Rediscovering Charles Dickens outside of a classroom setting has been a trip. It has taken me five months to reach the halfway point of David Copperfield. Earlier this year, I developed the pipe dream of blasting through the great literary classics. I picked one hell of a book to start with.

Reading it has been like watching a long television series. It's got a sprawling cast, season-long subplots, recurring villains, and characters who disappear for so many episodes that I barely recognize them when they return. It is a true test of patience and my willingness to consult Wikipedia without accidentally learning how everyone dies. I’ve grown attached to David and enjoy returning to his world, although Dickens occasionally makes me work harder for the privilege than seems reasonable. I’m still unsure whether I’m genuinely captivated or have entered a sunk-cost relationship with several dozen Victorians.

The more I read, however, the less self-made David appears. His rise reflects the Victorian ideal that a man could earn his way out of hardship through sheer personal virtue. Dickens complicates that promise by repeatedly sending good fortune and timely benefactors to his rescue. I view this as a command to bow my head and work until my spine resembles a question mark, trusting that good behavior might eventually persuade respectable society to stop kicking me in the balls and let me through the front door.

David certainly worked hard, but he also got extraordinarily lucky. Benevolent people appeared whenever his life had finished dragging his ass across the cobblestones, usually with the means to pull him out of whatever fresh hell he had landed in. Dickens valued character, but even he seemed to understand that behaving well is easier when you weren't starving in a factory.

That contradiction feels contemporary. We have traded top hats for LinkedIn profiles, but we still like to pretend that hard work produces success on its own. My career didn’t advance because I quietly completed whatever work landed in front of me. It advanced when I earned credentials, accepted responsibilities other people could see, and became willing to leave jobs that had stopped rewarding me. Even then, I had the kind of good fortune David would recognize. There were moments when someone else made the next step possible. I did the work. I still didn’t build myself from nothing. The self-made-man myth survives because it lets successful people claim every victory as their own while leaving everyone else to explain why they got screwed. David may have worked the assembly line, but somebody else packed the box.

Perhaps that is why I keep returning to his world. Beneath the endless subplots and the character descriptions I barely remember, Dickens is worrying at a lie we still haven’t managed to retire. Apparently, I’m captivated after all, which is irritating because I still have half the goddamn book left.

Let’s raise a glass to Snapper Carr, an absolute tour de force in Justice League of America history. He saved the world because he did yard work without being asked. In his 1960 debut, Starro the Conqueror puts an entire town under mind control. Snapper is fine. He had spent the afternoon spreading lime across his parents’ lawn and was still wearing enough of it to block the psychic rays. He thought he was doing his parents a favor, getting the lawn peachy keen. Instead, he stumbled upon an interplanetary defense system available by the bag at any local hardware store. America had not yet reached the moon, but it had already weaponized lawn care.

The Justice League figures out that lime is Starro’s weakness and dumps it on him. That’s it. Earth keeps its free will, the Carrs get a better lawn, and Snapper is made the League’s teenage mascot. Unpaid, naturally. Snapper had no powers. He was available at no cost, which apparently mattered more. He received no uniform, only a belt-buckle pager and the expectation that he answer it. For all its talk of justice, the League ran on free labor. It was 1960. Teenagers were cheap, lawns were sacred, and liability had yet to be invented.

Snapper also snaps his fingers whenever he gets excited. Hence, Snapper. This counted as character development in the Silver Age. Give the kid one irritating habit, name him after it, and let him loiter around the Secret Sanctuary. Batman had money. Superman had the sun. Wonder Woman had the gods. Snapper Carr had a bag of lime and the confidence to provide his own applause. Know your history.