David Copperfield

Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1850) was the book its author loved best — "of all my books," he wrote, "I like this the best" — and it is the most personal thing he ever published. Told in the first person by David himself, looking back across the whole of his life, it follows an orphaned boy from a cruel stepfather and a brutal school, through the humiliation of child labour in a riverside warehouse, to rescue by his fierce great-aunt and a slow climb toward education, marriage, and his vocation as a writer. Behind David's reversed initials Dickens hid, and at last confronted, the buried shame of his own childhood.

Around David stands one of the richest casts in all fiction: the eternally hopeful, eternally insolvent Mr. Micawber, forever sure that something will "turn up"; the dazzling, faithless Steerforth; the loyal Peggotty and her seafaring family at Yarmouth; the child-wife Dora and the steadfast Agnes; the fierce, generous Betsey Trotwood; and the writhing, fawning clerk Uriah Heep, whose professed "humbleness" masks one of literature's great studies in resentment and ambition.

Read as a story, it is the warmest and most expansive of Dickens's novels — funny, tender, and crowded with life. Read more closely, it is a profound book about childhood suffering, about class and vocation, and about the long education of the heart: how a wounded child becomes a working man, and how a working man learns to want what is good rather than what merely delights. Dickens called its hero his "favourite child," and generations of readers have understood why.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.