Charles Dickens - David Copperfield

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

DAVID COPPERFIELD

CHARLES DICKENS was born in 1812 at Landport near Portsmouth, where his father was a clerk in die navy pay office. The family removed to London in 1815, and in 1817 to Chatham. It was here that the happiest years of Dickenss childhood were spent. They returned to London in 1823, but their fortunes were severely impaired. Dickens was withdrawn from school, and in 1824 sent to work in a blacking-warehouse managed by a relative. His father was imprisoned for debt. Both experiences deeply affected the future novelist. Once his fathers financial position improved, however, Dickens returned to school, leaving at the age of fifteen to become in turn a solicitors clerk, a shorthand reporter in the law courts, and a parliamentary reporter. In 1833 he began contributing stories to newspapers and magazines, later reprinted as Sketches by Boz, and in 1836 started the serial publication of Pickwick Papers. Before Pickwick had completed its run, Dickens, as editor of Bentleys Miscellany, had also begun the serialization of Oliver Twist (18378). In April 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, who bore him ten children between 1837 and 1852. Finding serial publication both congenial and profitable, Dickens published Nicholas Nickleby (18389) in monthly parts, and The Old Curiosity Shop (18401) and Barnaby Rudge (1841) in weekly instalments. He visited America in 1842, publishing his observations as American Notes on his return and including an extensive American episode in Martin Chuzzlewit (18434). The first of the five Christmas Books, A Christmas Carol, appeared in 1843 and the travel-book, Pictures from Italy, in 1846. The carefully planned Dombey and Son was serialized in 18468, to be followed in 184950 by Dickenss favourite child, the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield. Then came Bleak House (18523), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (18557). Dickens edited and regularly contributed to the journals Household Words (18509) and All the Year Round (185970). A number of essays from the journals were later collected as Reprinted Pieces (1858) and The Uncommercial Traveller (1861). Dickens had acquired a country house, Gads Hill near Rochester, in 1856 and he was separated from his wife in 1858. He returned to historical fiction in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and to the use of a first-person narrator in Great Expectations (18601), both of which were serialized in All the Year Round. The last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, was published in 18645. Edwin Drood was left unfinished at Dickenss death on 9 June 1870.

NINA BURGIS assisted in the editing of the Pilgrim edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vols. Ill and IV, and is joint editor of Vol. VI (18502). She died in 1992.

ANDREW SANDERS is Professor of English at the University of Durham. He has edited George Eliots Romola and Dickenss Dombey and Son for Penguin Classics and (in the Oxford Worlds Classics series) Elizabeth Gaskells Sylvias Lovers, Dickenss David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities, Thackerays Barry Lyndon and The Newcomes, and Thomas Hughess Tom Browns Schooldays. He is the author of The Victorian Historical Novel (1978), Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist (1982), a companion to A Tale of Two Cities, The Short Oxford History of English Literature (1994), Anthony Trollope (Writers and their Work series) (1998), and Dickens and the Spirit of the Age (forthcoming). He was editor of The Dickensian from 1978 to 1986.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

CHARLES DICKENS

Edited by
NINA BURGIS

With an Introduction and Notes by
ANDREW SANDERS

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Text Oxford University Press 1981
Introduction, Explanatory Notes Andrew Sanders 1997
Chronology of Dickens Kathleen Tillotson 1982
Further Reading Andrew Sanders 1997

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1983
Reissed with a new Introduction and Bibliography 1997
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1999
Reissued 2008

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ISBN 9780199536290

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