So did just about every middle-class parent in the English-speaking world, who must have thought Dickens's alchemical gift for euphemism transmuted into opacity such episodes as Steerforth's seducing Emily, Jack Maldon's putting the moves on the married Annie Strong and the prostitute Martha's attempted suicide -- not to mention the schoolmaster Creakle's sadistic sexuality ("I am confident that he couldn't resist a chubby boy, especially") and the homoerotic bond between David and Steerforth (who calls him "Daisy" and wishes he had a "pretty, timid" sister). Whatever middle-class children made of the book, they grew up with its characters and language lodged deep in memory.

Samuel Beckett (born in 1906) appropriated a familiar line from Chapter III in his early story "A Wet Night," simply changing "I" to "we" and adding a vulgarism: "This may be premature. We have set it down too soon, perhaps. But let it bloody well stand." More ambitiously, P.G. Wodehouse (born in 1881) seems to have appropriated Steerforth's bloodlessly efficient manservant and pander Littimer in creating Jeeves, Bertie Wooster's comically omniscient "gentleman's personal gentleman" -- to whom he also gave something like Mr. Micawber's allusive orotundity. George Orwell (born in 1903) recalled that when he first read "David Copperfield," around the age of 9, he thought the account of David's childhood had been written by a child. (Another remark everybody used to know.)

What amazed Orwell was Dickens's empathy with children; what amazes me is that children could ever read "David Copperfield." Education has slipped between then and now. But "David Copperfield" has slipped, too. Harold Bloom, in his 1994 survey "The Western Canon," packs the current conventional wisdom into a single conjunction: "Dickens had enormous affection for 'David Copperfield,' but this was his 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.'" But, not and. Got it. A warmup act for the masterworks.

These days even those of us who have enormous affection for Dickens tend to seek out less guilty pleasures among his books. The bursting-at-the-seams social novels -- "Bleak House" (by consensus, his masterpiece, though I don't consent), "Little Dorrit," "Our Mutual Friend" -- offer more in the way of high seriousness, if that's our idea of a good time. And "Great Expectations," Dickens's other great bildungsroman, is a comparatively modernist novel: it's tighter, less episodic, and its narrator-protagonist stews in guilt and anguish -- which really is our idea of a good time. Dickens wrote "David Copperfield" smack dab in the middle of his career: before all these books, and after the rowdy, exuberant, shamelessly weird, wildly uneven early work -- "The Pickwick Papers," "Oliver Twist," "Nicholas Nickleby," "The Old Curiosity Shop," "Martin Chuzzlewit" -- in which we gladly put up with all sorts of nonsense for the privilege of watching him become Charles Dickens.

"David Copperfield" is the absolutely typical Dickens novel; maybe Dickens, the hammiest of all great writers, loved it best because it was just so him. But its very centrality makes it easy to overlook or take for granted. Compared to the early work, its miscalculations seem less understandable, its moralizing less tolerable; shouldn't he have known better by this time? Compared to the late work, it seems too merrily "Dickensian."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"