David Copperfield (Wordsworth Classics) - Softcover

The greatest achievement of the greatest of all novelists --Leo Tolstoy

David 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 Hornby

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

'I really think I have done it ingeniously and with a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction.' So wrote Dickens of David Copperfield (1850), the novel he called his 'favourite child'. Through his hero Dickens draws openly on his own life, as David Copperfield recalls his experiences from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Rosa Dartle, Dora, Steerforth and Uriah Heep are among the characters who focus the hero's sexual and emotional drives, and Mr Micawber, a portrait of Dickens's own father, evokes the mixture of love, nostalgia and guilt that, put together, make this Dickens's most quoted and best-loved novel.