CANCELLED David Copperfield and Demon Copperhead: The Power of Two Stories

Have you read any Dickens lately? If you haven’t, Barbara Kingsolver has. This study group will begin with Charles Dicken’s David Copperfield, a first-person tale of a boy’s struggles to grow up in Victorian London amid the damaging results of institutional poverty. Then we will turn to Barbara Kingsolver’s modern bestseller, Demon Copperhead (Harper, 2022) as she transposes Dicken’s epic novel to the contemporary American South to create her young hero in the mountains of Appalachia. David Copperfield and Demon Copperhead speak from and for two generations of lost boys. Let’s talk about the two heroes, the two worlds and the societies they lived in, and the authors’ faith in the “transformative powers of a good story.” We will read and discuss the books over 6 weeks, beginning with Dickens. Feel free to get a head start before the study group begins. We will reserve the 7th week for full comparison and discussion. Any edition of David Copperfield is fine; Demon Copperhead is widely available in print, paperback and e-book.