Most of the readers of this review are likely to have read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. If you are among this group you may remember that Holden Caulfield begins it, rather unconventionally, by saying: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap . . .” Remembering this opening line, as I browsed through thousands of titles at the annual used book sale in Winston-Salem, I was bemused by the serendipity of finding an aging copy of Catcher in the Rye right next to the genuine article: a complete and unabridged copy of David Copperfield itself! I took this as an indication that I should reread Catcher and make a run at Copperfield too.   

What unites the two works? What separates them? What did Holden mean by “David Copperfield crap”? And what lessons can be drawn for readers of a journal like Modern Age?  

The unity is that both are tales of young men in the process of growing up—and that’s what separates them too. Holden Caulfield is a spoiled teenager. It’s not clear who spoiled him. Perhaps he did it to himself. Sixteen-year-old Caulfield comes from a wealthy family living in the Upper East Side and attends an elite boarding school. He is irresponsible, cynical, and has honed a talent for alienating friends and potential allies. He doesn’t seem to understand why he is ostracized by his school’s fencing team after he, the team’s manager, loses all their “foils and equipment and stuff” on the subway. “It wasn’t all my fault. I had to keep getting up to look at this map, so we’d know where to get off.” (Who would ever make him team manager and entrust anything valuable to him? Why was he, a native New Yorker, confused by the subway anyway?) 

As the story unfolds, Holden decides to leave school early—he’s about to be expelled for earning F’s in almost all his classes due to lack of effort and engagement (not lack of intelligence)—alienates almost everyone at school before leaving, and goes on a bit of a road trip. Rather than return home, he wanders around Manhattan, wastes almost every dime he has, gets shaken down and beaten up by a pimp, destroys his relationship with a girl he has dated, and makes unrealistic plans (not that there’s any real plan) to run away to the West somewhere and live as a gas station attendant. When his younger sister, about the only person he doesn’t alienate, packs up her belongings so she can run away with him, he comes to his senses long enough to return home and eventually ends up in a sanitorium.  

That’s Holden. He abuses every opportunity that’s handed to him. He’s a loser. Losing not just fencing equipment, money, and friends, but also desire and self-respect—even though he still seems to think he’s better than everyone else. He is a sad excuse for an anti-hero.   

Knowing this, it becomes obvious why he has no love for David Copperfield. Copperfield (notice that it seems natural to call him by his last name, unlike Holden) opens his “personal history, experience, and observation” by considering that “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” And he does turn out to be the hero—although that title is equally claimed by Agnes, who is his most steadfast friend, most loyal advisor, and eventual wife. Copperfield is born to a recently-widowed mother, is loved and cared for, but when his mother remarries, things fall apart. His step-father and the step-father’s sister despise him. When he stands up to undeserved punishment he is sent to a boarding which—unlike Holden’s school—liberally employs corporal punishment. Despite the harsh treatment, he learns and even thrives—and his most valuable lessons are about how to make allies and thrive in such an environment. After his dispirited mother dies, his wicked step-father packs Copperfield off to oppressive work in a wine-bottling factory. Young David lodges with a struggling family but is forced to pay for his own meals and manage his life at the tender age of ten. Life is grim for him and there’s no end in sight. He has no one to turn to and clings to memories of stories about an aunt whom he has never met.  

He takes the initiative, saving money (which is unjustly taken from him) for a road trip that is much more perilous and consequential than Holden’s. Copperfield walks over seventy miles in six days, sleeps outdoors, trades his dwindling clothing and other possessions for sustenance, and arrives sunburned, dust-and-chalk-covered, bedraggled, unkempt, faint, and weary at the home of the aunt he has never met. Because she is compassionate and David has learned how to make other people be compassionate to him, she adopts him, and sends him to a good school, where—by the time he is Holden’s age—he rises to be “head boy,” the academic, moral, and physical leader of the student body. He fills this role because he takes himself, other people, and the world seriously. He is bold, kind, grateful, sentimental, occasionally prayerful, and sees the good in others—but is quite capable of making mistakes in his naivety. He achieves success in adulthood, despite additional significant setbacks, largely because he has developed the “habits of punctuality, order, and diligence” and the “determination to concentrate [himself] on one object at a time.” Whatever he tries to do in life, he tries with all his heart to do well and learns that “there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness.”  

It’s no wonder that Holden Caulfield had an adverse reaction to David Copperfield. Copperfield is everything Holden could be and should be but refuses to be. Copperfield embodies the virtues that made Britain great and allowed it to remake much of the world in its own image during the nineteenth century—the British century. These same virtues were transplanted to the United States and allowed it to flourish, remaking much of the world in its own image during the twentieth century—the American century. Despite the broader dynamic striving post-war American culture, Holden Caulfield rejects all these things. He sees almost everyone else as a “phony.” He is cynical at a young age and wants you to sympathize with him for it. Being responsible is utterly foreign to him. He embodies and is a precursor to a culture that suppresses traditional American virtues and has worked to supplant them in the early twenty-first century. He could never grasp Kenneth Clark’s recognition that civilization requires confidence, “confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental power.”  

American students were once assigned works like David Copperfield. In the early 1960s (see Scarvia B. Anderson, “Between the Grimms and ‘The Group’ – Literature in American High Schools”, published by the Educational Testing Service) the most frequently assigned works of literature had much more in common with Copperfield than Caulfield. They included William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet, Our Town by Thornton Wilder, Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, and works by Dickens—with Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities in the top ten. David Copperfield was not in the top ten, probably because of its sheer length, as it runs to 357,489 words (almost twice as long as Great Expectations and nearly three times as long as A Tale of Two Cities). Yet about 20 percent of schools assigned it. My mother read it in the mid-1950s. (It took me about two weeks to finish it, with the help of a flight to the West coast and back.) 

Although I cannot find anything as definitive as the Educational Testing Service’s survey of high schools, it is clear that today students are assigned books that are more like The Catcher in the Rye. My younger sister read it in the late 1980s and my son read it about fifteen years ago. Neither cared much for it. Edutopia’s survey puts Catcher in the Rye in fifth place among the most assigned high school books. The top ten also includes other works that are dark and/or dystopian, which involve injustices without the restoration of justice before the story ends. (Shortly before the end of David Copperfield, a chapter titled “I Am Showed Two Interesting Penitents” shows that two of the tale’s unrepentant villains are now behind bars.) These include George Orwell’s 1984, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—and worst of all William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, which sees humans as naturally depraved. If we want a society that thinks the world is unjust and encourages everyone to think like a victim or see victimizers in every seat of authority, we can continue to go the route of Holden Caulfield, or else we can return to protagonists like David Copperfield. A mentor whom Holden trusts shares a valuable insight: “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to nobly die for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” Yet J. D. Salinger then negates this counsel by implying that the mentor is also a pedophile. If we want a society that thinks the world is depraved and life isn’t worth living, we can continue to go the route of Salinger—or instead we can return to the authors that were assigned when Salinger wrote his book.   

If we want our children, ourselves, our culture, and yes even our economy to thrive better, we need to stop pretending that the world is a terrible place. Robert Pondiscio summarizes recent research by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Jeremy Clifton (“Stop Telling Kids the World Is a Terrible Place”) which shows that cultivating a pessimistic world view—à la Holden Caulfield—harms children. Clifton identifies three “primal world beliefs”—Is the world safe or dangerous? Is it enticing or dull? Is alive or mechanistic? These primal beliefs, especially the negatives ones adjudging danger, dullness, and lack of meaning, strongly predict lower life satisfaction, worse health, and diminished flourishing. “Children who grow up with positive primals don’t just feel better. They tend to do better. They are more curious, more motivated, and more engaged with the world.” They lead more fulfilling lives.   

And they are more economically productive: Madhu Moranty, for example, finds that “positive and optimistic attitude[s] to life influence the worker’s wages positively, and that the magnitude of this effect is comparable to or even higher than the individual effects of the standard human capital variables [such as education] on earnings.” 

It is shameful that too much of this is out of the hands of parents. They often try to raise their children with positive values and traditional virtues, but schools and the broader culture work to erase their best efforts. Much of the blame goes to the state, as public schools set the agenda. We are told that The Catcher in the Rye was the “most censored” book in America between 1960 and 1983. But it wasn’t actual censorship, which involves the state banning or blocking publication. This was merely parents trying to stop the state—public school teachers and administrators—from playing havoc with taxpayers’ money and parental prerogatives. The separation of education and state would likely work wonders.