In June 1882, Sigmund Freud gave a copy of David Copperfield, his favourite Dickens novel, to Martha Bernays. This copy — one of the 1,600 volumes which were brought from Vienna to London in 1938 when the Freud family fled Nazi persecution — remains in Freud’s library at the Museum today. In this special event, Lucinda Hawksley will explore what was happening in Dickens’s life at the time of working on David Copperfield and the inspirations behind what is widely considered to be his most autobiographical novel.
Photo credit: “Freud’s library” by Thomas Quine on Flickr is licensed under CC BY 2.0