The second half of David Copperfield displays Dickens at his magnificent, and often uneven, best.

But here, he focuses on the interior life of his hero, as if saving the plot for later. His own early novels ( Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and so on) are largely comic picaresques. Dickens is one of the first to acknowledge the inspiration of the emerging English canon: Robinson Crusoe, The Adventures of Roderick Random and Tom Jones, the books he finds in his father's library. In the first half, before Dickens's irrepressible storytelling kicks in and the motor of the novel starts to hum with incident, we find him almost meditating on his literary beginnings. The story – so appealing to Freud – is of a boy making his way in the world, and finding himself as a man and as a writer. I love David Copperfield because it is, in some ways, so un-Dickensian.

Why not Pickwick Papers? Or, better still, Great Expectations? Or Bleak House? Or Little Dorrit? And why not, here in the holiday season, that festive evergreen A Christmas Carol? Or the granite brilliance of Hard Times? Yes, in different ways, all masterpieces. Some Dickens aficionados will be dismayed. At the outset, I'm going to anticipate your howls of rage. Freud's choice – and Dickens's own opinion that David Copperfield was 'of all my books' the one he liked 'the best' – helps clarify an impossible selection midway through the 19th century.

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