him to an occupation he so loathed. 
     Much of “David Copperfield” is familiar in our mouths as
     household words, and Swinburne has maintained that Micawber
     ranks with Dick Swiveller as one of the greatest characters in
     all Dickens’s novels.  “Copperfield” comes midway in the great
     list of works by Charles Dickens.

I.—­My Early Childhood

I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night, at Blunderstone, in Suffolk.  I was a posthumous child.  My father’s eyes had been closed upon the light of this world six months when mine opened upon it.  Miss Betsey Trotwood, an aunt of my father’s, and consequently a great-aunt of mine, arrived on the afternoon of the day I was born, and explained to my mother (who was very much afraid of her) that she meant to provide for her child, which was to be a girl.

My aunt said never a word when she learnt that it was a boy, and not a girl, but took her bonnet by the strings in the manner of a sling, aimed a blow at the doctor’s head with it, put it on bent, walked out, and never came back.  She vanished like a discontented fairy.

The first objects that assume a distinct presence before me, as I look far back into the blank of my infancy, are my mother, with her pretty air and youthful shape, and Peggotty, my old nurse, with no shape at all, and with cheeks and arms so red and hard that I wondered the birds didn’t peck her in preference to apples.

I remember a few years later, a gentleman with beautiful black hair and whiskers walking home from church on Sunday with us; and, somehow, I didn’t like him or his deep voice, and I was jealous that his hand should touch my mother’s in touching me—­which it did.

It must have been about this time that, waking up from an uncomfortable doze one night, I found Peggotty and my mother both in tears, and both talking.

“Not such a one as this Mr. Copperfield wouldn’t have liked,” said Peggotty.  “That I say, and that I swear!”

“Good heavens!” cried my mother.  “You’ll drive me mad!  How can you have the heart to say such bitter things to me, when you are well aware that out of this place I haven’t a single friend to turn to?” But the following Sunday I saw the gentleman with the black whiskers again, and he walked home from church with us, and gradually I became used to seeing him and knowing him as Mr. Murdstone.  I liked him no better than at first, and had the same uneasy jealousy of him.

It was on my return from a visit to Yarmouth, where I went with Peggotty to spend a fortnight at her brother’s, that I found my mother married to Mr. Murdstone.  They were sitting by the fire in the best parlour when I came in.

I gave him my hand.  After a moment of suspense, I went and kissed my mother.  I could not look at her, I could not look at him; I knew quite well he was looking at us both.  As soon as I could creep away, I crept upstairs, and cried myself to sleep.