ens in
more especial relation to David Copperfield. Many guesses have been made
since his death, connecting David's autobiography with his own;
accounting, by means of such actual experiences, for the so frequent
recurrence in his writings of the prison-life, its humor and pathos,
described in them with such wonderful reality; and discovering in what
David tells Steerforth at school of the stories he had read in his
childhood, what it was that had given the bent to his own genius. There
is not only truth in all this, but it will very shortly be seen that the
identity went deeper than any had supposed, and covered experiences not
less startling in the reality than they appear to be in the fiction.

Of the "readings" and "imaginations" which he describes as brought away
from Chatham, this authority can tell us. It is one of the many passages
in _Copperfield_ which are literally true, and its proper place is here.
"My father had left a small collection of books in a little room
up-stairs to which I had access (for it adjoined my own), and which
nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room,
_Roderick Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_, _Humphrey Clinker_, _Tom Jones_,
the _Vicar of Wakefield_, _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, and _Robinson
Crusoe_ came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive
my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time,--they,
and the _Arabian Nights_ and the _Tales of the Genii_,--and did me no
harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; _I_
knew nothing of it. It is astonishing to me now how I found time, in the
midst of my porings and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those
books as I did. It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled
myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by
impersonating my favorite characters in them. . . . I have been Tom Jones
(a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have
sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I
verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of voyages and
travels--I forget what, now--that were on those shelves; and for days
and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed
with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees: the perfect
realization of Captain Somebody, of the royal British Navy, in danger of
being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great
p