David Copperfield (Penguin English Library)

by Charles Dickens (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2012

  $4.20

  'Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show' Dickens's epic, exuberant novel is one of the greatest coming-of-age stories in literature. It chronicles David Copperfield's extraordinary journey through life, as he encounters villains, saviours, eccentrics and grotesques, including the wicked Mr Murdstone, stout-hearted Peggotty, formidable Betsey Trotwood, impecunious Micawber and odious Uriah Heep. Dickens's great Bildungsroman (based, in part, on his own boyhood, and which he described as a 'favourite child') is a work filled with life, both comic and tragic. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

• Used

  Paperback
  1983

  $3.25

  `I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD,' wrote Dickens of what is the most personal, certainly one of the most popular, of all his novels. Dickens wrote the book after the completion of a fragment of autobiography recalling his employment as a child in a London warehouse, and in the first-person narrative, a new departure for him, realized marvellously the workings of memory. The embodiment of his boyhood experience in the novel involved a `complicated interweaving of truth and fiction', at its most subtle in the portrait of his father as Mr Micawber, one of Dickens's greatest comic creations. Enjoying a humour that never becomes caricature, the reader shares David's affection for the eccentric Betsey Trotwood and her prot 'eg 'e Mr Dick, and smiles with the narrator at the trials he endures in his love for the delightfully silly Dora. Settings, (East Anglia, the London of the 1820s), people, and events are unified by their relationship to the story of Steerforth's treachery, which reaches its powerful climax in the storm scene. This edition, which has the accurate Clarendon text, includes Dickens's trial titles and working notes, and eight of the original illustrations by `Phiz'. This book is intended for the general reader, A-Level students and English literature undergraduates.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1989

  $5.47

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $12.67

• New

  Hardcover
  1991

  $18.46

  In a book that is part fairy tale and part thinly veiled autobiography, Dickens transmutes his life experience into a brilliant series of comic and sentimental adventures in the spirit of the great eighteenth-century novelists he so much admired. Few readers can fail to be touched by David's fate, and fewer still to be delighted by his story. The cruel Murdstone, the feckless Micawber, the unctuous and sinister Uriah Heep, and David Copperfield himself, into whose portrait Dickens puts so much of his own early life, form a central part of our literary legacy. This edition reprints the original Everyman preface by G K Chesterton and includes thirty-nine illustrations by Phiz.