How do I hate this novel? Let me count the ways.

First, the plot of Copperfield is so contrived as to be laughable. There are very few incidental characters, no passing attachments, very little background noise or color beyond the main action. It's as if the hero lives in a bubble with about ten other people, all of whom collide with each other endlessly to the exclusion of the rest of the world. When Dickens is wrapping things up at the end, having the hero's former schoolmaster conduct him on a tour of a prison containing two other previously unconnected characters in adjacent cells, he gives up all pretence of turning out anything but a moralistic fable. All the exactitude and realism of the narrative style is undermined by the author's obsession with knitting every last yarn of plot into a ball so tight it is only six inches across, yet weighs more than Saturn.

The characters are cardboard cutouts. Hardly any (the hero, his aunt) have any moral nuance. There is more subtlety of motive in a pantomime. Very few people in life are all good or all bad, yet in Copperfield very few are anything but. Even the hero-narrator confesses his failings as if at a job interview - "I was wrong then but I've seen the light now". By the end, the implication is, he's perfect, the natural end-product of a perfectly-plotted bildungsroman, but to me he's just a self-righteous trump.

I've nothing against contrived, transparent characters and plots and bad literature in general, but in conjunction with what seems to be a genuine desire in the narrative style to show things as they are, they make no sense. It's almost as if there's one person in charge of the writing and another, with diametrically opposed views on art, supervising the book's structure. This combined with the standard Victorian flabbiness of the serialized prose makes Copperfield a crap novel.

As for Dickens's vaunted engagement with the ills of society, it doesn't go beyond "child-labor is a bad thing, debt is a cruel burden, crime and poverty are linked". There's no attempt to formulate an alternative, other than exhorting people to be nicer to each other. In so far as Dickens acknowledges the problems he deserves credit, but could his thoughts on public policy stand by themselves? No. Do they redeem a bad novel? No again.

On the plus side, chapter 55 ("Tempest") is a riveting read, and Dickens's ear for language, dialect and discourse is acute throughout.