David Copperfield

The greatest achievement of the greatest of all novelists – Leo TolstoyDavid Copperfield is Dickens’s Hamlet… I can’t remember being so moved by one of his novels… What puts David Copperfield right up there with Bleak House and Great Expectations, however, is its sweet nature, and its surprising modernity… Completing David Copperfield has left me feeling bereft – Nick HornbyI couldn’t put it down – Barbara Taylor BradfordThere were never such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens’s exultant imagination…you can never quite forget them – W. Somerset MaughamDickens is huge - like the sky. Pick any page of Dickens and it’s immediately recognizable as him, yet he might be doing social satire, or farce, or horror, or a psychological study of a murderer - or any combination of these – Susannah ClarkeDickens did what very few writers have managed to not only describe a city, but to define it… His experience was the Victorian nightmare made real: a swift descent from relative safety and affluence to utter penury and humiliation. The horror never left him. You can see in David Copperfield, as well as in Great Expectations and Nicholas Nickleby, this very real fear of slipping down the social scale… Dickens, for all his sentimentality, was an extraordinary person, inseparable inthe imagination from London, just as London is inseparable from Dickens * Time Out *Dickens has genius to vivify his observation * Spectator *He deals truly with human nature, which never can degrade; he takes up everything, good, bad, or indifferent, which he works up into a rich alluvial deposit. He is natural, and that never can be ridiculous * Quarterly Review *I came to Dickens relatively late in life, but in a way, I think that’s the best time. When you’re a child, all you see is the plum-pudding characterization and twisting-and-turning storylines, and though that is part of the juicy pleasure of Dickens, you need to be an adult to get the heartbreaking measure of his genius. And nothing shows that more, for me, than David Copperfield. It’s the fullest, most breathtakingly truthful story of life - not for nothing was it Freud’s favorite novel. – Nigella Lawson

Charles Dickens was born in Hampshire on February 7, 1812. His father was a clerk in the navy pay office, who was well paid but often ended up in financial troubles. When Dickens was twelve years old he was sent to work in a shoe polish factory because his family had been taken to the debtors’ prison. Fagin is named after a boy Dickens disliked at the factory. His career as a writer of fiction started in 1833 when his short stories and essays began to appear in periodicals. The Pickwick Papers, his first commercial success, was published in 1836. In the same year he married the daughter of his friend George Hogarth, Catherine Hogarth. The serialisation of Oliver Twist began in 1837 while The Pickwick Papers was still running. Many other novels followed and The Old Curiosity Shop brought Dickens international fame and he became a celebrity in America as well as Britain. He separated from his wife in 1858. Charles Dickens died on 9 June 1870, leaving his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

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