David Copperfield

A boy is sent from his mother's house to a bottle factory, walks to Dover to find an aunt he has never met, and grows into a writer among the people who marked him: Peggotty, Steerforth, Uriah Heep, Mr Micawber waiting for something to turn up. Dickens gave David his own blacking-warehouse months and called this his favourite child. The first-person voice was new for him, and the shame in it is not invented. Twenty-one plates after Turner, Morland and their peers follow the novel's own weather, from smugglers on a beach to the banks of the Loire.