David Copperfield, the flats near Yarmouth

David Copperfield appeared between 1849 and 1850 in nineteen monthly parts, the last a double number, and Dickens called it his favorite among his own books. He knew the Norfolk coast at first hand and thought Yarmouth one of the strangest places he had seen. The novel is written in the first person, which was new for him at that scale. Project Gutenberg carries the complete text.

Where this text comes fromA boy has been promised the seaside and is looking at a marsh. The whole passage is disappointment being registered politely, in the first person, by a narrator too young to say so directly, which is why the observation arrives as hedged qualification rather than complaint. Dickens knew this coast and thought it genuinely strange, so the flatness is not invention. What you copy is the moment of arrival, before anyone tells David what he is supposed to think about it.

What you might not noticeThe narrator calls the landscape spongy and soppy, two words that sound like a child’s vocabulary rather than a novelist’s, and the sentence keeps them because the whole book is narrated by a man recalling how he saw things as a boy. Source

What it trainsTwo sentences hold sixty-nine words between them, an average close to thirty-five, and two semicolons do the work that a full stop would normally do. Those semicolons need no Shift at all, so the only Shift work in the passage is its seven capitals, five of which sit inside sentences: four are the pronoun I and one is Yarmouth. Four commas. The difficulty is not any single word, since nothing here passes ten letters, but the length of the clauses: the first sentence changes its subject twice before it ends and the eye loses the thread.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg