David Copperfield

A boy is sent from his mother's house to a bottle factory, walks to Dover to find an aunt he has never met, and grows into a writer among the people who marked him: Peggotty, Steerforth, Uriah Heep, Mr Micawber waiting for something to turn up. Dickens gave David his own blacking-warehouse months and called this his favourite child. The first-person voice was new for him, and the shame in it is not invented. A hundred plates of sea pieces and Dutch flagships by painters like Willem van de Velde the Younger and Ludolf Bakhuizen run alongside the voyage, from the Dover road to the Yarmouth shore.