David Copperfield

Charles Dickens

Random House Publishing Group, Nov 28, 2000 - Fiction - 896 pages

Hugely admired by Tolstoy, David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickens's own life. Its eponymous hero, orphaned as a boy, grows up to discover love and happiness, heartbreak and sorrow amid a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains. Praising Dickens's power of invention, Somerset Maugham wrote: "There 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."

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes a new Introduction by Pulitzer Prize finalist David Gates, in addition to new explanatory notes.

Contents

• Observe: 14
• My First Half at Salem House: 85
• My Holidays Especially One Happy Afternoon: 102
• Liking Life on My Own Account No Better: 161
• The Sequel of My Resolution: 170
• My Aunt Makes Up Her Mind about Me: 188
• Am a New Boy in More Senses Than One: 212
• Somebody Turns Up: 232
• A Retrospect: 248
• Look about Me and Make a Discovery: 255
• Steerforths Home: 270
• Little Emly: 278
• Some Old Scenes and Some New People: 296
• Corroborate Mr Dick and Choose a Profession: 316
• My First Dissipation: 330
• Good and Bad Angels: 338
• Fall into Captivity: 356
• Tommy Traddles: 370
• Mr Micawbers Gauntlet: 379
• Visit Steerforth at His Home Again: 397
• A Loss: 404
• A Greater Loss: 412
• The Beginning of a Long Journey: 421
• Blissful: 438
• My Aunt Astonishes Me: 454
• Depression: 463
• Enthusiasm: 482
• A Little Cold Water: 498
• A Dissolution of Partnership: 506
• Wickfield and Heep: 522
• The Wanderer: 540
• Doras Aunts: 548
• Mischief: 563
• Another Retrospect: 581
• Our Housekeeping: 589
• Mr Dick Fulfils My Aunts Predictions: 603
• Intelligence: 617
• Martha: 630
• Domestic: 640
• Am Involved in Mystery: 650
• Mr Peggottys Dream Comes True: 662
• Notes: 823
• Commentary: 849
• Reading Group Guide: 863

About the 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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: David Copperfield; Modern Library Classics
• Author: Charles Dickens
• Contributor: David Gates
• Edition: revised
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2000
• ISBN: 0679783415, 9780679783411
• Length: 896 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Satire