In March 1870 Dickens's friend Sir Arthur Helps, Clerk to the Privy Council told Queen Victoria when briefing her for her meeting with Dickens, that David Copperfield was believed ‘to give a hint of the author's early life’. This was a widespread and very natural belief, given the novel's autobiographical format, Dickens's frequently expressed special fondness for it, certain details of the hero's young manhood and his situation as a successful novelist and family man at the end of the book. As far as the child David's degradation in the bottling warehouse was concerned, and his familiarity with the inside of a debtor's prison, readers presumably imagined these passages to be entirely fictitious, another powerful exposé of the abuse of children in contemporary society by the large-hearted author of Oliver Twist.

That, shortly before he began writing Copperfield, or perhaps earlier, Dickens had been, intermittently, working on an actual autobiography, in which his childhood suffering and the bitter feelings to which it had given rise were laid bare, was known only to his wife and to his intimate friend John Forster. The version of his early life known to the general public during his lifetime was decidedly different and conformed generally to the information supplied by Dickens himself on the rare occasions when he consented to supply any. This version did not disguise the fact that he came from a modest background and had been educated at the sort of private academy usually attended by boys from the lower and middle middle classes.