David Copperfield: Dickens’s "favourite child"

"No one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing" avers Dickens in the preface to David Copperfield, going on to admit that "of all my books, I like this the best… like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD". The quintessential Dickens masterpiece and the most overtly autobiographical of his works, it occasioned him great pain to write, and even greater to finish, a parting that he saw as "dismissing some portion of [myself] into the shadowy world". As the comparison of the biography and synopsis above will confirm, the plot contains all too visible parallels with its author’s life, and the writing of it can be interpreted as a form of catharsis. The book differs in several important ways from Dickens’s previous novels: it has no systematic social reform agenda, far fewer grotesques and a markedly different plot structure, lacking the customary ‘flight and captureâ...