As if organising St Cedd's church fete were not enough for Mrs Maxie, later that mellow July afternoon her son Stephen sprang the news of his engagement. By morning, Sally Julep, her new parlour-maid - unmarried mother and minor village scandal - was dead.
I really think I have done it ingeniously and with a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction.' So wrote Dickens of David Copperfield (1850), the novel he called his 'favourite child'. Through his hero Dickens draws openly on his own life, as David Copperfield recalls his experiences from childhood to the...