We all know that David Copperfield is a fantastic read... but have you seen how gorgeous this edition is? Beautiful cloth bound hardback with a lovely ribbon too! A PERFECT gift to yourself or anyone else. Absolutely love these editions!

Qnother masterpiece e

Dickens' most personal novel was also his favourite and many people would agree it is the best. The first third of the book is faultless - No one writes about childhood half so well as Dickens and here he is at his brilliant, sparkling peak. David Copperfield contains some of Dickens' most memorable scenes and characters - it's as part of the fabric of our lives as the greatest of Shakespeare. True, it does sag a little at the end - it's as if Dickens could not force himself to let his favourite child go - the last few chapters could have done with tighter control - this book takes a long time to end. However, only a curmudgeon would quibble about such a very minor detail which doesn't detract at all from what we've got - one of the finest novels in the world. It makes you feel glad to be alive just to read it.

I bought this book as part of my wife's Christmas present. It is a long book and is keeping her quiet! She is enjoying it and finding the comparisons with Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver) interesting.

To call 'David Copperfield' Dickens' most balanced novel, or the one most perfectly representative of his genius, is not to imply blandness, unless, that is, you are one of those people who finds gyroscopes boring because they do not fall over. It is the Goldilocks Dickens: not too facetious, not too gloomy, but just right. I would recommend it instantly to someone who gave up on Dickens at school, and wishes now to give him a second chance. By 'balanced' I mean that quality, not always present in Dickens' work, of dualism. It is not that 'Oliver Twist' is nothing but workhouses and pickpockets; but we remember Mr Bumble and Fagin much more than we do Mr Brownlow and Rose. It is not that 'Bleak House' is all Chancery and Fog; but we remember Mr Tulkinghorn and Miss Flite much more than we do Esther Summerson - and she, bless her, is supposed to be the heroine. In 'Copperfield' though, the vigorous virtue of Betsey Trotwood meets the creeping villainy of Uriah Heep on terms of perfect equality. Mr Micawber, it need hardly be said, requires no counterpoint. He stands alongside Falstaff, Quixote, and the Good Soldier Svejk as one of the immortals of world literature. The plot is probably the most user-friendly of all Dickens' novels. If his first novels had too little plot, and his later novels a great deal too much (I have yet to meet anyone who can cogently explain to me exactly what happens in 'Our Mutual Friend'), we see in this one a happy medium, a golden mean, in which the three or four different elements proceed in an exemplary manner to a well-ordered conclusion. When I first read it, I was forever waiting for one of Dickens' annoying and improbable plot-twists: that Mr Dick is the long-lost father of Little Em'ly, for instance, or that Mr Barkis's box contains the second will of David's father. Not a bit of it. True, plausibility is sometimes stretched, usually to allow the re-entrance of particular characters, but this calls for the suspension of disbelief, not its expulsion. I used to think it a weakness of Dickens that his central characters have no centre; David himself is no exception. The various names he is given in the course of the book are suggestive of this: David Copperfield, David Murdstone, Mas'r Davey, Trotwood Copperfield, Daisy (this last by Steerforth). But it seems to me now, re-reading his books after 15 years, that Dickens made the right choice. David Copperfield, like Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit before him, is simply the plate on which marvellous courses are served. With a meal as delicious as this, filigree on the porcelain could only be considered a distraction.