Book Description
`I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is
DAVID COPPERFIELD,' wrote Dickens of what is the most personal,
certainly one of the most popular, of all his novels.
This new edition features an enlarged text, revised notes, and a
new introduction. It uses the accurate Clarendon text, and also
includes Dickens's trial titles and working notes, and eight of the
original illustrations by `Phiz'.
Reviews
Dickens's heavily autobiographical novel describing a young man's
rise in the world is a classic coming-of-age story. David
Copperfield, the narrator, is orphaned at a tender age and raised
first by his brutal stepfather (who halts his schooling and sends
him to work in a factory--as did Dickens's own father), then by a
kindly aunt. He trains for a career in law, but eventually becomes
a writer. An ill-advised marriage brings him considerable
unhappiness, but not long after his wife's death he is reunited
with his childhood sweetheart. A sprawling portrait of life in
Victorian England, DAVID COPPERFIELD is perhaps Dickens's most
popular work, and it contains many of the characters--Mr. Micawber,
Uriah Heep, Betsey Trotwood, Steerforth, and Little Emily--who gave
Dickens his reputation as the finest literary portraitist of his
age.
About Author
Charles Dickens was born in a little house in Landport, Portsea,
England, on February 7, 1812. The second of eight children, he grew
up in a family frequently beset by financial insecurity. At age
eleven, Dickens was taken out of school and sent to work in London
backing warehouse, where his job was to paste labels on bottles for
six shillings a week. His father John Dickens, was a warmhearted
but improvident man. When he was condemned the Marshela Prison for
unpaid debts, he unwisely agreed that Charles should stay in
lodgings and continue working while the rest of the family joined
him in jail. This three-month separation caused Charles much pain;
his experiences as a child alone in a huge city–cold, isolated with
barely enough to eat–haunted him for the rest of his life.
When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to school,
after which he became an office boy, a freelance reporter and
finally an author. With Pickwick Papers (1836-7) he achieved
immediate fame; in a few years he was easily the post popular and
respected writer of his time. It has been estimated that one out of
every ten persons in Victorian England was a Dickens reader. Oliver
Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) and The Old Curiosity Shop
(1840-41) were huge successes. Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) was less
so, but Dickens followed it with his unforgettable, A Christmas
Carol (1843), Bleak House (1852-3), Hard Times (1854) and Little
Dorrit (1855-7) reveal his deepening concern for the injustices of
British Society. A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations
(1860-1) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) complete his major
works.
Dickens’s marriage to Catherine Hoggarth produced ten children
but ended in separation in 1858. In that year he began a series of
exhausting public readings; his health gradually declined. After
putting in a full day’s work at his home at Gads Hill, Kent on June
8, 1870, Dickens suffered a stroke, and he died the following
day.
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