DAVID COPPERFIELD

Dickens wrote 'David Copperfield' after completing an autobiographical fragment recalling his employment as a child in a London warehouse, and in the first-person narrative realized marvellously the workings of memory. The embodiment of his boyhood experience involved a 'complicated interweaving of truth and fiction', at its most subtle in the portrait of his father as Mr Micawber, one of his greatest comic creations. As David moves into manhood he encounters eccentrics and innocents, friends and villains, from his aunt Betsey Trotwood and her protege Mr Dick to the Peggotty family, the treacherous Steerforth, his beloved Dora, and the despicable Uriah Heep. David charts his growing self-knowledge in a story that is a classic of Victorian fiction.