David Copperfield

by Dickens, Charles; Johnson, Edgar

• ISBN13: 9780451522924
• ISBN10: 0451522923
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781101142349
• Additional ISBN(s): 9780451530042, 9780451521668
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1962-08-01
• Publisher: Signet Classics

Summary

One of Dickens's best-loved and most personal novels, David Copperfield is the embodiment of Dickens's own boyhood experience recalling his employment as a child in a London warehouse. This edition, which has the accurate Clarendon text, includes Dickens's trial titles and working notes, andeight original illustrations by "Phiz."

Author Biography

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in his Gads Hill home in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation-but also the horror of the infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years' formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney's clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, characteristically while still engaged in a multitude of work.