"David Copperfield" was Dickens' 'favourite child', and is a novel of personal development with richly comic as well as deeply poignant moments. "Great Expectations" also traces the progress of a young man through life but, as a novel of the author's maturity, is expressed in subtler shades of nuance. "Oliver Twist" is more black-and-white than either, highlighting the incorruptibility of young Oliver as he battles with the evil of Fagin and Bill Sikes. "A Christmas Carol" is both a ghost story and a moral tale which defined the pattern of Christmas celebrations. The four books in one volume represent much of Dickens' finest writing. This elegant edition is quarter bound in bonded leather, with head and tail bands, a ribbon marker, gilt top edge, and illustrated front and back boards.
One of the grand masters of Victorian literature, Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years' formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney's clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.
