It's not the large-print edition - updated

It's a facsimile version of the original (Diet Mt. Dew for size...)

I last read this book back in 1996 and had it on my mental list of books to reread "someday."  As I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog, as one gets older the possible choices of "someday" start to narrow, so I've decided it's time.  When I looked at our library listings, I was delighted to find that this reproduction of the 1937 edition was available...

... with all of the original illustrations.

There is a waiting list, so I have just this month to consume the 871 pages.  So I'd better get started...

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night..."

Addendum:   It took me two months of very intermittent reading, but I've finished the book (and thoroughly enjoyed it).  Herewith some excerpts, memorable passages, curious turns of phrase, and interesting words:

"We accordingly went up a wonderful old staircase; with a balustrade so broad that we might have gone up that, almost as easily; and into a shady old drawing-room, lighted by some three or four of the quaint windows I had looked up at from the street: which had old oak seats in them, that seemed to have come of the same trees as the shining oak floor, and the great beams in the ceiling. It was a prettily furnished room, with a piano and some lively furniture in red and green, and some flowers. It seemed to be all old nooks and corners; and in every nook and corner there was some queer little table, or cupboard, or bookcase, or seat, or something or other, that made me think there was not such another good corner in the room; until I looked at the next one, and found it equal to it, if not better. On everything there was the same air of retirement and cleanliness that marked the house outside." (Chapter 15 at the Wickfield residence, describing a room I would love to live in).

The word "picnic" is recurrently hyphenated as "pic-nic."  Wiktionary indicates that the etymology is from a hypenated French word: pique-nique, from piquer (to pick) and nique (small thing) to refer to a meal eaten outdoors.  The seque there is a bit obscure to me.

"... made some hasty but determined arrangements to throw her out of a two pair of stairs' window."  (Chapter 1).  "Pair of stairs" was a term for a flight of stairs, so the reference appears to be to a second-floor window, not a pair of windows.

"I sat looking at Peggotty for some time, in a reverie on this suppositious case: whether, if she were employed to lose me like the boy in the fairy tale, I should be able to track my way hone again by the buttons she would shed."  Based on supposision; imaginary.

"Our old neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Grayper, were gone to South America, and the rain had made its way through the roof of their empty house, and stained the outer walls. Mr. Chillip was married again to a tall, raw–boned, high–nosed wife; and they had a weazen little baby, with a heavy head that it couldn't hold up, and two weak staring eyes, with which it seemed to be always wondering why it had ever been born."

'There now!' said Uriah, looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight. 'Didn't I know it! But how little you think of the rightful umbleness of a person in my station, Master Copperfield! Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of umbleness - not much else that I know of, from morning to night. We was to be umble to this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the monitor-medal by being umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by being umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being such a well-behaved man, that they were determined to bring him in. "Be umble, Uriah," says father to me, "and you'll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it's what goes down best. Be umble," says father," and you'll do!" And really it ain't done bad!' [classic Heep]

"Under the temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities, contracted with a view to their immediate liquidation, but remaining unliquidated through a combination of circumstances, I have been under the necessity of assuming a garb from which my natural instincts recoil—I allude to spectacles—and possessing myself of a cognomen, to which I can establish no legitimate pretensions." [classic Micawber]

"Often and often, now, had I seen him in the dead of night passing along the streets, searching, among the  few who loitered out of doors at those untimely hours, for what he dreaded to find."

"I sit down by the fire thinking with a blind remorse of all those secret feelings I have nourished since my marriage.  I think of every little trifle between me and Dora, and feel the truth, that trifles make the sum of life."

"I now approach an event in my life, so indelible, so awful, so bound by an infinite variety of ties to all that has preceded it, in these pages, that, from the beginning of my narrative, I have seen it growing larger and larger as I advanced, like a great tower in a plain, and throwing its fore-cast shadow even on the incidents of my childish days."  A literal usage of "forecast" as throwing something forward.