation that William Wordsworth . It was the novel, in the words of Dickens’s friend and biographer, John Forster, in which