David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickens'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's power of invention,Somerset Maugham wrote:"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's exultant imagination...you can never quite forget them.