Product Description

This is the novel Dickens regarded as his 'favourite child' and is considered his most autobiographical. As David recounts his experience from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist, Dickens draws openly and revealingly on his own life. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters are Rosa Dartle, Dora, Steerforth, and the 'umble Uriah Heep, along with Mr Micawber, a portrait of Dickens's own father which evokes the mixture of love, nostalgia and guilt.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14248 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1024 pages

About the Author
Charles Dickens (1812-70) was a political reporter and journalist whose popularity as a novelist was established with the success of Pickwick Papers (1836-7). His other novels include Great Expectations and Bleak House. Jeremy Tambling is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong.

Customer Reviews

One of the greatest of all novels
Leo Tolstoy described this as the greatest of all novels - and he was no mean judge. Autobiographical, yet picturing all of Victorian society, full of unforgettable characters, moral yet uproariously funny, vividly written - it is an unparallelled achievement.

Worth Reading.
I read this book because it was in the Big Read top 100. I wasn't really expecting to like it, but I did. I follows David Copperfield through his life from child to adult, along with those people he meets along the way.
My one problem with the book was the length. By the end I did start to lose interest, but I still got through it and would recommend it to others.

An incredible and unparalleled reading experience, though very uneven.
I first read "David Copperfield" several years ago, and since then it has remained my favorite book. This is based mainly on the early section of the book, the first 12 chapters, or 160-ish pages, detailing the earliest years of the title character, filled with events so vivid and moving and characters so alive that they can't be forgotten. Many are based on Dickens' own childhood experiences, such as David's employment in a blacking factory, which echoes Dickens' own fate after his father (the original of Mr. Micawber) was imprisoned for debt. Dickens seems to have been scarred for life by the business of the blacking factory, less by what befell him there than by the sense of being abandoned by his parents to a life of menial labour, and the sense of social shame, which was obviously important to Dickens, and is a central aspect of Pip's character in "Great Expectations". The immediacy and evocative power of many of the early episodes is unparalleled, in other Dickens books, or any books by anybody. It's genius without equal.

It must be noted that this is a highly uneven book. One cannot hope to divine the mystery of how the same mind who wrote of, say, David's "memorable birthday" in Chapter IX can also be responsible for the crass emotionalism that peppers the later part of the book (the character of Agnes Wickfield, especially, being the source of grave excesses). Alas, this dichotomy is only too familiar to the habitual reader of Dickens. His flaws are so great as would be fatal to almost any writer, but they are outweighed by his unique gifts, and these gifts are nowhere more in evidence than in parts of "David Copperfield".

Note: I also found Jeremy Tambling's introduction to this Penguin edition to be a particularly interesting and insightful specimen of its kind.