David Copperfield is Charles Dickens' eighth novel and his first to feature a first-person narrator. It was published in twenty issues and nineteen issues, by Bradbury and Evans, between 1849 and 1850, with illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne, known as Phiz.

Many consider this novel to be Dickens's masterpiece, starting with his friend and first biographer John Forster, who wrote: "Dickens' reputation was never higher than when Copperfield was published." so high in reputation as at the completion of Copperfield), and the author himself sees it as “his favorite child”. It is true, he specifies, that "underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life", that is to say an experience of self-writing. It is therefore not surprising that for this reason, the book is often placed in the category of autobiographical works. From a strict literary point of view, however, it goes beyond this framework with the richness of its themes and the originality of its writing, which makes it a true autobiographical novel.

Situated in the middle of Dickens' career, it represents, according to Paul Davis, a turning point in his work, the point of separation between the novels of youth and those of maturity. In 1850, Dickens was 38 years old and he had twenty years left to live, which he filled with other masterpieces, often denser, sometimes darker and addressing most of the political, social or personal questions that he laid.

At first glance, the work is modeled in the loose and somewhat disjointed manner of the "personal histories" popular in 18th-century Britain; but in reality, David Copperfield is a carefully structured and unified novel. It begins, like other novels by the writer, with a fairly gloomy picture of the condition of children in Victorian England, notoriously when troublesome children are herded into infamous boarding schools, then sets out to retrace the slow rise social and above all intimate of a young man who, painfully providing for the needs of his good aunt while continuing his studies, ends up becoming a writer: story, writes Paul Davis, of a "Victorian Everyman in search of understanding of self” (“a Victorian everyman seeking self-understanding”).

One of the characteristics of the story, noted by Edgar Johnson, is that Dickens, in the first part, “makes the reader see with the eyes of a child”. , an innovative technique for the time, already experimented with in Dombey and Son with an omniscient narrator, and brought here to its perfection thanks to the use of “I”.

David Copperfield has often been adapted into versions for children, in English and in other languages, and has given rise to numerous productions for stage, music hall, cinema and television. He also inspired cartoon and comic book authors. Along with Oliver Twist, it is undoubtedly Dickens's most universally known novel.