refer 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 ca