In the "Pickwick Papers" the Fleet Prison was made to serve as an important feature of the story. In "Little Dorrit," the story as far as its human interest, humor and pathos are concerned, centres in the Marshalsea. The introduction of the King's Bench into "David Copperfield" is entirely episodic, but it makes one of the most brilliant chapters in the book, and, from its personal connection with the author's own life, one of the most important. That Dickens drew largely on his own experience for the material in "David Copperfield" has been abundantly shown by many commentators. Without being an autobiography, the book gives one many glimpses into the real life of its author. He transfers scenes and changes names a trifle, as he was fond of doing, but the private memoranda furnished by him of his early toil and trials afford a key to much that one reads in "Copperfield" in the flimsy disguise of fiction. Thus, he adapts the knowledge of the Marshalsea, which he acquired while his father was a prisoner there, to the fictitious figure and fortunes of old Dorrit; and he bestows on Mr. Micawber, in the King's Bench, the traits displayed by his father in the Marshalsea. A recent compiler of odds and ends of Dickens personalia, sapiently undertakes to show that the elder Dickens must have been incarcerated in the King's Bench and not in the Marshalsea, because Mr. Micawber was locked up there. Unfortunately for this arrangement, Dickens himself had distinctly disproved it in advance. Some years before he wrote "Copperfield"--probably before he even thought of writing it--he jotted down a number of personal facts, many of which were used in Forster's biography. These notes demonstrate positively that in it, as in "Dorrit," he pursued his favorite plan of interchanging occurrences, scenes and characters, without, however, departing from the main facts, which he had grafted in this fashion on the inventions of his fantasy. At the very commencement of the King's Bench interlude in "David Copperfield" this becomes apparent.
"At last Mr. Micawber's difficulties came to a crisis, and he was arrested one morning and carried over to the King's Bench Prison in the Borough. He told me, as he went out of the house, that the God of day had now gone down upon him--and I really thought his heart was broken, and mine too. But I heard, afterwards, that he was seen to play a lively game of skittles before noon.