Dickens devotes the better part of the chapter “Blissful” to his text so that he shows how Copperfield is obsessed. “She was too bewildering,” David later explains, “To see her lay the flowers against her little dimpled chin, was to lose all presence of mind and power of language in a feeble ecstasy.”

Curtis’s David Copperfield picnic is eye-candy, and he is about two minutes of his film for Dora Spenlow’s birthday picnic. David is in love. We see him courting Dora, but it’s visual rather than auditory. Despite the brevity, it’s a delightful romantic picnic.

The food is picnic-fodder.

The cast: Ciaran McMenamin as David Copperfield; Joanna Page as Dora Spenlow; James Gout as Mr. Spenlow

See Simon Curtis. David Copperfield (1999). The screenplay by Adrian Hodges is based on Charles Dickens’s novel (1850), Charles Dickens. Chapter XXXIII. Blissful” from The Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield the Younger (1850)