David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

It's been fun to revisit this novel as part of my research into the BBC-1 Classic Serials of the 1980s worked on by Terrance Dicks. He was the producer of a TV dramatisation this broadcast in late 1986 which was nominated for a BAFTA. 
(Tedious nerd bit because this is how my brain works: the director was Barry Letts, Terrance's former boss on both Doctor Who and the Classic Serial, and the cast included Stephen Thorne (who I interviewed), Terence Lodge and Christopher Burgess from their time on Doctor Who. Then there was Sarah Crowden, whose father met with Letts in 1974 to discuss taking the role of the Fourth Doctor. 
I'm conscious, too, of Terrance and Barry Letts working on this stuff from their office in 509 Union House at the BBC, upstairs from the crises affecting Doctor Who (producer John Nathan Turner in room 304, his script editor in 312), with David Copperfield broadcast over the same weekends as The Trial of a Time Lord. Did they trade ideas for casting? Here we have Owen Teale, fresh from Doctor Who and the Vengeance on Varos. And there's a nod to future Doctor Who, too, with Simon Callow fresh from A Room With A View, the film that made his name, here as one of Dickens's best known characters, Wilkins Micawber, 20 years before taking the role of Dickens in Doctor Who...)
Anyhow. The novel is the autobiography of a fictional character who has a number of resemblances to the real-life Dickens. We follow David Copperfield - also known as "Master Davy", "Daisy" and "Trot" in different phases of his life - from birth through school and different jobs and two marriages, to established and successful writer. I'd have liked more on what he saw and felt in his time as a parliamentary reporter, not just how long it took to learn shorthand, because I've done the same job. But an impression can be gleaned from what David says when he moves on:

"One joyful night, therefore, I noted down the music of the parliamentary bagpipes for the last time, and I have never heard it since; though I still recognize the old drone in the newspapers, without any substantial variation (except, perhaps, that there is more of it), all the livelong session." (Chapter 48, Domestic)

As well as David, we follow the lives of a huge cast of characters around him, not least his school friend Thomas Traddles and early crush Emily, his nursemaid Clara Pegotty, aunt Betsey Trotwood and the feckless but well-meaning Micawber, always determined that something will turn up. In this version, engagingly narrated by Richard Armitage, Micawber is a broad Brummie, which produced some odd mental images as I listened to this in the wake of the death of Ozzy Osborne.
(More of how my brain works: early on, Clara takes young Master Davy to visit her brother, Daniel Peggoty, who lives in a converted old boat on the beach at Yarmouth. There's a long description of this cosy if eccentric home:

"Over the little mantelshelf, was a picture of the ‘Sarah Jane’ lugger, built at Sunderland, with a real little wooden stern stuck on to it; a work of art, combining composition with carpentry, which I considered to be one of the most enviable possessions that the world could afford." (Chapter 3, I Have a Change)

I said before that I think Terrance Dicks might have got the word "capacious" from Charles Dickens; could he also have swiped "Sarah Jane"? (Sarah Jane Smith was, of course, played on screen by Elisabeth Sladen. When she died in 2011, the new companion being devised for Doctor Who was renamed in her honour; Clara was Sladen's middle name.))
Anyhow again. The novel boasts some memorable villains. First, there's David's cruel, violent and manipulative stepfather Edward Murdstone and his sister Jane. Then there's schoolmate James Steerforth, who - brilliantly - Davy is taken in by but we and other characters see through. (In the TV version Terrance oversaw, Steerforth's mother is played by Nyrie Dawn Porter, surely as a kind of a clue to the viewer of moral corruption in the family, given Porter's association with The Forsyte Saga (1967)).
Then there's the ever 'umble Uriah Heep, in whom David spots wickedness long before Micawber lays out, at length, exactly what Heep has done. I don't think David gets better at recognising wrong 'uns - he is still drawn to Steerforth even after knowing the truth about him. I think in part Steerforth's posh, wealthy charm makes him more agreeable to David, so there's some snobbery in his distrust of Heep. But I also think, as others have observed, that Heep is in some ways a dark reflection of David himself: a young man of humble background trying to establishing himself and with an eye on his boss's daughter that might not be wholly appropriate...
If there's a failing here, it's how good and noble David is throughout; loving, patient, tolerant, hard-working, forgiving, blah blah blah. He speaks of his hatred for Heep, but I think that is intended as another signifier of virtue. It makes David rather insipid as a character but also, given how close much of this is to the real life of the author, it kept feeling like self-justification. 
The TV version swaps some stuff around, I think to tackle some of this beige. In the book, David and his former schoolmate Traddles are reunited with Micawber and, in chapter 28, they all have dinner at David's, the meal "mutton off the gridiron" plus "a bowl of punch, to be compounded by Mr Micawber". On screen, the bowl of punch is brought forward; it is David's first meal with Micawber, and they drink it instead of a solid meal. In both, the point is to show David and his friends making the best of things, and enjoying themselves, with only limited means. But I think the TV version has added tension because it's not right to be serving such a "meal" to children. That focus on "tension points" is, I think, very Terrance Dicks...
See also:Me on Our Mutual Friend, by Charles DickensMe on Dickens, by Claire Tomalin