Murdstone” in David Copperfield ), it’s clear the man views Demon as an unwanted burden to be shed at an opportune moment. When Demon’s sweet, hapless mother hooks up with Stoner, (“Mr.
The son of a teenage mother and a young man who died in an accident before his birth, Damon Fields inherits his dead father’s red hair (“Copperhead”), and his first name soon shifts into “Demon.” The loving Peggoty family from David Copperfield become the Peggots and their grandson Matthew, known as “Maggot.”
Throughout the book, Kingsolver plays off the names of the characters from David Copperfield for her own characters to great effect.
This coming of age story deals with loss, abandonment, poverty, grief, and addiction in the present day, suggesting that the problems Dickens depicted in Victorian England remain far from solved. For most of the story, there’s not a single adult he can count on.In "Demon Copperhead ," Barbara Kingsolver brings the plot and characters of Charles Dickens’s classic " David Copperfield" into the twenty-first century in a rural county in Virginia. He quickly becomes very cynical about what adults have to offer, because in his world they never come through. Demon is much more savvy and he’s already had such a rough life. “David is kind of wide-eyed, trying to see the best in people. And in some ways she’s departed from her model, particularly in the character of her hero. You don’t have to have read David Copperfield in order to read Demon Copperhead, she insists. She worked through what she thought of as a translation, or a masterclass: at one stage she had a spreadsheet with notes for all 66 of the David Copperfield chapters and her own notes for what would happen in each of her corresponding chapters.ĭespite her admiration for the author who she calls her “genius friend”, she doesn’t want to talk too much about Dickens or his novel. She’d always loved the humour in Dickens – at 12 she strong-armed her siblings into putting on a puppet show of A Christmas Carol – but this was a whole new level of discovery.
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