David Copperfield relates the story of his life - transmuting many of the early experiences of his creator-right from his birth to his attainment of settled maturity and successful authorship. On his journey, David encounters a gallery of memorable characters, kind, cruel or grotesque: Mr Micawber, Uriah Heep and Steerforth are among the many who shape his development. By turns absorbingly comic, dramatic, ironic and tender, the novel brings into energetic life the society and preoccupations of the mid-Victorian world.

Charles Dickens (1812-70). Best known for his host of distinctively cruel, comic and repugnant characters, Charles Dickens remains the most widely read of the Victorian novelists. Born in Portsmouth in 1812, Charles Dickens was the second child of a clerk in the Navy Pay-Office. His childhood, like many of those portrayed in his novels, was not a particularly happy one, owing in the main to his father's inability to stay out of debt. This led, in 1824, to his father's imprisonment in Marshalsea prison and Dickens being sent to work in a blacking warehouse. Memories of this time haunted him for the rest of his life. In defiance of his parents' failure to educate him, Dickens worked hard, becoming first a clerk in a solicitor's office then in 1834 a reporter of Parliamentary debates for the Morning Chronicle. It is from here that Dickens's talent for portraits and caricatures stemmed, and his Sketches by Boz, which appeared in the Monthly Magazine and the Evening Chronicle, became immensely popular. Following on from this was The Pickwick Papers (1836-7), which made Dickens's characters the centre of a popular colt. With the serialization of Oliver Twist (1837-9) Dickens began his indictment of the cruelty that children suffer at the hands of society. While working on Oliver Twist, Dickens learned of the death of his beloved sister-in-law, Mary. The grief he displayed at this news seems to underline the less than loving relationship he had with his wife Catherine, from whom he was finally separated in 1858. Dickens followed the success of Oliver Twist with Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). He travelled to America later that year and while there his advocacy of an international copyright law and support for the abolition of slavery aroused the hostility of the American press. On his return to England, Dickens wrote Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) and the hugely popular Christmas Books. After the publication of Dombey and Son in 1846-8 Dickens's novels became increasingly sombre, with his social criticism more radical and his comedy more savage. Between 1849 and his death in 1870 Dickens published David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. His last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was never completed and was later published posthumously. Public grief at Dickens's death was considerable and he was buried in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. Written in the form of an autobiography, David Copperfield was first published in twenty instalments stretching from May 1849 to November 1850. With such memorable characters as Micawber and Uriah Heep, David Copperfield is highly praised as one of Dickens's best books.