David Copperfield | Page 4

to it with the composure which this formal
heading would seem to require. My interest in it was so recent and
strong, and my mind was so divided between pleasure and regret -
pleasure in the achievement of a long design, regret in the separation
from many companions - that I was in danger of wearying the reader
with personal confidences and private emotions.
Besides which, all that I could have said of the Story to any purpose, I
had endeavoured to say in it.
It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how sorrowfully the
pen is laid down at the close of a two-years' imaginative task; or how

an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into
the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are
going from him for ever. Yet, I had nothing else to tell; unless, indeed,
I were to confess (which might be of less moment still), that no one can
ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I believed it in the
writing.
So true are these avowals at the present day, that I can now only take
the reader into one confidence more. Of all my books, I like this the
best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of
my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love
them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a
favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD. 1869

THE PERSONAL HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE OF DAVID
COPPERFIELD THE YOUNGER

CHAPTER 1
I AM BORN

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that
station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin
my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have
been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It
was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry,
simultaneously.
In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the
nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a
lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of
our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be
unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and

spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all
unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a
Friday night.
I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show
better than my history whether that prediction was verified or falsified
by the result. On the second branch of the question, I will only remark,
that unless I ran through that part of my inheritance while I was still a
baby, I have not come into it yet. But I do not at all complain of having
been kept out of this property; and if anybody else should be in the
present enjoyment of it, he is heartily welcome to keep it.
I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the
newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas. Whether sea-going
people were short of money about that time, or were short of faith and
preferred cork jackets, I don't know; all I know is, that there was but
one solitary bidding, and that was from an attorney connected with the
bill-broking business, who offered two pounds in cash, and the balance
in sherry, but declined to be guaranteed from drowning on any higher
bargain. Consequently the advertisement was withdrawn at a dead loss
- for as to sherry, my poor dear mother's own sherry was in the market
then - and ten years afterwards, the caul was put up in a raffle down in
our part of the country, to fifty members at half-a-crown a head, the
winner to spend five shillings. I was present myself, and I remember to
have felt quite uncomfortable and confused, at a part of myself being
disposed of in that way. The caul was won, I recollect, by an old lady
with a hand-basket, who, very reluctantly, produced from it the
stipulated five shillings, all in halfpence, and twopence halfpenny short
- as it took an immense time and a great waste of arithmetic, to
endeavour without any effect to prove to her. It is a fact which will be
long remembered as remarkable down there, that she was never
drowned, but died triumphantly in bed, at ninety-two. I have
understood that it was, to the last, her proudest boast, that she never