David Copperfield

Dickens's most autobiographical novel follows David Copperfield from a Suffolk childhood through cruelty, child labour and hard-won fortune, across an England he renders with tender exactness. It maps a real country: the village of his birth, the Yarmouth beach where the Peggottys keep their upturned-boat home, the London warehouse of his degradation and the improvident Micawbers, and Canterbury and Dover, where his aunt Betsey Trotwood gives him a second chance.

David

Blunderstone

Childhood

In the Suffolk village of Blunderstone, David's happy early childhood with his gentle mother is destroyed when she marries the cold, cruel Mr Murdstone, who beats the boy and packs him off. Dickens opens on the loss of an Eden, the tenderness of the beginning making all the harshness that follows cut the deeper.

The opening chapters

inspired by David's birthplace, Blunderstone, is drawn from the real Suffolk village of Blundeston; sited there.

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