FROM OUR EDITORS

Barnes & Noble Classics offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Dickens’s figures belong to poetry, like figures of Dante or
Shakespeare, in that a single phrase, either by them or about
them, may be enough to set them wholly before us.
—T. S. Eliot
Dickens’s favorite of all his novels, David Copperfield is the story of a boy who loses his parents at an early age, and who escapes the torture of working for his pitiless stepfather to try to make something of himself and, with any luck, find true happiness. Written in the first person—Dickens called it an “interweaving of truth and fiction”—David Copperfield is perhaps this great author’s most autobiographical novel. David Copperfield features an unforgettable gallery of characters, including David’s cruel stepfather, Mr. Murdstone, the treacherous Uriah Heep, the amiable Mr. Micawber, whom Dickens based on his father, and Dora Spenglow, whom David marries and calls his “child-wife.” But it is the youthful curiosity, candor, and goodness of David himself that give the story its indelible charm. Virginia Woolf called this “the most perfect of all the Dickens novels.”

Radhika Jones is the managing editor of Grand Street magazine, a freelance writer, and a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Jones also wrote the introduction and notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.