Why people recommend it
Charles Dickens’s enduring masterpiece, David Copperfield, is a sweeping Victorian bildungsroman that follows the tumultuous life, moral maturation, and professional struggles of its eponymous hero from childhood to adulthood. The novel was prominently featured on an episode of The Ezra Klein Show, where host Ezra Klein noted that it served as the direct structural template for Barbara Kingsolver’s acclaimed novel Demon Copperhead. Guest Barbara Kingsolver spoke at length about her deep literary debt to Charles Dickens, describing his work as the essential key that finally allowed her to unlock the narrative door for her own modern Appalachian retelling. Kingsolver explained that she took Dickens's classic novel as her primary structural blueprint and laid her own contemporary story directly over it because the foundational framework worked so remarkably well. Additionally, Chuck Bright referenced Dickens and his famous novel on Stuff You Should Know to illustrate the historical origins and cultural legacy of describing certain unsettling human experiences with the phrase the creeps.
Who recommended it
- Barbara Kingsolver Discussed
- Ezra Klein Discussed
- Chuck Bright Discussed
Barbara Kingsolver — 2 mentions
“The ghost in the room here is Charles Dickens because I owe him everything with respect to this book Charles Dickens is the key I finally found to the door of that house of this novel”
“no but I took David Copperfield as my template and I just laid my book right over it because it worked so well”
Ezra Klein — 1 mention
“and this is a novel that is following Loosely in the structure of David Copperfield by Dickens”
Chuck Bright — 1 mention
“and we have Charles Dickens to thank for this evidently because he gets credit for using the creeps and David Copperfield in 1849 people had had this feeling before”
Also mentioned in the same episodes
Other mentions (2: passing, ad reads, own books)
“I mean to for some reason we never apply this um rule of there must be a main verb to the title of a book like Bleak House or David Copperfield.”
“David Copperfield, Great Expectations.”