David Copperfield – Dickens’s most celebrated novel, and the author’s own favourite – is the classic account of one boy growing up in a world which is by turns magical, fearful and grimly realistic. In a book which is part fairy tale, 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. This edition reprints the original Everyman preface by G. K. Chesterton and includes thirty-nine illustrations by ‘Phiz’.