Talking about David Copperfield today at book club, we wondered which character in the book we’d most like to be. Not any of the women, although Peggotty was one of my faves. A few said they’d want to be David who, though he suffers, does grow (and ‘learn discipline’) and ends up well.
Today I think I’d prefer to be David’s schoolmate-turned-lawyer Tommy Traddles, he of the wayward hair. He spends a lot of the book “fighting my way on in the world against difficulties, and it would be ridiculous if I made a pretence of doing anything else,” and recovering from “great pulls.” But by the end has overcome all, helped save some of David’s closest friends and married the woman he set his heart on 400 pages earlier. He has good friends, good family, a great spouse and a good job. Not too shabby for a little boy forced to wear a sky-blue too-small suit to boarding school.
As for the other book I read this week, a more-recent novel, I certainly wouldn’t want to be the newspaper people in that story. Journalists hardly ever come off well in modern stories; they’re painted shady like most of the lawyers in Dickens novels (Bleak House, anyone?). But just as Traddles is a lawyer and not-bad, showing it can be done, I will write a journalist who is not-bad. And make him a romantic hero, no less. It’s the least this former newspaper-creature can do for the species.
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