A passion for human peculiarity

Many of the book’s admirers detect an artistic falling off as David passes from childhood into manhood. And while I don’t myself see any slackening of brilliance up through the final page, David’s harrowing early years are unforgettably vivid. Everywhere the boy turns, he meets singular souls. Dickens rivals Shakespeare in his fascination with nature’s sheer prodigality in creating so heterogeneous a troupe under the heading Homo sapiens. A passion for human peculiarity fortifies most of Dickens’s fiction, but it shows special potency when filtered through the eyes of the boy David, who is such a scrupulous, fervent interpreter of the world. He has to be. For him, a grasping of diverse personal motivations isn’t merely a satisfying of curiosity. It’s a necessity. David’s future, his deliverance from the forces determined to annihilate him, depends on his ability to construe character. 

Brad Leithauser, "Big Reading: A Hike through Dickens," Page-Turner, New Yorker, October 18, 2012