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.