Even the less-than-minor characters are indelible: the nameless creditor who stakes out Mr. Micawber's lodgings ("Pay us, will you? Don't hide, you know; that's mean"), the monstrous and deranged shopkeeper who buys young David's waistcoat ("Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!") or the waiter who playfully, ruthlessly hijacks his dinner ("Come on, little 'un, and let's see who'll get most"). In fact, the comestibles themselves tend to stand out in your memory: the "stout pale pudding, heavy and flabby, and with great flat raisins in it," which David buys in the Strand, or the revolting sherry he's served in an inn at Charing Cross, poured from "the stale leavings at the bottoms of several small decanters" and with "more English crumbs in it than were to be expected in a foreign wine." Everywhere in this book, lifelike details leap at you, interrupting even the headlong melodrama of the shipwreck chapter: "A half-dressed boatman, standing next to me, pointed with his bare arm (a tattoo'd arrow on it, pointing in the same direction)." If ever a writer put words together to create in your mind something like virtual reality -- a fictive world you could swear you're inhabiting, teeming with people you could swear you know -- Dickens does it in "David Copperfield."

And he does more. The better to persuade you that this is all real, he contrives to let his narrator remain foggy about other details, which he could easily have invented and which a lesser writer would have. "I forget whether it was the Blue Bull, or the Blue Boar; but I know it was the Blue Something." That this narrator is himself a novelist gives the narration a metafictional frisson -- which Dickens absolutely intends, innocent though he is of our critical jargon.

Both he and his narrator David know and love "Tom Jones," in which Fielding teasingly calls attention to the novel's fictiveness by such devices as telling us he hasn't been able to find out what Tom had for dinner. But those gaps in David's memory are even trickier than that. Like Fielding, Dickens plays with your disbelief in fictional artifice, while simultaneously making that disbelief easier to suspend -- how improbable it would be, you realize, if David could remember every single thing -- while simultaneously calling your attention to how skillful an artificer Dickens must be to disguise his artifice so well.

Yet no writer ever needed artifice less. In his preface to the first edition of "David Copperfield," he claims that "no one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing." The way the best scenes play in your head suggests that they were also squirmingly alive in Dickens's head: this gift is unfakeable. And he gets carried away by his belief just as you do. Late in the novel, when the Micawbers decide to emigrate, David tells us: "I think, now, how odd it was, but how wonderfully like Mr. Micawber, that, when he went from London to Canterbury, he should have talked as if he were going to the farthest limits of the earth, and, when he went from England to Australia, as if he were going for a little trip across the Channel." How wonderfully like Mr. Micawber: this isn't Dickens sneakily complimenting himself on how wonderfully he's managed to maintain a character's consistency. It's an uncalculated expression of admiration for a resilient eccentric whose reality, for the moment, Dickens doubts no more than David does.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"