Hello and welcome to Story Time for Grownups.

I'm Faith Moore, and this season we're reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

Each episode I'll read a few chapters from the book,

pausing from time to time to give brief explanations, so it's easier to follow along.

It's like an audiobook with built-in notes.

So brew a pot of tea, find a cozy chair, and settle in. It's story time. Hello, everyone, welcome back.

I apologize if there might be a little bit of background noise in this intro, not in the chapters.

I recorded those before, but it is raining pretty hard right now out my window. I record

up on the very top floor. So when it rains, we definitely hear it up here, but I wanted to make

sure that I recorded in time to get this episode out to you. So I'm doing my best to keep the

background sounds to a minimum, but you may hear the rain. Apparently, you know, March comes in

like a lion and goes out like a lamb, so apparently lions rain a lot because it just started

to rain a couple moments ago, and apparently it's going to keep raining for the entire week. So,

happy March, and sorry if you could hear the rain. But anyway, I'm so glad that you're here,

rain or no, whatever the weather is like where you are. I hope that you are cozy and warm,

at least in your imagination. And I'm so glad that you've joined me and that you're here.

Last time was quite a long chapter. So I think I have kind of a lot to say about it. I got

some great comments and questions. So let's not take too much time here at the very beginning because the chapter is, the chapter is kind of like a medium-sized chapter. So it's not, it's not going to be too long, but I do have a lot to say. So just please make sure that you're subscribed. Please tap the five stars if you haven't done it already.

If you have done it already, you don't need to do it again. I think it only works once. But if you haven't tapped the five stars and you are enjoying this show, I would greatly appreciate it if you would just do that in your podcast player. And if you have a couple of extra seconds and you're enjoying the show, please leave a positive review. It works in some sort of magical, I don't know,

l chemical reaction or something inside your podcast player, that if you tap the five stars and

leave a review, if enough of you do that, then the podcast starts to magically appear in other

people's podcast players as one of the suggestions. So it'll say, oh, you like this, maybe you would like story time for grownups. And maybe they would. So if you could please do those things and subscribe, that would be really, really helpful. And it helps to support the show. If you're interested in supporting the show in other ways, you can scroll into the show notes. There is a link there to our online community, which is called The Drawing Room. And there's also a link there to our tip jar if you'd like to make a financial donation. But of course, you are not obligated to do any of those things. You are supporting the show simply by listening to it, and I am so, so glad that you're here. Okay, so last time we read chapter 16, today we're going to be reading chapter 17. So let's begin by just reminding ourselves what happened

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