David Copperfield begins in Blunderstone Rookery, a house in rural Suffolk. The rooks no longer nested on the property, but David's father had liked the idea of living near a rookery. This home is an ideal setting in the years before his mother's second marriage. After she marries Murdstone, it becomes a prison with Murdstone and his equally "firm" sister as keepers.

Before this second marriage David goes with his nurse, Peggotty, to her native region, the seacoast near Yarmouth. Yarmouth, Dickens told his friend, John Forster, was "the strangest place in the wide world." It has miles of flat coast, an even sea, and marshes reaching toward the sea. Peggotty's brother Dan'l lives in a small house that has a roof made from the bottom of a boat.

Dickens had a lifelong fascination for the sea which figures prominently in several of his books, including Dombey and...