But I think his colorlessness actually makes David a more convincing representation of a writer -- certainly more so than writers might like to admit. He's suitably self-obsessed -- after his mother dies, he looks in a mirror "to see how red my eyes were, and how sorrowful my face" -- yet he lacks a stable identity. He answers to any name he's given: David, Davy, Mas'r Davy, Daisy, Doady, Copperfield, Master Copperfield, Mr. Copperfull, Trotwood, Trot.

It's glaringly odd that David's ostensible soulmate, Agnes, calls him Trotwood (the high-toned handle Aunt Betsy has bestowed) rather than his real name. And Dickens must have wanted that oddness: he knew that novelists live rich and strange secret lives behind their faces, and sometimes seem like pod-people to their nearest and dearest. The clueless Dora wistfully tells David he's "full of silent fancies"; Mrs. Dickens must have known just what she meant.

David's solitary childhood -- we never hear of his having a friend or playmate until he's sent away to Salem House -- and his obsessive reading sound writerly enough. So does his "distrust of myself, which has often beset me on small occasions." So does his tendency to retreat to an observer's distance at important moments: as sailors fight for their lives, he notes that arrow-shaped tattoo; when Dora's aunt consults the crucial letter he's written, asking permission for his courtship, he notes that the paper looks both "familiar" and "odd" in her hands.

And most writerly of all is his passivity -- about everything except his writing career. After he runs away to take shelter with his aunt, the big, splashy events happen to other people: for Emily, Steerforth, Mr. Peggotty and the Micawbers, he's a likable minor character. David spends the last 600-odd pages of the book that bears his name watching more extreme, dangerous and involving lives than his own, acting as confidant and go-between and letting his "good and bad angels," Agnes and Steerforth, duke it out for his soul. Toward the end of the book, David says he's devoted himself to writing "with my strongest earnestness" -- a word that keeps bobbing up like a Wagnerian leitmotif -- yet surely as a novelist he's better served in his silent fancies by something like Steerforth's chameleon duplicity than by Agnes's radiant integrity.

And that's what bothers me most about "David Copperfield": I suspect Dickens isn't always leveling with us or himself. Sophisticated readers can correct for the merely antiquated: the notion, which no one in this novel questions, that it's better to die than to have unrepentent sex, or the implication that Uriah Heep isn't merely villainous but underbred. These are the ground rules; we can play or not. I can even sit still for the cranky, tacked-on chapter about a model prison, which slows up the ending so unconscionably. (Dickens objects to solitary confinement, then considered a promising and enlightened reform, as coddling a bunch of no-goods.)

And I do my best simply to forget Mr. Micawber's wisecrack about bills of exchange as an invention of the Jews, "who appear to me to have had a devilish deal too much to do with them ever since." My serious mistrust kicks in when I hit David's lofty bloviations about the novel's moral exemplars: Mr. Peggoty, the Christlike seafarer, and Agnes, the celestially backlit hall monitor. "There was something so religious in it," David says of Mr. Peggotty's certainty that he'll find the fallen Emily, "so affectingly expressive of its anchor being in the purest depths of his fine nature, that the respect and honour in which I held him were exalted every day." And he thinks of Agnes's "sweet face and placid smile, as though they had shone on me from some removed being, like an Angel."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"