I have been meaning to read David Copperfield for years. It sat on my shelf, patient and a little reproachful, while I read around it. I had read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House, but somehow David Copperfield — the one Dickens himself called his favorite child — kept getting pushed aside.

I finally picked it up this winter, and I am so glad I did. It is a big, sprawling, generous novel — the kind that takes you in and keeps you there for weeks. David narrates his own life from infancy to middle age, and Dickens fills that life with some of the most memorable characters in all of English literature.

There is the magnificent Micawber, always waiting for something to turn up, always in debt, always cheerful. There is the terrifying Mr. Murdstone, David's cold stepfather, who represents everything Dickens hated about cruelty dressed up as discipline. There is the angelic Agnes Wickfield and the treacherous Uriah Heep, who is one of the great villains of Victorian fiction — all false humility and coiled malice.

And then there is Steerforth. Oh, Steerforth. He is the most complicated character in the book — charming, brilliant, selfish, and ultimately destructive. David loves him with the uncritical adoration of a boy who has never had a friend before, and watching that friendship play out is both wonderful and heartbreaking.

The novel is semi-autobiographical. Dickens drew heavily on his own childhood — the blacking factory, the debtors' prison, the sense of being abandoned by the adults who should have protected him. You can feel that personal investment on every page. This is not just a story Dickens invented; it is a story he needed to tell.

I will write more about the second half of the book next time — there is so much to say. But for now I will just tell you that if you have been putting off David Copperfield the way I did, stop putting it off. Make a pot of tea, find a comfortable chair, and let Dickens take you in. You will not regret it.