It was thanks to the bicentenary of Dickens' birth that I found myself skimming through some books that had been long abandoned and - I must shamefully admit- dumped on the highest shelf of my modest home library. The covers did not stir any particular emotion (apart from the guilty feeling of neglecting my house and not dustying enough!), but the first pages of David Copperfield brought me back to my high-school days. I remembered that my very first encounter with Charles Dickens goes back decades ago. And I also remembered that I was far from enthusiastic when our teacher handed us two tomes of more than 200pages each. I remeber to have reluctantly started to read, but the very first pages of David Copperfield soon grabbed my attention and eventually I happened to be one of the few in my class to have actually read it.

I had the chance of rereading David Copperfield at university, but this time I knew what I had in my hands and now the challenging part was to read it in English.

Although my students nowadays have a different range of books to read (no time for big two-volume novels!), I somehow feel it should be right to at least pay a tribute to this great portraitist of human character tomorrow.

I wonder what the students' response will be!