Pleasure and regret - this is what Dickens wrote after completing David Copperfield. Having just spent six months with the characters of the novel and mounting a stage production, I feel I understand a little of how he must have felt - the satisfaction of completing the task but the loss of the creative endeavour and the engagement with an imaginary world. Here's more... "It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two-years' imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, for ever."
