Editing David Copperfield (section)

===Opinions of other writers===
''David Copperfield'' has pleased many writers. [[Charlotte Brontë]], for example, commented in 1849 in a letter to the reader of her publisher: "I have read ''David Copperfield''; it seems to me very good—admirable in some parts. You said it had affinity to ''[[Jane Eyre]]'': it has—now and then—only what an advantage has Dickens in his varied knowledge of men and things!"<ref>Charlotte Brontë, Letter to W S Williams, 13 September 1849, cited by {{cite book |first=Patricia H |last=Wheat |title=The Adytum of the Heart: The Literary Criticism of Charlotte Brontë |location=Cranbury, New Jersey, London and Mississauga, Ontario |publisher=Associated University Presses |year=1952 |pages=33, 121 |isbn=978-0-8386-3443-1}}</ref> Tolstoy, for his part, considered it "the best work of the best English novelist" and, according to [[F. R. Leavis]] and Q. D. Leavis, was inspired by David and Dora's love story to have Prince Andrew marry Princess Lise in ''War and Peace''.<ref>{{cite journal |first=Tom |last=Cain |title=Tolstoy's Use of David Copperfield  |journal=Critical Quarterly |volume=15 |number=3 |date=September 1973 |pages=237–246|doi=10.1111/j.1467-8705.1973.tb01474.x }}</ref> [[Henry James]] remembered being moved to tears, while listening to the novel, hidden under a table, read aloud in the family circle.<ref>{{cite magazine |url=https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/05/lodge.htm |magazine=The Atlantic |title=Dickens Our Contemporary, review of 'Charles Dickens' by Jane Smiley |last=Lodge |first=David |date=May 2002 |access-date=25 July 2012}}</ref> [[Fyodor Dostoevsky|Dostoevsky]] enthusiastically cultivated the novel in a prison camp in Siberia.<ref>{{cite web |first1=Irina |last1=Gredina |first2=Philip V |last2=Allingham |title=Dickens's Influence upon Dostoyevsky, 1860–1870; or, One Nineteenth-Century Master's Assimilation of Another's Manner and Vision |url=http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/gredina.html |work=The Victorian Web |access-date=26 July 2012}}</ref> [[Franz Kafka]] wrote in his diary in 1917, that the first chapter of his novel ''[[Amerika (novel)|Amerika]]'' was inspired by ''David Copperfield''.<ref>{{cite journal |title=Kafka's Imitation of David Copperfield |last=Tedlock, Jr |first=E W |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=7 |number=1 |date=Winter 1955 |pages=52–62 |doi=10.2307/1769062 |publisher=Duke University Press |jstor=1769062 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |title=David Copperfield as Psychological Fiction |last=Spilka |first=Mark |date=December 1959 |journal=Critical Quarterly |volume=1 |issue=4 |pages=292–301 |doi=10.1111/j.1467-8705.1959.tb01590.x }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Spilka |first=Mark |date=Winter 1959 |volume=16 |number=4 |pages=367–378 |journal=American Imago |title=Kafka and Dickens: The Country Sweetheart |jstor=26301688 }}</ref><ref group="N">Kafka's novel is a kind of inverted bildungsroman, since the young man whose destiny we follow is more of a disaster than an accomplishment.</ref> [[James Joyce]] parodied it in ''[[Ulysses (novel)|Ulysses]]''.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Wheale |first=J |year=1980 |title=More Metempsychosis? The Influence of Charles Dickens on James Joyce. |journal=James Joyce Quarterly |volume=17 |number=4 |pages=439–444 |access-date=May 3, 2021 |jstor=25476324  |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25476324 }}</ref> [[Virginia Woolf]], who was not very fond of Dickens, states that ''David Copperfield'', along with ''[[Robinson Crusoe]]'', Grimm's fairy tales, [[Walter Scott|Scott]]'s ''[[Waverley (novel)|Waverley]]'' and ''[[The Pickwick Papers|Pickwick's Posthumous Papers]]'', "are not books, but stories communicated by word of mouth in those tender years when fact and fiction merge, and thus belong to the memories and myths of life, and not to its aesthetic experience."<ref>{{cite journal |url=http://www.woolfonline.com/?node=content/contextual/transcriptions&project=1&parent=45&taxa=46&content=6157&pos=3 |first=Virginia |last=Woolf |title=David Copperfield |journal=The Nation and Athenaeum |date=22 August 1925 |pages=620–21 |access-date=20 February 2019}}</ref> Woolf also noted in a letter to Hugh Walpole in 1936, that she is re-reading it for the sixth time: "I'd forgotten how magnificent it is."<ref>Virginia Woolf, Letter to Hugh Walpole, 8 February 1936.</ref> It also seems that the novel was [[Sigmund Freud]]'s favourite;<ref>{{cite journal |title=A Psychoanalytic Dictionary of David Copperfield |last=Jaeger |first=Peter |date=1 September 2015 |volume=64 |number=246 |journal=English: Journal of the English Association |pages=204–206 |publisher=Oxford University Press |doi=10.1093/english/efv018 }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |first=Bradley |last=Philbert |year=2012 |url=http://bradleyphilbert.com/writing/charles-beget-david-beget-david-beget-david/ |work=Bradley Philbert |title=Sigmund Freud and ''David Copperfield'' |access-date=24 July 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130825131340/http://bradleyphilbert.com/writing/charles-beget-david-beget-david-beget-david/ |archive-date=25 August 2013 |url-status=dead }}</ref> and [[W. Somerset Maugham|Somerset Maugham]] sees it as a "great" work, although his hero seems to him rather weak, unworthy even of its author, while Mr Micawber never disappoints: "The most remarkable of them is, of course, Mr Micawber. He never fails you."<ref>{{cite book |first1=William Somerset |last1=Maugham |title=Great novelists and their novels: essays on the ten greatest novels of the world and the men and women who wrote them |url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.186265 |publisher=J C Winston Co |year=1948 |page=[https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.186265/page/n176 181]}}</ref>