David Copperfield

Charles Dickens' work sits among the cornerstones of English literature, capturing the hearts of millions of readers around the world with its tales of love, loss, success and failure in Victorian London. Always socially engaged, but never at a loss when it came to plotting and characterization, Dickens has rightly gone down in history as one of the finest chroniclers of the language, and also one of its most inventive.

With David Copperfield, however, Dickens sought to do something a little different. He wanted to create an autobiography of sorts, weaving himself and his own story into the pages of the novel. But how much of the novel is taken from Dickens' own life, and how much is the product of the author's fertile imagination? Well, this is for readers to decide as they delve into one of Britain's best loved writer's best loved works. Standing alongside the likes of Bleak House, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, David Copperfield is one of the defining texts of the Dickens canon and a crowning achievement of 19th-century writing.