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David Copperfield

By Charles Dickens
Introduction by David Gates

By Charles Dickens
Introduction by David Gates

By Charles Dickens

By Charles Dickens

By Charles Dickens
Introduction by Michael Slater

By Charles Dickens
Introduction by Michael Slater

By Charles Dickens

By Charles Dickens

By Charles Dickens

By Charles Dickens

By Charles Dickens

By Charles Dickens

Best Seller

Part of Modern Library Classics

Part of Everyman's Library Classics Series

Part of Vintage Classics

Part of Modern Library Classics

Paperback $12.00

Nov 28, 2000 | ISBN 9780679783411

Mass Market Paperback $7.99

Sep 01, 1981 | ISBN 9780553211894

Hardcover $30.00

Nov 26, 1991 | ISBN 9780679405719

Ebook $5.99

Jan 17, 2012 | ISBN 9780307950536

Ebook $1.99

Sep 26, 2006 | ISBN 9780553902983

Ebook $2.99

Oct 31, 2000 | ISBN 9780679641346

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      Nov 28, 2000 | ISBN 9780679783411

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    • Mass Market Paperback $7.99

      Sep 01, 1981 | ISBN 9780553211894

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    • Hardcover $30.00

      Nov 26, 1991 | ISBN 9780679405719

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      Jan 17, 2012 | ISBN 9780307950536

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    About David Copperfield

    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.

    About David Copperfield

    Of all Dickens’s novels, David Copperfield most fervently embraces the comic delights, the tender warmth, the tragic horrors of childhood. It is our classic tale of growing up, an enchanting story of a gently orphan discovering life and love in an indifferent adult world. Persecuted by his wrathful stepfather, Mr. Murdstone; deceived by his boyhood idol, the callous, charming Steerforth; driven into mortal combat with the sniveling clerk Uriah Heep; and hurled, pell-mell, into a blizzard of infatuation with the adorably dim-witted Dora, he survives the worst—and the best—with inimitable style, his bafflement tuming to self-awareness and his unbridles young heart growing ever more disciplined and true.

    Of this richly autobiographical novel Dickens himself wrote, "like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is David Copperfield."

    About David Copperfield

    When David Copperfield escapes from the cruelty of his childhood home, he embarks on a journey to adulthood which will lead him through comedy and tragedy, love and heartbreak and friendship and betrayal. Over the course of his adventure, David meets an array of eccentric characters and learns hard lessons about the world before he finally discovers true happiness.

    Charles Dickens’s most celebrated novel and the author’s own favorite, David Copperfield is the classic account of a boy growing up in a world that is by turns magical, fearful, and grimly realistic.

    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.

    About David Copperfield

            

    "        Like so many fond parents I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child," wrote Charles Dickens. "And his name is David Copperfield."
            Of all of Dickens’s novels, David Copperfield most closely reflects the events of his own life. The story of an abandoned waif who discovers life and love in an indifferent world, this classic tale of childhood is populated with a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains who number among the author’s greatest creations.
            "David Copperfield is filled with characters of the most astonishing variety, vividness, and originality," noted Somerset Maugham. "They are not realistic and yet they abound with life. There never were such people as the Micawbers, Pegotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens’s exultant imagination, but they have so much vigor, they are so consistent, they are presented with so much conviction, that you believe in them. They are extravagant, but not unreal, and when you have once to know them you can never quite forget them." T. S. Eliot agreed: "Dickens excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings." And Virginia Woolf concluded: "In David Copperfield, though char-
    acters swarm and life flows into every creek and cranny, some common feelings–youth, gaiety, hope–envelops the tumult, brings the scattered parts together, and invests the most perfect of all the Dickens novels with an atmosphere of beauty."

    The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-
    dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world’s best books, at the best prices.

    About David Copperfield

            

    "        Like so many fond parents I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child," wrote Charles Dickens. "And his name is David Copperfield."
            Of all of Dickens’s novels, David Copperfield most closely reflects the events of his own life. The story of an abandoned waif who discovers life and love in an indifferent world, this classic tale of childhood is populated with a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains who number among the author’s greatest creations.
            "David Copperfield is filled with characters of the most astonishing variety, vividness, and originality," noted Somerset Maugham. "They are not realistic and yet they abound with life. There never were such people as the Micawbers, Pegotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens’s exultant imagination, but they have so much vigor, they are so consistent, they are presented with so much conviction, that you believe in them. They are extravagant, but not unreal, and when you have once to know them you can never quite forget them." T. S. Eliot agreed: "Dickens excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings." And Virginia Woolf concluded: "In David Copperfield, though char-
    acters swarm and life flows into every creek and cranny, some common feelings–youth, gaiety, hope–envelops the tumult, brings the scattered parts together, and invests the most perfect of all the Dickens novels with an atmosphere of beauty."

    The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-
    dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world’s best books, at the best prices.

    About David Copperfield

    ‘Like so many fond parents I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child,’ wrote Charles Dickens. ‘And his name is David Copperfield.’

    Of all of Dickens’s novels, David Copperfield most closely reflects the events of his own life. The story of an abandoned waif who discovers life and love in an indifferent world, this classic tale of childhood is populated with a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains who number among the author’s greatest creations.

    ‘David Copperfield is filled with characters of the most astonishing variety, vividness, and originality,’ noted Somerset Maugham. ‘They are not realistic and yet they abound with life. There never were such people as the Micawbers, Pegotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens’s exultant imagination, but they have so much vigor, they are so consistent, they are presented with so much conviction, that you believe in them. They are extravagant, but not unreal, and when you have once to know them you can never quite forget them.’ T. S. Eliot agreed: ‘Dickens excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings.’ And Virginia Woolf concluded: ‘In David Copperfield, though characters swarm and life flows into every creek and cranny, some common feelings–youth, gaiety, hope–envelops the tumult, brings the scattered parts together, and invests the most perfect of all the Dickens novels with an atmosphere of beauty.’

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    About Charles Dickens

    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. When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to… More about Charles Dickens

    About Charles Dickens

    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. When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to… More about Charles Dickens

    About Charles Dickens

    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. When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to… More about Charles Dickens

    About Charles Dickens

    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. When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to… More about Charles Dickens

    About Charles Dickens

    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. When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to… More about Charles Dickens

    About Charles Dickens

    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. When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to… More about Charles Dickens

    Product Details

    Category: Fiction Classics | Literary Fiction

    Paperback | $12.00
    Published by Modern Library
    Nov 28, 2000 | 896 Pages | 5-3/16 x 8 | ISBN 9780679783411

    Category: Fiction Classics | Literary Fiction

    Mass Market Paperback | $7.99
    Published by Bantam Classics
    Sep 01, 1981 | 960 Pages | 4-3/16 x 6-7/8 | ISBN 9780553211894

    Category: Fiction Classics | Literary Fiction

    Hardcover | $30.00
    Published by Everyman’s Library
    Nov 26, 1991 | 1016 Pages | 5 x 8 | ISBN 9780679405719

    Category: Fiction Classics | Literary Fiction

    Ebook | $5.99
    Published by Vintage
    Jan 17, 2012 | 928 Pages | ISBN 9780307950536

    Category: Fiction Classics | Literary Fiction

    Ebook | $1.99
    Published by Bantam Classics
    Sep 26, 2006 | 960 Pages | ISBN 9780553902983

    Category: Fiction Classics | Literary Fiction

    Ebook | $2.99
    Published by Modern Library
    Oct 31, 2000 | 896 Pages | ISBN 9780679641346
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    Praise

    "The most perfect of all the Dickens novels."
    –Virginia Woolf

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