ens's preference for David Copperfield as an artifact of his work is readily available. In an 1866 letter to Robert Browning, he describes David Copperfield as "my own particular favourite" (in Storey 171).[1] The autobiographical features of the novel appeared to grow out of two elements that were unique to the early serialization and planning of David Copperfield. One was point of view; David Copperfield was Dickens's first deployment of first person. The second was a "fragment of autobiography" that Dickens had begun in 1846 but that his wife encouraged him to abandon, in part because "what it told was too painful to confess" (Fielding 108). The fragment was set aside for two years, and in 1848 the serious planning of David Copperfield began. Fielding sums up the process in terms of the pattern of the evolving narrative:
But now that he was writing in the first person, for the first time, he saw a great opportunity to make use of it. Into the second number went the account of his childhood reading; into the third went some of his recollections of Wellington House Academy; and into the fourth were inserted, almost unaltered, the account of his time in the blacking factory (changed to Murdstone and Grinby's) and the desolate life he had led for a while in London. "I really think I have done it ingeniously," he wrote to Forster, "and with a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction." . . . [T]hroughout the whole novel the seeds of his recollections blossomed in the most out-of-the-way corners and crevices and in a manner that was detectable even by some of his readers at the time (Fielding 108).
As a serial presentation, published in nineteen so-called "numbers," the narrative of David's life perforce unfolds gradually. Fielding cites its natural development "in several stages," as well as the mutability--whether from childishness to maturity or exposure of depravity masquerading as humility--of such chara...