David Copperfield

That boy passes through a childhood by turns snug and cruel. There is Peggotty at her needlework by candlelight, and the boat-house at Yarmouth with its Dutch clock and painted tea-tray. There is also the cold "firmness" of the stepfather Mr. Murdstone, a warehouse full of bottles to be washed and labeled, and a long, ragged walk from London toward Dover with nothing left to sell. Along the way David gathers the people who will shape him. Some he loves too easily, like the charming Steerforth and the loyal fisherman Mr. Peggotty. Some he cannot help but distrust, like the clammy, staring clerk Uriah Heep, forever insisting on his own humbleness. And some, like the ever-hopeful and ever-insolvent Mr. Micawber, defy every category.

Dickens writes it in caricature that somehow deepens into something true. Micawber's arithmetic of happiness and misery is comic until it isn't. The child's-eye view catches both the absurd and the quietly cruel, as when a schoolyard placard warning of a biting creature turns out to refer to David himself. Miss Betsey's fierce eccentricity keeps interrupting her own tenderness with a bark of "Janet! Donkeys!"

It is the story of an orphan finding his way toward the man he is meant to become, through misplaced trust, foolish devotion, and love that takes a lifetime to recognize. "If you please, aunt, I am your nephew," the ragged boy manages at the door in Dover, and everything after grows from that trembling sentence. It is a large book, and it earns its size, holding a whole world of people who feel like they go on living once the reading is done.