Charles Dickens (1812-1870) British, 2 Volume Set of David Copperfield 1923 Reprint. Book split into Volume I and II, originally printed by the MacMillan Company in 1911. Good condition for their age. 

Size: 4 1/2 x 5 3/4 x 1 1/8 in. 

#3100 #9 . 

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7th, 1812 in Portsmouth, England. The family moved a lot for his father’s work in the Navy Pay Office, and he read voraciously. However, he left school at the age of 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison, which later inspired his epic novel “Nicholas Nickleby.” The experience and the people he met during this ordeal radically affected the young Dickens, inspiring numerous stories and characters of his in the future, particularly “Bleak House.” He was sent to Wellington House Academy at the age of fifteen, which he thought to be a terrible school and immortalized in “David Copperfield.” From 1827 to 1828 he worked at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore in Holborn Court as a junior clerk. He became a local sensation for his gifted mimicry and speedy copywriting, and went to London theaters nearly every day. By 1833 he was submitting short stories to London Periodicals, and gave up the hopes of an acting career as his writing career took off. He was an overnight sensation with “The Pickwick Papers,” and set the precedent for what is now known as the “best-selling” author. Dickens was one of the first authors ever to ensure that his books were available in cheap bindings for lower classes as well as in morocco-and-gilt for people of high society, and Queen Victoria requested an interview with him after reading “Oliver Twist,” wishing to learn how to improve the life quality of her “most humble” subjects. On April 2nd, 1836, Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth, with whom he had ten children, but he developed a restlessness that never abated, often flirting with younger women and sporadically taking journeys to other countries to seek inspiration, particularly France and America. He described his impressions in a travelog that included a powerful condemnation of slavery, and gave several lectures in New York City on the question of international copyright laws. His return to England led to three stories about Christmas, the most popular of which, “A Christmas Carol,” revitalized enthusiasm for the holiday throughout the English-speaking world. Dickens then spent several years in Italy and Switzerland writing new works that had a more serious, darker tone. He set up several charities, particularly for “fallen women” and “immigrant orphans.” Dickens interacted with many French authors including Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, which inspired his most famous historical work, “A Tale of Two Cities.” In 1857 Dickens fell in love with an actress in his play “The Frozen Deep” named Ellen Ternan. He attempted to have his wife institutionalized, and the two separated, never seeing each other again. Dickens spent the next decade giving reading tours, returning to the literary world only briefly with “Great Expectations.” He and Ternan, 27 years his junior, had a tempestuous relationship, and hardly any of their personal letters survive. In 1865 he was the only unharmed survivor of the Staplehurst rail crash, comforting the dying around him, and the experience haunted him the rest of his life. He became obsessed with the occult and paranormal, with his last, unfinished work “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” an attempt to “exorcize his survivor’s guilt.” He died of a stroke on June 9th, 1870, and was laid to rest in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. His legacy remains one of the best-selling authors of all time, with all of his 15 novels still in print to this day, and it is estimated he created some 13,000 characters in total, or approximately a character a day for the whole of his working life. His works served as the template for most fiction in the latter half of the Victorian Age, and the term “Dickensian” entered the lexicon to describe something reminiscent of his style, usually dealing with poor social conditions or comically repulsive characters.