And, despite the late-inning reformations he engineers, Dickens prefers Mr. Wickfield as an alcoholic wreck, Mrs. Gummidge as a self-pitying hypochondriac and -- best of all -- Mr. Micawber as an epicure of debt, cheesy eloquence and bipolar self-excitation. Well, so does everybody. The Mr. Peggotty of the early chapters, who roars in barely comprehensible Yarmouthese, likens himself to a "sea porkypine" and drinks at The Willing Mind, is at least an energetic invention. (Although the Leavises understandably find his dialect -- for which Dickens consulted a book called "Suffolk Words and Phrases" -- "irritating in its patronizing exhibition of the quaintness of the humble.") The later Mr. Peggotty, a fisher of women who talks about good deeds being "laid up wheer neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and wheer thieves do not break through nor steal," is a pain in the butt. Dickens must have known it. And his refusal to know he knew it makes me want to shake him.

"David Copperfield" goes squishy and unctuous when Dickens stops following his storytelling instincts and starts listening to extraliterary imperatives: his dutiful religiosity, his class guilt (which he enterprisingly decided to confront in "Great Expectations") and -- in the case of the dwarf Miss Mowcher -- a cease-and-desist letter from a solicitor for the real-life model, a chiropodist and manicurist named Mrs. Hill. She recognized herself in one of the novel's monthly installments and objected to Dickens's apparent intention to use Miss Mowcher as a bawd; this explains the headsnapping transformation of a worldly wit in Chapter 22 ("If either of you saw my ankles, say so, and I'll go home and destroy myself") into a preachy paragon in Chapter 32: "Try not to associate bodily defects with mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason."

In Dickens's presentation of women, especially, he clearly felt constrained both as a Victorian Englishman in general and as Charles Dickens in particular. Nowadays you need either great sophistication or none at all to endure his heroines as they exhibit their virtue in unearthly patience and floribundant oration (Agnes, Annie Strong) or their sexuality in icky coquettishness (Dora, David's mother). I'm willing to think they played better then than they do now, but if Shakespeare -- and, earlier in Dickens's own century, Jane Austen -- could write women who were smart, good and sexy, what was up with the Inimitable?

He writes best about damaged, dark and dangerous women: in this book, the superbly brittle and edgy Rosa Dartle; elsewhere, the majestically embittered Edith Dombey, Estella, the conscience-stricken mantrap in "Great Expectations," and Miss Wade, the paranoiac crypto-lesbian in "Little Dorrit." I don't imagine I want to know why. Nor does it help, really, to learn that while the empty-headed, increasingly burdensome Dora is obligingly, even gladly, dying so David can marry Agnes, his ideal helpmeet, Dickens was regretting his own early and ill-judged marriage -- and naming his newborn daughter Dora, after the supposedly lovable character he was about to kill off. Okay, we always knew something was fishy. Now that we know more or less what, it's still fishy.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"