David Copperfield
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface to
CHAPTER I - I Am Born
CHAPTER II - I Observe
CHAPTER III - I Have a Change
CHAPTER IV - I Fall into Disgrace
CHAPTER V - I Am Sent Away from Home
CHAPTER VI - I Enlarge My Circle of Acquaintance
CHAPTER VII - My First Half at Salem House
CHAPTER VIII - My Holidays, Especially One Happy Afternoon
CHAPTER IX - I Have a Memorable Birthday
CHAPTER X - I Become neglected, and Am Provided For
CHAPTER XI - I Begin life on My Own Account, and Don ’t like It
CHAPTER XII - Liking Life on My Own Account No Better, I Form a Great Resolution
CHAPTER XIII - The Sequel of my Resolution
CHAPTER XIV - My Aunt Makes Up Her Mind About Me
CHAPTER XV - I Make Another Beginning
CHAPTER XVI - I Am a New Boy in More Senses than One
CHAPTER XVII - Somebody Jurns Up
CHAPTER XVIII - A Retrospect
CHAPTER XIX - I Look about Me, and Make a Discovery
CHAPTER XX - Steerforth’s Home
CHAPTER XXI - Little Em‘ly
CHAPTER XXII - Some Old Scenes, and Some New People
CHAPTER XXIII - I Corroborate Mr. Dick, and Choose a profession
CHAPTER XXIV - MY First Dissipation
CHAPTER XXV - good and Bad Angels
CHAPTER XXVI - I Fall into Captitivity
CHAPTER XXVII - Jommy Jraddles
CHAPTER XXVIII - Mr. Micawber’s Gauntlet
CHAPTER XXIX - I Visit Steerforth at His Home Again
CHAPTER XXX - A Loss
CHAPTER XXXI - A Greater Loss
CHAPTER XXXII - The Beginning of a Long Journey
CHAPTER XXXIII - Blissful
CHAPTER XXXIV - My Aunt Astonishes Me
CHAPTER XXXV - Depression
CHAPTER XXXVI - Enthusiasm
CHAPTER XXXVII - A Little Cold Water
CHAPTER XXXVIII - A Dissolution of Partership
CHAPTER XXXIX - wickfield and Heep
CHAPTER XL - The wanderer
CHAPTER XLI - Dora’s Aunts
CHAPTER XLII - Mischief
CHAPTER XLIII - Another Retrospect
CHAPTER XLIV - Our Housekeeping
CHAPTER XLV - Mr. Dick Julfils My Aunt’s Predictions
CHAPTER XLVI - Intelligence
CHAPTER XLVII - Martha
CHAPTER XLVIII - Domestic
CHAPTER XLIX - I An involved in mystery
CHAPTER L - Mr. Peggotty’s Dream Comes True
CHAPTER LI - The Beginning of a Longer Journey
CHAPTER LII - I Assist at an Explosion
CHAPTER LIII - Another Retrospect
CHAPTER LIV - Mr. Micawber’s Transactions
CHAPTER LV - Tempest
CHAPTER LVI - The New Wound, and the Old
CHAPTER LVII - The Emigrants
CHAPTER LVIII - Absence
CHAPTER LIX - Return
CHAPTER LX - Agnes
CHAPTER LXI - I Am Shown Two Interesting Penitents
CHAPTER LXII - A Light Shines on My Way
CHAPTER LXIII - A Visitor
CHAPTER LXIV - A Last Retrospect
Afterword
Selected Bibliography
As a child, Charles Dickens (1812-70) came to know not only hunger and privation, but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A surprise legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling. He taught himself shorthand and worked as a parliamentary reporter until his writing career took off with the publication of Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, Dickens had a long run of serialized success through Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). In later years, ill health slowed him down, but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. At his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained unfinished.
Gish Jen was born in New York, New York, and graduated from Harvard University. She is the author of the novels Typical American (1991), Mona in the Promised Land (1996), and The Love Wife (2004), as well as the short story collection Who’s Irish? (1999). Her shorter work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Times, and in The Best American Short Stories of the Century.
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A Note on the Text
STRANGELY THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THAT DAVID COPPERFIELD has appeared almost in its entirety as Charles Dickens wrote it. The explanation, however, is simple. Like all except five of his novels, it originally came out as a monthly serial (between May 1849 and November 1850) in pamphlets having thirty-two pages of text. Sometimes, in setting up a number in type, it was found to be too long; Dickens dealt with the problem by making cuts. There was no implication that he thought the deleted passages bad—they were merely dispensable. But when the book was published later in bound volumes, they were not reinserted—perhaps Dickens had merely forgotten them.
Most of them seem to the editor well worth restoring. Except for a very small number of exceedingly brief ones, they are therefore printed in this edition as they appear in the original manuscript in the John Forster Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Their text we owe to the generous aid of John Butt, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. To distinguish them from their contents, they are set off by square brackets.
All the great body of the text is taken from the “Charles Dickens” Edition of 1868-70, which Dickens himself revised for the press, striking out or altering occasional words and making other changes. A few obvious errors that escaped him have been corrected.
The editor has also thought that readers would find it useful to know where each of the original monthly installments ended. These have consequently been indicated by a row of asterisks.
Preface to
The Charles Dickens Edition
I REMARKED IN THE ORIGINAL PREFACE TO THIS BOOK THAT I DID not find it easy to get sufficiently far away from it, in the first sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with the composure which this formal heading would seem to require. My interest in it was so recent and strong, and my mind was so divided between pleasure and regret—pleasure in the achievement of a long design, regret in the separation from many companions—that I was in danger of wearying the reader with personal confidences and private emotions.
Besides which, all that I could have said of the Story, to any purpose, I had endeavoured to say in it.
It would concern the reader little perhaps, to know how sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two years’ imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him for ever.
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