Dickens’s reading copy of David Copperfield

David Copperfield (1850) was Dickens’s favorite novel and his most autobiographical work. He began adapting it for his repertoire of public readings in January 1855. This is Dickens’s own “prompt copy,” which he prepared by cutting and pasting the printed text onto the blank pages of a book. Following his first public performance of David Copperfield in 1861, he revised and annotated this copy, using it as his script and for stage directions. Dickens possessed considerable dramatic ability and relished his histrionic performances, writing to a friend in 1862: “I read ‘Copperfield,’ and positively enthralled the people. It was a most overpowering effect, and poor Andrew [a lieutenant in the Royal Navy] came behind the screen, after the storm, and cried in the best and manliest manner.”