David Copperfield
The narrator begins by wondering whether he will turn out to be the hero of his own life, and the joke is that he keeps being rescued by other people. Dickens's most autobiographical novel follows a boy from a Suffolk childhood through factory work, a disastrous marriage and a career in letters.
Its reputation rests on the secondary characters: the improvident Mr Micawber, the oily Uriah Heep, the fierce Betsey Trotwood. They are comic, but they also form a system of care that substitutes for the family David loses. The book is long, and deliberately so; it wants you to feel the accumulation of years.
Public-domain status
First published in 1850. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Charles Dickens died in 1870, so this work has been free to republish there since 1941.
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- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847
- Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861
- The Time Machine — H. G. Wells, 1895
- London — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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