David Copperfield

David Copperfield is born after his father's death and raised happily by his young mother and her devoted housekeeper Peggotty until his mother remarries the cold, cruel Mr Murdstone, who sends David away to a brutal boarding school and then, after his mother's death, to hard labour in a London warehouse at the age of ten. David walks alone from London to Dover to find his eccentric great aunt Betsey Trotwood, who takes him in and raises him properly. The novel then follows him through school, where he befriends the charming but morally hollow Steerforth, who later seduces and abandons Peggotty's niece Emily; through his articled clerkship, where the servile, scheming Uriah Heep slowly defrauds David's mentor Mr Wickfield before being exposed; and through two marriages, first to the pretty, impractical Dora Spenlow, who dies young, and finally to Agnes Wickfield, who has quietly loved him the whole time. Around David circles Mr Micawber, permanently in debt, permanently certain that something will turn up, one of Dickens's most beloved comic creations, who eventually finds his own unlikely success in Australia alongside the emigrating Peggotty family.

Dickens draws heavily on his own life here, the humiliating factory work, the doomed early love, the climb into journalism and authorship, and called it, late in life, his favourite of his own books, "a very complicated weaving of truth and invention," in his own words to his friend and biographer John Forster. The novel's scale is large but its emotional throughline, a boy learning who to trust after everyone he loves either fails or saves him, stays clear throughout.

Dickens noticed, and later called a small manifestation of his own fate, that his hero's initials, D.C., were his own reversed.