May: Charles Dickens begins the monthly serialization of his new novel. In the work, the young protagonist David Copperfield (who is the first–person narrator) describes his despair as a young double orphan. His financially–strapped (and generally quite toxic) surviving stepfather forces him to go into severely arduous work in his London shoe–blacking factory. Copperfield eventually runs away – traveling by foot the eighty miles from London to Dover.
The tale is a saga directly out of Dickens’ own desperation–filled childhood, the severity of which he had kept to himself. Even his own children believe that work is essentially fiction. Dickens had written seven novels before David Copperfield and would write seven more after.