DICKENS ON THE TUBE - Masterpiece Theatre's 'David Copperfield'.

Like many "fond parents," Charles Dickens wrote in 1869, "I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is David Copperfield."

You can almost feel that favoritism when you read, or reread, the most autobiographical of Dickens's novels, the book into which he projected much of his childhood trauma, including his miserable days, at age twelve, pasting labels in a blacking factory. Even if you don't know its factual basis, David Copperfield feels personal. Drifting, on the tide of the narrator's reminiscence, past miserable times and happy times, significance and insignificance, mistakes and successes, you become increasingly convinced that you're involved in a real life.

If the new "Masterpiece Theatre" adaptation of David Copperfield (airing April 16 and 17) feels somewhat less like life than like, well, "Masterpiece Theatre," that is hardly a significant criticism. How, after all, do you condense a nine-hundred-page, densely eloquent masterpiece into four hours and still have time left over for commentary by Russell Baker? Adapter Adrian Hodges and director Simon Curtis have, in fact, telescoped the book with considerable delicacy, preserving innumerable small but telling details (the cotton wool Aunt Betsey uses to stop up her ears during David's birth, for example) and lifting much of the dialogue straight from Dickens. Characters may have been pruned, and episodes shuffled or retouched for dramatic effect, but David Copperfield's soul is still there.

The personalities, too, hit the right blend of realism and the grotesque. Ever since Dickens's own lifetime, a classic way to fault his writing has been to condemn its exaggerated characterizations. "It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man's power," Anthony Trollope complained, "that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature." And certainly no one would dispute that tic-ridden personalities like Copperfield's immortal Mr. Micawber-constantly debt-ridden but eternally sanguine that "something will turn up"-have more than a little bit of artifice about them. But that's the point, of course, and besides, real people can be caricatures, too. Critics who object to repetitious traits like the "Something will turn up" tag line would have a hard time with my boss, who always whistles the same three-note trill when confronted with a problem, and, when he's surmounted one, walks around rubbing his hands together so audibly you can hear him down the corridor.

In any case, Micawber is a fixture of the literary empyrean, and Bob Hoskins does a creditable job plastering him into public television's universe, too. Stiff-necked and seemingly top-heavy in his curling gray sideburns, making frantic use of his eyebrows, Hoskins is in many ways a cartoon-when he topples over backward while pretending to slit his throat (a ploy to escape creditors), he might be back in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But his face is expressive enough to show the real person, too. When he walks young David (Daniel Radcliffe) through the debtors' prison, one solicitous arm draped around the boy's shoulder, you can see why some critics see Micawber as a buffoonish incarnation of Dickens's real father-an imprudent man whose untrustworthiness may also have found its way into the character of the villainous Murdstone (Trevor Eve in the PBS series).

With actors like Sir Ian McKellen (as the vicious though doddering headmaster Mr. Creakle), Maggie Smith (as Aunt Betsey), and Nicholas Lyndhurst (as the smarmy Uriah Heep) also acing the balancing act of Dickensian personality, it's hard not to feel that the creators of "David Copperfield" have given the ExxonMobil Corporation (sponsor of "Masterpiece Theatre") its money's worth. What's missing, of course, is Dickens's exuberant language. When we follow the mature David's early professional career, for example, we do not hear how, when he attends parliamentary debates as a reporter, "Britannia, that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a trussed fowl: skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape." Reading a book like David Copperfield is a leisurely business; you have to exult in the verbal conceits as you meet them, and you meet a profusion of them.

In fact, the extravagant language, with its verbal detours and hyperbolic images, reinforces that impression of abundance you get from Dickens's novels with their surfeit of characters and details. It's a style that mirrors, in a way, the urban landscapes that form the backdrop for so much of his fiction. Countless stories-more than any author could tap-are washing around in a metropolis like Dickens's London; the city is a sort of grand-scale version of the oddity-packed pawnshops the author likes to describe, most notably, of course, in The Old Curiosity Shop, whose narrative actually swells up out of the clutter. By comparison, a medium like "Masterpiece Theatre" seems streamlined-the Merchant-Ivory-picturesque montage (a country lane, a berry on a twig, etc.) that launches "David Copperfield's" first episode, for example, seems almost absurdly tidy when compared to the book's thickly written first pages, in which we meet a couple of colorful but completely superfluous characters (for example, an "old lady with a hand-basket") who are never heard from again.

Of course, 150 years after the publication of David Copperfield, the tidy TV version may seem, to some people, a more soothing antidote to the frenzy of modern life (the Internet, you might say, has become our Curiosity Shop). In any case, "Masterpiece Theatre's" handsome adaptation is a reminder of George Orwell's remark, in an essay analyzing Dickens's characters: "There are no rules in novel writing, and for any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about- survival. By this test, Dickens's characters have succeeded."