David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickens&#39;s own life. Its eponymous hero, orphaned as a boy, grows up to discover love and happiness, heartbreak and sorrow amid a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains. Praising Dickens&#39;s power of invention, Somerset Maugham wrote: &quot;There were never such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens&#39;s exultant imagination...you can never quite forget them.&quot;<br />Dickens wrote of <i>David Copperfield</i>: &#39;Of all my books I like this one the best&#39;.