`I really think I have done it ingeniously and with a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction.` So wrote Dickens of David Copperfield (1850,NULL,NULL,NULL), the novel he called his `favourite child`. Through his hero Dickens draws openly on his own life, as David Copperfield recalls his experiences from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Rosa Dartle, Dora, Steerforth and Uriah Heep are among the characters who focus the hero`s sexual and emotional drives, and Mr Micawber, a portrait of Dickens`s own father, evokes the mixture of love, nostalgia and guilt that, put together, make this Dickens`s most quoted and best-loved novel.
