David Copperfield

A young boy in nineteenth-century London runs away from an unhappy home, finds employment in a wine factory, and becomes acquainted with a wide variety of characters in the city streets. David Copperfield includes material from the autobiography Dickens had recently begun and is written in the first person, which is a new technique for him. Although Copperfield differs from his creator in many ways, Dickens uses many early personal experiences that meant much to him, including his period of work in a factory while his father was jailed, his schooling, his passion for Maria Beadnell (a woman much like Dora Spenlow), and his emergence from parliamentary reporting into successful novel writing.