David Copperfield

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night.

The definitive Victorian Bildungsroman arc sprawls but each movement grows organically from the last; Steerforth's ruin and the Heep exposure provide moral counterweight, so plot scores 90.

"I am well aware that I am the umblest person going," said Uriah Heep, modestly; "let the other be where he may. My mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in a numble abode, Master Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for."

Micawber, Uriah Heep, Steerforth, Peggotty, Betsey Trotwood, Dora, and Agnes are Dickens's most populous and individually voiced ensemble; Heep's unctuous humility defines the hidden-villain type, so cast scores 94.

"If Mr. Micawber's creditors will not give him time," said Mrs. Micawber, "they must take the consequences; and the sooner they bring it to that, the better for them. My papa was not a man to give time (except of course in the last extremity of pecuniary difficulties) from Mr. Micawber."

Opening Yarmouth and Salem House chapters fly; middle London chapters dilate and risk indolence until Micawber/Heep exposure and Steerforth's shipwreck reset urgency, so pace scores 82.

It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously. In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life.

One of the great first-person retrospective voices—the birth chapter's comic cosmology and the Peggotty passages modulate from childhood vernacular to mature reflection without losing warmth, so prose scores 93.

I was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or "there by", as they say in Scotland. I was a posthumous child. My father's eyes had closed upon the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it.

Yarmouth beach, Blunderstone, Salem House, Canterbury, and the London Inns of Court give a documentary sweep of Victorian England from provincial childhood to metropolitan profession, so world scores 88.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night.

Ch.I—"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life"—is among the strongest opening gambits in English fiction; birth-on-Friday-at-midnight cosmology binds reader to narrator in under a page, so hook scores 95.

Placed in a mental position of peculiar painfulness, beyond the assuaging reach even of Mrs. Micawber's influence, though exercised in the tripartite character of woman, wife, and mother, it is my intention to fly from myself for a short period.

Established the autobiographical Bildungsroman as the dominant Victorian form—the retrospective first-person frame, the child-wife as structural mistake, the hidden villain beneath apparent servility—so innov scores 88.

And now my written story ends. I look back, once more—for the last time—before I close these leaves. I see myself, with Agnes at my side, journeying along the road of life. I see our children and our friends around us.

"A Last Retrospect" closes the life-journey with earned serenity; the coda transforms 64 chapters of loss into a single image of domestic continuity without denying what was sacrificed, so ending scores 90.