David Copperfield is not fictionalised autobiography but its nature reflects Dickens’s thinking and writing over a period of years. The story of David Copperfield has many parallels in Dickens’s own life, especially his childhood. He too, like David was sent to a blacking factory, when his father, John Dickens was imprisoned for debt. This period, as Dickens himself says, was the darkest in his life and the shame and resentment he felt, made his sufferings a secret he could not share with anyone. Thus, from a first-hand knowledge acquired under unhappy circumstances, Dickens gives his readers a glimpse of the unsavoury side of Victorian England-struggling poverty and debtor’s prisons. There are many characters in the novel whom Dickens knew and many places in London that David visits were frequented by Dickens himself. The novel also gives us two unforgettable characters-Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber, the latter being party based on Dickens’s father.
