"The greatest achievement of the greatest of all novelists" -- Leo Tolstoy "Dickens did what very few writers have managed to not only describe a city, but to define it... For all his sentimentality, [Dickens] was an extraordinary person, inseparable inthe imagination from London, just as London is inseparable from Dickens" * Time Out * "David Copperfield is Dickens's Hamlet... I can't remember being so moved by one of his novels... What puts David Copperfield right up there with Bleak House and Great Expectations, however, is its sweet nature, and its surprising modernity... Completing David Copperfield has left me feeling bereft" -- Nick Hornby "I came to Dickens relatively late in life, but in a way, I think that's the best time. When you're a child, all you see is the plum-pudding characterization and twisting-and-turning storylines, and though that is part of the juicy pleasure of Dickens, you need to be an adult to get the heartbreaking measure of his genius. And nothing shows that more, for me, than David Copperfield. It's the fullest, most breathtakingly truthful story of life - not for nothing was it Freud's favorite novel" -- Nigella Lawson

Charles Dickens was born in Hampshire on February 7, 1812. His father was a clerk in the navy pay office, who was well paid but often ended up in financial troubles. When Dickens was twelve years old he was send to work in a shoe polish factory because his family had be taken to the debtors' prison.Fagin is named after a boy Dickens disliked at the factory. His career as a writer of fiction started in 1833 when his short stories and essays began to appear in periodicals. The Pickwick Papers, his first commercial success, was published in 1836. In the same year he married the daughter of his friend George Hogarth, Catherine Hogarth. The serialisation of Oliver Twist began in 1837 while The Pickwick Papers was still running. Many other novels followed and The Old Curiosity Shop brought Dickens international fame and he became a celebrity America as well as Britain. He separated from his wife in 1858. Charles Dickens died on 9 June 1870, leaving his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.