Watching Armando Iannucci's 'The Personal History of David Copperfield' has made me want to read the Charles Dickens' book. And that's a compliment. Honest.
I've always struggled with Dickens. Like many others, I can find the complexity of his language a bit of a barrier. Although I've found his work quite difficult to get into, I have read 'Great Expectations' and 'A Christmas Carol'. More often than not, though, I've enjoyed his stories through sumptuous costume dramas. You know the drill - august actors and comic newcomers bedecked in carefully designed costumes lurking in precise recreations of Victorian London, usually at Christmas. It's no surprise that 'Dickensian' is an adjective.
Watching 'The Personal History of David Copperfield', I realised something. The book is famously autobiographical and the film draws on Dickens himself for some of Copperfield's character traits - his observation skills, the gurning in mirrors to conjure characters, the love of snazzy waistcoats. But it also puts the writing back into the story. Throughout the film, Copperfield is recalling, refining and noting down phrases which appear on screen and, I assume, are from the original text. The words are literally in the film.
What is a writer if not their words? Their vocabulary and metaphor, turn of phrase and grammar, even spelling and malapropisms. Writers are wordsmiths, combining knowledge, experience and language and hammering away until they've crafted something new, be it beautiful or useful. Some creatives do it with paint, some with performance, but writers do it with words. First it struck me as odd that I could know Dickens' stories without knowing Dickens' words. Then it struck me that his words were amazing and I really needed to give them another try.
So, this is how 'The Personal History of David Copperfield' (film) left me wanting to read 'David Copperfield' (book) for all the right reasons. Iannucci's energetic film has almost acted as a trailer for it's source material, piquing my interest in a way that I hadn't expected, like a big Dickens advert. And, having watched the director's recent BBC documentary, there's part of me that's wondering if that was the point all along.
'The Personal History of David Copperfield' was released in the UK in January. 'David Copperfield' was published between 1849 and 1850. 'Armando's Tale of Charles Dickens' is available for the next 10 days via the BBC website.
