Dickens's contemporaries, of course, recognized just as we do his visionary verisimilitude and his Olympian stock company of characters. Today it's easier to see his psychological acuity: half a century before Freud -- whose work would have scandalized him -- he knew by observation and imagination that people's irrational behavior made perfect sense. Of course David would marry a woman just like his mother, right down to the curly hair and the negligent housekeeping. Of course the fatherless Annie would love the geriatric Dr. Strong. Of course the stingy, taciturn Barkis would fixate on the explosively affectionate Peggotty. And of course sexuality can force its way to a hundred non-genital outlets: Uriah's writhing and handwringing, Dora's fingering the buttons of David's coat, Miss Murdstone's snapping shut her steel purse.

And Dickens's mastery of the full range of the English language may now be ... inimitable. He has what seems like a modernist taste for surreal comedy: "For anything that I can perceive to the contrary," says Mr. Micawber, "it is still probable that my children may be reduced to seek a livelihood by personal contortion, while Mrs. Micawber abets their unnatural feats by playing the barrel-organ." He has a postmodernist's taste for the absolutely trite: "Everything is like life, in my opinion," says the undertaker Mr. Omer, "if you look at it in that point of view." But what modernist or postmodernist writer would also risk the sheer loveliness of Emily's farewell letter to her never-to-be-husband Ham? "In another world, if I am forgiven, I may wake a child and come to you." Hard as I find it to take seriously the notion that Emily's transgression needs all this self-abasement, I can't read that without a lump in the throat.

Finally, it's the many-minded amplitude of "David Copperfield" that makes it both so formidable and so embraceable. Dickens thunders away by proxy about "earnestness," yet he permits Mr. Micawber to fly under (or soar above) his ever-vigilant moral radar. His villains, paradoxically, also belong to the world of pure play. Miss Murdstone, the celibate Wicked Stepmother, and Uriah Heep, the charity-school Iago, never make moral choices either: they're just bad, working their wills like two-year-olds while Dickens revels in their malice.

Yet the same novel can also accommodate a character as subtly drawn as Steerforth: the narcissist who charms everyone but himself, the seducer who half-wishes somebody was smart enough to thwart him, the too-knowing sophisticate who'd like to be as morally uncomplicated as the sailors he hangs out with, and eventually drowns with -- or as the fresh-faced schoolfellow who ends up writing about him. His creator surely put as much of himself into Steerforth as into David: Dickens gave David his own boyhood traumas (like his mortifying, terrifying stint at a shoe-blacking warehouse), and Steerforth his own adult suspicion of a spiritual void behind all that Inimitableness.

Every novel is probably a portrait of the artist, a cryptographic autobiography in which the trouble in its author's head is projected as an imaginary world, people and all. People especially. Scholars tell us Mr. Micawber grew out of Dickens's father, Dora out of his old sweetheart Maria Beadnell -- and his wife -- Tommy Traddles out of his friend Thomas Talfourd, and so on. Good to know. But "David Copperfield," more nakedly than any of his other novels, is all Dickens, all the time: his earnestness and his anarchic humor, his fears and his fantasies, his joy in his own generative powers. His guilt about his joy. But his joy anyway. No wonder he loved this book the best. No wonder some of us still do, deep down. The masterworks can wait.

Copyright © 2000 by David Gates. Excerpted from his introduction to "David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens, recently published by the Modern Library. All rights reserved.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"