Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield is so imaginatively conceived and so gloriously cast – with Dev Patel as Charles Dickens’s semi- autobiographical hero, and Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton in stunningly comic yet touching roles – that it banishes the very idea of a fusty 19th-Century period piece. Of course, anyone who has read Dickens as an adult, rather than forcibly in school, will realise that his books are hardly stuffy, but lively and comic.

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Iannucci is known for a different kind of comedy, with piercing political satires including The Death of Stalin and the TV series The Thick of It and Veep. Here he captures one of Dickens’s most essential qualities, though: the ability to create main characters who are real and affecting, and minor figures who are hilariously caricatured. What’s missing, and what makes this adaptation an enjoyable romp rather than a great film, is Dickens’s narrative pull. Iannucci is better at shaping scenes than he is at telling a story, so the film is a bit up and down.

David Copperfield, the novel that Dickens famously called his “favourite child”, borrows much from the author’s own life, including his boyhood working in a factory and his fame as a writer. The film mirrors the novel’s first-person narrative by making David a famous writer at the start, on stage at a theatre reading his life story to an audience. Suddenly, the image of his childhood home appears behind him and the adult David literally walks into his own past, looking on as his young, widowed mother goes into labour. It is the first of several scenes that create a storybook feel, especially in the boyhood episodes.

Two other women who will be crucial in David’s life are there at his birth, including his kindly nurse, Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper) and his aunt, Betsey Trotwood (Tilda Swinton). Swinton instantly puts her mark on the film as Betsey, striding around energetically, aghast at Peggotty’s name, and so disappointed that the child is a boy and not the namesake goddaughter she expected that she leaves David’s life altogether (at least for a while).

Most of the characters leap off the screen with Dickensian verve. David’s stepfather, the cruel Mr Murdstone (Darren Boyd), is too pallid a villain. But Murdstone’s sister, Jane, is played perfectly by Gwendoline Christie with a cold-blooded stare that would alarm adults as well as children, her pale face glaring out from her black bonnet.

The Murdstones send David to work in a bottling factory, where he boards with the always short-of-funds Mr Micawber and his family. Peter Capaldi as Micawber and Bronagh Gallagher as the endlessly loyal Mrs Micawber sharply define their fairly small roles. Later, Ben Whishaw makes the obsequious Uriah Heep the slimiest of villains.