In which novel does David Copperfield work at a blacking factory?

David Copperfield works at a blacking factory in Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield. The episode occurs after David’s mother dies and his cruel stepfather, Mr Murdstone, sends him to London to earn his keep at Murdstone and Grinby’s warehouse.

The young David labels and pastes pots of shoe polish in exhausting conditions, living away from respectable society and feeling abandoned. He eventually escapes and travels to Dover to seek help from his eccentric aunt, Betsey Trotwood. This turning point begins his long journey from vulnerable child to successful writer.

The factory episode is strongly autobiographical. Dickens himself worked at Warren’s Blacking warehouse near the Thames as a boy in 1824, after his father was imprisoned for debt. Dickens concealed this painful experience for years; even his wife did not know about it until he revealed it in writing to his friend and biographer John Forster.

Readers sometimes confuse this episode with Oliver Twist or with Dickens’s broader criticism of child labour. The factory is specifically part of David Copperfield, a novel published serially from 1849 to 1850 and later issued in book form in 1850.