200th Birthday Celebrations

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens.  This morning I finished reading The Catcher In The Rye, and instead of rolling a dice or sticking a pin into the list to choose the next book I decided to read the first Dickens book on the list I that came across, to honour his birthday.


And the first book I discovered as I perused the list was David Copperfield, so the decision has been made, this is the next book for me to explore and discover on my voyage through the greatest literature in the canon.

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."


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