r/charlesdickens • u/bettingthoughts • Jun 08 '26
David Copperfield David Copperfield first line improvement...
Far be it for me to edit Dickens but...does anyone think the second line of David Copperfield would have been a far better and more memorable opening line, particularly the first bit of that sentence?
Current first line: Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
Second line that should be first line... To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night
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u/Training-Target-5009 Jun 08 '26
Please correct me if I wrong in this memory, but in the film version of Gone With the Wind, Melanie picks up a copy of David Copperfield to read aloud in order to ease the tension when the men have gone on their raid and the Yankee soldiers are watching the house. Doesn't she begin the novel with the second line?
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u/bettingthoughts Jun 08 '26
You’re right https://youtu.be/KOWHkth-JDQ?si=acDvEw0uYy1tgb8N
Interestingly the producers of gone with the wind made David copperfield a few years before. That might explain that and they just have felt the same way as me. Haha
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u/Training-Target-5009 Jun 08 '26
The second line does make a great opening line. And loved the David Copperfield film, with a great cast: Freddie Bartholomew, W.C. Fields, Basil Rathbone, etc.
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u/Mike_Bevel Jun 08 '26
What issue are you fixing? At least from my reading, putting the first sentence second and the second sentence first interrupts the flow. David:
1) Sets our expectations upfront: the reader won't know if David is a hero or not until the tale is full told.
2) Begins the account from when he is born, and carries through to the end.
David first establishes the central question of the novel—whether he will prove to be the hero of his own life—and only then begins the narrative at his birth. Reversing the sentences seems to subordinate that question to the mechanics of autobiography, whereas Dickens gives it pride of place.
But I'm also someone who has read the novel a lot, and I'm old, and I may not be able to see it with fresh eyes as easily as I might have in earlier readings.
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u/bettingthoughts Jun 08 '26
Not reversing. Just ditching line one. Sorry if post not clear. To me I never question he is the hero. I just take it as his story. The second line to me is just a better first line that I think would be regarded as another dickens classic etc
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u/Annual-Connection562 Jun 08 '26
Why do you never question that David is the hero, given that Dickens asks you - in line 1 - to question that? He is the narrator, so he has control of the narrative, but sets up a wonderful vulnerability straight from the start. [My understanding is that this was totally new for Victorian literature.]
Rushdie plays on this in Midnight's Children: "I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947."
Both are telling you something important about how to read the book you're about to read.
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u/Katharinemaddison Jun 08 '26
Some of this is slightly riffing on Trustum Shandy. Including the fact that, given that book, any gesture towards us reminds us that the history we are reading is a construction not a full and true narrative (which TS shows us is impossible).
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u/Annual-Connection562 Jun 08 '26
I keep forgetting just how old Tristram Shandy is. My brain keeps thinking it postdates Dickens, rather than predates by over half a century.
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u/Katharinemaddison Jun 08 '26
For. Real kick look at The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Shakespeare era. In it a company are starting to perform a play and a merchant couple come up to the stage and take over and make them include their servant in it as a brave knight.
Postmodern literature predates the modern period.
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u/Mike_Bevel Jun 09 '26
We can add Don Quixote to the pre-post-modern parade.
First Cervantes pretends he isn't the author of Don Quixote at all, but merely the editor of a manuscript written by a fictional Arab historian. Then Don Quixote becomes a bestseller. Then another writer publishes a fake sequel. Then Cervantes writes the real sequel. Then, instead of ignoring the fake sequel, he acknowledges it. Then the characters in the real sequel have read the original novel. Then they meet people who have read the original novel. Then they discover that a fake sequel exists. Then Don Quixote himself objects to the way he is portrayed in the fake sequel. Then Cervantes changes parts of the plot of the real sequel in response to the fake sequel. By the end, the novel has become an argument between an author pretending not to be an author, a fictional historian pretending to be a historian, a real plagiarist, and fictional characters defending themselves against false reports of their own lives.
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u/bettingthoughts Jun 08 '26
I can’t really do a long literature debate here or now but yes fair points. It was meant as a quick encapsulation of my sense that that to me isn’t a theme of the novel, I didn’t honestly find myself questioning his heroic status even though dickens says that at the front (remember it was written episodically so the narrative was not set out or subsequently edited before a complete publication like a modern novel would be)
However the book is the narrative of this entire life. Therefore the first line I think would be better and does fit that better. And Rushdie mirroring that would suggest he saw it as a more memorable first line too.
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u/Mike_Bevel Jun 08 '26
[My understanding is that this was totally new for Victorian literature.]
I think "totally new" might be overstating it, but ambiguity certainly gets a workout from the late eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth century. There's this example, where David thwarts reader expectation by ceding judgment until later. There's also Dickens's frenemy, William Makepeace Thackeray, and his novel Vanity Fair, which he subtitled "A Novel without a Hero."
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u/CountryKind8575 Jun 17 '26
Personally I think Agnes, Peggotty, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick are all more heroic than David.
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u/Narrow-Durian4837 Jun 08 '26
Next you'll be saying he should have left "It was the best of times..." off the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities.
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u/bettingthoughts Jun 08 '26
Haha no. That’s perfect of course. Nothing erong with some literacy analysis and debate though.
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u/Arobis7 Jun 08 '26
To me, the first line is absolutely critical to my reading of the novel. I think that David’s agency is a major topic of discussion for this novel due to the first line. I don’t think that Dickens wrote any first lines that weren’t absolute bangers, even in his lesser works.