David Copperfield

David Copperfield tells its own story, from a birth attended by a great-aunt who leaves in disgust when he turns out to be a boy, through a cruel stepfather, a spell of child labour in a London warehouse, and a walk to Dover to throw himself on the mercy of an aunt he has never met — and Dickens narrates all of it in the first person, an unusual choice for him, as an adult remembering exactly how much a child understands and how much he doesn't. The cast around him is enormous even by Dickens' standards: the endlessly, cheerfully insolvent Mr. Micawber, the damp and unctuous Uriah Heep, the faithful Peggotty, the wrecked Little Em'ly — most of them drawn, by Dickens' own account, closer to life than anything else he wrote.

It ran in nineteen monthly parts from 1849 to 1850 before Bradbury and Evans published it complete that year. Dickens said late in life that of all his books he loved this one best, and the novel's own opening question — whether David will turn out to be the hero of his own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else — is one he leaves the reader to answer.

Bibliomancer restores the 1850 text exactly as Dickens wrote it.