David Copperfield

Why it’s on the list: Dickens’s most openly autobiographical novel — a first-person life from a childhood handed to a cruel stepfather and a bottling warehouse through to a career as a novelist — and the one he called his own favourite. It holds up as a curriculum text because Micawber, Steerforth, Uriah Heep and Betsey Trotwood are all tests of judgment.

Where I heard about it

• Dissident Teacher — on A Library to Build Great Americans, a 468-title curriculum published on Substack in December 2025, in the Ages 13–99+ band under Fiction.

About this edition

Dickens (1812–1870) published it in monthly instalments between 1849 and 1850. He had himself worked in a boot-blacking factory at twelve while his father sat in debtors’ prison, and had told almost nobody. In his preface to a later edition he called it his favourite of his own novels.

Connections

• Charles Dickens — the author.
• Poverty — the childhood the book opens with, and the one Dickens had.
• Literature