David Copperfield

David Copperfield is a novel by Charles Dickens, published in monthly parts through 1849 and 1850 and then as a book in 1850. It is narrated by its own hero from infancy to maturity, which makes it the clearest bildungsroman in Dickens's work and, as he said himself, his favourite among the books he wrote.

David is left to the care of a nurse, Peggotty, then placed under a stepfather who sets out to break his spirit, and finally put to work pasting labels in a warehouse at the age of ten. He runs away to his great-aunt Betsey Trotwood, who takes him in, and the novel follows his schooling, his training in a proctor's office, his friendships and the long course of his first marriage.

Dickens used the book to rework his own childhood, and it carries the widest gallery of characters he wrote, from the Micawbers and their permanent insolvency to Uriah Heep, whose humility is a strategy. The structure is deliberately sprawling, and readers have treated it ever since as the novel in which Dickens put the most of his own experience.